And then there were three!

Greetings! Como estan!?

Sorry about the large delay in updating the blog. Due to the enormity of the gap between posts, and Jacqui constantly reminding me that long posts are boring, I'll keep this short and will skip a lot of our travels trough southern Peru!

In a nutshell, we flew from the amazon jungle in Iquitos to Lima, then bused it to Nazca, then Arequipa, and then to Cusco, where we will begin the telling of tales!

Cusco! What an amazing city! As you walk around the city that was once the capital of the Inca Empire, you constantly see buildings that were build by the Spanish invaders, but built on top of Inca foundations and walls, due to the fact that the Inca buildings were too strong to demolish! On the flip side, it is also the town of hundreds of offers of massages, countless offers of weed, and tour operators hassling you on the street so that they can try to rip you off!

Coming to Cusco, coincided with the arrival of Jac's sister Alanah! In a weird way I was really looking forward to having Alanah visit! Not that I was sick of Jac's company (that happens a fair bit later on), it was just cool to see someone we knew and to hear about whats happening back home! (and boxes of cadbury chocolate and tim tams didn't hurt either!)

We introduced Alanah to the ways of Peruvian tours, with a "lovely" city tour! The ruins were cool and all, but the fun began at our first stop. Our group was mainly Spanish speaking, with three other English speaking tourists. After our "English speaking" guide talked about some part of a temple for 10mins, we were gifted with a 2 minute summary! Our crafty guide then cottoned on to the fact that one of our fellow tourists was a colombian married to an American. She then insisted that this poor Colombian tourist translate everything to us for the rest of the tour! However, this first impression of a tour didn't stop Alanah from wanting to go on a horse ride! I thought this was a perfect time for some sister bonding time, so I graciously allowed the girls to go on without me, while I bummed around town!

Throughout these first few days, Alanah was struggling big time with a healthy combination of jet lag and altitude sickness! So mush so that on the night before heading of to the inca trail, she woke up just before midnight and thought it was time to get up and proceeded by starting to get ready to leave! But to her credit, she ended up dominating the 4200m pass, called "dead woman's pass" not only in the face of altitude, but also with probably the biggest bag in the group (because all she had was her main big bag) not to mention the constant attack from bugs on her legs! Ouch!

The Inca Trail

So here it was, the 4 days I was never looking forward to! Did i want to see Machu Picchu? Yes. Did i want to walk over 50 km, up to 10hours a day, and ascending from 3000m to 4200m above sea level, only to then descend down to 2400m! No!

However, as I started the walk I started to strangely enjoy the challenge! With my mind prepared for the worst, I didn't find myself struggling too bad. Yes the climb to 4200m was really hard, but I never thought it was unachievable. As you walk you are also gifted with never-ending amazing views of mountains and ruins every time you stop for a breather. The hardest part for me was on the third day where we had to descend 1000m in one go over old rocky stairs! my knees and calves were shot by the end!

One of the very special things about this trip was that my birthday unintentionally fell on the last day of the trek, when we finally arrive at Machu Picchu! Without me or Jacqui knowing, the guide organised the cook to "bake" a cake on the night before my birthday! The cook, eddy, in camping conditions managed to make this amazing banana cake with icing and he even detailed it with a picture of the mountains of machu picchu! Unfortunately due to the surprise of it all, we didn't have a camera handy, but another bloke on the trek took a photo and will email it to me soon,

So on the last morning, started out well before sunrise in order to get to Machu Picchu early. After a couple hours, we arrived at the "sun gate", where we got our first glimpse of what we had been trekking towards! It was awesome! We then proceeded closer to the ruins, where we got a brief history lessons from our guide as well as a chance to take some pictures! We then had a close up tour of the ruins, through which the three of us were getting increasingly tired and giggly! Our guide would always interrupt his explanations with the same line, "WHAT!!! You got questions amigos!" after maybe three successful attempts of not laughing out loud, we couldn't help ourselves as he kept asking, "WHAT!!! You got questions amigos!!"

Well that's about all there is too our time in Cusco and the Inca Trail! Since then we have travelled through lake titicaca and into Bolivia! Hopefully soon I will write another post on all that!

Until then, adios!