After a beautiful bus ride through the Peruvian Andes we arrived in Cusco a late Wendesday afternoon. It was quite an entertaining experience and pretty cheap too. We entered the bus a few minutes after it’s official departure time meaning we already started with an delay. Soon after the First Ladies selling food entered (kind of normal in SA). Then the bus steward started selling natural medicine for 45 min in an unignorable voice level, to give way the more woman selling actually some kind if backed meat that was chopped from its bones directly in the bus. After a while without disturbance men in black entered the bus searching for something, but did not seemed to find what they were looking for.
Our homestay in Cusco was not as nice as living with Bertha, but we anyway had a whole apartment to ourself for the next couple of days. Surprisingly the rainy season finally managed to catch up with us meaning it rained a good 50% of our time in Cusco banning us to our new home for most of the time.
Plaza de Armas in the shine of rainy season.
So we found a nice place around the corner to get lunch (2 courses for less than 2€ leaving you stuffed for the rest of the day), strolled through the city and it’s markets and learned how to prepare a proper Peruvian „Pisco Sour“ in the „Museo del Pisco“ (it’s a bar not a museum).
Familiar shaped shoes found on the „Inca market“.
The rainy weather also comes with a specific temperature range that is quite unfavourable for hanging out in a unheated unisolated apartment.
But we always could warm us up with high caloric lunch menus (sustainably only served between 12:30-14:30).
We didn’t visited any place of interested probably because we spent alone one day to figure out how to go to MachuPicchu. Originally we wanted to walk the Salcanty trek but after days of rain we were a little discouraged. So we asked several tour operators but including the inflexibility of a tour they were kind of pricy (more than 200$ if you want to spend more than 3h at the sight meaning you have to go by the overpriced train).
So we went for public bus/train as transportation, a cheap hotel to find when we arrive and buying the tickets our self.
The last part going to be the tricky one almost made me give up on MachuPicchu. The office were to by the tickets closes at 4 pm so we headed out a 2 pm. Arrived at the place pointed out by google maps turned out to be far of the actual address (google does not know house numbers). So after good 45 min walk we took a cab back to the correct house number only to find out, that the office was moved close to Plaza de Armas (the place we started at 2 pm). Another cab ride later we actually managed to buy the tickets a few minutes before 4 pm (don’t expect Peruvians to be on time but the officials know when their working day ends.).
Tom mixing his first peruvian Pisco Sour in El museo del Pisco. I was not quite convinced about the raw egg added to it.
