On the Path to Cusco

For the ride from Puno to Cusco, we took a tour. We originally tried to reserve the Inka Express bus, but they never showed up with the tickets, so we ended up on an identical tour from a different company that our hotel helped us book. The ride takes a few extra hours, but along the way, we got to stop at a few historical sites and had a guide in English to explain things to us. Our guide was the short, energetic woman who was hilarious, which made the trip quite enjoyable.

More pictures are in the Peru album.

Our first stop was at Pukara, a site of some pre-incan ruins that contained some great carvings. The iconography of the carvings was predecessor to what the Incans used, so they figured that the Incans came from around that area. Today, the town is mostly known for producing these little ceramic bulls that people put on or in their homes to give them good fortune (and protect them from earthquakes).

The next stop was simply the highest point on the drive that provided a semi decent view of a glacier. After Patagonia, the glacier was underwhelming, but it was the first one many people on the bus had ever seen, so they enjoyed it. Also, the high point was the divide between the Amazon watershed and the Pacific one. I hadn't realized that water from that far west ended up in the Amazon.

After the pass, we stopped for lunch at a buffet place. For a buffet, it was decent. Our entertainment was watching people trying to get pictures of a very regal looking black alpaca  People were trying to tempt it to look into the camera, but for the most part, it just ignored them. There was also a white alpaca that just got annoyed. I saw him jump a guy who was being too annoying.

After lunch we stopped at Raqchi, an Incan ruin. There were two defining features. The first is a gigantic temple building of which mostly the lower walls are the only part still intact. The lower walls were built out of the famous Incan puzzle piece stonework, while the upper walls were adobe and thus mostly succumbed to erosion. The other major feature at the site is hundreds of round buildings. Most of these buildings were storage for crops or places for offerings. Our guide went on a rant about how most of the crops in the world were domesticated in the Andes and we need to save our heritage in the future because Monsanto and other GMO companies are making food that's killing us.

Our last stop before Cusco was at the church of San Pedro Apostol de Andahuaylillas. It was interesting because it incorporated some of the Inca ideas and iconography in order to make it more recognizable to the locals and thus make conversion easier. For example, there was a sun on the altar, which was a symbol for the most important Incan god. Also, mirrors were heavily used because the Incans had only seen their reflection in water before and were thus amazed to see themselves reflected in Gods glory.

When we got to Cusco, we tried to go to our hostel, but nobody answered the door! After waiting around for half an hour, one of the neighbours came by and said that the hostel had been closed and empty for the last couple of days. It turned out that he rented rooms in the adjacent building for short term tenants and he had a room free, so, given that it was dark, we just stayed there. It was a very weird building. Our room had a massage tub, but the only kitchen in the building was on the room and composed of a propane burner and a sink that drained into a bucket.

For dinner that night, we went out to Marcello Batata and had some of the best food we had tasted in a long time. They make fantastic cocktails, especially one with pisco, ginger, passion fruit and ground cherries. For an appetizer, we had a smoked octopus with olive tapenade and olive mayo. It tasted like if you made bacon out of octopus and cooked it perfectly so that it melted in your mouth. It was inspiring. Our mains were well executed traditional Peruvian dishes, but they couldn't live up to that octopus.