Oh SooZQ, baby I love you
(The Inca underwear rock...that's one they don't tell you about in the guidebooks...)
After our bus tour, we went down to the paragliding park and tried our hand at paragliding. Soo and I both used our cameras during the entire trip, so I’ll be adding more pictures to this blog at a later date. But until then, these will have to do:
How can you not love yama Jesus?
We also visited the Cathedral, which I think is my favorite church I have ever seen. We walked in and were a bit confused by all the mirrors we saw in the first section of the church. But then we passed into the next room, a dark, slightly eery room that separates the Cathedral from El Triunfo, the oldest church in Cusco (apparently you can have two different Catholic churches right next to each other and connect them by a large doorway—I don’t understand it, but such it is). In this intermediary room, there were huge paintings that reminded me of watching Cinderella as a little girl, you know the part where the king and the duke walk through the palace next to pictures of the prince, which get bigger and bigger as they continue walking. Don’t question my comparison with Disney movies, it will do you no good. Anyway, I was thoroughly impressed by the size of the paintings on the wall and of the paintings themselves that are from the “Escuela Cuzqueña”, the Cuzco School, which was a combination of European and Andean styles of painting. Then I took into account that these were the paintings used to convert Incas to Christianity through their Peruvian-style depictions of Bible stories. Which made me feel like I was looking at something incredibly sneaky and evil, something that robbed a culture of their native belief system and way of life. The church was filled with all kinds of golden frames and altars, and I had to wonder how much of that had been created from Inca gold. What had that gold been before it was turned into a giant picture frame? An Inca headdress? A statue of a yama? Maybe a golden ear of corn? Obviously something way cooler than a picture frame. But I admit, all of that gold combined with the original wooden altar and the wooden choir made me feel like I was on-board a pirate’s church. The wooden altar is definitely reminiscent of the back of a pirate ship and that gold definitely has some ransacking and looting in its history... The rocks used to build the church were also stolen from one of the local sites, Sacsayhuaman. Shameful. But continuing on the pirate theme, as you walk into El Triunfo, immediately to your left is a statue of a colonialist that looks strikingly like Johnny Depp in “Pirates of the Carribbean”. Complete with pirate’s clothing, a pirate hat, and sword. How appropriate! The Cathedral is packed with history and art, almost to the point of being cluttered, but I think that lack of pretension and the depth of history hidden behind the façade of beautiful things was what drew me to the church. That and the pirates.
We also went to visit the Inca walls around the Plaza de Armas. We found a lot of ancient-looking structures, but it took a bit of roaming about to find the authentic walls.
We stayed at The Point, a big party hostel, which didn’t really help with the sleeping business, but we woke yet again at 4:00 am to go to Macchu Pichu. Here was our transportation schedule to Macchu Pichu:
1. Taxi to bus station at 4:30 am (3 soles)
2. Bus to Urubamba at about 5:00 am (5 soles each—they told us it was to Ollantaytambo, but they lied)
3. Colectivo taxi to Ollantaytambo at 6:30 am (2 soles each)
4. Train to Aguas Calientes at 8:30 am ($26.50)
5. Bus to Macchu Pichu at 11:00 am ($6)
Pretty incredible, right? Yeah, I think we covered about every single kind of transportation you can have in Peru in this trip! It ended up working out fabulously, though, that we got to go see Ollantaytambo which is a quaint, historical little town with a major Inca fortress. The town itself was really cute, complete with skinny cobblestone streets that date back to the 13th century and lots of little stone buildings. If I were to do this trip again, with more time, I would definitely stay a night in the town—the setting is absolutely incredible.
We had about two hours to explore the fortress, which is quite a marvel. Some people rate Ollantaytambo higher than Macchu Pichu. I disagree, but I do think it’s beautiful. And we had it pretty much to ourselves that early in the morning. The sun was out, and yet again, I found myself wanting to grab a yoga mat and greet the morning sun. (By the way, we lucked out with our weather during our time in Cusco, with the sun out every single day.) But with my rapidly tightening jeans, I decided that yoga wouldn’t be the best idea, so we stuck with the original plan of exploring the ruins. Although we didn’t get altitude sickness (thank you Sorojchi pills), we did experience a massive shortness of breath which was partly due to being out of shape, but I’m going to say it was more due to the altitude and thin air.
And, my friends, I will continue with the Cusco trip in a second blog.
Soo and I met eight years ago at the ever lovely Camp Waskowitz, during our inaugural year of MDA camp. We’ve talked about traveling together for quite some time, and I was quite the happy girl when Soo sent me the itinerary for her flight to Lima. Yay, my first visitor! Any of you who have heard me talk about MDA camp (or have actually gone) know that it can be a pretty intense affair where your boundaries are tested and your comfort zone becomes a very different place. In the process, you form solid bonds with those people you’re working with.
Now, as any of you fellow travelers can attest to, finding a good traveling partner can be tricky business, what with budgets (is one of you super-frugal and the other more extravagant?), sight-seeing (do you both want to see the same things and does time allow?), shopping (how much time are you going to spend shopping?), food (how adventurous of an eater are you?), etc. etc. Traveling with someone is like moving in with that person—and then spending 24 hours a day with them for however long you’re traveling together. On occasion, travelers will split up for a while, but I would say generally that when you’re traveling with another person, you’re spending 95% of your time with them. Given Soo's and my camp history, I figured we’d get along just fine. And I was definitely right.
Soo’s flight got in at 4:30 am on Sunday morning (the day after Pericles’ birthday), about three hours after I’d gone to sleep that night. That night’s sleep epitomizes our sleeping schedule for the rest of the trip--meaning little sleep was had. I went to the airport to pick her up and I figured that I would take a nap after we got back to the hostel, but that just didn’t end up happening. We talked and talked, catching up on the latest and greatest, and being welcomed to the hostel by a new friend from the jungle with a glass of wine…at 7:00 in the morning? Strange…we had to wait until he left to dump the contents out in the sink. We so sneaky. : ) Then we hit up my personal favorite, the Metro grocery store, for snackies then we got to play typical tourist, a game I haven’t really played much of since I’ve been here in Lima. First, we wandered around Miraflores by foot, had lunch, then went on a red double-decker bus tour of Miraflores.
Now, as any of you fellow travelers can attest to, finding a good traveling partner can be tricky business, what with budgets (is one of you super-frugal and the other more extravagant?), sight-seeing (do you both want to see the same things and does time allow?), shopping (how much time are you going to spend shopping?), food (how adventurous of an eater are you?), etc. etc. Traveling with someone is like moving in with that person—and then spending 24 hours a day with them for however long you’re traveling together. On occasion, travelers will split up for a while, but I would say generally that when you’re traveling with another person, you’re spending 95% of your time with them. Given Soo's and my camp history, I figured we’d get along just fine. And I was definitely right.
Soo’s flight got in at 4:30 am on Sunday morning (the day after Pericles’ birthday), about three hours after I’d gone to sleep that night. That night’s sleep epitomizes our sleeping schedule for the rest of the trip--meaning little sleep was had. I went to the airport to pick her up and I figured that I would take a nap after we got back to the hostel, but that just didn’t end up happening. We talked and talked, catching up on the latest and greatest, and being welcomed to the hostel by a new friend from the jungle with a glass of wine…at 7:00 in the morning? Strange…we had to wait until he left to dump the contents out in the sink. We so sneaky. : ) Then we hit up my personal favorite, the Metro grocery store, for snackies then we got to play typical tourist, a game I haven’t really played much of since I’ve been here in Lima. First, we wandered around Miraflores by foot, had lunch, then went on a red double-decker bus tour of Miraflores.
After our bus tour, we went down to the paragliding park and tried our hand at paragliding. Soo and I both used our cameras during the entire trip, so I’ll be adding more pictures to this blog at a later date. But until then, these will have to do:
I’ve never participated in any kind of “adventure” sport before, but I would assume that paragliding is one of the lighter versions. It went really quickly, though. I figured we’d have to wait a bit, but they harnessed us right up and before I knew it, we were walking off of the cliff. And it was pretty calm, actually. I was definitely a bit frightened that a big gust of wind would come and blow us to our death, and I was very aware that there were no roller coaster rails or safety handles. But aside from thoughts of plummeting to a watery grave, I thoroughly enjoyed myself and I even got my paragliding dude to do spirals and tricks before we landed, which was great. Uh, I may have screamed a bit, but it was awesome. We even flew over the Marriott, the tallest building in Lima. (Or at least they told us it’s the tallest, but everything here in South America is the “biggest”, “tallest”, “oldest”, “most original”, …it must be the best at something.) So anyway, paragliding was fun. The Holland boy met us there, and we went out to dinner, went on some random ride in one of the arcades in Larcomar, then went to see the Spanish version of the movie “Closer” which totally reminded me of my first date with Martin. That movie is so awful, I don’t know why I thought it would be a good idea to see the play, but I do love the theatre so of course I went! We went with Dorita and a few of her gay boyfriends, which always makes for a good time for me. We were completely exhausted by the time the play was done, so we went back to Flying Dog and crashed. The next morning we slept in a little, then went downtown to the Plaza de Armas, went to do the catacombs tour, then we went shopping in the Inca Market with our Costa Rican roommate.
The next morning we had another 4:00 am wake up call to catch our flight to Cusco. When we arrived in Cusco, we played the bartering game with the taxi drivers (which we totally won) and went to drop our stuff off at the hostel. Then straight away we went to the train station to book our tickets to Macchu Pichu the next day. Well, when we got there the girl said we wouldn’t be able to go until Friday which wasn’t going to work since our flight back to Lima left on Friday…But we ended up booking tickets from Ollantaytambo to Aguas Calientes, which was actually a blessing in disguise because 1) it was cheaper and 2) we got to go see the ruins of Ollantaytambo, which we wouldn’t have had time for. After booking our tickets for Macchu Pichu, we went out and bought our tourist ticket for Cusco, which in hindsight was probably a waste of money, at least in terms of the sights we saw in Cusco. The museums weren’t very exciting, and the Cathedral isn’t even included in the ticket anymore (Lonely Planet led me astray!). The ticket works for the ruins we saw on Thursday, and those were definitely good, but the four sites we visited in Cusco were lame. I think the best thing we saw on the tourist ticket was in this silly little museum that’s tucked behind the tourist information office. We saw the yama version of the last supper.
How can you not love yama Jesus?
We also visited the Cathedral, which I think is my favorite church I have ever seen. We walked in and were a bit confused by all the mirrors we saw in the first section of the church. But then we passed into the next room, a dark, slightly eery room that separates the Cathedral from El Triunfo, the oldest church in Cusco (apparently you can have two different Catholic churches right next to each other and connect them by a large doorway—I don’t understand it, but such it is). In this intermediary room, there were huge paintings that reminded me of watching Cinderella as a little girl, you know the part where the king and the duke walk through the palace next to pictures of the prince, which get bigger and bigger as they continue walking. Don’t question my comparison with Disney movies, it will do you no good. Anyway, I was thoroughly impressed by the size of the paintings on the wall and of the paintings themselves that are from the “Escuela Cuzqueña”, the Cuzco School, which was a combination of European and Andean styles of painting. Then I took into account that these were the paintings used to convert Incas to Christianity through their Peruvian-style depictions of Bible stories. Which made me feel like I was looking at something incredibly sneaky and evil, something that robbed a culture of their native belief system and way of life. The church was filled with all kinds of golden frames and altars, and I had to wonder how much of that had been created from Inca gold. What had that gold been before it was turned into a giant picture frame? An Inca headdress? A statue of a yama? Maybe a golden ear of corn? Obviously something way cooler than a picture frame. But I admit, all of that gold combined with the original wooden altar and the wooden choir made me feel like I was on-board a pirate’s church. The wooden altar is definitely reminiscent of the back of a pirate ship and that gold definitely has some ransacking and looting in its history... The rocks used to build the church were also stolen from one of the local sites, Sacsayhuaman. Shameful. But continuing on the pirate theme, as you walk into El Triunfo, immediately to your left is a statue of a colonialist that looks strikingly like Johnny Depp in “Pirates of the Carribbean”. Complete with pirate’s clothing, a pirate hat, and sword. How appropriate! The Cathedral is packed with history and art, almost to the point of being cluttered, but I think that lack of pretension and the depth of history hidden behind the façade of beautiful things was what drew me to the church. That and the pirates.
We also went to visit the Inca walls around the Plaza de Armas. We found a lot of ancient-looking structures, but it took a bit of roaming about to find the authentic walls.
We stayed at The Point, a big party hostel, which didn’t really help with the sleeping business, but we woke yet again at 4:00 am to go to Macchu Pichu. Here was our transportation schedule to Macchu Pichu:1. Taxi to bus station at 4:30 am (3 soles)
2. Bus to Urubamba at about 5:00 am (5 soles each—they told us it was to Ollantaytambo, but they lied)
3. Colectivo taxi to Ollantaytambo at 6:30 am (2 soles each)
4. Train to Aguas Calientes at 8:30 am ($26.50)
5. Bus to Macchu Pichu at 11:00 am ($6)
Pretty incredible, right? Yeah, I think we covered about every single kind of transportation you can have in Peru in this trip! It ended up working out fabulously, though, that we got to go see Ollantaytambo which is a quaint, historical little town with a major Inca fortress. The town itself was really cute, complete with skinny cobblestone streets that date back to the 13th century and lots of little stone buildings. If I were to do this trip again, with more time, I would definitely stay a night in the town—the setting is absolutely incredible.
We had about two hours to explore the fortress, which is quite a marvel. Some people rate Ollantaytambo higher than Macchu Pichu. I disagree, but I do think it’s beautiful. And we had it pretty much to ourselves that early in the morning. The sun was out, and yet again, I found myself wanting to grab a yoga mat and greet the morning sun. (By the way, we lucked out with our weather during our time in Cusco, with the sun out every single day.) But with my rapidly tightening jeans, I decided that yoga wouldn’t be the best idea, so we stuck with the original plan of exploring the ruins. Although we didn’t get altitude sickness (thank you Sorojchi pills), we did experience a massive shortness of breath which was partly due to being out of shape, but I’m going to say it was more due to the altitude and thin air.
And, my friends, I will continue with the Cusco trip in a second blog. 
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