Cusco is beautiful. I mean really, picture-book, postcard, tourism advertisement beautiful. I stayed in a hostel a little ways up the hill next to the Plaza de Armas, the main square, with a terrace that looked out across the city. It’s all spanish tile roofs, narrow cobblestone streets, and giant, impressive red cathedrals, surrounded on all sides by mountains. The Mercado San Pedro, the main market, is chock full of sights and smells – every part of every dead animal you can imagine (no lie, I saw a guy pull up and unload a station wagon piled full of just cow heads, tongues cartoonishly sticking out the sides of their mouths), sections of dried fruits and nuts, brightly colored fruit and vegetable stands, handicrafts, and more. There are tons of cute little plazas everywhere you go, and the city is surrounded on all sides by mountains. I was really swept away by the visual when I arrived and am thinking hard about going back – I didn’t even make it to the famous ruins of the sacred valley! I did have the luck of stumbling onto a food fair on the Sunday that I was there, and I got to try Cuy, the famous guinea pig that’s eaten here. It was… meaty, I didn’t find it spectacular one way or the other, but it was also unfortunately cold since it had been prepared early for this food fair. I’ll be trying it again sometime.

Preparing chiriuchu – the traditional dish I had, with chicken, guinea pig, sausage, salted meat, corn, seaweed, potato, and probably some other things…

The reason I didn’t see the ruins around Cusco is because I was in a hurry to get to Huancayo and start volunteering and I had my heart set on doing the Salkantay trek up to Machu Picchu beforehand. The Inca Trail is the famous trek to Machu Picchu but it has significant drawbacks – it costs upwards of $500 and you have to reserve 6-9 months in advance. This was obviously going to be impossible for me and so I had resigned myself to just taking a bus out to Machu Picchu rather than doing a trek. Somewhere along the way, though, people had told me about the Salkantay, which is a less-traveled but still gorgeous route up to Machu Picchu, and which can be reserved just the day before for $160-230, depending on whether or not you want to take the train back. This turned out to be a great decision.

Salkantay mountain is pretty impressive

Not a bad spot to camp, especially under a tent-roof-thing

Me being a goof

Hilton being a goof

This plant feels just like it looks – like felt

These adorable calves nuzzling each other under the mountains

Granadilla flower – awesome fruit, awesome flower

Suddenly, jungle!

Freshly fried chicharron and giant corn at the market in Aguas Calientes. I couldn’t resist even though we were having dinner an hour later.

The treks up to Machu Picchu are a deluxe affair. There are horses to carry your stuff, porters that run ahead to set up the tents, and cooks to whip up full meals. Our guide, Hilton, was delightfully laid back, often smirking as he delivered silly jokes in an accented drawl. And the scenery, especially on the first two days, when you trek in the shadow of Salkantay mountain, is spectacular. After that, as you drop to lower elevation, the vegetation changes dramatically, with temperatures rising and brightly colored flowers popping out everywhere. Hot springs at Santa Teresa were a highlight, and the famous 2 hour walk along the train tracks from Hidroelectrica to Aguas Calientes, the town at the foot of Machu Picchu, was a delightful, peaceful stroll through tropical vegetation. After that we had a bit of time to check out Aguas Calientes before hitting the hay earlier so as to get up and out the door by 4:30 to climb the thousands of steps up to the ruins. I worked up quite a sweat… Machu Picchu itself is impressive – it’s a huge complex of ruins on top of a sizable mountain, and the work that must have gone into building it boggles the mind. To me, what really puts it over the top is the surrounding scenery, all towering peaks completely covered in dark green tropical vegetation. It’s stunning, and we got especially good luck, with clear skies for sunrise followed by a rush of fog as the rising temperatures sent the clouds that had been down in the valley shooting skyward. I walked through the ruins, hiked out to the Sun Gate, where you get a beautiful faraway view, and strolled out a little ways to look at the Inca bridge. It was really a great day, even if the 6 hour ride back to Cusco was… uncomfortable.

Yep, they have llamas just wandering around

Sweet moon

Suddenly, fog

I’ll be honest, I’m pretty proud of this picture

This rock is a big deal. Energy rock or an altar or something. I wish I could remember…

Temple of the Condor. The condor was a very important animal to the Incas. Notice it looks like… a condor

Evolution of a tourist photo – obligatory selfie

Small talk while you wait for the nice guy from Indiana to get out of your shot

A little awkward…

Are we doing this?

Hahaha

HAHAHA

Final product. This has been “Evolution of a tourist photo”

It was a bit of a drop…

The Inca Bridge is that very narrow walkway along the sheer cliff

Back in Cusco I called it an early night since I had been up since 4am. The next day I had a delicious, giant, American-style breakfast at a place called Jack’s and then went to the San Pedro market to get some snacks and stroll around. At 6pm I had the first leg of my trip to Huancayo – a 21 hour bus ride to Lima. I splurged on an extra-wide, extra-reclining seat on one of the nicer bus companies, which was a good decision, but the first many hours of the trip are all hairpin turns winding through the mountains so it’s hard to sleep no matter what the seat is like. I got in to Lima around 3pm and had until 11:45pm before my 7 hour bus ride to Huancayo so I took a walk down to Miraflores, a beautiful neighborhood by the sea that’s popular with tourists. A fancy club with loads of clay tennis courts right in the middle of the city caught my eye, as did the Parque del Amor (park of love – come on, you knew that…). After seeing the sunset through the gigantic statue of a couple making out at the Parque del Amor – by myself, so sad – I splurged on a delicious seafood dinner and then headed back to the bus. Lima isn’t known as one of the culinary capitals of South America for nothing, and I’m excited about going back for some more food before I fly to New York. The 7 hour bus ride to Huancayo was uneventful – I slept the entire time – and I haven’t had much trouble settling in here. I’ll be back soon with an update on life here in the Mantaro Valley!

I needed this…

Cusco’s Plaza de Armas

Giant crowd for salsa in the park in Lima

Right in the middle of the city!

Tasteful

Our intrepid reporter was on the scene, first full day in Torres del Paine, with some crucial insights…

Based on what I’d heard I wasn’t expecting much at all from La Paz. People had told me, or I had read, that it’s dangerous, dirty, and generally just not that great. I was pleasantly surprised, then, to find a city surrounded by mountains, with cheap fresh fruit in the street, beautiful old buildings, cute narrow roads, and a generally safe and bustling atmosphere, at least as far as I could tell. Jess, Maria, Anatole and I got in early in the morning and went straight to bed. Around noon we headed out to stroll around and see what we could find. We stumbled onto a market of sorts which was really just a bunch of people set up in the street, without stands or anything, selling all manner of fruits and vegetables. One advantage of traveling with a group is that it’s easier to buy food and cook it yourself, and we ended up buying eggs, cheese, beets, potatoes, carrots, avocado, oranges, papaya, chirimoya, and at least a couple of other things I can’t remember. After wandering around a bit more we headed back to the hostel and made lunch, which slowly turned into dinner as we realized there was only a single burner and it was going to take a while to cook the giant pot of potatoes and beets that we had. It was delicious though and I very contentedly stuffed myself with beets.

The next day we wandered again, finding a set of food stands where the locals got lunch. I got myself a plate of kidneys for about a dollar, and a lunch menu with soup and a main dish was about $1.25. Crazy. We then strolled over to the big park in the middle of town and worked our way up to a high lookout point, where you got a great view of La Paz wedged into the valley. On the walk back it started pouring right as we got to the plaza with all the impressive government buildings, so we took shelter for a while and then hopped in one of the many colorful buses back to the hostel, where we whiled away the afternoon. Right as we were getting back to the hostel we ran into Eugene, whom I had met way back in El Chalten, Argentina. We stayed in touch and had planned to meet up in La Paz but I wasn’t expecting to actually just run into him in the street outside of our hostel (not so strange – I told him where we were staying…). That night Eugene, Anatole, and I wanted to check out El Alto, which is the larger, poorer part of La Paz (or actually might be its own city bordering La Paz) that stretches out on the plateau above. We walked over to the shiny new cable car station and paid our 50 cents for the ride up. We started chatting with two young women in our car and they ended up showing us around El Alto, helping us wind through the streets filled with hawkers and taking us to an arcade, where we played air hockey for a while. El Alto is reputed to be even more dangerous than La Paz so I was a bit on edge, especially when Eugene and I agreed that a guy in the arcade had been watching our group a bit too intently for a while. We told the girls we wanted to go and the walk out was a bit tense but we didn’t see our admirer anymore and later decided he was probably drunk and just looking at either the girls, the gringos, or both. After a dinner of fried chicken, spaghetti, rice, and fries (seriously – that’s a standard dinner) we said our goodbyes and headed back down to La Paz. In our earlier conversations Eugene had told me about the Death Road, which used to be a functional road but which is now used almost exclusively for tourists on mountain bikes to drop 3,000 vertical meters down a gravel road in a matter of a couple of hours. It sounded pretty fun to me so we did it the next day, and sure enough, it was. With a bit of caution it really isn’t very dangerous but you can certainly get going pretty fast and it was a hell of a good time.

The colors on the mountains are incredible

Illimani lurking in the background

The most mysterious of meats. It wasn’t good.

Eugene had also told me about Huayna Potosi, a snowcapped mountain just outside of La Paz that you can climb in 2 or 3 days. He wanted to do it and, after some waffling, I decided to join him, so we set out the day after the death road. We did the 2 day climb, which is actually more of a 24 hour excursion. We left La Paz in the early afternoon and drove right up to the base camp in a beat up old station wagon. From there we walked over to a nearby glacier and did some basic practice with crampons and ice axe, and then hiked about 2-3 hours up to high camp, at an elevation of 5,200 meters. We got there around 6, had dinner, and then went straight to bed. After an hour or two of sleep and several more of just lying there we got the wakeup call around midnight. The climb is done at night because the sun is very strong and starts loosening up the snow as soon as it comes out, increasing the risk of avalanche as the day goes on. So we set off at 1am to get to the top around 7am, walking a short section of rock before getting to the snow and pausing to put on crampons, get out ice axes, and put on harnesses to tie ourselves to our guides. After that it was just up, up, and up, mostly shuffling in a zig zag up the slope, with one particularly hard exception being the ice chute type thing we had to actually climb up. I had never tried to exercise at altitude like this before so I didn’t necessarily have any concrete expectations but I can safely say it was harder than I thought. At the section just before the summit, which was very steep and all loose snow where you would step up and slide halfway back down, I could hardly take more than 5 steps in a row before I was completely winded, needing to stop and suck in huge breaths. So that was an interesting experience. I had a couple of moments where I thought I should just turn around, but luckily when I finally asked Mario, my guide, how much farther we had to go, he pointed to the top of the section we were climbing and said that was the summit. And man, what a feeling it was to get to the top. The sun had just risen and across the other side of the mountain was a huge flat expanse, with a giant lake that Mario told me was Lake Titicaca. Looking back towards where we had come from showed an awe-inspiring landscape of mountains all around. I felt a hell of a sense of achievement as well. As soon as Eugene told me about it I got excited about my first experience above 20,000ft – cruelly, I later found out that the top is at 6,088m, which is, I kid you not, 19,973.75ft. I didn’t even have to look that up again when I wrote this post, the number is fixed in my brain. But really, I kid (not about the elevation, that’s true) – the sense of achievement is real, and the climb was amazing. I’ll come back another time for 20,000ft.

Pre-summit fuel. Fried chicken is basically the official food of Bolivia

Mario in all his glory

We got a pretty sweet moon

Lake Titicaca in the back

Absolutely rocking the ladies’ jacket they gave me

Look at his eyes. Our hug at the top smelled of alcohol. No lie =/

That’s the summit, where those ant-sized people are

Used to semi-rappel me down an ice chute. See if you can spot the crack!

After coming down from the mountain all I wanted was a quiet room to shower and sleep, which is exactly what I found. The next morning I slept in and packed, Eugene and I grabbed lunch, and then we caught the cable car over to the cemetery, where we admired the memorials for a while and then I hopped on a bus to Copacabana. This turns out to be the original Copacabana, rather than the famous beach in Rio, and it sits on the edge of Lake Titicaca on the Bolivian side. It’s a cute, small, touristy town, where the main attraction is cruising around Lake Titicaca, specifically to the Isla del Sol, or Island of the Sun, The Incas apparently believed this was the birthplace of the Sun, one of their most important gods. It’s a big island out in the middle of the lake with some truly beautiful beaches, ruins, and a nice 3 hour walk from the north end to the south end, which is what I did. I met Quinnen, a woman from Boston who’s working as a tour guide for an American company currently giving luxury tours to Machu Picchu, in Copacabana, and we walked around the Isla del Sol together for a while before splitting up because I had to run to catch my boat back and she was staying for a couple of days at an idyllic, secluded beach on the island. Rough life… That night I got on a bus and headed out for the 11 hour ride to Cusco.

Bolivia was great. I didn’t get to see nearly as much of the country as I would have liked but I sure enjoyed what I did see. The south, with its volcanoes, sweeping desert, and of course the salt flat, is truly striking and unique. La Paz is a bustling city between beautiful snowcapped mountains, and Lake Titicaca is a huge, tranquil resting spot. I’m not sure when but I will definitely be back to check out the jungle and other parts of the country. Now it’s on to Peru, which is going to be the last country I visit before heading back to the good old US of A. I bought a ticket from Lima to New York leaving June 7th, so after my week in Cusco I’ve got 4 weeks volunteering in Huancayo, then about 8-9 days to see… something, and then that’s all folks!