Cusco

Posted byJim Westfall 6 Comments on Cusco

14 November 2019

View from our apartment in Cusco Peru – the Kallachaka ruins are on the hillside in back of us

After a very long day of traveling, we landed in Cusco. It took us about 24 hours which included getting in about 4 hours of sleep on a bench in the Bogota airport. We caught a cab to our apartment, walked to a supermarché to stock up on food and essentials, took some time to cook rice and lentils at altitude, then slept for much of the next dozen or so hours. Today, we started exploring!

We visited our Spanish school today and took written and oral placement tests – this was pretty quick and easy since we rapidly got to the point that we had no clue what the test was asking. That’s why we’re here isn’t it – to learn how to get farther into the test! It turns out that this is the “low season” here in Cusco, and at the school, so there will only be one other student in class with us. This is going to end up being 3 weeks of essentially private lessons so if we don’t learn much, then I think we’re unteachable …

Susan and I like to walk and we’ve been told that we have “a walking problem”. So, we spent the rest of the day walking and exploring Cusco. We got down to the historic town center, at the Plaza de Armas, and up into the San Blas neighborhood. Both were good but San Blas was not as crowded with other tourists, and the hawkers more intent on peddling their goods stayed down at the Plaza, so it was more enjoyable. We did find a very nice vegan restaurant, Chia Vegan Restaurant, near the center – Centro Histórico.

Going back to the hawkers, the nice thing is that they provide random opportunities to practice speaking Spanish. Even though it’s crowded down there, I think we will wander back because, along with the opportunities to talk to strangers, there are a lot of good restaurants and, heaven forbid, we might even buy some stuff – algos cosas turisticas.

… and a few photos …

One of the things I love about traveling is stumbling across interesting stuff. I’ve taken a few photos, like these, but I hope to put up a gallery or two of murals, graffiti and eye catching things like the two bulls with a booze bottle.
Street scenes as we wandered between the Centro Histórico and San Blas. It is hilly in that part of town – the center is down in the valley.
In San Blas Susan is negotiating with a street vendor for a simple gold (OK, gold colored metal) ring. For a bunch of reasons, traveling with her wedding ring can be worrisome, so she picked up a simple band as a stand-in.

Cusco is over 11,000 feet and I was expecting that walking up and down and over town might be more wearing than it turned out to be. I guess that living in Colorado, and spending as much time as we do hiking in the mountains, actually keeps us in pretty good shape after all!

We don’t have classes until Monday so we have tomorrow and all weekend to explore the city. This is a walkable city, which is good because we don’t have a car. As we have been walking around, we have said many times how good it was that we weren’t driving; there seems to be a lack of signed streets, so even walking we get turned around frequently. Turn signals seem to function in vehicles here, but so do horns, which we heard enough of without them being directed at us. It looks like there are lots of buses and they’re cheap so we’ll use them too. I think we’re going to be ready for the Inca Trail when we go in a month.

Published by Jim Westfall

I love to travel. A friend recently said, “travel is what defines us”, and I guess, at some level, I agree. The problem is, how can I be environmentally conscious and at the same time travel. I love to travel so I need to find a way to do so and, keep my footprint small ...

6 replies on “Cusco”

    1. Indeed we will do that! I’m not sure how we’re going to keep up our Office Hours down here – we’ll either have a huge backlog when we get back or we’ll have to figure out a way to Skype the whole process. Maybe we can video conference from Under the Sun …

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  2. Love it Jim! I look forward to reading about and seeing pictures of your adventure. Fantastic about the “private” Spanish lessons! How many hours a day will you be in class? Also, what was the deal with the Bulls and booze??

    Love, Betsy

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    1. Betsy –

      I have no clue about the bulls and booze. Someone just decided to ornament their roof.

      Yes, the small class size is going to be good but, on the downside, one of the things I like about doing this is a class, as we did in France, is the interaction with more people helps me with the conversational side. It will be good though. We will be in class from about 9AM to 1PM Monday through Friday. My guess is we’ll also have a couple hours of homework every day too so Spanish will take up 5 or 6 hours of our day for the next 3 weeks.

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  3. Sounds like quite an adventure for you two. How does the food compare to Latin American food in restaurants in the US?
    Love,
    Edee

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    1. Edee – It’s interesting about the food, regardless of where I’ve travelled. What we get in the States is always made with local ingredients, not the ingredients from the country they’re imitating and I think they also modify the recipes to match our “tastes” in the States. So, no, regardless of where I’ve travelled in Latin America, I’ve never found a lot of commonality with what we find in the states.

      On top of that, Latin America is defined as everything south of the US border. That covers a lot of countries and a lot of different cuisines!

      So in Peru you are likely to find guinea pig and alpaca on the menu but I’m not guessing you’ll find either of those in very many restaurants in the US …

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