ODO: 352,175
On schedule day 2: Leaving Lima last night put us a half day ahead! The plan is to use the extra time to get a long overdue oil change from a shop we like in Ica. We have a schedule because we pre-booked a couple things in Cusco, and then filled in the days around said pre-booked events. One of us loves a schedule, the other hates it, but we make it work. Once our oil change is complete, the shop, Taller 289 offers us a free car wash, which we are in desperate need of. They even clean up the interior a little! This is the same shop that helped us out with some bad coils the first time we passed through Peru. This shop is great. We grab some Chinese food on the way out of town for lunch, and the servings are big enough that we will eat this for days.
We are on an ancient art tour, with the first stop being some petroglyphs we found on google maps. Scattered on the rocks along the hill, there are 54 of them to find, like a treasure hunt. KoKo heads off up the hill, into the heat to find as many as she can, while Berne takes a meeting. She does not find them all, but she does find a lot of them before having to turn back because she didn’t bring water, and its hot, uphill, exposed desert.
As soon as we pull away from the petroglyph parking, our driver front shock seizes up (not the shock we just “fixed”). It makes some bad noises, and feels bad driving for a few minutes before it starts to calm down. Maybe the car wash removed some of the dirt and oil holding the truck together…With some gentle driving, we make it to our second and third stops: The Whale, and The Figures. Both are geoglyphs on the side of some hills. Our viewing is quick because the sun is going down. A bad Google route through Nazca takes us to a small oasis of a campground for the night. They have a large headed dog who insists on being loved.
Schedule Day 3 is our first pre-booked event: Nazca lines flight tour! This is the big stop on our ancient art tour. Flights head out in the morning, in small planes to view the Nazca Lines the way they are supposed to be viewed, from above! But our flight is delayed from 10am to 11:40am due to visibility. We pivot, and go to the nearby textile museum, and ceramics museum. Both come with a short tour, and some local lore.
Back at the airport we are bumped again to 12:50pm, then 1:30pm…We start to worry this isn’t going to happen. At 2:00pm they call us! We board with one other couple, basically a private tour! As soon as the small plane is in the air, and we hit our first gust of wind, KoKo knows this was a mistake, and proceeds to get extremely motion sick. The tour is 30min long, which is 25min too long for her. The pilot banks the plane steeply so each geoglyph can be seen by both sides of the plane. KoKo is sad the entire time. The tour takes us past all of the major lines, some of which are only accessible by air. Back on land, KoKo needs to recover, so our two other adventures for the day are cancelled, and we head back to the campground. A few days from now, we will both agree that we were glad we did this, even though in this moment, no one is happy.
Done with the art portion of our schedule, we start the climb towards Cusco, and the start of the architecture portion. We leap frog trucks well past 10,000ft. There are giant herds of guanacos and vicuna. And once again, we sit in road construction. Some of the road construction can be bypassed in the dirt, so we bypass it! The road crew seem to enjoy this. According to our schedule, we have two days to make the 650km drive (Google thinks it will take 13.5hrs, that tells you about the road condition), but the road construction has really set us back. Our goal is to get within four hours of Cusco, so we drive and drive, and drive. Camp spots get thin in the crazy switch backs outside of Cocha. We end the day in the first pull off we come across once we cross the “withing four hours of Cusco” line. Its filled with garbage, and smells bad, but we met our goal and can finally rest, so that’s all that matters.
We’re up and out early. This gives us plenty of time to figure out how we’re going to see Machu Picchu tomorrow. Online tickets are sold out, so we’re gambling on being able to get in person, next day tickets. These can only be purchased in Aguas Calientes, the closest town to Machu Picchu, a place you can only get to by train or hiking. The plan was to take the train from Cusco, but we discover the train from Cusco is really a van to Ollantaytambo and a train from there. Seems silly, so we just drive to Ollantaytambo. From where we park the truck, we can see the Inca ruins on the hillside of this town. This was an administrative hub in its hay day. Our plan is to learn more about this place after we visit Manchu Picchu. The next train happens to be the Peru Rail VistaDome, a train car with a clear ceiling for extra good views. And they are extremely, extra good views. We ride past some Inca terracing some glacier capped mountains, and through a beautiful river canyon, and over the mountain into the jungle.
Once we disembark, we hustle to the Machu Picchu ticket office. There are exactly four tickets left for the 10am slot. We take two of them. Next, the bus ticket office (we still need to take a bus up some more mountain, or hike straight up for three hours), and finally our hotel. Our slow pace to the hotel helps us learn that this town is full of tiny biting bugs, our exposed skin pays dearly. We drop our backpacks and head back out to find dinner, at a much quicker pace. The town is very cute and touristy, and two thirds of it is a tourist market. We take dessert to go, so we can get some rest.
Rain is pouring down when we first wake up. If we keep sleeping, maybe it will stop. Rain is still pouring down when its actually time to start getting up. Nuts. This is why we brough our rain jackets. The hotel cat is waiting to escort us to the lobby when we are ready to check out. By the time we are done with breakfast and heading to the bus, the rain is clearing up. By the time we get to the gates of Machu Picchu, the sun is trying to come out.
We queue with the other tourists through the gate, along the path, around the corner and up lots of stairs, until finally…The grand reveal: Machu Picchu! We decided not to get a guide because we wanted to be free to take pictures at our leisure, and also to leave quickly if we decided we were over it. Our chosen route, the classic route, is scheduled to take about two hours, we enjoy the grounds for a little over three. We take our time, trying to find all the fun angles, and being awed by the stone work. The weather holds for us, only sprinkling a little bit. There is a pair of stick bugs, and a centipede hiding in the cracks, which there are not many. Of course llamas, but they look like they are paid to live here. Our only true wildlife is a single viscacha perched on a ledge, ignoring us.
We didn’t know how long we would spend in Machu Picchu, so our first stop back in Aguas Calientes is the train station to buy a return ticket. The hotel cat helps us collect our luggage, and we head back to the train. During the trip down, we are treated to an Alpaca wool fashion show, it is very popular. Back at the truck, we hustle over to Cusco with the last bits of daylight. As we pull into Cusco (which is a very large city crammed into a small valley), it starts to rain. This does not make navigating the extremely narrow and painfully steep streets any easier. Everything is made of tile, so everything is slick. Somehow we make it to the only campground in the city. Stress is high, sleep will be hard to come by.
In the morning we get our first look at the campground, and it is PACKED! There are three levels of vehicles, and it’s hard for us to tell which ones are in storage, and which have people currently staying in them. Our favorite is an older VW bus in fantastic condition hidden under a tarp. We hand over our laundry before catching a taxi down the very steep hill into town to meet up with Alex and Meg, our friends from Ica. We have a full afternoon of markets, and sightseeing, and beers before heading to dinner. Meg has a restaurant on her list, and they are only here one night, so we go with her choice. Lucky for us, Meg knows food, and has picked out a winner: Oganika. We enjoy grilled alpaca, lasagna, and goat cheese and jam pizza. With full bellies, we head out into the rain. Alex and Meg go up the hill to their van, we go down the hill into town for some dessert before heading back.
Back to our ancient architecture tour, we spend the morning wandering Sacsayhuaman, again, without a guide. There are far more giant rocks here than Machu Picchu. As we wander around, our biggest question becomes: Where are all the missing rocks? You can clearly see where spaces in the walls have been patched (we overhear a guide say this is to keep the rest of the wall stable), but the missing rocks are gigantic, so where are there? We find no good answers. Thoroughly confused, we head back to the campground, which is a convenient five minute walk, and pack up our house.
We pick the adventure road, because, life’s too short not to. It turns out to be disappointingly non-adventurous. There is a run down aqueduct, and large sculptures along the way, so not a total bust. The real adventure is the sky dome we will be sleeping in tonight. Peru has a lot of geodesic domes, some of which have glass ceilings to watch the stars. KoKo has been obsessed with this since she discovered them. This is also one of our pre-booked events.
We arrive to a cute property on top of a hill. They check us in, which includes ordering dinner and arranging a backstrap weaving class for the afternoon, before showing us to our dome. There are three domes, and tonight, ours is the only one occupied. This is a family run business, so we receive lots of attention. Mom-in-law teaches us weaving, while both dogs, the cat, and two kids pile onto the blankets around us. It’s perfect. This style of weaving is much more complicated than what we did in Mexico, but Mom makes sure we end up with good looking projects. After a delicious dinner, we get to pet and feed some of their alpaca herd before heading back to our dome. Because it’s made mostly of glass, temperature regulation in the dome is hard. When we arrived it was an oven, now that the sun is gone, its quite chilly. We cozy in and stare through the ceiling at the stars, and some lightning in the distance.
