We had an all-day flight from Cordoba to Cuzco so we could meet our friends Jack and Jen.
Actually, it was more like a 2-hour and a 1-hour flight, separated by an 8-hour layover (during which we sat in Lima’s International terminal – a nice, clean place, but really boring if you’re spending 8 hours there). Our flights were good, though – comfortable and on-time.
We arrived in Cuzco and experienced major culture shock, going from the sanity and normalcy of Argentina to the chaos and over-touristyness that is Cuzco, Peru.
You see, Cuzco is one of the top 5 most touristy cities on the planet. It’s the only major city with an airport within driving distance of Machu Picchu, probably the most famous historical site in South America. So everybody who goes to Machu Picchu goes through Cuzco, and they estimate that more than $1 million in tourist money goes through Cuzco EVERY DAY.
So, we arrived in Cuzco to 15,000 repeated offers of “hotel” and “taxi” and “Machu Picchu”, which was a little overwhelming – and extremely annoying – after the relative peace we experienced arriving in Argentinian towns. Also, its important to realize that we blended in pretty well in Argentina (with all of the Europeans – we have German and Italian blood). But neither of us have any Inca or Quechua in us, so we will never blend in in Bolivia, Peru, or Ecuador. Luckily, we had pre-arranged a taxi pickup at the airport to bring us to our hotel, so we avoided most of the chaos.
We spent most of our time in Cuzco acclimatizing. It’s at about 11,000 feet (3400 meters), so when you’re not used to the altitude, it takes a few days to adjust. We walked around, checked out the city plaza de armas, and waited for our friends Jack and Jen to arrive.
They got in a few days later, and we spent three days catching up and hanging out. And of course, getting harassed by all of the vendors trying to sell us things in the city (I photographed one of our harassers after she had repeatedly ignored our “No, gracias”s. She’s in the slideshow). They’ll sell you one of 5 things:
- Massages
- Tours
- Paintings
- Postcards
- The “right” to photograph – either a Quechua woman in traditional dress or a goat – with a Quechua child or with you
Needless to say, we didn’t need any of them.
There are a lot of cathedrals in Cuzco; we saw the outsides of a few of them. I’ve been cathedralled out since late 1996, so I didn’t photograph the insides of any of them. They are big, and a mix of catholic and inca architecture.
We were really glad to head out of Cuzco and go to our campsite at the head of the inca trail to start our hike.
Here’s what we saw around Cuzco (Click on any of the images to see the shot up closer):
