Next Stop -- Cuzco Peru

After Chilling at the Hotel and neighborhood of MiraFlores for a day and half we were off on the next leg of the journey -- Cuzco Peru.

Believe it or not, I think I heard something about Cuzco being the old capitol of Peru -- or at least where the royalty used to hang out in Incan times.

As one flies into Cuzco, to be honest it's not much to look at. Nearly every abode is the color of mud bricks (sans paint) and it looks relatively dry and rugged (at least in August). It's inland quite a ways from Peru and it's at a pretty screaming altitude....of course the whole time there it was being quoted in meters and I was too lazy to convert to feet and figure out if it was anything to worry about.

wiki.answers.com says it's 11,600 ft. I guess that's pretty high.

Being a total lowlander since I left West Texas (ions ago) it seemed pretty intimidating.

The airport is pretty small and as I was walking to the baggage claim I was slow footing it so I wouldn't be caught out of breath. They had some crazy getup near the baggage claim -- "free oxygen" with some asian chick laying down and taking a hit.

The travel agent that got us from A/P to hotel gave us the advice to just rest the first day and drink some of the coca tea -- the natives were fond of chewing on the leaf. I guess making a tea out of it seemed more civilized.

My friend assures me it certainly makes it a little more palettable....or potable in the case of the tea.

The hotel we stayed in was pretty nice. It was obviously geared towards foreigners and reminded me a little bit of a spa in the high desert of southwestern US. Maybe Northern AZ.

At this point, I'm still listening to all the "warnings" about the altitude, so I'm diligently drinking my coca tea. We decided to have a nice quiet night relaxing at the hotel. I also tell the travel agent to bag the "city tour" the next day. We'll check things out on our own.

The whole town had sort of a cool vibe to it. There were some spectacular old churches and structures left behind from the Spaniards occupation, as well as a couple of different "squares" with fountains, and surrounding shops and archetecture that the zoning commission had gone a long ways to maintain...No drivethrough burger joints to satisfy the tourists.

While there were a lot of tourists, many of the tourists probably consider themselves "new age" or somehow more "spiritual" than others -- after all, they were in the mountains of Peru, right? That tended to keep the "obnoxious" factor that you get around alot of popular tourist attractions to a minimum.

Alas, we didn't bring our camera out on the town, but I'll google up some images to show you what we saw later.

..stay tuned.

Uruguay Guy