Cristo Blanco

 From Sept 25th, 2022

We were both feeling pretty good when we went to bed on the previous night.  However, morning came at 4 a.m when the hotel kitchen staff started getting ready for breakfast, which is available from 4:30 a.m. until 11 a.m.  Our room was across a small courtyard from the kitchen, but we made the mistake of leaving our windows open.  

After breakfast and coca tea, we left the hotel  at 7:30 a.m. for our self-directed hike to Cristo Blanco, the most famous monument in Cusco.  Make no mistake about it:  this was not a nature hike.  We would walk on pavement across the city, past the tourist areas, and up into the mountainside where working class Cusco lives.

The Spaniards built cathedrals everywhere in Cusco, so I guess it's no surprise that a huge white Jesus overlooks the city.  There were some other interesting sites along the way.

 

We were so focused on getting to the top of the mountain that we took a wrong turn into some ruins.  

A very upset parks employee came up to us and demanded that we buy $40 tickets to keep looking at the ruins.  When we asked where Cristo Blanco was, she gave us a disgusted look and pointed to where we had missed our turn.  I think she said "gringos" under her breath but it could have been something more colorful.

I can't say that I was impressed with the 26' tall White Jesus, but I liked his view.

 

We took a different way back down.  I don't think Julia liked these steps.

But she made it without blowing out a knee. We survived our first steep hike above 11,000' and experienced some  breathlessness but no other side affects. We didn't know at the time that these stairs were a very good introduction for the Inca Trail later that week.

It was only 9 on a Sunday morning.  The city was just beginning to wake up. More on that in the next post.

A Peruvian Dinner

Our tour guide gave us several instructions for the first couple of days acclimating to Cusco's elevation.  Avoid physical exertion.  No alcohol.  Stay with safe foods.  She recommended the chicken soup and no seafood or red meat.

After five hours on the ground without eating, we sat down at Los Portales, a restaurant facing the Plaza Kusipata, and started breaking the rules.

Julia ordered trout soup, and I ordered seco de cordero (lamb in cilantro sauce).  To drink, I ordered a Cusquena Dorada, which was a malty pilsner that came in a 620 ml bottle. The entire meal, including tip, was $25.  Everything was delicious. The fruits and vegetables in Peru are more flavorful than the genetically-engineered stuff in the U.S., designed for maximum shelf life.  Our stomachs survived the adventurous meal.

Naughty rule-breakers

On the next morning, we would break the remaining rule and go for a rigorous hike.

Cusco: Starting to Explore

Fortified with our coca tea, Julia and I headed out into the streets of Cusco.  A city of about 500,000 people, the tourist areas of Cusco are relatively safe and easy to find one's way around. 

Cusco has two seasons:  wet and dry.  We were there at the end of the dry season, so it was appropriate that it rained on the day we arrived.  It's rare to rain all day, so after an hour or so, the rain stopped, and the streets dried up.

 

Arriving in Cusco

When we arrived in Cusco, a representative of Sun Gate Tours was waiting for us at the airport with a sign that said "Julia."  This was very exciting to me because I've seen many folks with signs at airports but the sign was never for us before. 

That's because we've never booked a tour like this before.  Our normal way of travel is to explore the area on our own.  However, that's not possible if you want to hike the Inca Trail.  Peru requires all hikers to be accompanied by a government-licensed guide and to have an Inca Trail government permit.  These permits are highly sought-after, and one generally needs to get a permit months in advance.  

The easiest way to get a guide/permit is to sign up for a tour package. The tour company then handles everything: airport transfers, booking the hotel, booking day excursions, hiring Inca Trail guides, cooks, and porters, transfers to and from the trail, and transfers back to the airport at the end of the trip.

Isn't that expensive, you might ask? Probably, yes.  However, to pay for this trip, Julia used credit card points that she earned from paying for stuff over the course of thirty years of operating her business.  Peru was on her bucket list, so my frugality had to be set aside.  Besides, I was getting to hike in some very cool mountains so I kept my mouth shut about costs.

Flying from Lima to Cusco, we were changing in elevation from sea level to over 11,000 feet.  We immediately noticed the thin air, and our tour company representative advised us to avoid any alcohol, to take it easy for the first couple of days, and to drink lots of coca tea.  One makes coca tea by dropping whole leaves of the coca plant into hot water.  Our hotel kept a big glass container of leaves in the lobby, along with hot water.  When we arrived at the hotel, we did as we were told.

While the leaves of the coca plant are the base for making cocaine, coca tea is only a mild stimulant.  I'm not sure how much it helped us to adjust to the elevation, but it tasted pretty good--much like green tea.  After a  long travel day to Lima and only a few hours of sleep, the tea was just what we needed before heading out to explore Cusco on our first day.

Peru: the Backstory

When I was in middle school, a young couple moved in next door.  Dick was an instructor at the local technical college.  Dick met his wife, Chi Chi, while serving in Peru for the Peace Corp.  

Normally, I wasn't all that interested in who the neighbors were, but Dick and Chi Chi were looking for a babysitter on date nights, and my mother volunteered me to serve in that role.  It was my first and only baby-sitting job, but it was generally a good gig.  They would put baby Pablo to sleep and go out on a date, while I would listen to tunes on their nice sound system in the living room and hope that Pablo slept the entire time until his parents came home.

I had no idea how to change a diaper or quiet a crying baby.  My   mother was next door to bail me out if necessary, but Pablo was a very good sleeper.  The first diaper I ever changed was many years later for my daughter Allie.

A second baby Mark eventually arrived, and he was not as good a sleeper as Pablo.  My time as a babysitter ended.

Later, I got to know Dick a little better.  We played one-on-one basketball on his garage roof rim, and I also played pick-up games on  Sunday mornings with Dick and his friends at a local playground.  Somewhere along the line, I learned about cuy (guinea pig), one of the national dishes of Peru.  Dick and Chi Chi would have family/friends gatherings when they grilled cuy  in the backyard.  I would peek through the fence in mixed horror/fascination.  

Dick and Chi Chi would go back to Peru every couple of years. Chi Chi was from the city of Arequipa.  If I recall correctly, her father owned a big factory there. 

In college, I had a friend named Daniel who was Jewish but born and raised in Peru.  Daniel aspired to be a novel writer, but I don't think that ever happened. For some reason, it sticks in my memory the day that he told me he had his first dream in English.   I ran into him years later when my kids were young.  He was married and working for a tech company in Madison.

After that, I didn't think much about Peru until Julia began weaving with a loom that a friend owned but didn't use.  There are weaving villages in the mountains of Peru, and Julia put it on her bucket list to visit a weaving village in the Sacred Valley, the Inca Trail and  Machu Picchu.  That trip was supposed to occur during the year after Julia retired, but the pandemic shut down Peru's tourism economy in 2020.

In fact, the Inca Trail itself was shut down during the pandemic, and the jungle started to take the trail back.  Our guide told us that when hiking resumed, two porters died after separately being bitten by very poisonous snakes who normally avoid he trail.   

Inca Trail hiking slowly resumed in 2021 with just a few small groups.  Our guide told us that things were pretty much back to normal in 2022.  The government allows 200 hikers per day to start the four day trek to Machu Picchu.  By contrast, 5000 visitors per day are allowed to travel by train and bus to Machu Picchu. 

On September 24th, we drove to Chicago and took American Airlines to Dallas and then to Lima.  Our flights were perfectly on-time, and our luggage arrived safely.

 

 

We slept for a few hours at the hotel across from the Lima airport and then boarded a smaller domestic plane to Cusco, elevation 11,152 feet.  Here, our Peru adventure begins. 

Back from Peru

Yesterday was a very long travel day, starting at 3:30 a.m. in our Lima hotel, flying to Miami and then Chicago, and then driving back home, arriving at 10 p.m.  

But the time we spent in Peru met all of our expectations and more.  I'm beginning to organize my thoughts and the photos from our trip, and the blog will focus on that content for awhile.  

In real time, we will be moving Justin and all of his possessions tomorrow to his new apartment in Madison.  We had time for a short hike late this morning after retrieving Callie from the kennel.  

Hopefully, this weekend will be a time to decompress and put together the first post about the Peru trip.