[Jan 7] When I was sitting in my apartment in Dublin booking flights, the 8.20am from Lima to Cusco seemed like a wonderful idea. The reality of it provided two major obstacles. First, it wasn’t that I wasn’t fully awake at 5.30am when we were getting up, but more that my sleep was being slightly interrupted by my body moving around. My packing sufferred accordingly. Second, the people running the hostel insist on keeping the gate to the outside world locked with a key. But given that none of them were up in the pre-dawn hours and we didn’t know where they slept, how were we to get out?
The answer came rather unexpectedly in the shape of the dog. He seemed to figure out what was going on and wandered off down one of the halls, nosed his way through a half-open door, and roused a very sleepy member of the family. He let us out and wished us well (the man, not the dog), and I would imagine went directly back to bed
There were several flights to Cusco leaving in the morning, so it’s a popular destination. The plane we were on was much bigger than I had expected, with three seats on each side of the aisle. That would mean, I noted to Katie, that if we crashed Alive-style on the Andes on the way over, there would be plenty of people to eat. She didn’t seem to think that was funny.
I was sitting with a South American woman to my left, and I gathered from what she was saying that she did not like me using the netbook on the plane, even when we were just crusining, so I kept it closed. She seemed happy with that, and talked to me quite a bit in what I think was Spanish, seemingly entirely unperturbed that I had hardly a notion of what she was saying. We did manage to get across that she was from Cusco and we were from Ireland. Or possibly Iceland. But we had a nice chat either way.
Once the pilot announced that we were coming in to land, our new friend smiled and made a hand gesture of the sort a dogfight-instructor might have given to a Spitfire pilot around 1940. I understood that part all right – I had read that the approach to the airport in Cusco is rather engrossing, and so it proved. You come in reasonably low over one range of the Andes, then bank 90 degrees left over another range, then bank again through 90 degrees so you are right down in the valley, and then you hit the runway if all goes well. It was excellent.
Once landed, we had a minor moment of panic in that we thought quite a bit of money had been taken from Katie’s bag, and we were both a bit rattled. Then we thought she had lost her passport in all the fuss of searching her bag due to the money kerfuffle. Thankfully, both passport and money turned up eventually, and we got a lesson for free that could have been rather expensive. Remember kids: if you’re getting up for a flight at stupid o’clock, pack the night before.
We got a taxi to the hotel, which is just off the main square in Cusco. Part of the thinking behing coming a few days before the Inca trail hike is to get acclimatised. I was at these heights before, in India, so I had a fair idea what to expect, but I still found it hard to catch my breath at times, and the air felt thinner and less substantial. Katie had no problems at all.
Once checked in, we went for a ramble around. Cusco is dominated by tourism – it’s a staging post for all sorts of adventure tourism and jungle hiking and visits as well as the Inca stuff. Everywhere there are shops selling sleeping bags and water bottles and compasses and North Face stuff and all the rest of it.
There is still plenty of local life scattered around the narrow streets though, and if you walk for ten minutes in any direction you can get away from the hawkers, although in fairness the people selling stuff to the toursists are incredibly polite: a simple ‘no thanks’ or ‘non, gracias’ and they leave you alone. We did buy two woolen hats off a little old lady in the square, which she said were Alpaca, or made of Aplaca, or however you put that. It’s deliciously warm and toasty in the cold night air.
After we had our long ramble around we went to the cathedral on the main square. We balked somewhat at the 25 soles entry price; it may be only six euro or so, but it seems a lot over here. But curiosity won out, and in we went.
It was so worth it. The cathedral is built on top of an important Incan religious site, which seems to have been a favourite trick of the Spanish in the course of their colonisation, and is lavishly decorated. Just inside the main door are altarpieces roughly five metres high that are influenced by the meeting of the two religious cultures, Spanish Catholicism and Incan worship of the sun. The altarpieces are covered and gold leaf and festooned with hundreds of mirrors, ranging in size from tiny to very large. In the Catholic culture of that time, a mirror represented vanity, but to the Incans it represented their god. And they felt that if you could look into it and meet your own reflection with equanimity, you were at peace with your conscience. A sensible notion in any epoch.
There were numerous pieces of art scattered around the church, much of it from what is called the Cusco School, which is nominally a mixture of Cusco influences with European artisitic technique. I couldn’t see much of the former to be honest, but you have to remember I know about art what George Bush knows about the Internet. But we had the audioguides to help us out, and they pointed out various things like a triangular dress worn by Mary which some people speculated represented the mountains, which the Incas also worshipped, or a painting in which Mary appears to be pregnant, but is actually wearing a local fashion which merely produces that impression through the use of layers of cloth. It was a great way to spend the afternoon.
We went back to the hotel with the intention of resting for an hour or so, and that turned out to be quite a bit longer. Possibly the air is making us more tired than usual, or possibly there is a touch of jet lag still. But later in the evening we went out to an Irish bar on the main square that had been recommended by the guidebook, and had dinner and a drink there. I had Shepard’s pie. I don’t know how many times in my life I have proved you can take the man out of the bog etc, but it’s certainly dozens. Food and drink were both delicious. Loads of people were out and about late on, similar to Lima, and the walk back to the hotel was very pleasant. The buildings around the edges of Cusco go way up the mountains and the collective light show from them was spectacular.
