6/29/11-Wednesday—6/30/11-Thursday:
After having our last Elena dinner with our whole Peruvian family, so sad, Lena and I left Huancayo at 11 pm on the night bus with Cruz del Sur. We were pumped because these buses are so comfy and roomy and the seats lean all the way back so you can sleep. However, this time we got stuck on the top layer of the double decker bus and didn’t have quite as enjoyable an experience. As soon as we started winding through the mountain roads we felt like we were going to tip over constantly! We just looked at each other and burst into a hysterical giggle fit because we just knew our plans of getting 7 hours of good sleep on the bus just came to a quick hault, much less the possibility of getting sick just increased dramatically up there. However, somehow with the help of some Dramamine I was knocked out soon and didn’t wake up until we got to Lima! Miracle. We were so tired and out of it when we got to Lima, but I had to wake up enough to scramble around and get us a taxi immediately to the Lima airport, without getting the complete gringo rip off. We managed to make it to the airport in perfect timing for our 9:15 flight. We were able to leave our huge suitcases in storage at the Lima airport, which is a blessing because we could have never made it around backpacking with those things. Somehow, to our surprise the two of us gringas were making it around all our many transportation connections flawlessly so far! Everything was working out too easily; we couldn’t get over our luck. We flew Star Peru, one of the cheaper airlines, to Cuzco. It was a smaller plane and we ended up in the very front row with by far the most leg room I’ve had in a month in Peru! (the people here are tiny short!)—Seriously, we were wondering how in the world we were getting so lucky considering how difficult it was to book and plan all of our quick travels to Machu Picchu. We were bouncing off the walls after an awesome Dunkin Donuts breakfast and coffee…Ahh felt like America!... and stealing a ton of chocolate covered espresso bean samples from the Café Britt store in the airport. Working on little to no real sleep we were full of adrenaline and ready to go for the day once we arrived in Cuzco after the short 1:15 flight. However, typical Peruvian time, naturally our flight didn’t take off until the time which we were supposed to land in Cuzco (10:15 am). By this point, this doesn’t surprise me in the least. Peru has definitely taught me patience and to give up stressing about time. We have yet to go anywhere without waiting or people showing up late. They just don’t worry about it. Once we arrived we just wandered around Cuzco, with no real plans for the first time in this busy month. We had a great afternoon, just leisurely walking the cobblestone streets of Cuzco and following my guidebooks walking tour map like we were on a treasure hunt! It was kind of hilarious because I was walking around reading from my guidebook like a tour guide about what we were seeing and then we would get so excited when we actually found where we were supposed to be. We kind of just wasted the afternoon away admiring the neat Spanish architecture of Cuzco and views of the town all over the mountains. Then we stopped and had the best pina/naranja fresh fruit juice batidos (kind of like a natural smoothie) that I have had since I’ve been here. We walked around some more then saw the glorious yellow ice cream cart girl walking around , which you see all over the highlands area of Peru where you can get this amazing flavor of ice cream cone for only 1 sol! (like $0.40) Us fat gringos, everytime we see them we have to get one! Later that afternoon, we caught a combi (like a small minivan public bus) through the gorgeous Valle Sagrado to Urubamba and then to Ollantaytambo, where we caught the train to Aguas Calientes (the town right outside Machu Picchu). This combi ride was hilarious!! We were on there with one precious older lady who talked to us the whole time and like 4 other men and a super fat driver who our lady friend kept calling Gordito (Little Fatty) to his face! She laughed and explained to us that in Peru, unlike the US, it’s ok for people to say that to each other and no one gets offended, in fact it’s cariño, a kind of an endearing term. The music on the radio is always hilarious and a pleasant surprise to hear old American hits mixed in with current Latin music. You never know what you’re going to hear. This ride was particularly awesome. Our gordito driver went from jamming out to Rocky, Eyes of a Tiger to Make it Hurt So Good to Put Me in Coach to Girls Just Wanna Have Fun…to salsa…They were loving it because Lena and I were singing Karaoke to all the English songs in the back and they kept wanting us to sing louder. It was like a discoteca in a combi the whole way there as we speed through the winding mountain roads at what felt like about 90 mph! We stopped briefly in Urubamba to drop off the sweet lady, which is a pueblo set in one of the most gorgeous mountain settings I have ever seen, with towering steep snow capped mountains ride in the backyard of the town. Then we headed on to Ollantaytambo, our stop, which is also such a cute little mountain town along the Urubamba river. It was kind of like a Peruvian twist on a Colorado ski village. We got there in time to have an awesome meal at a little restaurant called Orishas along the river. It’s cold here, so it was so nice to go inside by the fire and have cappuccinos and my favorite meal I’ve had here, alpaca bruchetta (like kabobs with the llama like animal, alpaca, meat and veggies). Still, everything was going perfectly and we were so happy. Then finally we got on the train to go to Aguas Calientes at 7 pm and got there around 8:45. The train was the cheaper backpacker train so it was filled interesting backpacker types from all over the world. So fun! You sit at little tables of 2 people facing 2 people. My seat was with a precious about 30 year old couple of singers from Argentina (Buenos Aires) and a 25 year old Brazilian guy. They were so interesting to talk to and I had Spanish convos with them the whole time and actually really kept up. I felt almost Spanish, like I was one of them and I even understood most of the Brazilian’s Portañol (the equivalent of Spanglish between Spanish and Portuguese). I was surprised because I had never really heard Portuguese before but it’s a beautiful language, very similar to Spanish but with a more pretty Frenchy flowing accent and different words for a lot of things. In fact, he claimed he didn’t know Spanish very well and that I was better at Spanish than him! It is hard to tell when you are somewhere if your Spanish is really improving, but right then I really felt like I have improved because I am so much more comfortable now to just converse without thinking first or having planned out what to say. Sure I still screw up all the time just as much, but I now feel comfortable enough to just improvise and on the spot speak to people before even thinking about what to say. I think teaching all of the health lessons to the children and mom’s really helped me with this because being the only real Spanish speaker, I was forced to be the one to improvise and just speak to them rather than just reading a lesson. Cool feeling! When we arrived in Aguas Calientes, it was freezing and raining! In the whole month we have been here there has hardly been a cloud in the sky and no rain because it is the dry season and of course when we go to Machu Picchu it is awful weather…our luck begins to turn drastically starting about then…But we were met at the station by one of the workers from the hostel we booked, who was so nice and walked us back to our hostel, Supertramp, no it’s not a brothel, I have no idea why it’s called that but it had great reviews and it was actually really neat. The staff was super helpful and explained to us exactly what to do the next morning to go to Machu Picchu. Unfortunately, because of the bad weather our plans had to change a little. All along we were planning on getting up at about 3 am to be in the first 400 people to enter the park so that we could hike Huaynu Picchu (the steep mountain overlooking Machu Picchu). However, the hostel people warned us that if the weather continued it would be pointless because you won’t be able to see Machu Picchu because of the clouds. Also, they said it is overrated and overhyped just because there is a limit set on the number of people because of the narrow and steep trail. They recommended to us to instead climb Machu Picchu mountain if the weather was good, which is a longer hike and actually the tallest mountain by Machu Picchu with a much better view of the ruins and usually only about 40 people a day do it because no one really knows about it. Plus we only had to get up around 5 am, not 3. So we were excited, but the rain didn’t stop all night and I couldn’t even sleep it was raining so hard and loud on the roof.
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