12/4/04
After a couple of whirl-wind days in Cuenca, an adorable town in southern Ecuador we headed for the border. Our plans to pamper ourselves in Villcabamba were tossed-out when we decided that we were going to hike the Inca trail out to Manchu Pichu, which meant that we needed to cover a lot of ground, fast. So, over 2 days we bused it from Cuenca down to Peru. The trip was LONG but pretty uneventful, and the border crossing went well. Instead of taking a bus for over 40 hours from Piruia (northern Peru) to Cuzco, we decided to fly. We spent 11 hours in Lima...and were not impressed.
Cuzco is an adorable city in the middle of the Andes. We are adjusting to altitude again, here we´re at 3500 m. We´re staying at the Samay Wasi youth hostal (Calle Meioc N 422) and it´s great, the owner is the lead man in a afro-latin band and we (everyone staying at the hostal) went out to see them perform last night...they were fantastic! Before the performance we had a shaman came to the hostal and preformed a cleansing ritual of the building, we burned incense, chewed on coca leaves and drank cane liquor (tastes like gasoline)!
We leave Monday (dec 6) to backpack for 4 days out to Machu Pichu...we can´t wait!! The weather here is much like it was at the Black Sheep Inn, warm durring the day and cool at night. However, it is the start of the rainy season so we may have a pretty wet hike.
We were SOOOOOO excited when we got here and realized that we had 3 packages waiting for us!! We got Packers cookies from the Antigo bakery from Gram, great pictures and little guardian angels from Aunt Marijo, and a fabulous box filled with goodies from Linds (including magazines, which we have now read every article in!)...THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! It was really nice to have a piece of home!
For all of you who are wondering, we had a great/crazy Thanksgiving at the Inn. We had 33 guests that night (oddly, most of them Canadian) and they ALL commented on how great the turkey tasted...Jim cooked two 22 lb. turkeys all by himself! Iain (the manager, also Canadian) and I supervised. The power went out around noon and so did the phones...good thing we had gas stoves!
We have both been healthy since our last bout with bugs. The meds that they gave me didn´t work very well, so I resorted to lots of herbal remedies and within 2 days was feeling like myself again.
We´re planning on staying in Peru for about another week and a half, we´ll be heading to Chile around Dec 16th and going straight down to Patagonia and then flying out of Santiago the start of January...hard to believe that our time in South America is almost over!
Peace and Love, Lisa