Seriously, though. No gracias.
The next day I sat laying by the pool and then headed off to Cuzco…the bus was late in departing and some of my fellow gingo passengers were antsy, although I’m not sure why, since it was an 18 hour bus ride. What’s the hurry? I befriended a Czech guy named Adrien on the bus, if that indeed was his name…he turned out to be a bit of a shady character. I shared a hotel room with him for two nights to save on hotel costs, and he may have stolen money from me. I say may because I can’t be too sure, but I do suspect it was him…either that or I lost it. Oh well, these things happen. To complete the story, I blame myself for not locking it up. Now, however, I have lost a lot of trust in my fellow travelers, but have likewise learned a valuable lesson to always lock up my valuables (which I normally do, but it’s the one time you don’t…)
So, anyway, I arrived in Cuzco on Monday, and April and Shelley, my first guests from the States, were arriving on Wednesday. I was extremely excited. I spent the two days running around town, making sure everything was ready for when they arrived. Walking around Cuzco as a gringa is like wearing a huge sign that says, “Hey! I have lots of money…you should try to sell me everything you have.” It was horrible…every few feet someone was offering me something – Tour? No gracias. Information? No gracias. Finger Puppets? No gracias. Internet? No gracias. Restaurant? No gracias. Good Deals! No gracias. Tour? No gracias. Information? No gracias. Taxi (beep)! No. Tour? No gracias. Macchu Pichu? I’ve already got it. Finger Puppets? No gracias. Menu of the Day! No, I’m not hungry. Water? No gracias. Candy? No gracias. Good Price! No gracias. Information? No gracias. Taxi, lady? No. Information? No gracias. Tour? No gracias. Finger Puppets? No gracias. Post cards? No gracias. Paintings? No gracias. Come In, Come In! No gracias. This really happens everywhere in touristy areas, and my patience had grown a little thin…you can only say “No, gracias” so many times in a day. It was so bad in Cuzco that there were actually municipal police parolling the main square in an effort to stop the touts from bothering the tourists, though I can say that it didn’t work.
I did sit and talk with an old lady one afternoon in the main square. She was selling jewelry, although she didn’t immediately try to sell me anything. I gave her a little money, and it wasn’t until long after that she showed me her goods. A police officer happened to be walking by and reprimanded her slightly, but that’s all they really do. She sat and talked with me for a little, instead of just running up to me trying to sell something, which is how it normally is. The second night in Cuzco I went to dinner with some people from my hotel. As we walked around, trying to decide on a place, I made the mistake of stopping to look at someone’s menu. Within seconds, a second person handed me a menu. Now I had two to choose from. They each were shouting their special deals to me – free Pisco Sour! (the local alcoholic drink, which they all offer). Then they each had friends behind them pointing at the one I should choose. Another guy popped up – “Mexican food!”…now I had three options. Suddenly, I had more menus being thrown in my face – I was being mobbed by restaurant touts, all shouting their deals to me, and this is in no way an exaggeration. Finally, I put my hands up to my ears and, with a smile on my face, shouted at them in Spanish “You make me want to cry!” as we ducked away from the crowd into the restaurant we were standing in front of. After all that, I ended up trying the alpaca, which was alright, except for the hair in it, which put me off a bit.
The next day I woke up early to go meet the girls. I negotiated a cab to the airport and talked to some lady running a local food stand who taught me some Quechwa while I waited for them. I had to wait outside of the airport…no way to get in, they told me as a troop of soldiers ran by. Finally they arrived – yay! We went back to town and took it easy that day, making sure the girls acclimatized alright to the altitude, and taking care of some last-minute preparations for our Macchu Pichu Inca Trail hike. The guys at the tour agency were great…as we signed the contracts and made our final payments, they made jokes about “signing our sentence”. We gave them other good expressions to use in English, such as “pay through the nose”, “costs an arm and a leg”, and “signing your life away”. They made me write them down for them in a little notebook, where I saw they already had “athlete’s foot” written down. Who knows what context that came from.
That night we had a great fondue dinner with meats and cheese and veggies – a meal I actually really enjoyed – and then headed to the world’s highest owned Irish pub for a few beers. There they had the most perfect shirt…it said “No gracias” on the front of it, a clear sign that someone shared my annoyance with the local street vendors. We were all pretty wiped out (especially for the girls after traveling so much and getting up super early), so we headed to bed early.
The next day we went horseback riding in the area, visiting a few of the archeological sites nearby. I hadn’t been on a horse for ages, so that was fun in and of itself. My horse had really bad gas, which made the whole thing even funnier. The horses were pretty well behaved, although towards the end, they would spontaneously take off running, which proved to be a lesson in balance and was probably to blame for our sore asses the next day. We ran into another couple of riders, and the girl, obviously irritated with our novice horse-riding skills yelled, “Control your horses”. Of course, with no idea how to do that, we just kept bouncing along.
That night was another early night…we packed up our stuff and went to bed fairly early…we had a 4am rise to be picked up and brought out to start hiking the Inca Trail
Tags: Cuzco, Peru, Tag Index
Tania