Touring South America with dad

It was a long day of travel complete with the obligitory delays, bad food and screaming children but we eventually made it into Lima. All I saw of the city was from the windows of two taxis as after an insufficient 6 hours of sleep we got up and went back to the airport to catch a flight to Cuzco…the city of the Incas (there will be no apostrophes in this post as I have yet to master the Spanish keyboard and I keep getting ç instead); the ancient capital of a sprawling empire; a modern day tourist Mecca complete with Irish pubs, Italian restaurants, and hostel signs in Hebrew. It is a neat blend of old Spanish influence built upon older Incan architechture. Some of the dogs here even have collars. Cuzco is really high. There are cultral shamanic tours you can take where the local descendants of the Incans will whip up a hallucinagenic brew for you and take you on a spiritual trip, but that is not what I mean. It is at 11000 feet and I flew in froom sea level. The altitude is killing me. Last night I got a terrible headache and I have been tired all day. I know….poor me. Luckily there are drugs for this sort of thing. Better living through chemistry I say. The cocao leaf tea helps too 🙂

 So, today as dad and I were walking around the town tour guides kept asking me if I had seen sexy woman. “Well, yes, many times thank you, but what is it to you” is what I was thinking, but what I said was “No.” Finally I stopped to listen. I mean, hold on dad, lets see where he is going with this. Could be an interesting cultural phenomenon. Could be. And let me tell you folks……it was. Today I went on a tour to sexy woman with a bus load of people. Only, they spell it Saqsayhuaman and it is the remains of a huge Incan temple. We saw lots of Incan stuff today. Walls mostly; they were pretty neat in there own right, but with a little imagination you could see how they were spectacular. Turns out saqsayhuaman in the local tongue means satisfied stomach. See, the Spaniards killed so many local warriors at this site that the buzzards ate until they had satisfied stomachs…and like so many unfortunate nicknames it stuck. The temple, or what remains of it after it was razed and looted, is architechurally amazing. The way they carved each stone to fit into the stones around it boggles the mind…especially given what they had to work with. Oh, and I bought a hat. Good times. Tomorrow we are going to book a tour to the Amazon and check out the many cathedrals around town. With any luck, guinea pig will be on the menu. Oh yeah.

Tags: 1, Tag Index

This entry was posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 9:23 pm and is filed under 1. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.