After returning from the Sacred Valley, Lauren and I decide to spend 4 final days in Cusco to recover from Salkantay and utilize our tourist ticket. This ticket gives us entry to 5 museums in Cusco as well as the ruins on Saqsaywaman Mountain, the sacred mountain that overlooks the city of Cusco. This time around we really want to stay up on the hill in the bohemian district of San Blas, so we wander around until we find the best little hostel. It's called La Boheme and it's a combination hostel and crepe place run by a couple of really sweet French girls. We receive fresh crepes for breakfast every morning (included in the cheap price) along with all the café, coca and chocolate tea we could drink all day long. Chocolate tea, by the way, is a delicious refreshment made by steeping the husks of cacao beans in hot water for a couple of minutes until a nice chocolatey flavor is reached. It's probably the best tea I've ever had. For breakfast I always order a lemon sugar crepe and it is sweet and delicious. Crepes have really begun to grow on me. I guess it helps when they're made properly by the French. Also the wifi works really well, which is rare in Perú. Needless to say it is my favorite hostel we've stayed at so far.

All we really did the past 4 days is visit museums and eat at the delicious vegetarian food place we discovered. The museums were interesting; we went to the popular art museum, the contemporary art museum, the regional historical museum, the Museo del Sitio del Qoricancha (an archeological museum) and the Pachacuteq monument, which was built to honor the famous Inka Pachacuteq. He was the one who built Machu Picchu and is well known for enhancing the social, political and economic aspects of Inca society. The Museo Municipal de Arte Contemporáneo was my favorite. Unlike the Museo de Arte Popular, the paintings were more focused around Inca and modern Peruvian society instead of just religious Catholic paintings and portrayals of the Spanish Conquistadors. Those types of pictures and sculptures aren't too fun to look at given the history of what the Spanish did to the native people. It is quite baffling how big Catholicism is here given the fact that the ancestors of these practicing Peruvians were slaughtered and enslaved by the Conquistadors who brought the Catholic religion over from Spain. So yeah, I don't get it, but I'm biased because I think worshipping a sun god is way cooler anyway. The Museo Histórico Regional was cool; it focused a lot on the Inca and pre Incan cultures that occupied modern day Cusco and other nearby areas in Peru. I learned that the valley wherein lies the city of Cusco used to be an ancient lake called Lake Morkill, which served as a watering hole for the mega fauna that lived back in that time, including mammoths, saber toothed tigers and a gigantic armadillo that is an ancestor of the modern day armadillo. The Qoricancha archeological museum was also really cool. There we learned about metallurgy (the practice of melting and molding metal to make weapons, ceremonial and other objects), the characteristics of the pottery of the Inca and pre-Inca cultures, and the practice of cranial deformation, which indicated status in the Inca culture. I understand the head deformation thing (well, not really, but I'd at least heard of it before), but what really blew my mind was the cranial surgery they did back in the day. I don't remember the term for it, but essentially what they did was drill holes into the skull so as to remove bone fragments from the brain in the case of head trauma, for example. There were many reasons why they performed this type of surgery in an attempt to save a person's life, but I just can't imagine the absolute agony the person must have been in. No anesthesia and they afterwards they would fill the hole with gold or silver to patch it up. Apparently 65% of patients would survive, which was quite possibly a good number back then. But yikes...just yikes. There were skulls with 3 or 4 holes drilled all the way through the bone, ouch. I suppose we are pretty spoiled with modern medicine.
Our final day in Cusco we finally climbed Sacsaywayman mountain, something we had been wanting to do since we first arrived. We had met an older guy named Dan from Tasmania in our hostel and he was traveling alone so we invited him to climb with us. He was really cool to talk to and was filled with stories and anecdotes. There were ruins at the top of the mountain, which we explored a bit because clearly we have not had enough of them. Again, we didn't have a guide so all we could do was guess as to what we were looking at. Dan is a carpenter down under so he was really interested in the stonework, which made things a bit more interesting. There were massive stones stacked on top of each other to make walls with no mortar to hold them together. They seemed to be a variation on the Inca block, which is an almost symmetrical stone that they stacked in the aforementioned way. These stones, however, were much larger (some 4 or 5 feet tall) and had anywhere from 7 to 12 angles carved in them, which were then fit together like pieces of a puzzle. This was most likely to provide stability in the event of an earthquake, but there may have been other reasons too. The architecture is quite amazing given what tools they had at their disposal in the 16th century. After exploring the ruins we wandered over to the giant statue of Jesus Christo, named Christo Blanco. It was a white statue of Jesus, in case you couldn't tell by the name. There we enjoyed the view of Cusco for awhile, since we could see the whole city sprawled out below us from up on the mountain.
After our lovely morning hike the 3 of us went out to lunch at our favorite veggie spot in the city. On the way to the restaurant it started raining and then began to hail with vigor. If this is the dry season I don't think I want to be here in the wet season. The restaurant we went to is called Prasada and they have 2 locations, so we went there at least 3 times. They had delicious veggie burgers and sandwiches and tacos; I wish that restaurant could just follow us around South America. Unfortunately I think we just got lucky with Cusco, I'm not really holding my breath for too many vegetarian restaurants in Bolivia. At one of the locations, it ended up being the lady's birthday so she shared some of her homemade (I think vegan) cake with us, it was very sweet.
Last night I took advantage of the final thing left to do with the tourist ticket in Cusco, an hour long dance show at the Centro Qosqo de Arte Nativo. Lauren wasn't up for it so I invited Dan and the 2 of us went to enjoy the collection of native dances, which were accompanied by Peruvian music. I love the music here; they utilize flute instruments a lot paired with small guitars called charangos. The music is very upbeat and makes me want to frolic through nature, I love it. When Dan and I arrived we found a line of hundreds of people that went all the way down the street. We were some of the last audience members to be let in so I feel fortunate we made it. It was my last night in Cusco so there was no option of a second attempt for me. I'll be honest and say that a big part of my motivation in coming to the show was the fact that I spent 6 weeks in Spain and failed to see a flamenco performance, which is just sad. I was therefore determined to immerse myself in the Peruvian culture via dance and music. I'm glad I went; it was a great show with very colorful costumes and all the dances had different themes, such as romance or farming (which I suppose were the only 2 themes I could pick up on).
After the show I went back to the hostel to enjoy the best salted caramel crepe I will probably ever have in my life (these people truly know how to make a crepe), before setting out with Lauren and one of the hostel employees, Sergio, to a bar called Kilómetro Cero. This bar hosts live music every night and we first heard about it during our free waking tour of Cusco we had done almost 2 weeks earlier. Since then I had been determined to go hear some awesome music, and waiting until out last night in town was a good way to build the anticipation. The band totally rocked. I mean, they had a guy on the saxophone, an awesome electric guitarist/vocalist and a guy sitting on the guitar amp using it for a drum and playing it super well, so that's pretty awesome. They played all Spanish songs I didn't recognize, though everyone else in the bar was singing along, and they also randomly threw in 'Knocking on Heaven's Door,' half in English and half in Spanish. It had been such a long day and I was pretty tired so I barely made it past midnight, but I also think I was getting slight carbon monoxide poisoning from all the cigarette smoke in that place. The bar was super tiny and everyone in there kept lighting up cig after cig, which wouldn't have been so bad except they didn't have the doors or any windows open. So that probably didn't help with the fatigue I was feeling. I finally crawled into bed a little before 1 (which may not sound so late but I'm a granny) and we had to be up at 6 this morning to catch the bus to Puno, a 7 hour drive. Bus rides are definitely my least favorite part of traveling, but in a big country like Perú the long ones are necessary to get you where you want to go. I take solace in the fact that I have probably already experienced the worst bus ride of my life (hopefully, cause it was too awful to relive anything like it again) so I know I can power through. There was a really funny old Italian guy who kept yelling things to no one in particular. His family found him amusing and we were pretty sure he just liked hearing the sound of his own voice, so that was some mild entertainment.
We arrived in Puno on the beautiful Lake Titicaca around 4 pm and caught a cheap taxi to our hostel, only a couple blocks from the main plaza. We got some real food for the first time all day at this nice little restaurant that offered a cheap 3 course tourist menu, as most of them do, and we will probably be in bed nice and early tonight as we are both exhausted.
My next post will describe my experiences in Puno and our tour of the lake, which we plan to do in a couple of days. Buenas noches!