Cusco

30th Oct - 31st Oct (Day 240 - Day 241)

We arrived in Cusco in the evening and was greeted by pouring rain, which wasn´t a great sign as we had to start our trek in 2 days time. We took a taxi to our hotel in the centre of Cusco. The hotel was great but our rooms were on the 3rd and 4th floors which with the impact of the altitude made carrying our bags to our rooms quite a challanging experience.

Once we had settled in and recovered from the climb up the stairs we headed back down to reception to go to our pre-trek talk with Pedro, who would be our tour guide for the Lares trek. For the next hour Pedro repeatly told us how hard the trek would be, how badly we might be affected by altitude and how it would be absolutley freezing at night......it was not the most encouraging speech I had ever heard but at least it made us realistic about the challange ahead of us......although judging by the looks on Tina, T and Jess´ faces during the talk the word challange and nightmare could be easily interchanged.

After Pedro had scared us all with his talk we decided to head out to the main square in Cusco for dinner. This was only a short walk but it was the first time we had explored Cusco and the beauty of the place became apparent, especially lit up at night. The main square itself is truely stunning, with a number of lovely buildings all made up of a mixture of Inca and Spanish architecture, the main focus being the huge and impressive catherdral on the East side of the square. All around the square as small shops and restaurants, these are a little expensive and touristy but the settling is amazing.

We wandered around for a while before choosing on a restaurant for dinner. We chose a small restuarant just of the main squre which had some Peruvian delicacies on the menu such as guinea pig, alpaca steak and beef heart. We decided to go for it and ordered a meat platter with all the aforementioned dishes. The beef heart and the alpaca steak were fantastic and I think we all really enjoyed those dishes. The Guinea pig seemed a little over cooked and as you can imagine isn´t the meatest of animals anyways, so this was more of a challange and not quite as enjoyable as the other options. Although Tina did seem to like playing with the foot of the guinea pig and kicking peas around a plate with it....so at least we got our monies worth in some way!

We spent the following day wandering around Cusco stocking up on last minute supplies for our trip. This involved us all getting matching llama wool, hats, gloves and socks as we were a little concerned about how cold it would get up on the mountain. The rest of the day was spent trawling around shops in Cusco, the girls seemed to enjoy this but I can´t say I shared their excitment...this is the only downside of being outnumbered by girls 3 to 1 again. Luckily out of the blue Steve the white rasta from Bournemouth turned up and I was able to chat about football for a few hours while their girls continued to be out bargained by the locals in Cusco.

That evening we eat dinner in the hotel before heading up to our rooms to pack our bags for the trek, this was followed by as early night as we had to be up at 4.30am the following morning to meet our tour guide Pedro and the bus that would take us to the starting point of our trek.

Xx