It has been hard to edit all my Peru pictures especially with school starting back up, but they will be arriving shortly! Promise!
Make sure to check back soon to see them!
Hike to the water fall. Had no idea how long it should take or even how long the hike was. All we knew was that our gold was to find a waterfall.
Well, 14 miles later, and unable to breath because we went an additional 2,000 meters up into the mountains and the 90 degrees of beaming sun, we were completely disappointed and dead tired. The waterfall was definitely not worth it.
The only good parts were the valleys of animals and the sometimes decent views.
What we walked to the top of
Looking down into the Valley
A Cow on the side of the trail
Horse
Very Fragile Bridge
Another Horse
The Valley
Cows!
#3
Salineras, 2 hours, long vertical climb
Salt mines, maintained since pre-hispanic times, made up of a small salt water spring which is conducted through a series of channels into hundreds of white pools. There are people who still mine there using their feet to sift through the salty water.
Salineras
The Mountainside
View of Pools
A Pool
Donkeys Lugging Salt
Worker Lugging Salt
First Hike:
Pinkuylluna, Ruins overlooking the town of Ollantaytambo
One of the two cloudy days so far
Sign Up
Side View
View of the Town
2nd:
Puente a Puente (Bridge to Bridge), about 2 hours
Crossed Train Tracks
Crossed the First Bridge
Donkey
The Urubama River with Snow Capped Mountians in the Distance
Bridge #2
The Train Tracks Brings Us Back to Ollantaytambo
After having bread and tea for breakfast, we set out to romp the streets a little and then went to the office to see if they had any plans for us. As of then they hadn’t but later that afternoon Paula (volunteer coordinator lady for Awamaki) can over and told us that we would be going on a few hikes and taking pictures of them to be apart of a tour guidebook that Awamaki would be co-publishing with the South American Explorers Club. They would use this to hopefully boost tourism in the Ollantaytambo area to bring money into the community. So we accepted the hiking challenge and got excited for the next few days!
I called it a morning at around 6am when the sun started to raise and the not so comfortable seats were beginning to get to my back. At around 7:30, they started to play music as a polite way to wake people up and to announce that breakfast was on its way. Breakfast=nasty sandwich, with who knows what because neither one of us opened the package.
After breakfast, my ears were miserable, so i kind of just sat and dealt with the bus whipping around hair-pin turns on the edge of a winding mountain road. What helped pass time the most was that they played Iron Man and a homemade medley of Titanic, Greece, Footloose and Dirty Dancing dance footage.
We finally made it to Cuzco at 3pm and i have never felt so happy to walk on the ground a to get of a 14 hour long roller coaster ride. From Cuzco we got a taxi that brought us back to Ollantaytambo. Here we met up with the volunteer coordinator and she brought us to our host family´s house. We put our stuff in our giant bed room, had trout and rice for dinner, took a cold electric shower and went to bed.
We both passed out on the bus, and since we took a little earlier bus than we were originally planning. we arrived in Nazca at 4am instead of the 6:30. It makes a huge difference when you don´t have the slightest clue where you are or what to do until 11pm that night.
So the conductor woke us up and told us that we were arriving in Nazca, and strangely enough, we were the only people to get off the bus. And thank god that it was a private, gated terminal because it was a bit sketchy out. We stood inside the bus station for a few minutes trying to figure out what to do next with our lives. We looked up in our Bible (the guide book) and found a reasonably priced hostel that was close by. So we caught a taxi, checked into the hostel and promptly fell asleep.
We did much of nothing for the rest of the day other than walk around the town and grab some lunch.
At around 8pm, we headed back to the bus station to make sure everything was set for our 11:30 pm departure. We checked out backpacks at the station and went across the street to Rico Pollo for dinner. We ordered a whole chicken to split, and for $10 total, we didn’t think that it could have been that much food. But oh were we mistaken. They came out with a huge plate of about 20 pieces of chicken and a giant plate of fries. Everyone in the restaurant stared at us wondering what we were doing. And we had the same question. It was very good, but we both were pretty tired and didn´t want to stuff ourselves too much, so we ate a few pieces and pushed even more around our plates to make it seem like we did some damage.
The plates before
The Food Mushed Everywhere
After dinner, we waited around the bus station until out bus finally took off at around 1am.
There were some people in our hostel who had done the Cuzco-Arequipa route, some make it through fine, others had broken windows. But they informed us that they had to walk through the protest, and sometimes fend for yourself on the other side to find your way to Cuzco. After much confusion about if the buses were actually running or not, and searching and debating our other options… we finally came up with a round-about (safe) plan to make our way back to Cuzco.
When looking at a map, we saw that maybe we could take a bus from Arequipa-Nazca and then from Nazca-Cuzco. Also, since we already had tickets with Cruz del Sur and that they were completely legit and thrust worthy, we went to ask them if that would be possible. Ans yes, it completely was!
Arequipa-Nazca= 9 hours
Nazca-Cuzco=14 hours
Total of 23 hours
Compared to the original 10 hours that we were planning on this seemed a little ridiculous, but I guess we had to do what we had to do to get there safely. Also because they were going to apply our other tickets to these, we were sold!
We got tickets that left tonight @ 7:30pm and arrive in Nazca at 4:00am. Then leave at 11:30pm on Friday and arrive 14 hours later.
VIP seats for 9hours, regular for 14… I guess not too bad.
So we happily set out to Zig Zag to get some Good-Bye crepes and stopped by the grocery store to stock up on some snacks for the road.
When we arrived back at the bus station to catch our bus, we were completely surprised at how nice the terminal was. They metal detected us, hada lounge with leather seats and a snack bar and before you got on the bus, they videotaped everyone’s face. We had VIP seats which were among the 9 seats on the 1st floor. The seats were leather and went basically all the way flat. It was a little claustrophobic at times, but very comfortable!
Laying back on the bus!
Sleeping!
We woke up early to call Cruz Del Sur, and the news was that they still were not running. And since we already covered all the places that we wanted to visit yesterday, we didn´t really have much to do. So all we really did all day was eat, perfect our pool skills and pray for the buses to start running again.
We woke up fairly early, and checked out of our room because we had a 7:30 bus ticket to Cuzco. We set out to the plaza because we had a few places we wanted to visit before we headed out of Arequipa. Firstly, we needed to grab some food. So we naturally headed back to the Crepe place. Steph got a chicken, avocado and cheese crepe. An I got a tune, spinach and cheese crepe. It was soo good. They made a pesto like sauce out of the spinach which caught me by surprise, but was amazing.
Tuna, Spinash and Cheese Crepe
After lunch we went to the Museo Santuarios Andinos, where we watched a short National Geographic film about the finding of the very well preserved young Incan girl that was wound in 1995. The mummy, about 500 years old, was well preserved in the ice on a local mountain. However, in 1995, a close by volcano erupted, melting the ice, and exposing “Juanita.” The museum was filled with both Juanita´s spiritual offerings, along with the other about 5 mummys that have been found in Peru and Chile. After looking at a lot of artifacts, we got to see Juanita- They keep her in a case at -20 degrees C and at 95% humidity. She was so well preserved. You could see the skin on her arms and they said that all her internal organs were perfectly intact.
After seeing Juanita, we headed to visit the Monasterio de Santa Catalina. It is about 425 years old and is a small city with 100 houses, 60 streets, a main square, a church, cemetery and an art gallery. As many as 175 nuns lived there during the 17th and 18th centuries. Now, 29 nuns live there ranging from 21-96 years of age. It was really pretty and basically a little city within downtown Arequipa.
A Bedroom
View from the top
Another View
After, we headed back to the hostel to grab our stuff and to head to the bus station to catch our bus. But unbeknownst to us, all the buses were not running the Arequipa-Cuzco route because of the protests. So we checked back into out room and went out to get some dinner. We went to an Italian restaurant that we had seen earlier in the day and had a great meal.
Dinner:
Chicken Cordon Bleu with Ravioli
Dijion Pork Chops
