Epicentre
Earlier, we’d pulled into the gloom of a Lima morning without incident. The scheduled blockade in Callao had either passed, or not happened, and the bus pulled into the terminus relatively on time. I wasn’t told this until we were at the airport, but the taxi driver who drove us to the airport took us through a very dangerous part of the city as a short cut. The roads were narrow and poorly kept, and the houses were little more than piles of bricks stacked together. From the street we were on, smaller, unsealed single lane streets and pedestrian only alleys fed off into the tangled urban heap. Few people were around because of the time of day and I guess that’s the main reason the driver took us that way. I found myself wishing I’d kept my camera with me, as I don’t know if I’ll get to see this part of Lima again, and it was an experience I’d rather revisit in more than just my head.
Cusco airport is fairly old. At some point I imagine it was beyond the edge of the city, but now the urban sprawl has swept past it, with houses lining the perimeter of the airport on all sides. To a degree, the buildings of the airport resemble those from a 1970’s James Bond film, set in the Caribbean. In the luggage hall several musicians were playing Andean music, locals and tourists alike huddled around the conveyor belt that would bring their luggage in from the tarmac. Unlike any other airport I had been in before, you could stand and watch the ground crew drive up to the loading dock, then transfer the luggage to the conveyor. The other difference was that as we prepared to leave, we were challenged by airport staff to show proof we were the owners of the baggage we were carrying, done via stickers on our boarding passes, with bar codes matching the tags on the bags.
The hostel we were booked into had sent someone to meet us, who hailed us a taxi and rode with us to the front door. We passed through the centre of town and then buzzed up the steep narrow streets, the taxi stopping suddenly on a steep incline. The hostal wasn’t much to look at from the outside, a modest, well kept building with a small entrance.
The room was downstairs, and quite dark, but the small courtyard in the middle of the building had an impressive view out over the city. The self-contained bathroom had seemed a bonus but it was more of a cupboard to me, with little room between my knees and the wall once squatted on the loo (as events would unfold, this was to become an important factor for me).
Our efforts to book or even find out about trains from Cusco to Machu Picchu had been fruitless thus far, and when we were settled in town we went to the train station to try our luck. All services to Machu Picchu from Cusco had been sold out for the next several days, and the only available service was from Ollantaytambo. We bought the tickets and decided to worry about the logistics of getting to Ollantaytambo later. We scoured the guide for what sounded like a decent accommodation option, and Edgard called and made a reservation.
In the afternoon we walked to the Plaza de Armas and met up with the tail of a longer tour. At this point we were just interested in a local tour and had booked for the larger one the next day. They took us through the Cusco Cathedral, pointing out that much of central Cusco had been constructed on the foundations of the old Inca city, with religious buildings in particular built from the ruins of Incan temples in an effort to usurp the “heathen religion”.
We were then led to another religious site—Coricancha—once one of the most important religious sites in the Incan empire, which was stripped of it’s gold and demolished to be replaced by the Santo Domingo convent. Parts of the old temple still remain inside the convent, and the Incan foundations are clearly visible as reminders of what once was. Within view of this are the homes of the poor, clinging to the steep sides of the valley.
From Coricancha we boarded a bus to Sacsayhuaman, where the remains of the impressive Incan fortress are to be found. Massive boulders the size of buses and weighing over a hundred tonnes had been quarried from a nearby hillside, dragged to the site and knitted seamlessly together to form retaining walls and parapets. The zig-zag formation of the walls once formed the teeth of the Cusco Puma, and is probably the only remaining clearly visible reference to the original Incan design (the entire site constituted the head).
A semi-mature Andean Condor was perched on a rock on the site as a tourist attraction. Despite it being untethered, it was clearly captive, with a handler attempting to wrangle people around it as they tried to get their picture taken. I had my turn, and as I took my position beside it, the bird looked right at me. Even though it wasn’t fully grown, it was already big. It didn’t take long to see the bird wasn’t comfortable with lots of people posing around it for photos, and as more people crowded ever closer, it began to fan its wings, and eventually launched itself into the air and glided to a spot on the rocks where no humans would bother it.
By the time the tour had guided everyone back to the bus, the sun was sitting on a jagged horizon and the light was beginning to dim. They took us to a few more sites in the ravines surrounding Sacsayhuaman before returning us to the Plaza de Armas. Cusco is doing pretty well by Peruvian standards. The tourist dollars that flow through here haven’t exactly repaved the streets and temples with gold, but even the poorest here are faring far better than those in Lima. Nonetheless, the next day we would pass through those poor areas and be reminded that despite the relative affluence, they still live unenviable lives.