Cusco, the Great Inca City

 

We spent a whole 13 days meandering through the wonderland of Cusco and the famous Sacred Valley. Even though this was where the bullying of touts and price gouging was the worst, we were still wowed with every site.  Cusco itself is an incredible city, built from huge rocks cut long ago buy the Incas, many walls and buildings still in tact from those Pre-Columbian years.  There are cobbled alleyways and pedestrian streets zigzagging up and down every hill.  Elaborately carved balconies and window-shutters adorn many of the buildings. There are hundreds of manicured plazas surrounded by ornate stone churches.  We spent 5 days just wandering through this Inca city in awe.  And there are amazing and well maintained Inca structures in the hills overloooking the city including sacred fountains (of youth and cleansing),  moon temples, mummy preparation complexes as well as a giant temple/fort made of giant rocks, precisely cut and fit together without any kind of mortar to create layers of zig-zagging walls, designed both to represent the god of lightning and defend the city of Cusco from enemy armies. This last one, by the way, was called Sacsayhuaman (pronounced “sexy woman”!).

 

Cusco was an expensive place to sleep and eat, but to our delight (and destruction) it also had several great happy hours, which we more than tood advantage of! On our first night there, instead of eating dinner, we had our first Bloody Mary in over a year (and it was delicious).  For dessert we went to a different bar with a later happy hour for rum and cokes. The next night we followed suit at a few other bars switching to Caipairinhas, Pisco Sours, and Mojitos…a dangerous combination – ask Kristian for more details on that one, if he can remember!