Apart from spending most of the ride at above 4,000m, the ride to Cusco was pretty uneventful and unremarkable. We are here as a base for some Inka revision. Cusco is actually a very nice place architecturally. It was the centre of the Inka Empire and became the centre of Hispanic South America when the Spaniards defeated the Incas in the late 1500's. It is a big city but the old centre is quite amazing. The Spaniards tried to erase the collective memory of Inka culture by knocking down everything the Inkas had built. But they were a bit lazy and when there were some good strong walls, they just built on top of them. So you see Spanish Andalucian architecture built on top of massive Inka remnants throughout the old centre of Cusco. There also seems to be some sort of preservation order going on in the area, as a lot of back streets which have a different sort of 'quality' also remain unaltered with their adobe brick construction, probably from the first part of the 20th Century.
We have decided to stay put in Cusco for a while. We are using it as a base to visit things in the surrounding areas - all Inka related - and also having a rest. We are also effectively lying low waiting for the issues in Ecuador to calm down a bit before we attempt to enter, and cross the country. There is still a lot of Peru to go through before the Ecuador border, but as we are in such a nice and interesting place it's best to put our roots down here temporarily. So there will be a number of Cusco posts.
The old centre has a succession of squares all dominated by at least one 16th Century Spanish Church, Convent, Basilica or Cathedral. There might even be a monastery somewhere we haven't found yet. Street life is very colourful here. Clearly there is quite a bit of tourist stuff going on, but there is way more than that. They reckon there are about 400 types of potato on sale here which represents 10% of what they hold in the research centres. So there are plenty of street vendors selling cooked potatoes of one sort or another. And then there is the corn, purple, yellow or white. And the corn drinks, fermented or not. And the cheese ice cream. And a multitude of coloured drinks. And let's not forget the cactus fruit and quail's eggs. Alpaca is more for the restaurants rather than street food - as is guinea pig - but there were a couple of buckets of skinned ones for sale outside the market, you could see their little feet poking out. But there is also the other side of things with the not so young ladies with their bags of identical tourist parafinalia, the street children, the tour and massage hawkers and the disabled singers.
In the evening it is quite chilly here; we are at 3,200m altitude and only relatively expensive restaurants have doors. A small glass of wine is as expensive or more than a main course, so we are off the wine. But fresh fruit juice is available cheaply everywhere. And there are plenty of really different fruit here.
There always seems to be something happening here. Just like the Candelaria practice in Puno, there was a Carneval practice in Cusco the other morning which lasted for two and a half hours. It involved all the surrounding villages, which are basically agricultural, coming into town and parading their local Agricultural Association banners with their bands and dancers. This was not a tourist thing but a way for people from different villages to get together. Everybody was dressed up; they tossed some of their local produce be it spring onions, flowers, avocados, corn or whatever into the people watching. Or, to the amusement of all who saw it, a potato thrown, as opposed to tossed, at the most sensitive part of the male policeman trying to keep order. Direct hit. Big smiles (almost) all round.
