Hello lovely family,
Well it has been a week since my last blog so I will try to update you all on the adventures of the past 7 days. My first day I spent in Lima; usually I would go on to say how much I hate the capital city but this trip really allowed me to see the wonderful sights The City of Kings has to offer. The first couple nights I stayed in Barranco, the soho district of Lima. It was a beautiful area with beach access via a large staircase that scale the nearly vertical cliffs. The area was equipped with many tourist restaurants including a 19th century train car turned cafe and even a Dominos pizza. Lima was very Americanized with Radioshacks, Chilis, and Burger Kings sprawled across the modern part of the city. It was a bit quiet in my hostel in Barranco though so I switched to one in MiraFlores. This trendy and upscale part of the city had beautiful homes, a gym, and a mall built into the cliffside with all your Gucci and Prada needs. I went to an ancient site in the middle of the city that is over 1600 years old and made only from adobe bricks. Connstructed by the pre-Incans, the pyramid was built in layers every twenty years as a tribute to the shark, ruler of the sea. It was really an amazing site to see. My last two mornings in Lima I ran on the boardwalk along the coast, it was a very peaceful place and it helped me come to terms with my new life in South America. Tuesday I boarded a plane to Cusco to meet Alice and Wrenna. I have fallen in love with Cusco all over again; the sights and the people are so wonderful and welcoming. My first night we went out to eat and our waiter treated us to some free pisco sours. "For the beautiful ladies," he said, although the altitude was making them a bit stronger than usual and I had to turn down a few. The next day Alice was sick from the either some water or food she had so we spent most of the day taking care of her. Thursday she was feeling better so we went on a walking tour to Saqsaywaman and some more sacred sites higher up in the hills. It was really amazing to see the sites again but with a local guide, Erick, to tell us the history, and with such enthusiasm. Finally, yesterday we got up early and took a bus to Moray and Maras. It took about three hours to get there and it was a pretty amazing show of Incan achitecture and agricultural inovation as it was terraces used for agriculture but made into perfect spiraling circles. Unfortunately, Wrenna lost her phone in the taxi so we spent much of the day trying to get it back. Thats how we came to be in the back of a police car hunting down the taxi driver as we suspected he found it and was going to sell it. We weren't able to catch him before he headed back to Cusco to likely do just that, and although it was pretty upsetting for the both of them we continued our journey. We wanted to visit some salt flats we had heard were very cool but as we were low on money we decided to walk. It took an hour to walk through the desert like farm land, locals riding donkeys past us along the way, but we made it and the Salinas de Maras but it was worth it. A thousand pools of salt flats covered a mountain side in classic scaled fashion and it was amazing to learn that no company owned them, each family in Maras owned from 1-50 depending on their wealth and would come to harvest the salt each weekend. Walking through and past the flats, we went to Urubamba to catch a long bus back to Cusco. The day had been very long so we went to bed early and slept in this morning. Today we decided to keep it low key and just explore more of the city of Cusco. I will try to write more often to keep these shorter but there is always something to be doing! I love you guys, talk to you soon!
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