Day 3 - Cuzco

Plaza de Armas with San Cristobal Church on the hill

San Blas
hill through smoke from breakfast fires

A light breakfast and a pill and some coca tea to start.  Do not want to feel like yesterday.  No headache but just so tired and so hard to move.  Being out of breath easily and moving as if dizzy. Not to mention the tingling, which worried me the most.

        Guides my daughter arranged, friends of a friend, arrive at 10.  Absolutely charming.  The tall German Steffen from what was once East Berlin and little Maria from Cuzco met working on a cruise ship.  They arrive with snacks in their backpacks - especially bananas - and coca candies, one of which Steffen hands me halfway through the day.  They show us the San Pedro market, the stone of 12 corners and explain things we saw yesterday.  Peppered with details that I hope I’ll remember, like what the carvings over the doors mean - the snakes and all.

Santa Clara Market

Wanchaq Market

       We stop for juice and lunch in the other market, the one the natives shop at, the one Europeans never see. No tourists here except us.  A lady makes huge drinks from fresh fruit - one is enough for two, even in the dryness of Cuzco.  (She calls me Mahmmy, which is a diminutive for any woman, regardless of age.  Or so I’m told.  That word - ma mie - is a term of endearment in French, so I like it.)

San Blas Church

        Then Maria orders our meal and we sit at the stand and enjoy - meat stew, chicken soup, fried mountain trout.  It’s Reading Market in Philly, Peruvian-style.  All around us stalls piled high with fruit and vegetables, some familiar, some not.  I buy a plastic bag of coarse salt from the mountains (this will reappear later on); Andy buys coffee beans.  I also see and buy some muna (pronounced moon-yah), a type of mint that helps fight that breathless feeling I’ve been getting.  I’ve read it’s effective and I’m up for anything that helps.

         Steffen and Maria have other wonders to show us, up-hill.  Wimping out on the walking part, I request a taxi which takes us to T'oqokachi, the art-y section of town.  The Montmartre of Cuzco. The church across from Maria's old convent school - San Blas - is closed.  (You need a ticket/pass that you can buy from the central tourist agency, which is the case for many places.)  So I don't get to see the baroque pulpit carved out of a single piece of cedar.  It evidently stands above an Incan sanctuary dedicated to the god of thunder and lightning, Illapa.  The Roman Catholics made sure, here as elsewhere around the globe, that the old sanctuaries were... rebranded.  The Romans did that before them, in Antiquity.

      Then back by foot to the hotel.  Our bellies and eyes filled, we all sit in the courtyard and drink a beer (me, coca tea) to celebrate our new friends.  And that is plenty for a day in Cuzco, where the sun sets by 5 or 6 and you run out of oxygen well before that.

Woman carrying calf

N.B.  If you're planning to go to Cuzco 
and you're looking for a walking tour, 
or if you're really crazy 
and would like to take a bike tour, 
you might want to contact Steffen and Maria.  
They have an e-mail:  tastingtheroad@gmail.com
and also a blog:  www.tastingtheroad.blogspot.com

Foot loom