The guys on the tour are pretty much all from Australia. Some from Sydney and some from Melbourne. To be honest, Lima was a bit of a blur. I was exhausted from my flights and still feeling it. We had the funniest tour guide of the catacombs though. It was more of a sprint than a tour... the conversation kind of went like this...
Guide "And this is where the catacombs were discovered...."
Us "So what about the....."
Tour guide disappears around corner....
Us "How old is the ....."
Tour guide shimmys down some steps...
Us "When was the first....."
Tour guide exits stage right...
Very entertaining.... We then got a mad woman taxi driver back from the centre of town to Miraflores (which is the area we´re staying in and a very nice area too). She kept banging on the side of her taxi everytime she wanted to merge into another lane. The Peruvians have the same driving etiquette as the rest of South America. Why stick to two official lanes when you can easily squeeze four lanes of traffic in there... After about 40 mins of a 20min journey, I turned to the taxi driver and asked in spanish, "Do you like the traffic in Lima then?" I thought she was going to kill me... ha ha.
We had a quiet evening, went for dinner and then slept. Up at 4.30am this morning to get to the airport for our flight to Cusco (sometimes spelt Cuzco).
I´m kind of in a bit of a daze at the moment. We met our new guide for Cusco called Bobby. He´s great. Very keen... We went to the main square. Did the classic tourist stuff, this is a church, this is the traditional dress of the Andes etc.
Really interesting though. He then took us to an indoor market which has everything for sale.... Including pigs heads and cows snouts... Lovely. It´s really interesting trying to acclimatise to Cusco.
We´re about 3,300m high. Breathing can be a little challenging but Bobby helped to sort that out by taking us for some Coca tea... and coca chocolates.
They don´t remove the cocaine element from the coca plant when they make the tea here.... I think I floated back to the hostel... It was kind of weird but you need to have this stuff to survive the trek. So I bought 100g of dark and 100g of green Coca chocolates.... bring on the mountains I say...
Tomorrow, we start trekking and on Friday, I climb to 4,600m.... Oh man... Should be interesting.. It takes 4 hours going up the same distance it takes 45mins to come down that day.
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