Cuzco? ´Cooco´? Cusco? or Q´osqo?

Oh man. I just got to Trujillo, and all I want to do is write about Trujillo. I love Trujillo! I´ve liked every city (and pueblo) that I´ve visited in Peru so far, but Trujillo is already easily my favorite. Trujillo is so classy, so old. The men are so stylish. The women are beautiful. And everyone is so tall! I love Trujillo, Love it, Love it!
But before I got to Trujillo, I was in Cuzco, and then in Lima for another day, so I think I´d better write about that or else I´ll lose track of whats going on and that would be really unfortunate.
So... Cuzco. I think my plane ride there sums it up pretty well. I sat in the front row of the plane, with nice leg room, by two girls, one from Australia and the other from Canada, who I didn´t talk to much. As we came close to landing, as soon as we went beneath the cloud layer and could see mountains, the girls started snapping pictures of each other. With the aerial view of Cuzco as their backdrop. They snapped away and snapped away, of each other, even though their background was barely visible to them, or to me. ¨We´re about to land in Cuzco,¨ the Australian girl told her Canadian friend. ¨We´ll never have a better time.¨
¨What does that mean?¨the Canadian asked. ´
Öh, I don´t know,¨ the Australian said. ¨But it´s Cuzco. We´ll hardly have a better time. Ever.¨
I liked Cuzco, or Qósqo, or whatever you choose to call it. I really did. The first night that I was there, I met a different Canadian girl, named Laura, who gave me her travel guide and took me around to show me the city. We wandered past the plaza de armas, a few late night markets, and through Cuzcos shadier parts (to which I´m naturally attracted, as usual; Lord help me but I don´t know why) and then made our way back up the steep walk through the neighborhood of San Blas to the hostel. From the hostel balcony, it´s a beautiful view of the city. From up there, I became aware of just how special of a place Cuzco is. I have some good photos from up there to prove it.
Of course, I spent the whole next day getting screwed over by Cuzcos tourist sharks. First there was the business of getting a ticket for Inti Raymi. 90 dollars is the going price...if youre silly enough to pay it. And guess who was? What I found out, just as I left my money at the Banco de Credito, is that the steep ninety dollar fee is only for a seat, headphones, radio guide, commemorative book, and DVD. You can sit up on the hill at Sacsayhuaman for free. Of course, you don´t find that out waiting in four lengthy lines for tickets. But I got my Inti Raymi ticket by noon and then went to Sacsayhuaman. Again, I became aware of jus how special Cuzco is. From atop the hill where the site is located, Cuzco the city is so impressive. And the inca walls are so well crafted, alongside which sit the older preInca constructions. As I sat in this older part of the ruins, particularly in an Inca cemetary, a man who claimed to be a curandero using native practices walked by me and explained that the Inca first studied these older walls still exist because the Inca wanted to first study humility before building their own constructions. Sounds like a bunch of sentimental hogwash to me, but it looks like I still remember it anyway.
Um...the next day I went to Pisac. In some ways, the day was really frustrating. I took the bus there and we spent two hours getting to the town. And from there it was either another bus, walking, or cab, to get to the ruins, and this line of cabbies totally conspired to rip potential tourists off on cab fare, as each of them insisted that it would cost 15 soles (US five bucks) to get there...and then it was right around the corner. I was pretty grumpy about this, but I wasnt walking 6 km or getting on another bus. And what was worse was that on the way there and back, the cab driver kept picking up HITCHHIKERS (ie random village people) and letting them ride on my tab wherever they needed to go. He would pick up some random person, and they would get on and start talking to the cab driver in Quechua, and meanwhile I would be sitting there just hoping to get to the ruins while they got a lift at my expense. One of these people, though, at least talked to me, and explained the process of making adobe. She was an old lady, so I naturally was happier to give her a lift, say, than I was to pick up some of the scarier looking middle aged men.
Um. Well, anyway, that made for an interesting adventure, and then Pisac was quite nice as well. Actually, its beginning to look like Cuzco was a constant vacillation between pleasure and strife. At Pisac, I was again shocked by amazing beauty. The site is huge, beautifullly sited on a mountainside, and there´s lots of cool was to interact with the land. Theres a cemetary to scramble through, a tight tunnel through through mountain to reach a sun temple called the Inti Huatna, and then a series of storage vessels hidden from the main path along a steep downward trail that I explored (until I had a nearly perilous fall and then turned chicken...haha).
Anyway Pisac was really wonderful, and exhausting, and after eating cream of asparragus soup in the little pueblo, I left the seemingly haunted pueblo in a colectivo where I talked to the driver the whole time about what the US was like. He was shocked to learn that men in the US don´t usually marry until thirty years old, which was how I answered his question when he asked whether I have a wife. He wanted to know also what beer was made from in the US and whether Id had really chicha yet. I hadn´t. But I convinced him to teach me a few words in Quechua and before getting off the collectivo in Cuzco, much happier with my ride back than with the way there.
Then at night there was a huge parade for Inti Raymi, which was the next day. So packed! Almost rivaled San Antonio Fiesta in terms of civic festivities. It was really a cool thing to see. The native dress of Cuzco is not necesarilly atractive, as they wear these knit vests and hats with a billion ribbons, and all the ladies go dancing down the streets with this on while the men where some crazy textiles ted randomly on their bodies. Also, every single group in the parade danced to the same song, which is apparently called ¨todos bailan,¨ honked out on trumpet instead of being played sweetly on the qena. All this is to say that Im not really sure that I aesthetically loved what was happening as the content of this festival. But nevermind that, because it was so cool to see what was going on, especially all the people in the audience (even the fat little lady with a tophat and a baby tied to her back who kept shoving me really hard to get through a long line on the sidewalk).
Okay. Inti Raymi! Huge festival, lots of standing around. Music and dance, a la indigena. I liked watching, because it was really beautiful. But at the part principal in the Sacsaywaman I got really sad, because I realized just how much I wanted to be sitting up on the hill with all the other, normal people, how it wasnt fair that it was supposed to be a festival for indigenous people and yet none of them were getting the VIP service, none of them were sitting in the bleachers because they were all either up on the hill because they couldn´t pay for a seat that expensive or were down the street selling grilled Cuy or chicha from a plastic bucket because they had to work instead of taking the day off to watch the celebration of the sun. I don´t know..it made me really sad, so much so that I had a hard time enjoying it.
Time to wrap this up, I think. So my second to last day in Cuzco I went to Tipon, with a cab driver who I hired for a few hours to take me, wait for me, and bring me back, since Tipon is probably the hardest of the sites to get to by yourself. Turns out my cabbie was (of course) a native Quechua speaker and happened to know quite abit about archaeology, which seems to be true of a lot of cusqueños, so he took me, got off of the car with me, and walked around, showing me a lot of interesting stuff. This was the least crowded of any site on the boleto turistico, probably because its so hard to reach. But it was also my favorite. Beautiful canals, highly symmetrical fountains. The only other people there were some american tourists doing healing rituals. Me and the cabbie kind of laughed at them, because it seemed so silly to see all these middle aged white people dressed in all white clothing doing witchery at a site that they probably didn´t know much about (there was one guy there who decided it would be cleansing to stick his bald head under the ancient fountain and let the water run on his exposed scalp'''''so weird). Anyway, we walked around, and the cabbie showed me how to use a series of ancient steps that I probably wouldn´t have noticed otherwise, and it was a lovely time. On the way back to Cuzco, we drove by his village, just outside of San Jeronimo, and he showed me the school his daughters attended. All in all it was pretty sweet, and I lucked out to have such a good guide.
Oh, the same day, I also spent the morning hiking to qénqo. It was gross, because I had to walk along the highway, and scary for the same reason considering that peruvians are not exactly magnificent drivers. And once I got to Qenqo it wasn´t that exciting. I almost busted a lung getting there though.
Alrighty, almost at the end. So the last day I took an organized tour, beause I realized that it was the only way that I would ever get to all of the sites that I was still missing on the boleto turistico. So I went with the tour group to Ollantaytambo and Chincheros, and back to Pisac. The coolest part was watching weavers in Chincheros. The weirdest part is that I got hit on by this weird lady from Ecuador who was 33 and on the tour with her son, who was FOUR YEARS YOUNGER THAN ME. She kept showing me her pictures and making me tell her how good she looked, and she kept telling me I was good looking and dropping hints that she wanted an American boyfriend because she was tired of Latino machistas. I kept hanging out with her though because she and her son were actually really funny (when she wasn´t making me feel uncomfortable that is) and because it was better than spending the whole tour by myself.
I ended my tour in Cuzco by learning a new card game, Hearts, with four new British friends on the hostel.
This post has gone REAALLLY long. I think I´ll have to write about my night in Lima (which deserves a post) with the Trujillo batch. It´s time for me to get out and see more of Trujillo now, anyway. YAY! I love Trujillo!!!!