Peru - Cusco
I arrived in the city of Cusco after a roughly seven-hour bus transfer from Puno by Lake Titicaca. I was a little worried about what I'd do in the middle of the night in Cusco, but luckily I managed to wake the hotel's reception clerk, who, even at half past four in the morning, cheerfully checked me in. I could get a little more rest, and in the morning set off into the city full of energy.
I spent the morning searching for a suitable agency for a trek in the mountains, but I'll write about that in the next article. In Cusco, from the very first moment, I was struck by the colonial Spanish style that is almost omnipresent here. But I found it a little sad. I saw various remnants of masterful Inca building skill, and on the foundations of those walls, houses, churches and palaces had been erected in the European spirit.
In fact, I felt sorry about it the whole time, and a little ashamed to be walking around here as a tourist from Europe, in places the Spanish had utterly decimated, driving out the original culture. So I didn't have much appetite for admiring the Spanish monuments and preferred to focus on the Inca ones. I solved the entrance to these sites (about twenty in total in Cusco and the surrounding areas of the Sacred Valley) with a combined ticket for 130 soles (valid for 10 days) and first set off to the museum by Coricancha. It's not a particularly large museum, but various excavated finds, golden statuettes, mummies and intriguing Inca skulls are on display here, shaped in childhood by binding into an elongated form. This skull shape was considered proof of higher social standing.
Afterwards I visited the nearby church of Santo Domingo. It's built on the original Inca Temple of the Sun. The Spanish tore it down, carted off tonnes of gold and erected a church here. Of particular interest are the parts of the original Inca walls that can be seen here. I could thus admire the incredible building skills of the Incas, who with primitive tools managed to create perfectly precise walls out of enormous stones.
For the afternoon I planned a trip above Cusco, where the Sacsayhuaman fortress stands. The whole of Cusco lies quite high in the mountains (about 3,200 metres above sea level), the fortress itself is at 3,600 metres, and so people who fly in from Lima directly to here often have trouble with the altitude. In my case the acclimatisation from Lake Titicaca did its job, and in Cusco I noticed no problems with the altitude at all.
Sacsayhuaman is a beautiful, sprawling site above the city, where I could leisurely spend a long time enjoying the view over Cusco and admiring the remnants of the fortress walls. If the Inca walls at the church of Santo Domingo had seemed interesting to me, here they struck me as utterly incredible. Truly gigantic, multi-tonne boulders, perfectly worked and set one on top of another without a single gap. One could easily start to believe that they must have had some help with such work from extraterrestrials or deities.
Thousands of people worked on this fortress for roughly a hundred years. The builders transported the stones here (without the invention of the wheel) from sites 11 km and 35 km away. They split the stones using drilled holes, wet sand and wedges. The final working of the stones was carried out with copper and bronze chisels.
After touring the fortress I walked back to the city centre and strolled around the little shops, cafés and bistros. I was surprised at how modern the shops and businesses I found here were; tourism has really transformed the city a great deal.
I began my second day in Cusco with a visit to the local market. I always look forward to the markets in every Asian destination, but here I didn't expect all that much from it. All the more, then, was I surprised by its scale and abundance. Not only in the main market building, but also in many of the surrounding streets, a market of incredible proportions was under way. Fruit, vegetables, heaps of meat and many stalls with food and juices.
I wandered the market for what must have been the whole morning and couldn't take my eyes off it. Dozens of kinds of potatoes, grilled guinea pigs, little bags of coca leaves - I couldn't even manage to photograph it all and store it in my memory. Compared to Asia, there was far more meat here. Cow and sheep heads, offal and cuts of meat laid out on the counter are probably a sight only for the stronger of stomach, but meat is simply eaten here, and so this too is part of the Cusco market.
The local people, while shopping, stop for a big bowl of noodle soup, in which bones of gigantic proportions often float. The strong broth, though, gives them enough energy for the whole day in these conditions and at this altitude. I also tried some dishes here, and once I had feasted my eyes and couldn't fit anything more into my stomach, I left the market, because I still needed to prepare for my next adventure. The following day my five-day trek across Salkantay was beginning, ending with the climb up to Machu Picchu.