Cusco

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Originally uploaded by theslaad.

OK, so it´s been a week since the last blog, but honestly we haven´t done that much...
Cusco is a really nice place literally built right on top of an old Incan town. A number of the buildings have the original Incan stone work for the first few feet, and the bricks they used were not uniform. There are also lots of impressive old collonial buildings, and houses built up the sides of the hills.
Unfortunaltely, Jen at some point contracted salmonella. We visited the doctor on our 2nd day here and he prescribed some drugs to fight it. When Jen was feeling worse 4 days later and we went back to the clinic they decided to keep her in and administer the antibiotics intravenously. She´s still there now, 3 days on, but she should be able to go home tomorrow. She´s feeling pretty much better except for a bit of a stomach ache.
The hospital is actually not that bad. All the needles and things come from steralised bags, her private room has a spare bed that I can sleep in, the room has cable TV, there´s a great view from the window and they´ve sorted all our insurance stuff out for us.
The owner of our Hostel´s wife and 3 year old daughter came to the hospital last night to visit Jen wich was an unexpected and lovely surprise.

We were due to walk the Inca trail tomorrow, so obviously that´s out, but we´ll still be able to take the train to Machu Picchu in a few days when Jen´s fit and well again. We´d allowed plenty of time in Cusco, and we´ve gained 3 days from not doing the trek so aside from the walk (which Jen was never that keen on) we´re not missing out on anything.

Fingers crossed that they let Jen home tomorrow!

The Road to Cusco

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Originally uploaded by theslaad.

Our bus to Cusco from Nasca was supposed to be a 14 hour journey, leaving at 11pm and arriving at 1pm the following day. We booked some comfy seats and hoped that we would have a relatively hassle free journey. The guide book recommends not to take night buses as there are high instances of theft while you sleep, but we knew from when we caught the bus from Lima that the Cruz de Sur company films everyone getting on, and we knew there'd only be 9 people in our section.

It was not, however, a very hassle free journey!
The seats were comfy enough, but the road was very windy and uphill so there were lots of gear changing jerks. We managed to get some sleep but did feel quite motion sick. That turned out to be the least of our worries!
We woke up at about 9am to find that we were stationary. There had been a lot of rain and it looked as though a river had burst it's banks, turning the road into a bit of a river. It was okay though, as we manged to cross the water eventually.
A couple of hours later we came around a corner to find lorries parked along the side of the road. The bus driver kept going, but soon we were reversing to join the quene of staionary traffic. There was an announcement, but our spanish isn't yet good enough to understand what was said, but we did catch the word mañana (tomorrow), which is never a good sign. We sat around a bit, a few people got off the bus, and there were quite a few locals milling around.
After half an hour or so of waiting we went to find out what was going on. It turned out that there had been a huge rockfall which had completely blocked the road, and at best it would be cleared by the next day.
The concept of spending that long on the bus without any food didn't really appeal so we took the offer of a taxi from a local guy by the bus. The guys carried our rucksacks down past all of the parked traffic and over the rockfall where we gave them a few soles for their trouble and got into a taxi which we thought would take us to Cusco - another 3 or 4 hours away.

Around 3 or 4 minutes down the road we were stopped by the police who were in the process of retrieving a lorry from a ditch with a worn out rope and another truck. They told the passengers in the boot to get out and we squeezed past that little mishap. Once we were out of sight of hte police, the guys jumped back into the boot and we were on our way.

Until, 5 minutes later we encountered a mudslide, which was blocking the road. We had to abandon our taxi and take our things around the road, over a kind of verge to the other side of the slide where there were more taxis waiting. As you might expect, the verge was very slippery and we both fell over. I went down on my butt, and Chris broke his fall nicely on his rucksack.
We piled a lot of people into the car, three in the boot with our muddy rucksacks, and carried on with our journey.

This time we managed around half an hour before we had to get another taxi. We had thought that we were being taken all of the way to Cusco, but the driver just wanted to go to the next village where we were dropping off most people. We then had to wait around for our next taxi to fill up with passengers. Despite the obvious illegality, the car isn't full until there's someone in the boot!

Luckily, this taxi did take us all the way to Cusco. There were many more rockfalls to negotiate, but they only took up half the road, so we could still pass. The driver was a maniac though, and we occassionally feared for our lives when on the wrong side of the road going around a corner at 60kmph.

We arrived in Cusco at about 5pm, with very sore legs from being squashed into the back of the taxi, but glad to finally be at our destination. The git of a taxi driver wouldn't take us all the way into town though and ushered us into yet another taxi for our hotel. We were quite cross when we found out that it was in easy walking distance, but too tired and thirsty to care.

We stayed our first night in a charity hotel called Hotel Niños. It was nice, buit we didn't have our own bathroom, so this morning we moved ot a lovelly place for 40% of the price called Hotel Frankenstein, which is also nearer town. It's a very homely hotel, you can use their kitchen and living room, where there'a a nice wood burning fire. We have to negotiate our way around their pet Iguana - Martin in the mornings as he sits at the top of the stairs where there is the most sun.

Cusco seems very nice. We've spent today wandering around a bit. Have already bought a few things, and we're thinking that we are going to buy an extra bag! I've got a nice hat to keep my ears warm, as it gets pretty chilly up hear at an altitude of 3500m, it also makes it a bit tricky to breathe. But we should acclimatise in a few days.

Lima and Nasca

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Originally uploaded by theslaad.

We took the overnight flight from Mexico to Lima on Wednesday. It was only 6 hours but we got some sleep. We took the overpiced taxi from the airport (It´s 4 times the price of the taxis outside the airport, but at least you don´t get ripped off). We´d booked a hostel in advance and it was manky. Lovely location in Miraflores though. It´s not recommeded that you stay in Lima centre.

We snoozed until lunchtime and then went for a wander. We weren´t very adventurous in Lima, we just looked around shops, went to the cinema and ate. We went to a place called Pizza Street, which is pedestrianised and almost purely Pizza restaurants and bars, with people grabbing you and offering free Pisco Sours to eat in their restaurant. We found a nice Brazillian place with cheap Brahma and bottom wiggling dancing.

Yesterday we got a lovely coach, perhaps the nicest we´ve ever experienced, to Nasca. It only had 3 seats per row in the downstairs 1st class compartment. We felt very posh, and very comfortable. It also had films either in English, or with English subtitles which is better than the buses in Mexico with their very spanish films. We spent the whole 7 hour trip driving through barren desert.
We arrived in Nasca to a hoard of Peruvians shouting at us to come to their hotels. We walked straight past them to the hotel in our guidebook which was visible about 50m away. It´s much nicer than the place in Lima, but Nasca is hot and we don´t have air con or a fan. Apparently there´s been no significant rainfall here since the last ice age. I expect that could change now that we´re here.

Today we got up early to get on a Cessna 6 seater plane to fly over the Nasca lines. These mysterious and beautiful lines were created from about 500BC to 500AD by the ancient Nasca people (or, according to some theories, put there by aliens). The only reason they´re still there is because of the lack of rainfall and it´s forbidden for anyone to go there by land. We flew for about half an hour at between 300 and 1000 feet, and saw lots of geometric lines and pictures of a spider, a monkey, a whale, a humming bird, a condor, a parrot, a dog, an "astronaut", amongst others. The largest picture is about the size of a football pitch. We banked and turned around them in a stomach churning sort of way, before coming back for a very smooth landing.
There are various theories as to what the lines were for, including extra terrestrial landing strips, a giant calendar, and others which hopefully we´ll find out more about when we attend a lecture on the subject this evening.

Back to El D.F.

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Originally uploaded by theslaad.

It can be quite confusing whilst in Mexico, that the Mexicans refer to the city as Mexico too. So to avoid confusion, it is also called El D.F - the Distrito Federal. We enjoyed our first lot of time in D.F and decided at the time that there was so much to do that we needed a few days at the end of our trip here to do everything we wanted.
We arrived back from Cancun airport on Saturday and decided to stay in the Zona Rosa area rather than the Zocalo area. We thought it would be good to experience a different part of this vast city. In theory the Zona Rosa is quite an upmarket area with restaurants and night clubs along with nice shops. But we didn´t like it! We tried to find somewhere to eat, and it was quite a mission, plus on the way back to our overpriced hotel we shared the pavement with some rats and some very unpleasant smells. So on Sunday morning we checked ourselves back into the Hotel Canada near to the Zocalo. We are really impressed with that area of the city. It´s reasonably clean, has great architecture and there´s lots to do. There's also a nice atmosphre with all the noise created by the traffic police blowing their whistles all the time, and the organ grinders grinding thier organs.

On Sunday afternoon we took the Metro to the Dolores Olmeda museum which holds the largest number of Diego Rivera paintings in the city, plus some of Frida Kahlo´s work. Unfortunately the line that we needed was closed for refurbishment so we got the train a little way, then got a bus, then got another train. It was worth the long journey though, the house itself was impressive. Dolores Olmeda was a friend of Rivera´s and collected his work, which she left to the city when she died a few years ago. Rivera´s paintings are very good, we really liked his style. Frida´s paintings are very strange, but also cool in their own way. We bought a couple of postcards and then repeated our journey.
Luckily the Metro is very cheap. 2 pesos gets you to anywhere.

On Monday we went up the Torre Latino Americana, which is quite a big building, but not really as bid as the Auckland Skytower, or most other tall buildings built since the 50s. It's ugly from the outside, but gave us great views of the city. Just outside the tower was a display of one artist's sculptures. That´s a great thing about being in a big city, you can just stumble across really cool stuff.

Yesterday we took another mission on the underground to get us to Chapultec Park. The park is huge and houses various museums and a free zoo. We started off with the zoo. We mostly wanted to go there to see their Giant Pandas (they were very snoozy), but they had some other interesting animals including a nice fat hippo. After a long walk back to the entrance where you have to leave your bags, we had some lunch and then went to the Museum of Anthropology.
The museum was good as it contains lots of the artefacts that they have removed from the sites that we´ve visited. Including a very intact Chac Mul and a huge head.

Today we took advantage of the late check out time at our hotel and then went to the Diego Rivera Mural Museum. We really liked his murals at the palace and this one was just as good. It´s a big park scene containing lots of Mexican figures from throughout history, and the ever present image of the skeleton. It took him 3 months to paint in 1947. The rest of today we are using the internet and then going to the airport for our late flight to Lima, when we´ll be close to home at only 4 hours behind you.

We´ve realy liked Mexico. It´s a testament to how cool a country it is tht we´ve been ill for around half our time here and have still had a great time.
The architecture is beautiful and colourful, the history is interesting and it´s cool to be able to visit so many ruins. The food has been good sometimes - mole is nice as are tacos, but it´s nothing like we have at home!
There has been so much stuff that we would have loved to have bought, both for ourselves and as presents, but we just don't have room for colourful blankets, and bottles of chilli suce and tequila would get broken as would little carved animals from Oaxaca.

Xcaret Park

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Originally uploaded by theslaad.

We spent our final day in Playa Del Carmen going to the Xcaret Park. We mostly wanted to go there to see toucans, but they had lots of other cool stuff too!
It was quite an expensive place to visit but the money was worth it when we realised how much conservation work they do, particularly with breeding scarlet macaws and turtles (not with each other). We had a look at the native species area first. There were loads of scarlet macaws and other kinds of parrots, flamingos, beautiful toucans, crocs, a type of small wild cat and a very impressive king vulture. After that we watched the Papantia fliers. These crazy guys do a little dance before climbing up a tall pole. Whilst one of them stands on the top playing musical instruments, the other 4 spin the top of the pole so that their ropes unravel and they fly down to the ground. It was very impressive.
We spent the rest of the day exploring the park. There were areas of rain forest, beaches and ruins to look at. Plus cave systems and an underground river. We went for a peaceful boat ride along a different part of the river and spotted many lizards sunning themselves.
We visited some more nice animals including turtles, dolphins, a tapir, racoons, jaguars and pumas. They also had a nice aquarium.

In the evening there is a "spectacular" show, which is included in the entry. It was quite cool, they had good costumes for the Myans and played out that part of their history, including the ball game, although they missed out the human sacrifice part! The second half wasn´t quite as interesting as it was mostly dancing, but it was still good.

Overall the park was a bit touristy (we´ve never been in a crowd with that many Americans before, they just can´t help themselves - whistling and whooping galore), but well worth the vist. The toucans and Papantia fliers were worth the entrance fee by themsleves.

Playa Del Carmen

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Originally uploaded by theslaad.

At around and hour further along the coast from Cancun, Playa Del Carmen is the most touristy place that we have been so far on our whole trip. Lots of the Mexican people speak English, something that we haven't come across elsewhere, and everthing is around twice as expensive as in the rest of Mexico. But there is a stunning blue Carribean Sea and nice white sand beach here.

When we arrived we walked around getting extremely sweaty, trying to find somewhere cheap enough to stay. Our guide book and the internet had been no help so we had been a bit worried that we'd end up spending far too much money. We have ended up in a $50 a night place, not quite the $16 a night we paid for our time by the beach in Vietnam!

We went for a look around the town, which mainly consists of a long pedestrianised avenue one road back from the sea front. Playa is a new town that was built to accomodate people who were taking the ferry across to Cozumel, but has grown into a resort in it's own right. As a result there is no plaza or cathedral or any of the other features typical of every other Mexican town. The avenue is full of expensive restaurants and souvenir shops, not much else. As we were walking along a guy asked us if we were interested in going diving. After we had been talking to him for a while he offered us a special promotion! As we were English, married and over 30 we could go for a 90 minute sales presentation and breakfast at the Mayan Palace Hotel and in return he would give us a snorkle and dive trip, 2 ferry tickets to Cozumel and a bottle of tequila & a bottle of kahlua for just $20, not bad we thought.

So yesterday morning we were picked up in a taxi and taken a bit further than we realised to the hotel. We then spent from 10 o clock to around 1:30 listening to a lady trying to sell us a timeshare in their hotel. Except she said empatically that it isn't timeshare, but a vacation club! We said no to her, then her manager came and offered us a deal, we said no to him, and when we thought we'd escaped and could get our gifts another guy started offering us reduced packages, we said no! In the end we got our tickets and stuff though. The time spent was irritating, but didn't matter that much to us, but we did feel sorry for the people who were in the taxi back with us who had spent a day of their 6 day holiday being hassled.
In the evening we went down to the beach to watch the beautiful lunar eclipse. We thought that it was pretty cool that there might be people at home watching it at the same time as us. It wasn't quite as impressive here as it was still quite light, but got darker for watching the full moon return.

Chichen Itza

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Originally uploaded by theslaad.

Around midday on Wednesday we walked in the sticky heat with our bags to the bus station. We have decided after 6 months of study that rucksacks are a stupid way to carry your belongings and that suitcases with wheels are clearly a better option!
We didn't know what time the buses went to Chichen Itza, but luckily there was one leaving about 20 minutes after we arrived so we hopped on that and took the 2 hour drive to Chichen Itza. There are a few hotels near the ruins and we had booked ourselves into the sister hotel of the hotel we stayed in in Merida. It was quite nice and had a pool, but pretty crappy food that wasn't really Mexican, but wasn't Western either and generally arrived at the table luke warm.

We knew that the hordes from Cancun started arriving at around 10:30, so we got to the ruins nice and early. There were a few people about, but not many and we managed to get a few snaps of the Castillo without people in, something I doubt people managed later in the day.
Another reason for arriving early was to climb the Castillo (main pyramid) before it got too hot, but it was roped off and stayed that way all day. This is a new thing, as in our 2004 guidebook it says that you can do it. We're not sure why they've stopped people going up there, but if you fell you'd probably die, so better safe than sorry!

It was an amazing place to look around. There are many other buildings than just the Castillo. The group of the 1000 colums was pretty cool and you were able to climb onto a part at the back of there. All around there was intricate stone carvings, they looked great, but would have been even more stunning with all the original paint. There is also an observatory which they think was used for astronomical purposes. It looks just like you would expect. There was a huge ball court with nicely carved goal rings and various other pyramid shaped temples.
Defintely worth the visit.
On lots of postcards there are pictures of a Chac Mool that is relatively uneroded, but we hadn't seen it, we thought it was probably in the museum. Unfortunately they had closed the whole museum for renovation, which was quite disapointing. We had a look in a book and discovered that the Chac Mool was at the top of the Temple of Warriors so we had some lunch and then headed back in.
We were very glad that we had done our sightseeing in the morning as coach load after coach load of people had been arriving and when we went back in there were loads of groups of 30 or so people all around.
We found the Chac Mool but it was at the top of a closed off pyramid, presumably recently closed off, so we were unable to get very close.

We spent the rest of the day cooling off by the pool back at the hotel.

On Friday morning we needed a bus to take us 40km up the road to a large bus station in Valladolid. This meant we had to take our things and wait by the side of the road until one came along. We knew the rough times, but this is Mexico and they tend to run on their own special time. It was hot and dusty but eventually a bus came and we manged to get another bus from Valladiod to get us to Playa Del Carmen by late afternoon.