Cusco or Cuzco or Qosqo, Peru

The cobblestone streets in Cusco are narrow and treacherously slippery at times, but I think this may be overstating the case.



The streets here were so narrow that when we first arrived, late at night after the guinea-pig-and-chicken bus, we opened our cab doors and gently grazed the walls. I asked our taxi how he would get out. “Can you turn up ahead?” I asked solicitously. “Oh, no, there’s no out there,” he said. And backed up the entire length of the street.

But I guess they've had time to get used to it in colonial Cusco, especially in the hilly and quiet San Blas neighborhood. Our second hostel was apparently in a 350-year-old building.




1660 Año

Cusco is a much more cosmopolitan place than the Bolivian towns we'd been in lately. And more touristy: we saw (and heard) more Americans than we had encountered in ages... must be summer! Still, it's a beautiful city.


Colonial buildings and brooding skies



We enjoyed wandering through its streets and trying not to be intimidated by Quechua spelling.





Roof cows watch over most of the houses. They’re often intertwined with a cross but they seem not to be at all Catholic. I’ve been told they’re good luck. And wouldn’t you feel better with these guys on your house?

Public art--from murals to decorated letter drops--is popular.




Reminds me of Roman Holiday

One of the treats of walking around Cusco is the peeks you get into courtyards.



Although it's hard not to like the white-washed colonial buildings with their ornate doorknockers and quiet courtyards, you do get some reminders that all this was built on top of an Inca city, often cannibalizing its stones for new buildings.

This is particularly explicit when you visit the Church of Santa Domingo, built directly on the central Inca site of Qoricancha, or Temple of the Sun. Many of the walls inside remain. The walls were once covered with sheets of gold, and Atahualpa ordered his people to tear it down to try to buy his freedom back from Pizarro and the Spanish conquistadors. Once they got the gold, however, they killed him.


Smaller stones of the colonial building above, enormous gray Inca stones below -- the Inca stonework is much better, too

Another extraordinary sight that the Spanish reported at Qoricancha (before, presumably, stripping it) was a garden made entirely from gold, silver, and jewels, right down to the insects and the clods of dirt and grass. Today there is a rather nice large garden behind the site -- all natural. And there's a museum below with rather disturbing displays of trepanned skulls (a 60% survival rate!), skulls shaped into oblongs, and mummies.




Around town, many indigenous people sell weavings, hats, socks, etc. Some also bring alpacas or llamas with them to get people to take pictures. It's quite an experience to go down Cusco's foot-wide sidewalks behind the shaggy swaying rump of a llama.

Once you get a couple of blocks downhill from Cusco's main plaza, the tourists start to thin out, the architecture becomes more of a mix of colonial and modern, and things start to bustle. Here we came across all sorts of interesting markets and entrepreneurial street vendors.

For example, the quail cart guy:


Is it just me, or does he look like Hugo Chávez?

This is quite a contraption. Eggs and cooking setup above, actual quails below.




Ice cream at speed




Pedal-powered beer billboard


A gizmo for advertising your own wares

We also explored an enormous market which sold everything from the ubiquitous llama hats to colorful jello desserts to large dead pigs to huge slabs of chocolate... and much much more.



We spent a long time ohing and ahing at the produce, which is far more diverse than what you see in American supermarkets.



The market spilled into the street outside, too.



Our last night in Cusco was memorable: first the cooks in a tiny vegetarian restaurant cooked us a special Peruvian dinner--they'd offered earlier to make us a saltado de soya if we came back at an appointed time, so of course we did. It was delicious. We perched on stools and chatted with the other diner and devoured our treat.



Then we went off to try pisco. I can't say we could tell much difference between piscos--it's all high-octane but fairly palatable liquor--but we did get an awfully good drink with some sort of passionfruit. I think it was maracuya. We have a picture, anyway. Yum.


Maracuya demo



And yes, we still made our early-next-morning flight to Buenos Aires.