Pedro and Maria Motorcycle South America!: Cusco, 0 Miles

Because we didn’t book the train right away, we took today as our ‘see the city’ and errand day, including booking train tickets to Machu Picchu the following day. We started off by enjoying a healthy and delicious breakfast at Moni, a little vegetarian restaurant which serves hearty, tasty and healthy options. That along with some more coca tea, and we were ready to walk the town. We walked each square and several of the side streets. All along the way admiring the architecture of the inca stonework, cute little cobblestone streets and got asked a million times if we want this or that. One of the common things to be asked is ‘you want a photo’, ‘lady, beautiful photo’ coming from either a small child is brightly color garb holding a lamb, or a woman in similar wear walking a llama. Saying ‘no gracias’ here doesn’t get you anymore, in fact somehow makes you look more interested. You have to watch your step as the little ones tend to jump right in front of you insisting you take a photo of how cute they are. The smaller side streets tended to have less people asking or selling so we tried to stick with those.

I bought a couple little things to send home for Christmas, I even was able to buy some Christmas paper and tape all for pennies; it allowed me to get in the holiday spirit. Our next chore was to find the post office and go to the train station. After much walking we ran across the post office, it looked like a shining star up ahead as it was the biggest and most legit post office I’ve seen on the trip. Alas, just as everything has a catch, and nothing can be that easy, it was closed. After inquiring from some cops, today is a holiday. Just our luck! Because of that, and the fact we’ll be in Machu Picchu tomorrow, if we want to mail this package we’ll have to stay through Sunday night (an extra day) just to get it out Monday morning, which was the plan as we didn’t know the next time we’d see a post office we could trust would get our packages home.

Next stop train, and that attempt ended the same; closed for the holiday. Our dilemma was how do we get on the 6am the next morning if the ticket booth doesn’t open until 8am? I figured there must be a way for us to get on the morning train…even if it required us getting up at the crack of dawn just for the opportunity.

Mike has been craving Chinese food, so we found a decent looking place and enjoyed some delicious won ton soup and chicken fried rice. What a treat! Nothing tastes better than a little variety when you haven’t had much for a while… We sure are spoiled at home with any type of ethnic food available to us.

While wandering back from lunch we inquired at a couple of ‘travel agent’ places about the possibility of buying a train ticket for tomorrow morning. Well, of course they don’t want to tell you it is impossible, but actually take up a bunch of your time explaining everything and all the packages available. The first guy said it may be possible for tomorrow morning, but no guarantees. We also discovered that the cheapest possible cost for getting to Machu Picchu (backpacker bus) would be $150 each!!! Whoa! How can that be, it is a 4 hour train ride and a short bus ride! Talk about tourist robbery! Mike turned a little green at the price and I could tell he would almost rather not go, and instead head to some of the smaller, but still fascinating Inca ruins in the Sacred Valley, which we could reach by our motorcycle. I still felt obligated to cough up that large sum of money and make it happen. The next person we inquired worked at a hotel that our friends Maria and Tom were staying at. He made a quick phone call and confirmed that he could in fact get us on the morning train, but needed $300 cash. Fortunately we keep quite a bit of US dollars on us at all times, as many countries accept it and has come in handy quite often. Mike ran back and forth from the hotels and paid the man $300 dollars. At the point when he handed over the money, the man stated ‘you may be on a bus tomorrow’. What? Mike quickly took back the money and said ‘no, the only way we want to go is by train, I will only pay this if I know it will be by train’. Again the man confirmed this is no problem and took our money, with only giving us a hand written receipt upon Mike’s request as he didn’t feel too comfortable with the deal; we are handing over 300 dollars cash to this man and getting nothing in return except a promise that a taxi will be at our hotel at 5AM in the morning with our tickets… We took the risk as we desperately wanted to get up to Machu Picchu.

We spent some time around the city and enjoying yet another meal at our favorite little restaurant. Mike had a curry dish and I had the sun dried tomato pesto avocado sandwich. It was bed early for us as we had to be up at 5am for the big day ahead of us.

Llama lady