It’s our last day in the beautiful city of Cusco. We’ve really enjoyed the 3 days we’ve had here. The city is vibrant, alive and colourful. If you make it to Cusco make sure you do the city walking tour, it’s crammed with history and great sites, it’s one of the best walking tours we’ve done.
As our bus isn’t departing until 7pm and we can’t have a late checkout it’s going to be a day of just hanging around town today. I’ve always wondered what to do on days like these. You know, it’s the last day and you’re done all the sightseeing and tours, you’ve bought all the trinkets for the folks back home…. Now what?
Well in the city of Cusco you’re going to find more.
After packing our bags and organising some express washing to be done we stowed our bags with the hostel and headed to the square. I wanted to retrace some of the walking tour as Elena missed out the other day being violently ill with a bad case of gastro.
I returned to the Inca walls which fascinate me in their construction. I explained what I remembered from my tour until a young student took over and explained a lot more. The explaining let to a “Do you want to buy some of my paintings”. It’s really hard to explain that we don’t want to buy. They’re great paintings but we have no space in either backpack nor do we have a lot of wall display space at home. We’ve downsized considerably over the years. Trinkets and souvenirs are for amateur tourists and we’ve got over the t-shirt that says “look at where I’ve been”. We give the guy a tip for his trouble and head off.
I know theres a food market a short walk from town as we saw it when we were on top of the hill overlooking the city. Its a short walk from the square and it’s decided that this will be our lunch stop.
The San Pedro Markets are a mixture of craft, meats, veges, cheese and eating stalls. Spying a massive fruit salad and yoghurt I immediately wanted it, oh and a burger of course. It was fantastic! In fact people started to stop and ask us where we bought it. The lady at the counter behind us was impressed as we were now selling for her.
The neat thing about Cusco is that each little street and lane is different. We found ourselves just drifting through the city until we stumbled into a little french style cake and coffee shop. The mocha was 3 different colours and the cake portion needed a crane to lift it.
The hardest part of the day now was to head uphill to the hostel where we left our bags. But as we still had a couple of hours to kill time wasn’t our enemy yet.
Finding our Peru Hop Bus depot we sat around for 1/2 an hour waiting for the bus. But to our surprise it was a taxi that was to take us to the main depot as the street was too narrow for the bus.
Our trip to Arequipa would take 11 hours through the night, something we were getting used to. Tomorrow would be another big day as we have another tour planned the moment we arrive.
