Day 3: Ancient beautiful Cuzco

After awakening in Lima and shuffling off to the airport, we took the 1.5 hour flight to Cuzco, the ancient capital of the Incans located 10,000 feet up in the Peruvian Andes.

The city is beautiful -- a combination of Spanish Colonial construction mixed with earlier Incan architecture.


We checked in to our beautiful (and quaintly rustic) hotel: the Tierra Viva Plaza. The hotel was nice enough to send a driver to pick us up at the airport (because otherwise we never have found the joint) It's located down a tiny, 800 year old alley off the main square, Plaza de Armas.

After getting situated, we climbed about 30 minutes up out of the city to Sacsayhuaman (pronounced "Sexy Woman"), the remains of an enormous fortress that used to preside on the cliffs over Cuzco. The Spanish did their best to tear it down but couldn't seem to manage to destroy the foundations, which are still present, now 500+ years later. The stones are all hand-hewn to fit exactly next to each other with no mortar. Since all they had were simple hand tools back in the 1300s, erecting this place must have been quite a feat.

Gives you an idea how big the small stones are

And here's the view of Cuzco from the top

After a day of climbing way up then trying not to fall as we climbed down, we decided to head to a trendy restaurant right on the main square called LIMO. Cuzco is famous (?) for its variations on the preparation of alpaca -- an adorable littler version of the llama (which is a South American version of a camel, it seems). Alpaca is the source of the "wool" that is used to make all of the extremely soft textile products one finds in Peru.  It tasted like gamey beef.  Gotta try everything at least once!

A little baby alpaca

Our dinner being led off to
the restaurant's back door.
(just kidding Dustin!)

After dinner we decided just to rest as we had to wake up at 4:30 AM in order to make our car to train to bus arrangement to get to Machu Picchu. I'm sure we'll have a few million pictures for all of you tomorrow... until then, enjoy the view from our balcony at our Cuzco hotel...

Day 2: Lima is wonderful!

We arrived in Lima late last night - not getting to bed until about 3 AM.  We got up again around 11 AM and called our friend Eric who came over and accompanied us while we took a cab to our lunch restaurant of choice: Cebicheria la Mar which was wonderful.. pictures below.  Good thing we got there when we did because they don't take reservations and there was a 1+ hour wait within minutes of our arrival.

Tour of Cebiches

Aji de Gallina (Chicken in cream/egg sauce)

Saltado Pacifico (prawn, scallop, fish in red sauce
over ravioli with riccota)

It was a beautiful indoor/outdoor setting

After lunch we walked around Lima and had a wonderful time shopping in little boutiques and in flea market like covered markets.  Lots of little arts and crafts, dolls, leather works, and hand weaved products.

Dried gourds with Peruvian life
scenes etched into them.

Peruvian ancient stories played out in
little puppet dioramas

After shopping, we took a little siesta at our wonderful hotel, the JW Marriott.  We can't recommend it enough.  It's expensive but worth every sole.  Its beautiful, safe, well located and truly 5 star.

After we awoke from our siesta, we asked the hotel where to go for dinner and they recommended a 5-star Peruvian restaurant (#8 of 400+ restaurants in Lima according to TripAdvisor) called Pampa de Amancaes which we happily walked to.  We were the only table at the restaurant (can you believe it?) and the food was incredible.  We had cebiche, steak, and duck stew (which wasn't stewed -- but was wonderful!) 

Cebiches

Duck "Stew" ?

Steak

After that we walked back home in time to get in bed (after filing this blog update, of course) by midnight.  Tomorrow, we're up at 08:00 to get ready for our flight to Cuzco, ancient capitol of the Incans and gateway to Macchu Picchu!

 See everyone again tomorrow!!!

Day 1: JFK - MEX - LIM

So the day has finally come... The day when we can stop counting blog entries in "T minus" and start measuring in days.

Today was a travel day so therefore having an uneventful day is a good thing. We had a wonderful send off at 5:30 AM when a beautiful limo took us to JFK. The sun rose quite beautifully over the Southern State Parkway much as it must have at the Pines Party where so many of our friends were playing.

Our flight was delayed by about 2 hours but we didn't care much as the AF lounge at Terminal One is quite fabulous and we were just so excited to be on our way that we really didn't care how long we had to wait.

AeroMèxico was underwhelming (as expected) but not bad. Flight AM 405 took us to Mexico City (737-800, N861AM for you nerds) .. 5 hours of mostly sleeping as we didn't do too much of that last night.

MEX wasn't a bad way to spend a few hours (many less than expected thanks to our late departure). It's an acceptably modern airport with a nice 70's (?) retro feel. We had to process through immigrations (30 min line), baggage claim, customs, baggage recheck and screening even though we were just changing planes. The whole process was a bit cumbersome and would definitely prohibit a 2 hour plane change (which is allowable but impossible--don't do it) although this likely has become the standard for all international connecting airports after the horrible Christmas Day incident a few years ago. The Premier clubs (plural) were very nice in MEX so we watched the Olympics and drank a lot. (we'll at least I did.. X is more of a modest drinker)

Our Lima flight (Another 737-800 although this one was circa 2003 instead of 2001.. N859AM) boarded on time. It had a few idiosyncrasies that made us slightly less than confident as we sat down in our first class seats... (see below)

But despite this, the flight was fine and uneventful.

And then upon arrival at our hotel in Miraflores (at 1 am!) we were shocked to find out that we had a welcoming party! One of our travel friends from yesteryear just happens to be living in Peru and semi-stalked us via Tripit! We were so pleasantly surprised! Not only did we get to catch up over cocktails but now we have a built in tour guide for Peru! The universe works in interesting ways... Off to bed, so much to do tomorrow!

T-1: An Olympic Start

As a fitting start to our amazing trip, we spent the night before departure watching the opening ceremonies from the Olympics.  Although London isn't part of our itinerary (and we watched the show from exciting Bay Shore, Long Island) the ceremony, tears, and production value got us good and wound up for our trip.

Time is moving so slowly and we're sooooo ready to go!  Can anybody wind the clock a little faster?

But before we go, we wanted to leave you with one little moment from the opening ceremonies..  When nobody was looking, Her Majesty was seen pouting a little...  (do queens pout?)

Our next post will be travel DAY ONE written after we're ON THE WAY!

Time at a stand still?

I'm here at work and feeling really restless! I'm counting the hours before shift ends...then off work for a while to see the world! I got 5 more hours and counting and hoping that time would cooperate with me. I'm doing everything to keep me occupied; admitting patients even though they're not mine to admit, starting IV lines; basically doing other peoples work but I have this big grin on my face! I guess a watched pot never boils, huh?! Oh well...

T-9: Anticipa.....tion! and some weather changes.

Click here to go to our real countdown timer!
Thanks Pete!

With just 205 hours until our departure, we are, as you can imagine, getting a little antsy.

We've checked and rechecked everything.  We've confirmed all of our travel arrangements, we've got electronic and printed versions of every document imaginable.  And, of course, every single electronic device we own has a countdown timer ticking away, reminding us how little time remains between now and departure.

As part of these wonderful preparations, we have packed, weighed, and unpacked about ten times now.  Initially, we just presumed that everywhere we were going was going to be at least temperate.. so we concentrated on warm weather clothes.  Then, largely by accident, I decided to check the weather forecasts....



You will note that the lows predicted in Cuzco (about 10,000 feet up in the Peruvian Andes) are expected to be below freezing.  Who could have possibly predicted this!  Especially since it's the middle of their winter!

This led to to a very unhappy realization..  the only two places on our trip where the average daily temperature is 65 or higher will be Bangkok (a balmy 100) and Barcelona...

So, we had to go back to the drawing board with packing.


To help decide how much of what kind of clothes to pack, I decided to do what any self respecting anal retentive would do..  I'd make a graph.




This very beautiful graph gives a visual representation of the average daily temperature range in each of our primary destinations.

Happily, it allows us to wrap all of our summer clothes in space bags and cram them into the bottom of the luggage, take them out in Bangkok, wash the winter clothes, then swap back for Cape Town (and wash the summer clothes), then swap back for Barcelona!  Lighter on the speedos, heavier on the sweatshirts.  No problem!  Having a graph made it all make sense. =)


And so we packed..

And our "one 50 pound bag each" travel around the world "light as a feather" plan started falling to pieces. Do you know how much sweatshirts weigh? A heck of a lot more than speedos.

In other news...


Thanks to Chatchai we are now booked to spend a few days at the beautiful beachside YaiYa Resort in Hua Hin, Thailand to enjoy what few days of sun will exist during our trip.

We're also considering going to the Sensation Bangkok party on August 18th if anyone else is interested (think mega-rave meets circuit party meets Ibiza) .. mostly since Deep is dragging us to the one in NYC over Halloween and we want to know what the excitement is all about (and to be able to rub in his nose that we'd already been to one).  Comments welcome.

Air France did an equipment change on our JNB-CDG flight on August 31 from an A-380 to a 777.  Boo.  If anybody in our South Africa group is on that same flight you'd better call and change your seats because if you were in seat 62B on the second floor like we were, you'll now be riding on the roof.

“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” - Robert Louis Stevenson