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...