Nearing the End

9/14/09
Today was my last day of touristing in Peru. The month went by way too quickly! Right now, I’m at the beginning of my 20+ hour bus ride between Cusco and Peru. Right now they are playing the intro film about the bus company and sites in Peru, etc, that I’ve already seen twice on my other Cruz del Sur journeys. Last night, got home from dinner and slept. Slept slept slept from 5pm until 8am. Definitely needed it after sleeping less than six hours over two days. Now I have way too much time today on the bus to get more sleep, but I don’t know how much that will happen. Hopefully there will be some good movies. Anyway, knocked out last night after a dinner of pizza (yes, that’s what they had everywhere, made in a wood fire oven) and pineapple juice. Yum. But strange pizza… the vegetables were carrots, green beans, and bell peppers, from what I could tell. In the morning, walked down the hill and found the train station, and took the train to Ollantaytambo. Abby and I had seats in separate rows for some reasons, but I was sitting with really interesting people and we talked the entire two hour ride. The others were all from the US too. The ride was really pretty, in a valley between towering mountains, the train running alongside the sometimes rapid, sometimes smooth Urubamba river.
In Ollaytaytambo, one of the guys I had been riding with already had a taxi there to pick him up and bring him back to Cusco, and they had extra seats, so he let Abby and I go along for the ride instead of taking our two buses back. It took about an hour and a half total instead of the two and a half it would have taken with the bus. After getting to Cusco and dumping our luggage at a hostal for the afternoon, went back to the vegetarian restaurant for lunch. Mmm salad, soup, bread, tea, and saltado de soya… loma saltado, beef with fries, is a typical Peruvian food, so I had the vegetarian version of that, along with veggies and rice. It was pretty good and a nice filling lunch for 2 bucks.
We were considering going to a zoo in the area to see Andean animals, which I really would have liked to do, but we already had a few museums left in the religious circuit that we had already bought and we only had two hours before we had to head to the bus station, so we skipped the zoo, unfortunately. Went to the two remaining churches on our ticket, both of which were really pretty and fairly interesting, but I think I’ve definitely reached my limit of religious things for quite a while. Every church seems to have a black Christ that used to be white but because of the material it is made from and the ash from the candles that burn around it, has turned dark skinned over the years. A lot of the same styles we had seen in previous churches, the mixture of Catholicism and the Andes culture, Baroque style, very intricate pulpits and altars made of cedar wood and coated in gold leaf. Something I hadn’t seen before was that some of the paintings had coca leaves placed in as part of them, which was interesting. In one of the churches, we went to the second level and had a cool view of the central square, the Plaza de Armas, and the Cuscan hillsides.
Lastly, went to the Incan Museum by myself. The most interesting part was the musical instrument exhibit. Lots of different Incan instruments were on display, and there was a table with replicas of these instruments and a guy was demonstrating them. The instruments with water inside that you moved from side to side and different notes came out, the animal shaped flutes that somehow made the sounds of the animals they looked like, the bird filled with water that tweeted if you blew hard enough (he let me try this one), and lots more. It was really fun to watch and to talk to him about them. Then upstairs to a very extensive collection of pottery, jewelry, masks, cups, replicas of Incan foods, pretty much everything Incan you can think of.. I had less than an hour there and there were 23 rooms, so I had to race through them, but it was still really interesting and a great ending for the trip, I love pre-Columbian and Incan cultures.