Let's Go to Cusco!
Our alarm woke us up bright and early at 3:15am. We packed up and ventured down to the lobby to try and snag a little breakfast of some kind but the workers whisked us off to the shuttle van. Being this was so early, this shuttle ride was much faster and much easier.
The check-in process was smooth and easy. Security was a snap (they had like 5 lanes open at 4am). While waiting for our flight we had two annoying people near us. One person kept watching Tik Toks super loud. The other person was watching a movie at max volume on his phone. Ugh!
The flight was only about 50 mins long. Easy. The flight was maybe 40% full? Maybe even less? Very sad that this is the busiest time of year normally and everything is so slow.
Landing in Cusco was really cool with all the mountains surrounding the town. We grabbed the first taxi we met and agreed on a price before leaving. He was nice and tried to tell us stuff but our Spanish is so bad that it was a difficult conversation.
We didn't know this until after getting there but our hostel moved locations during Covid shut down. So it's a completely different building with completely different staff. Yikes. There was no sign on the door. The taxi driver tried to tell us multiple times where the door was in Spanish but we couldn't understand. Eventually, a white couple came out of a big wood door and we went in after them. This turned out to be our hostel haha.
The hostel was pretty quiet in the morning and we were able to get into our room right away. It was.... not great but not too terrible. Everything was clean at least.
We ventured out to the main square and there was a big military thing going on. Like hundreds of people were in military outfits and they had the square blocked off partly. Turns out it was military appreciation day basically. So it was cool to look at all their uniforms and watch part of the show. At one point, some of the mountaineer guys ziplined down from a church belltower.
Food was next on the agenda. We walked through the town to the main market area called San Pedro Market. On the way, we got some fresh orange juice from a cart (yummy). We walked around the packed market for a little while deciding what to do. There were lots of smoothie stalls, lots of soup stalls, and lots of other food stalls along with souvenirs, trinkets, fresh veggies, meat, etc. It was chaotic and we loved it. I said multiple times "this is why we love to travel".
Our food choice was a general Peruvian restaurant inside of the market. We both got chicken broth soup which was one of the best things we had all trip. Then we had a meat dish with fries. Lacey got a steak that was awesome, my ribs were not that great. Lacey wins again. All Peruvian meals come with meat, fries, and then a starch like noodles or rice. They love their potatoes!
We continued exploring the town after that. We walked all over the town including the San Blas neighborhood (up the hill and a little more swanky). The narrow streets and hills and cool architecture and views over the valley. It was all so amazing and interesting.
To rest up, we chilled at the hostel for a while. Unfortunately, the desk person had music blaring. And in the tight courtyard of the hostel and where our room was located, the music just bounced around. Plus there were big windows into the rooms and the doors did not block sound. Long story short, it was not a very relaxing environment to hang out in haha.
We spent the time after resting to try to find a tour to do tomorrow. We knew we wanted to go into the Sacred Valley (a valley about 30 mins outside of Cusco with lots of cool small towns and remains). But we didn't know what tour we wanted to do. We needed to be back for our pre-hike meeting by 5pm and we didn't want to just bus around everywhere. So we decided to sign up for an ATV tour. It took some haggling with a tour guide seller but eventually, we got what we wanted.
It was dinner time after we finally decided on a tour so we ventured out to find something. We tried to find a specific restaurant from a YouTube video but we couldn't find it (maybe it closed?). Walking around, we ran into a little cart selling grill meat skewers. So we got those instead. They were like $1 each and we got steak on one and chicken on the other. The end of the skewer had a big potato slice. It was delicious and fun to eat just out on the street. We also stopped and got ice cream before making our way back to the hostel.
By the time we got back to the hostel after wandering through the main square at night (beautiful!), it was about 8:30. The music was still blaring from the front desk worker. The "curtain," if you can even call it that, did not cover the entire window so it was bright in the room. The bed was fine but everything else about trying to sleep was a disaster.
At about 9pm Lacey went out into the lobby and asked the guy when the music gets turned down. He said "30 mins." Sooo we waited. It was 9:40pm and it was still blasting so I went out there and kindly asked him to turn it off. He did thankfully but it was crazy to have it going in the first place. I think the idea is that it's a "party hostel" or something but it's covid and no one else was here so we don't understand the point. Hostels are hit and miss and this one was definitely a miss.
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