Week 2.5

Despite two weeks in Cusco, we were still having a challenging and stressful time deciding where we wanted to go next, and how we wanted to get there. Having barely moved south in the last month, it would now be completely impossible to make it to Patagonia during its summer season under our own power. I’d been assuming we’d take a long-distance bus at some point, but since I dread the logistical uncertainty of getting our bikes on a bus, I’d been happy to just keep riding and put off the mode-change as long as possible. But Cusco has a unique feature that we would lose when we pedaled out: an airport, with direct flights to Santiago, Chile. So should we just do that? Sure, if flying wasn’t a logistical nightmare too! So let’s just pedal onward. But an abnormal amount of rain has continued to fall in Cusco, so maybe this is the time we should take a bus, to teleport us to somewhere drier? Ugh, I don’t know!!!

In the end we stuck with procrastination: we plan to pedal out from Cusco, toward Lake TItacaca, then make a right turn to cross the Peruvian Andes for the final time, and descend toward the coast, to the border with Chile, and to the Atacama Desert. Once in Chile we’ll decide how and when to make the extremely-long country shorter.

But we still had a lot of practical business to get done, and were feeling stressed about that, so we extended our stay in Cusco for a second time (just three more days this time). Now committed to making a big leap forward at some point, there is even less need to reestablish southward momentum.

One of our chores involved hiking 2.5 miles out to (and Ubering back from) Cusco’s big modern Western-style shopping mall. It was similar to the one we visited in Huancayo, but maybe even a little fancier, and again with so many of the slogans and ads in retailers’ windows oddly in English. Our main goal was to acquire some replacements for Rett’s wearing-out (and crash-torn) Lululemon legwear (meanwhile my pair of no-name tights from PerformanceBike is literally more than 20 years old and still going strong!) The mall wasn’t quite fancy enough to have a Lululemon store, but it did have a Columbia store (and a North Face, and Patagonia, all of which also have outlets in the historic center too). Even with a Buy One, Get One 30% Off sale, the prices were still significantly higher than they would have been in the US, making them one of the few things that are more expensive in Peru. So I’m not sure if they sell exclusively to foreign tourists in a bind, but we’re some of those foreign tourists, so we’re willing to pay the price too.

Another chore was bike maintenance: I bought new 11-speed Shimano HG chains to replace our “stretched” CUES chains (I guess the enhanced durability of CUES doesn’t apply to the chains, since we got less than 3000 miles out of them, admittedly in fairly rough conditions). The shop (Russo Bikes) actually had a couple CUES parts (they had been nonexistent even in US bike shops back in May), but not chains, so thankfully the legacy 11-speed chains they had are compatible. But like Columbia gear, they were significantly more expensive (US$57) than they would have been in the US.

During our weeks in Cusco, we cooked the majority of our own meals in our AirBNB, but we went out for our last couple nights, with the penultimate one being a bit more of a celebration turned into an adventure. We started with cocktails at our “neighborhood” bar just down the street from us, and then continued further up the many stairs of the San Blas neighborhood to a highly-rated pizza place (hey, while we’ve gotten chain fast-food burgers twice, we hadn’t had pizza at all in Cusco!)

To get to Chabuca Pizzeria, we climbed at least 100 steps, only to hit a sudden dead end, and had descend 97 before we could re-ascend the next staircase over. At least it was a really-atmospheric nighttime walk! When we finally reached our destination, there was a woman sitting on one of the stairs just across from the entrance, and it seemed like maybe she was waiting for it to open or something, but no, after a minute she stood up and continued further up the stairway, so apparently she was just (understandably!) resting!

Our ground-level AirBNB unit, at 11,400 feet above sea-level, was appropriately Peru-cold, a near-constant 59°F day and night. For the first time, an electric space heater was available, and we used it occasionally, but mostly stuck with the Peruvian strategy of blankets. So even though we were never especially uncomfortable (and outdoors during the daytime jackets were never needed), it was delightful when the door of the pizzeria opened, our hostess welcomed us into the cozy 12×12 ft. space, and we felt the radiant heat from the wood-burning pizza oven at the entrance flowing over us.

The service was just as warm as the temperature, with the teenage daughter serving as our waitress, offering tabletop games, and insisting on practicing her English. And the pizzas were some of the best we’ve had in Peru, so Google reviewers did another great job (and apparently we were close enough to the edge of Cusco that the prices were “normal” Peru: US$34 for two pizzas, water, a bottle of wine, and complimentary melt-in-your-mouth garlic-bread crackers as an appetizer!)

I’m glad for them too that we turned up, because by the time we left, it was nearly 8:30pm, and no other customers had arrived. So we at least made it somewhat worth it for them to have started a fire in the wood-burning oven. But I suppose even if no one shows up, it means that their house is a little warmer overnight than their neighbors’!

With a cocktail and half a bottle of wine in each of us, and our time in Cusco nearing its end, we delayed our return home and instead continued further up the stairs. The lights of the city below us had made me remember that when we’d visited the Inca site of Saqsaywaman, there had been lights embedded in the ground that presumably shone upon the massive stone walls at night. Since we were close to the top of the stairs and the highway that we had walked along when returning from Saqsaywaman, we agreed that it would have been a waste to not head back to see what we could see.

When we finally made our way over the crest and could see down to Saqsaywaman, we were disappointed to see that no lights were shining on it. But, hmm…we’ve come this far, right? We knew that the site “closed” at 5:30pm, some three hours earlier, but also knew that there was no gate restricting access, just a booth at the edge of the wide pathway where the ticket-taker stood during open hours. There must be roving security or something? We clambered our way down the rough trail in the dark (no headlamps were brought on this foolish and spontaneous adventure!) as light rain began falling on us. It picked up as we reached the empty ticket booth, and we took shelter for a few minutes under its roof. That also gave us time to observe that we seemed to be entirely alone. I guess 99.9% of visitors to Cusco have their schedules so packed with early wake-up calls that the site managers have no reason to defend against impetuous after-hours sneak-ins?

Well, they didn’t account for us! While our current lifestyle means we’re almost never out and about after sunset, ill-advised late-night tromps are baked into our DNA from decades prior. So even before the rain completely stopped, we abandoned our shelter and briskly tiptoed toward the colossal stone walls that had deeply impressed us even in daylight. In the darkness, alone together exploring new passageways of the Inca fortress, it felt that if we listened just right, we would be able to hear those walls talk. We have done some epic late-night tromps in our day, but passing through one of the most-famous ruins of the Inca civilization, on our way home from dinner, is one for the books.

It had rained for probably only 15 minutes, and stopped well before started back home, but it was enough to make the descent super-treacherous. The rain-slicked stones were incredibly slippery, and the combination of the downward-sloping path and irregularly-spaced steps made those steps much more dangerous than proper flat-topped steps would be. But an ill-advised tromp for a couple of near 50-year-olds wouldn’t be ill-advised if not for such challenges! And maybe we’d discovered another line of defense for the Incas? Perhaps they could use their sophisticated water distribution systems to send a flood down the stone pathway, making any attacking enemies slip and slide on their way up!

We gingerly picked our way hundreds of feet down in the dark, holding hands, and while we had plenty of foot-slips, thankfully neither of us went down. This was a different way back from where we had entered tonight, and we had forgotten from our previous trip (or barely noticed) that there was a gate where the stone slope met the highway. But thankfully it was wide-open, and no one was at the booth there either (and even if it had been closed, it looked like there was an easy way around it). Phew. Success!

The next night we returned to the mythical creatures at El Duende for dinner, another neighborhood spot where we’d had breakfast earlier. Since it wasn’t breakfast, we could now try their “te piteado”, a Peruvian alcohol-fortified tea that’s their specialty. A bit like wassail, but less Christmas-y, it was good! But halfway through dinner, a mischievous goblin tripped a power outage. The 5-10 minutes it took for the staff to get out portable lights suggested that this is a less-common occurrence in Cusco than it is in other places we’ve been in Peru, but it was an echo of a two-hour outage that we’d experienced the morning before at our AirBNB. Finishing dinner was no problem, but would the power come back on before we needed to depart tomorrow morning (since the goblin had surely hit our AirBNB too)? Thankfully it flipped back on (to mild cheers) before we even had to pay the bill, but that removed an excuse we could have used to extend our stay for yet another day in this wonderful city. Cusco, we’ll miss you!