We got up at the crack of dawn to fly to Arequipa. It’s a lovely city between Cusco and the coast.  The surrounding area is all desert. It’s pretty bleak! Bill finally got to eat guinea pig! I had grilled alpaca with quinoa. Mine was very good. I didn’t try the guinea pig! From Arequipa, we went to Colca Valley and stayed at a lovely lodge with incredible hot springs! That was awesome! We had one full day there which wasn’t enough. I tried to make friends with some unfriendly llamas and alpacas but that didn’t go so well. We met a group of Israelis at the hot springs and had an interesting conversation with them. We also met a nice couple from New Zealand. 

Overall, we really like Peru (although Bill has struggled with altitude problems), but Monograms has been a really terrible company. We had a bad experience with them again today, but I’ll save that for a different message. Below, I’m pasting in a message Bill typed up earlier (it’s out of order) and a link with new pictures. 

Hope things are going well for all of you!

Bill’s Message

For as many who wear big fluffy winter coats, hats, scarves and gloves here, they must wear them to bed too. We have stayed in nice hotels but the heating has been lacking in a couple of the nicer ones! One had no heat and one had portable only. I don’t mind the cool air but it can get a little brisk first thing in the morning!! They usually have very heavy blankets though. It is probably very efficient of them. They also don’t always have A/C. They seem to have a good power grid here and you see the lines ran all over the mountainsides. A hardy bunch here!! They do occasionally make comments about how cold it gets for us back home. 

On our flight to Arequipa there were large farm fields that looked more like what would be seen in the US just before we landed. Nice flat areas in the middle of the peaks. Smaller areas in the valleys were also scattered with farming communities. Some good sized even though the fields did not look as large as the ones closer to our destination. 

It is interesting to see the mountains out both sides of the plane for as far as you can see for the whole hour trip. Any of the roads that can be seen look very curvy and dirt. No real interstate. Not a lot on the roads. If there were paved roads they might be fun on a motorcycle. May have seen a highway but no train tracks. 

So today (Monday) I finally got to have some guinea pig!! It wasn’t bad, the meat was like dark chicken meat, the fat under the skin had a salmon skin texture and almost flavor to it. The preparation was fried under a weight, the other traditional way is roasted (sometimes on a stick). 

We had a slow but nice tour this morning. After lunch we walked back to the hotel. We got very close before getting assistance from a police officer. He walked us the block and a half we were off. 

A nap and a massage was a nice way to relax after the 04:30 wake up call! We have a tour Tuesday morning that takes us to our next destination, the Colca Valley! We have been looking forward to this part of the trip!! It should not only be beautiful but relaxing!! The hot springs should be a hit!!  

We made it out of Lima to Cusco, which is a very pretty city! I wish we’d had a little more time to spend there. Cusco is an old city built on top of Inca ruins. The streets are narrow and winding and the houses have clay tile roofs. It’s a wealthy city by Latin American standards. We visited a huge church where just about everything is covered with gold and silver. There’s a shrine to St Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of lost things. Here in Peru, he’s also the matchmaking saint. Women go to the church and leave notes asking for love. According to our guide, single men go to the church to collect the notes and ask out the women who left them! We also saw a painting done but a Peruvian artist not long after the Spanish came. The Spanish asked the artist to paint a copy of da Vinci’s Last Supper which he did. However, in the original, the last meal is lamb. The artist had never seen sheep and didn’t know what lamb was, so he painted a giant guinea pig as Jesus last meal because that’s common food here. 

We’ve been in the sacred valley for the last few days and we’ve seen a lot of Inca ruins. Yesterday, we climbed to the top of an Inca temple. There were a lot of stairs! But the view was spectacular! There was a woman carrying a small child (probably 1 1/2 years) up the stairs, which was impressive. On the way down, the baby waved and and said “hola” to everybody she passed. It was adorable! There are babies everywhere here. Families are probably still fairly large. Indigenous women still carry them in slings on their backs. I’m hoping to get a picture of that before I leave. Lima is a big cosmopolitan city but around Cusco and the other places we’ve visited, many people still live in traditional ways, especially poorer people. Women still wear bright skirts and shawls. Some of the dress is for tourists, but not all of it. You can see history when you look at people. Some people look and dress European, but a large part of the population still looks and dresses like people in the Andes have for centuries. It’s really fascinating! I love being in a place where you can really experience a different kind of culture. Bill and I both had Alpaca fixed in different ways in Cusco and Bill is still hoping to try the guinea pig! That said, there is a lot of poverty here. Tourism has helped, but many people still live hard lives. 

Today, we took a train to Machu Picchu. We sat across from a very nice, extremely attractive Brazilian couple. They were with a group of young, attractive Brazilian physicians who all looked like they could be cast members on Grays Anatomy! When I send pictures, you’ll notice that I’m wearing jean skirts, black leggings and tennis shoes with bright pink laces! They made some good suggestions for traveling in Brazil. Brazil has a strong tradition of cosmetic surgery. Maybe I should have asked about that! 

The train ride was fun and the environment changed dramatically. Cusco is about 11,000 ft in arid mountains, with not a lot of vegetation. Machu Picchu is 8000 ft but the mountains get more rain so they are covered in semi-tropical forests. Inca architecture is amazing in general. We’ve seen temples and amazing aqueducts. Their ability to channel water was incredible and some of it is still functional. There are terraces carved into the mountains everywhere! Machu Picchu is especially impressive! It’s a huge complex on top of a mountain with temples, houses, workshops and impressive views of the valley. There was a sundial that indicated summer and winter solstices and noon each day. Way higher on surrounding mountains there are other Inca complexes and food storage sites. Some people choose to hike to those sites. We could see them as tiny dots moving along old Inca trails! You would have to be a serious hiker to do those trails! The Inca didn’t use mortar. The stones fit so tightly together that you can’t slip a piece of paper between. No one knows how they cut the granite or moved stones weighing several tons!

Yesterday, we went to a llama and alpaca farm. That was really fun. We bought clover and got pictures petting the animals. There are also women who carry around baby alpacas. For a small amount of money, you can get a picture with them. They are really adorable! We visited a workshop that makes textiles (Bill bought a sweater) and a workshop that makes silver jewelry.

Overall, we really like Peru, but we’ve been very unhappy with the Monograms travel agency. We keep having to pay for things that should be included, and we missed good opportunities to experience Peruvian culture. I’m very frustrated! Last night they put us in a hotel in the middle of nowhere, so our only food option was expensive hotel hamburgers with the driest bread I’ve ever eaten. There were good local food options in the town we had just visited. Today, we are in Agues Calientes which is a neat town with lots of great restaurants. Instead of letting us try them, Monograms scheduled our lunch in a very expensive tourist restaurant with extremely bland food and they scheduled dinner in our equally expensive and bland hotel. If their were going to provide food, they should have done so last night when we only had the restaurant as our option. There is also no tea kettle in my current room and the bedspreads my room and Bills room were wet when we got home. They had not been thoroughly dried. I’m writing a negative review when I get home! 

So, I recommend Peru, but not Monograms!

Note from Bill

We have had a good tour of Machu Picchu and we had the option of going back up today but have decided to go off schedule and rearrange our trip. We are heading back to Cusco early and should get about four or five hours to experience the city. Emily really wanted to see more of it as it is a very interesting place. I think we have made a good choice. We are taking the train halfway back then have to take a car. The travel company people here have helped with the arrangements. We will have to do more of our own planning next trip to have it more tailored to our travel tastes. The nice thing is we seem to have the same complaints about how things could have been better. They really haven’t been that bad, just little things that could have really improved the trip. 

The cats and dogs here are free range, they look welled care for but it’s hard to know if they have actual owners. Some are dressed well, maybe they have jobs. I seen one poor pup with a cone of shame just walking down the sidewalk the other day and appeared to have somewhere to go and was unaccompanied. Maybe it was one the way to lose the cone of shame! They also must enjoy exercising as the dogs have track suits. They all seem so well behaved, no barking or bothering people. Occasionally they will follow someone with food. 
I’m surprised that as free as the animals are there is not a lit of road kill. I see what may have been a porcupine, it looked spiked and something a dog was eating freshly dead. The drivers honk at them sometimes but they always try to slow down for them. 

I was surprised at the temperatures here. It has been warm at Machu Picchu. It does cool off but warms up nicely during the day. Cusco will be cooler as it is higher up. It feels like fall here in Cusco, at Machu Picchu it was more spring like as it was a little humid. 

We got back to Cusco at a early enough hour to actually go out and see more of the city I really enjoyed seeing all the people, shops, different restaurants (you can get anything) and churches. Usually everything is surrounded by mountains. It is so beautiful to see. We stopped at a couple small museums. 
We went and watched a dance presentation at the cultural center and it was very good!! They looked like they had a lot of fun and even though I didn’t understand what they were singing back and forth to each other as they danced it was very cute and sweet sounding. 
It was a good way to end the day before another very early morning. The earliest yet, I think when we fly back that morning will be even earlier. Having to set alarms while on vacation feels the same as setting them for work. Setting alarms earlier than my work alarm…
Even with the long days I have really enjoyed being in Peru and seeing all of the sights. There really is no way to convey how beautiful it is, the history and the feelings of just being here. 

I have yet gotten a chance to eat guinea pig. We did see some the other day being held out on a stick as we drive by on the bus. There have been restaurants with it on the menu, but seems like it has always been when were locked in to a meal already or late nights with early mornings. 

They people who work with Monograms here seemed concerned with our choice to change out itinerary. The one at Machu Picchu and then upon our arrival in Cusco. I’m not sure how they planned the trip. I don’t think they researched how some of the timing of things happened and what would make more sense at times. 

Hello All, 

I’m finally getting around to writing my own update! Since my keyboard quit, it takes me forever to type messages. Bill is used to using his phone, so he is faster. We’ve been to some really amazing places in the last few days. Machu Picchu was incredible! It’s about 8000ft with high mountains all around. There were people who had hiked high up in the surrounding mountains. We could see them as tiny dots moving along the trails. We had a ticket to do a half hour hike, but as Bill noted, we decided to leave early to go back to Cusco. That was a really good decision! We had a lovely train ride with another Brazilian couple and a nice evening exploring Cusco. I really enjoyed the train rides.

Hope things are going well for all of you

Bill and I are sitting in the Lima airport waiting to fly to Cusco. We had a pretty good visit to Lima, but we’re ready to see something else.  Lima is an interesting place. It’s nicer than San Jose CR, but definitely not a place where we’d want to live! It’s a big city with about 10 million people.  It’s about a third of the population of Peru. It’s not a particularly attractive city but it did feel safe and there were interesting shops and restaurants in our neighborhood. I had good Indian food the night before Bill came and last night, we got chicken sandwiches from a food cart in a nearby park. We did a city tour of Lima with our guide yesterday afternoon. We toured the main historic square with government buildings and old churches and we toured the catacombs under one of the churches. That was really interesting. Until 1821, all bodies were buried under churches. Bodies would be laid out in open stone rectangles and covered with lime. Once they decomposed, the bones were buried in mass graves. There were tens of thousands of people buried under the church. It would have been gruesome work for whoever had to go put lime on the bodies and burry the bones. There were open air vents in the church so the smell must have been pretty bad too. 

After our official tour, Bill and I went to the Larco Museum. It holds Peru’s largest collection of pre-Colombian artifacts. That was fascinating! It has extremely high quality pottery, jewelry, textiles and weapons. Some of it is Inca, but most of it predates the Incas. Bill and I were both really impressed by the quality of the work. The museum has some of the collection on display but they also let you see their storage area which has thousands of pieces neatly arranged in glass covered shelves. 

Otherwise, the trip has been a little slow so far. Bill and I were completely wiped out for the first couple of days. We have been a little disappointed with the Monograms tour company so far. There is a lot to do in Lima, but the company scheduled very little for us. They gave us a list of interesting places we could visit, but didn’t take us to any of them. That leaves us to organize transportation on our own. Hopefully, things will get better once we are out of Lima!

I’m glad I did the language trip to CR before this one. English is not quite as common here as in CR. My Spanish isn’t great, but it has been helpful. 

Bill’s Perspective

Lima has been interesting, the traffic is some sort of organized chaos, they cut lanes, squeeze into the lanes until someone lets them in. They sometimes give a beep beep to be let in or to tell someone they can cut in or pedestrians to go in front of them. Intersections without lights or signs have a well placed speed bumps that slows traffic in a given direction, I believe this is how they decide who has the right of way. For ten million people the mass transit system is lacking. They need some trains, subway or elevated. The architecture is bland for the most part. They have a lot of concrete that appears to be sectioned off into cubes/ tube and you can customize them. Depending on where you put your exterior wall, you can have a balcony or you can push your wall to to edge and just have a flat front. The tops of fences, walls and buildings have electric wires, iron spikes or broken glass on the top edge, they must have a lot of second story cat burglars. They say they crime isn’t that bad though.
A lot of the buildings have re-rod sticking out of the tops and sides of the buildings in the support areas, it appears they can just tie in later and grow their buildings. 
The city is divided into I believe 43 municipalities, each hires their own extra security to supplement the local police. They don’t carry guns though, our driver this morning said that they do have some sort of less than lethal option. I didn’t see anything on the ones in the area of our hotel. 
Our driver this morning also informed me that the citizens here are able to apply for, take some tests and acquire firearms. I had asked after seeing some advertisements for tactical wear, Glock and Smith & Wesson. 
I am disappointed in all the American fast food places that are here. A very sad sign of the local culture going to the way side. 
It has been hazy here, they tell us that it is just how Lima is, 80-90% humidity, it doesn’t rain just drizzles some. 
It’s been interesting walking around the are and seeing all the people and businesses. I really enjoy seeing the little kiosks with snacks and food carts on the sidewalks. We are going to try one of the empanada carts if we get a chance. We did get chicken sandwiches from a street vendor. They were very meticulous about the prep!! 
My flights here were without problems, it was a long day and night. I did get some sleep after getting here so we got to have most the day for exploring. 
The hotel was nice, I got a good room, had a couch and was good for relaxing after walking around. 
Our tour yesterday left something to be desired, there is a lot more we could have done. We were able to see a local museum with a very extensive collection of pottery! You could see there were some extremely talented artisans! Very detailed! The gold, silver and copper stuff was not as I expected, some was detailed and nice, most was very thin though. Reminded me of tin foil. 
I’ve really enjoyed getting to share this experience with Emily and look forward to the rest of our adventure!!

P.S. We liked Cusco better than Lima, and we saw a lot of interesting things today. We’ll have an update about that and picture when we’re less tired