Unintentionally Sneaking in Sacred Ruins and Shopping for Animal Snouts

About five days before we left, I got some sort of terrible head cold. I was congested and coughing and all-around miserable for about a week. It really worried me because having that cold on the Salkantay Trek was going to make a challenging five days even harder.

Fortunately for me, I mostly kicked it sometime during the flights to Lima.

Unfortunately for Fran, I gave it to her about that same time. She started feeling it the first morning we woke up in Cusco, but she wasn’t going to let it stop her.

After meeting with our trekking group for an orientation, we headed out to explore the city. Known as the gateway to Machu Picchu, Cusco sits in the Andes Mountains at just over 11,000 feet and has about half a million people. It was the capital of the Inca Empire, but there is an enormous influence from the Spanish who arrived in the 1500s.

At least the cold prevented Fran from smelling the market.

We headed to the market, which is filled with clothing and foods of all types. And I mean all types. Cuy – or cooked guinea pig – is of course a delicacy, and you could see their little snouts poking out from carts just outside the market. The Peruvian people are true believers in nose to tail cooking. We spotted all types of innards, pig heads and cow snouts (they actually looked like donkeys, but we are sticking with cows).

Many booths were set up in the back of the market with people cooking food for lunch. We chose one that had a set menu – a great economical choice at markets and many restaurants in Peru – which consisted of soup followed by rice and trout.

After wandering the city a little more, we make the hike up the hill to Saksaywaman, which are Inca ruins just outside of Cusco (and, yes, most people pronounce it “sexy woman”). Strangely, we ran into our new friends Jerome and Stephanie, who would be doing the Salkantay hike with us the next day, at the entrance.

We had passed multiple guys on the way up who were offering inexpensive horseback rides, but we really weren’t interested. We just wanted to see the ruins. Jerome let us know that the tickets to get in were outrageously expensive, and suddenly the horseback ride sounded better since it was half the price, and they promised we could see Saksaywaman from the top, even if we couldn’t get in.

We rode out through the rural areas surrounding the city to two other Inca sites before heading to the top of Saksaywaman at the end of two hours.

Fran looked exactly like I felt during the second day of the cold. I had just wanted to find a bed and take a long nap. Fran looked a little like she might nap atop the horse and trust that it would get her where she needed to go.

Our guide stopped our horses short of the site and told us to get off: “You can walk this way, and you’ll end up walking straight in the top of Saksaywaman. This way you don’t have to pay.”

He then took our horses and rode back to his barn.

It seemed a little sketchy, but we really weren’t sure how else to get back to our hotels on the other side of the ruins, so we started walking.

We passed a few stray dogs – which are everywhere in Cusco – and Stephanie mentioned how all of them seemed so calm and friendly. Not 30 seconds later, two dogs ran at us barking. The bigger one was drooling blood, and the smaller one was trying to nip our heels.

Neither seemed quite as friendly as Stephanie inferred.

We said a few things in Spanish, and the dogs finally took off.

Saksaywaman

As the guide told us, we walked straight into the top of the ruins. The sun was starting to set, so we only had time to walk through, but they were impressive nonetheless.

We split up at our hotels, and Fran and I headed to dinner so that we could call it an early night.

The van was coming to pick us up for our trek early the next morning.