Sept 12: Onward Ho!

Word of the Day: chúpe (Peru)- soup

Woke up early with 2 friends to go for a morning walk. Interesting sights included:
- Qorinchanka ruins
-Delicious delicious tamales, corn meal, meat, onions and spice cooked inside corn husks
-Gigantic bread wheels
-brightly dressed indigenous women holding goats who pose for tourists and who you can pay to take pictures with

Around 10 or so, we departed by van to Ollaytaytambo to take the train to Aguas Calientes, the small tourist town surrounding Macchu Picchu. It was another gorgeous and fun ride, no less twisty, across sweeping hills, past farms and with far off views of high Andean snow capped peaks. The poverty was very apparent: most of the fields were being worked by hand and tiny homes in a continual process of rebuilding crowded the roadside, forming small towns on occasion.

We took the gringolicious train for about 2 hours to Aguas. Very quickly into the ride, the landscape transitioned to more jungly and humid as we drove past cloud shrouded hills and a river.

Upon our arrival in Aguas Calientes, we encountered the whole town in festival mood, since a community center had recently been built. In general though, the place had little character and nothing past tourist catered offerings. There was a surprising amount of Mexican food, which kind of bothered me, mainly because I assume it was there to cater to wealthy American tourists who would assume that every country in "South America" has the same food. Despite the fact that México is not even located in South America. I know, I'm guilty of this too: I often complain about the lack of black beans in Chile, but still!

We got to do some hiking! We tried to climb Putucusi, a hill that supposedly overlooked Machu Pichu but we got to a point where we could no longer go up due to a lack of ladders. It took some convincing to pull the male members of the group away, but we finally managed to convince them that bouldering on Peruvian cliffs was a bad idea....We decided to head to the hot springs. Despite my dislike of termal baths as overpriced and overrated, we admittedly had quite a relaxing time, although someone stole my Tufts 2012 shirt :( which was sort of amusing, come to think of it.

We had a nice dinner and tried alpaca meat, which I felt sort of bad about, but I figure that while I'm being un-vegetarian, I might as well go all the way. We also tried sopa a la criolla, a Peruvian specialty. We tried to get some shut eye before our early early morning departure for Machu Pichu!