Peru Day 1: Welcome to Cusco!

Wow! We arrived at the guest house, Santa Maria, and were all blown away by how nice it was. The founder of Peru’s Challenge, Jane, joked that they give us nice conditions and feed us well so we’ll be able to work hard! It’s all about the work! Ramiro, the house chef, cooked us an amazing meal of Quinoa soup and chicken with vegetables and rice. We think he should open a restaurant since he’s such a good chef. We were all a little tired from our travels, but we were ready to go explore Cusco after lunch!

Santa Maria Guest House

Nico, our main guide for the week, showed us around downtown Cusco. On every bus there’s a person who stands in the doorway and yells out what stops the bus stops at. We think this might be because the bus companies are private and they’re trying to get people to get on their bus. The buses only cost 0.70 soles cents! That’s about $0.25. On the bus ride to downtown we noticed there was a “Chifa” restaurant on every other block. They looked like Chinese restaurants, but the word for China in Spanish is still “China”. We looked this up later and found out that it’s a word specifically used to refer to Chinese-Peruvian food. We ended up having Chifa beef and broccoli pasta for dinner! Walking around downtown we saw lots of people selling jewelry and other trinkets on the street. There were also women dressed in traditional Peruvian clothes holding what we thought were baby alpaca. They were there to charge tourists to take pictures with them. We later discovered these are not alpacas but just baby goats! We felt a little bit like stupid tourists after discovering this.

 

On our bus ride home there were two different people, one child and one adult, who jumped on the bus to play music or sing  for money. They were actually pretty good! The child rubbed a coin on a shell to make a beat, then sold candy when he was done. The man played a pan flute which sounded a bit like a Chinese flute. We got home and ate our fabulous Chifa meal cooked by Ramiro, then were all exhausted and crashed between 8:30 and 9:30pm! Sleeping 10 hours under the warm wool blankets was amazing and helped get us ready for our full day of exploring Cusco and the surrounding ruins!