18 – 19 Feb 2012
Flying out of Cuenca is… an experience…
Because the city in nestled in the mountains:
The plane basically does a series of tight corkscrews:
Until we’re high enough to clear the peaks:
Then you can head off to your destination. In our case, that’s Cusco!
We’ll be spending a couple days here acclimating to the altitude (11,100′ / 3400m) before heading on to Machu Picchu (which is actually at a lower altitude- 8000′ / 2400m, which is even lower than Cuenca, which sits at 8400′ / 2500m, so we should already be fairly acclimated).
Me and Steve, our leader extraordinaire:
We did a walking tour around town:
Where we saw some ruins:
and got a taste of the stonework we’ll be seeing at Machu Picchu:
But it was cold and rainy and I’m definitely not 100% yet:
So I ended up crashing at the hotel for most of our time here 🙁 though I did make it down for dinner once:
My roommates, Sarah and Jackie, and me
Bread and soup seem to be staying down, so hopefully that’s enough to get me through- from here, we’ll be making our way away from the big towns and their pharmacies (where you can get IV supplies over the counter, which just boggles my mind!), and I need to be well enough to hike and explore the Incan ruins we’ll be seeing over the next few days!