Big Banana Feet - Blogabond

After returning from Aguas Calientes, it was quite late by the time we had checked back into our hostel, so we just went to the nearest restaurant for food. It seemed like quite a nice place and I ordered calzone. It was large, as they often are, but the filling was a bit cold. It must have been sitting around a while, waiting for other people's food, I thought.

I didn't sleep at all well that night. Lucy and Zdenek had been put in the room we had before and our new room had a really old uncomfortable mattress. To make matters worse, my stomach felt really unsettled and by morning I was convinced that I had food poisoning again, so I stayed in bed all morning while everyone else went out. By the afternoon I was starting to wonder whether altitude sickness wasn't playing at least a part in my ill health; Machu Picchu may be quite high, but it's not really high enough for altitude sickness, and the town is only at about 2000m, so I had probably de-acclimatised while there and now I was having to re-acclimatise in Cusco. Or else it was just food poisoning, I'm not sure. I managed to get up in the afternoon, but I still wasn't feeling right by the end of the day.

Inca wall

Despite that, I still managed to go out with the other three to book bus tickets to Arequipa and take a few photos of the town, since we had been too drunk last time. Zdenek was keen to see an Inca Sun temple, but we discovered it had been added to significantly by the Spanish and they had turned it into Santo Domingo Church. See how they've done that? Sun. Domingo. Anyway, you had to pay to go into the church to see what was left of the temple inside, so Joanne and I didn't bother, but Lucy and Zdenek later told us it was quite nice.

Sun temple turned into a church

Front of Santo Domingo Church (Sun temple)

Main square

In the morning I was feeling much better again. We walked around a few travel agents, considering changing our next destination from Arequipa to somewhere there might be a beach for Joanne to relax a bit before heading off, but in the end it was just going to be too much hassle and it would mean missing out on the Nazca Lines, as well as Colca Canyon, which a few people had told us was their next favourite after Machu Picchu, and one person even went as far as saying they thought it was better than Machu Picchu.

Nice balcony

Way up to our hostel

Coca shop very near our hostel

Since my shoes had finally died, it was really urgent that I get a new pair, so we returned to the two shops I had seen likely candidate shoes last time we were in Cusco. Unfortunately neither of them were open, so we had to try some other shops. In the first few shops, I looked for a pair of shoes I liked then asked if they had them is a size 44, to which the all said that they had nothing bigger than a 42, so in the next few shops I just came straight out and asked if they had anything in a size 44; a couple of shops said that, oh yes, they do have a size 43, which they seemed to look at as a kind of outsize shoe, but they didn't fit me. The two shops that weren't open must have been stocking gringo shoes, because nowhere else did anything bigger than a 43. I didn't think my feet were that big, but when I asked for a 44, the shop owners all looked at my feet in amazement. I told them all that Peruvians are small. Then we tried to get Joanne trousers and exactly the same thing happened, so I told them that Peruvians are small again, and one woman replied that Americans are big, so I put her straight on that one. Instead, I resorted to getting my last pair of shoes repaired. They hadn't fallen apart as badly as the ones I had just thrown out, they just had holes in the soles, so maybe they were salvageable. The guy put new soles on them and we were off again.

Ancient rite

On the way back to the hostel we passed an advert for an ayahuasca ceremony on Friday. This is a plant used in shamanic rituals, which sounds quite interesting, though I don't think Friday the 13th would be the right day to have the shamans treating you. Once we got back one more thing fell apart: the leather and stone bracelet thing that Joanne had got me for my birthday had finally had too much continuous wear and completely fallen apart. Nothing lasts a year!

Dead birthday present

When the taxi came to pick us up to take us to the bus station and deliver our tickets at the same time, we realised we had been done: the company on the tickets was not the company we had agreed to go with. When we got there we were at the back of the bus, where we had specifically asked not to be, instead of the middle where we should have been, and we discovered that the tickets had cost S35 rather than the S60 we had been charged. This was the first time in South America we hadn't got the tickets at the bus station and it was a mistake. We had thought S60 was OK because the hostel had tried to sell us tickets for S165! As it happened the bus was actually fine, but it was still very annoying knowing that we had been ripped off like that.

However, a good night's sleep was not to be had: some idiot had set their mobile phone alarm to go off at 4am and took ages to switch it off. It might not have bothered me so much if it hadn't been the alarm on my old phone I used to use to get up for work. I was completely awake. Then just as I thought I might get back to sleep some evil person called me on my phone. It really irritates me that I can't turn off all incoming calls. I can divert them all, but to where? I want them to divert to nowhere (or /dev/null if you want to get geeky).

written by

The Happy Couple on November 11, 2009 from Cusco, Peru

from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon

Send a Compliment

comment on this...