July 5: Cuzco

The teachers’ union SUTEP held strikes on and off in Peru until I left, with the worst of the blockades concentrated around Puno. My bus was supposed to leave at 7pm from Puno to Cuzco, bypassing the blockade through a mountain road. The bus didn’t actually leave until 8pm and by 9pm I had fallen into one of those uncomfortable airplane sleeps because again there was no room to put my seat back.

At around 10pm I awoke to lights and shouting. A line of trucks with their headlights on were blocking the alternate route so we had no choice but to find a plan C. I was still half asleep when I noticed all the men getting off the bus and I was not about to join them in the freezing cold dark night. Until the bus started to turn around. On the mountainside. I looked fearfully out my window as the edge of the mountain got closer and closer until someone outside would smack the side of the bus and yell, and our vehicle would lurch to a stop. After a thirty-two point turn we were on the way back to Juliaca outside Puno to find an alternate to the alternate route. By midnight we seemed well on our way.

I woke up again at sunrise, around 6am, to find that all the windows inside the bus had turned into blocks of ice. The layers of moisture from our combined breath froze over the windows and mine was starting to melt all over my sleeping bag. Not to worry. The trip from Puno to Cuzco was only supposed to take 10 hours, so we must almost be there. And then I looked out the window. We were nowhere at all. We were driving through the mountains on a dirt road and no sign of habitation could be seen for miles.

And as if the bus ride hadn’t been long and uncomfortable enough, as we began to wend our way down the mountain, our bus got stuck. Coming around a switchback that was too steep, the back end dug into the dirt and the bus didn’t have enough traction to drag itself back out. So once again everyone was forced to get off the bus in the chilly morning sun and try to dig the back wheels out of the dirt (failure), use all the men to push the bus forward (failure), run the engine until white smoke poured from it (failure), and finally some Peruvians scrambled under the bus to shove rocks under the back wheels (success!).By this time a line of irritated traffic had built up behind us, from a second coach bus that had also succeeded in thwarting the picket lines to several tractor trailers laden with goods bound for Cuzco. We tentatively followed the bus down the mountain on foot for a turn or two to make sure our adventure wouldn’t repeat itself, then boarded again for the remaining six hours of our trip. By noon I was beginning to recognize some of the town names and knew we were getting close to Cuzco. It had been a very trying sixteen hours. And then the bus driver decided to stop for some lunch without consulting his weary passengers!

We had nothing to eat and nothing to drink since the night before, except for two women who came on the bus in the middle of nowhere selling Ziploc bags of mate (tea) and wheels of cheese. A plastic bag of warm liquid and a block of dairy product didn’t appeal to me so early in the morning and I passed, not thinking that the ride could possibly be another five hours. At noon the bus driver rolled to a stop in some town and through the window bought two bowls of noodle soup from a woman at the side of the road. On the second level we passengers were ready to riot. The woman in front of me smacked her hand on the window pane and others stomped their feet yelling “Vamos! Vamos!”

At long last we arrived. I hailed a cab to take me to the hilly neighborhood of San Blas where I booked a room at the Hostal Kuntur Wasi, threw my backpack on the bed, and headed out to get some much needed sustenance.

Cuzco is a beautiful city of Spanish colonial architecture atop Incan walls. Getting lost around the city, even a novice like me could identify the beautifully cut Incan walls against the brick and mortar ones. I had bistek (beef) from a pizzeria and practically a whole jug of limonada to quench what felt like an undying thirst. I didn’t want to drink on the bus for fear of having to use the awful bus baño.
From there I visited Qorikancha, the easiest-to-visit Incan ruins in the city. Surrounded by a Dominican church, the ruins inside were once an Incan temple to the sun and moon. This was my first encounter with the infamous Incan trapezoid and an up close look at the painstaking masonry needed to build such precise walls without the use of mortar. I followed some tour groups around and learned that the weight of the lintel stone helped preserve the building’s solidity at its weak points, making the trapezoidal doorways and niches earthquake-proof. Furthermore, the lack of mortar allowed for micromovements of the stone during seismic activity, also reducing damage. It seemed a little surreal for the pagan temple to be preserved among the trappings of Catholicism, but the ruins had been given over to the Dominicans after plundering most of it for gold and stones that built the first Spanish structures in Cuzco.Some pictures of the Plaza de Armas:I forgot to mention that right before I left for Isla Amantani, I ran into Helen, a girl I had shared a dorm room with for one night in Arequipa. She and I met up for dinner and, as her plans to go to Machu Picchu that evening were thwarted by the strike, we decided to go together the following morning.