My Last Week in Cusco

I never actually told you about my last week in Cusco. Well that's kind of too bad because I don't remember a lot of it. I'll tell you about Halloween and my climbing day, though!

I think it was Halloween day that I finally went to the Chocolate Museum down the street from my hostel. That place was awesome! When you go inside you get a free cup of chocolate tea, which is tea made from the husks on cacao beans. It tasted like hot chocolate, but it was tea -- crazy! You could tour the museum for free - they had a bunch of informational signs all over the walls, a couple short movies to watch, and you could watch them making chocolate. I also signed up for the 2-hour workshop in which you make chocolate starting from the cacao beans! You start by roasting the beans, shelling them, and then you have to grind them into a paste. That was a little competition for the participants - the person who ground their beans into the most pasty consistency won a bag of the cacao husks for making chocolate tea. I totally won! After that the woman used our pastes to make different drinks for us to try, including Mexican hot chocolate. I think we skipped some steps because there should have been a tempering process in there, but it would've taken too long for us, so they gave us chocolate to use for making our own candies. We got molds to fill with chocolate and other things, like sprinkles, milk powder, chili powder, almonds, M&Ms, etc etc. They kept them in a fridge for us to pick up in an hour. Very yummy! So glad I went there - it was a great museum.

That evening I ate dinner at a restaurant overlooking the plaza, which was awesome because all of the local children gathered there in their costumes to meet up with friends, take pictures, and get candy. I went down after dinner and saw so many cute costumes! There were adults dressed like Disneyland characters with photographers around for families to take pictures with. There were also people selling candy (basically to the tourists) so they could give it away to the children. I bought a bag and was instantly mobbed by little children with their hands out yelling "HALLOWEEN! HALLOWEEN!" There were so many of them I was literally getting pushed over by the huge mob. When I finally ran out of candy, those around me gave me looks as if I had just killed their dog. One woman came up to me with her crying child in her arms, expecting me to get more candy for him. It was a very strange experience because I was doing something nice, but then people got mad when I couldn't be MORE nice. Oh well. A bit later I was just standing around taking pictures and whatnot and I swore I felt the guy next to me pull his hand out of my (fortunately empty) pocket. After that I moved everything to zippered pockets, but it was another 15 minutes before I even thought to check my backpack (which I had had with me from earlier in the day) -- one of my pockets was partially opened, and someone had taken my SteriPen (water purifier). DAMN! Fortunately it wasn't my mp3 player (which was right next to where my SteriPen was), passport, laptop, or any other vitally important thing, but it was still pretty frustrating. After that discovery I went back to my hostel.

That day 4 or 5 new girls showed up to stay in my room. I got to talking with one of them (Caroline) outside the room, and a bit later another one (Yvonne) joined us, and then we decided to go out for dinner and drinks. We went to the Irish Pub in the plaza and were invited to sit with this couple (limited seating), and we got on really well with them. We stayed a couple hours and then decided to head back (Yvonne needed to bring soup to her friend in the room who had altitude sickness). By that time there was a party in the hostel - live band and some dancing, but it cleared out pretty quickly after the rain picked up. So, despite my hiccup with the theft in the plaza, my night turned out to be pretty fun.

The next day I hung around the hostel in the morning and then went out walking and exploring with Yvonne. We went to the San Pedro Market, which is a huge market with food, textiles, and gambling. We ran into a guy from our hostel there, and he offered to buy us some fertility powder. What a sweet guy. Yvonne and I also ran into some boys who had a llama and some baby sheep, so we took pictures with them. (Yeah, anyone who tells you they have a baby alpaca is lying.) On our way back to the hostel we went to a panaderia and had some delicious butter croissants (which resulted in me going back daily until I left Cusco). We got Yvonne's sick friend (Ali) from the hostel and wandered around with her for a bit, and then later we all got massages at this really cheap (but decent) place near the plaza -- $10 for an hour massage! They never actually told us when the massage was over (they had left a couple times during it to get hot stones and whatnot, so when they left the last time we assumed they would be coming back, so we all started talking and saying how warm it was under the blankets, and that we weren't going to leave until they actually told us to get out. Turns out they HAD finished, and after 10 minutes one of the women came back, peeked in to see that we were all still lying there, and said "finite!!" Whatever -- we had fun!

The next day (11/2?) Yvonne and Ali had plans to go climbing and zip lining in the Sacred Valley, and they had invited me to join them. I agreed, and so we all got picked up at the hostel around 8am. It was an hour or hour and a half to get to the site, and the route we took was the reverse of the Sacred Valley tour I did with my dad, so I recognized a lot of places we drove by. When we got to the place (a parking lot with a giant metal storage bin that housed a toilet and little snack stand), they got us all (there were 2 vans... about 20 people) fitted with harnesses and explained procedures and whatnot.

Ali and I were under the impression that "climbing" meant "walking up the mountain on a nice clear trail". What it actually meant (which Yvonne thought was obvious when she said "climbing") was scaling the side of the mountain by climbing up metal rungs and clipping into a safety wire with carabiners. As soon as we saw this, Ali and I just looked at each other like "oh crap". We were debating joining the group that actually WAS just walking up a safe little trail, but then Ali decided to jump on it and try climbing first (which was super awesome of her). She got like 5 meters up and then froze, with Yvonne on the wall halfway below her. Yvonne climbed back down, and we decided we would all just go on the hike once the guide got Ali down. Little did we know, the guide went up there to coax her further... so we were going to climb the side of the mountain, apparently. The guide with Ali stayed with her pretty much the entire time. Yvonne and I decided to go last, thinking that the other guide would take up the rear. In the end, the second guide mainly bounced between Yvonne and another girl further up who kept getting stuck/nervous. I was dead last, which was nice in the sense that I took a bunch of pictures while waiting for everyone else to move, but it meant that I also had to wait for everyone else to move. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I had no problem with the heights, including when we crossed over a suspension "bridge", which was essentially two cables to balance on and another to hold. After a few hours of climbing, we finally got to the zip lines. (There were four zip lines and one belaying section to get us back to ground level.) I've never been zip lining anywhere else, but the Sacred Valley seems like the most amazing place to zip line. It was absolutely fantastic! After the climbing adventure was over, we had an hour and a half ride back to Cusco, and then some of the climbers/guides went out for dinner. Later that night a couple of us met up again for salsa lessons (which may have been a mistake given how sore we were from climbing), but all in all that was a pretty amazing day!

I spent the next couple days wandering around Cusco, hanging out at my hostel, shopping, eating, and generally just relaxing. Tuesday (election day) was the day I left for Puerto Maldonado to start my 2-month jungle adventure! But I'll save that for the next post (which HOPEFULLY doesn't take as long to get to as this one did... sorry!).