Has it really been over 4 months since we, naively, plonked ourselves in Costa Rica?!
Our journey now ends where it began – a trip to Machu Picchu, having booked our trip from the UK months in advance, because of those hideous pesky tourists!
In many ways the end of our journey here is likely to be the beginning of further adventures; we’re both uglier, older, bolder, braver and, still naive enough to do something just as stupidly amazing as this in the future.
So, having spent an insect fuelled few days in Manu National Park, we’ve trundled over to Cusco for the final chapter of our first, but not only, story. At the moment I think we’re both trying to find reasons to want to return to Manchester, helping soften the inevitable blow, when in reality we’d just rather travel onto a new (possibly non-latin) destinations!
As mentioned we’re in Cusco primarily to visit Machu Picchu – which Rebecca has filled you in on.
But before that happens we need to do the obvious free walking tour. Point of fact is that all these walking tours over 4 months have cost us a fortune in guide tips; still, they’re free so we can’t grumble?!
To get to Machu Picchu, we first needed to practice our ‘ruins visiting skills’ and found the perfect opportunity in a site just up the road from our hostel, enticingly called “SexyWoman”; so I was obviously quite eager to visit. (Admin – that’s actually spelt Saqsaywaman!)
Cusco city centre is quite beautiful, even more so if you removed the tourists and cheap souvenir shops. The city is quite draining from these respects; way too many people and tourists and I’m fed up of being asked if I want a massage!
A few days in Ollantaytambo provided a much needed break, stopping over there to then travel to Machu Picchu. As you can see from the photo dump below, it has similar Inca architecture to Cusco, but is just a small village really and if you got away from the main square into the maze of little cobbled streets, it seemed a million miles from the hustle and bustle.
However… while in Ollantaytambo we also visited an Inka site, Sitio Arqueológico De Ollantaytambo. Given that most people seem to only stop in Ollyantambo either just long enough to get off a bus and onto a train straight to Machu Picchu, or at most head to the main square to get a beer or some lunch after MP, we were expecting the ruins here too be relatively quite. Oh how wrong we were!
It turns out that it was so busy we felt herded around the site like sheep. Not a nice experience, and not sure why people choose to visit these places?
I never thought I would be a traveller, and had a certain amount of trepidation at the start of this trip. But it turns out that I have loved experiencing new places and cultures and food and endless bus journeys (Admin: you sure about that last one?) and I would do it all again in an instant if we weren’t booked on a flight back home in a few days.
Til the next time then…..
Sloth Journeys 