Travelling to Cusco

We were sad to leave lovely, sunny Brasil, but knew that there were many exciting adventures awaiting us in Peru so headed off to the airport for our 2am flight with eager anticipation!  The next day and a half we knew would be mostly travelling so braced ourselves for long, tiring trip of about 38 hours in the hope of getting to Cusco, Peru, as soon as possible.  Our flight from Rio to Lima was an indirect one which flew at 2am via Santiago.  We arrived in Lima at midday and caught a local bus which was an amazing cultural exprience.  We had to pay for 3 seats which we were a little confused about until the conductor pointed to Greg´s bag which was taking up 2 seats!  It was about a 45 minute trip and in this time we had a range of locals getting on to sell sweets, chips and to give speeches about the state of their lives...these, we fortunately, could not understand!  The conductor had promised us that she would tell us when we needed to get off the bus as she knew where the bus station was.  Fortunately, we were alert and spotted the ´huge´Cruz del Sur terminal on our left as the bus just sailed past.  We pointed it out to the conductor and she then asked the bus to stop.  Unfortunately we were on a main highway - so it took a while for us to actually stop...we walked back for about 15 minutes...heavy backpacks on and were overjoyed to find that there were still seats available in the ´´business class´section at 17h30.  We then headed off to have some KFC to Greg´s delight!!  The bus was one of the nice ones where you get served meals and the seats recline fully so we weren´t dreading the trip too much.  Unfortunately I didn´t take into account the impact that travelling up to really high altitude would have on me.  The whole way up you could feel your ears popping and both Greg and I had really bad headaches.  The next morning an hour after breakfast had been served I starting feeling really nauseuos and just knew that I would soon be rushing off to the ´bus toilet´.  For the next 1/2 hour I sat taking deep breaths trying to get rid of it, but to no avail!  I ended up throwing up whilst the bus did some serious S-bends around the Andes mountains....still climbing higher!  As you can imagine the clean up job was pretty severe as it is practically impossible to aim straight when your body is being tossed from one side of the cubicle to the next!  I felt a lot better afterwards, despite the headache which I didn´t expect to be going away for some time.  We arrived at the bus depot in Cusco at midday and got a taxi to our hostel - a nice, homely place called Monte Horeb Hospedaje, where we were served strange ´coco´tea when we arrived which is supposed to help alleviate the symptoms of altitude sickness.  My headache is almost gone this morning and I haven´t been sick again...so all is good.  The city of Cusco is really lovely and we plan to go up to Machu Picchu tomorrow.  We also found a really interesting trip into the Amazon for 3 days which we are hoping to go on later in the week. 

Buses in Lima

Greg points to our destination

Jules relaxes on her Peruvian bedspread

Julie points to our seats

Julie stands outside Monte Horeb Hospedaje

The view down our hostel street - San Juan De Dios