Cusco II
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Cusco,
Peru
Friday, December 28, 2007
The train journey back saw us nattering with more Americans, principally a nice bloke called Robert from New Orleans. He said, of course, that the best barbecue in the world comes from New Orleans, and as appreciative as we obviously were of good food (one of the favourite topics of conversation among travellers it seems - what you love to eat back home but can't get here), we'd have to go to New Orleans to gorge ourselves on grilled meat. Sounds pretty good actually.
The conversation ended up on the topic of outdoorsy kit, so Jacob held forth on that for a while...and the lights went out. For no reason that ever became apparent, the train was plunged into total darkness for pretty much exactly the length of time it took Jacob to rummage a torch out of his bag. An interesting little interlude.
We stopped at Poroy just outside Cusco, and a lot of people got off the train. We weren't totally sure what was going on, but as we were staying in Cusco, we stayed put. At the last minute, Kirsty remembered having read that buses into Cusco from Poroy take about fifteen minutes, whereas descending the switchbacks by train takes a good hour, so we grabbed our bags, bolted for the door, paid a few Soles for some bus tickets and headed into Cusco.
We made for our hostel, who gave us two beds in an empty six-bed dorm despite our having booked a double room, but as we were tired and intending to be up very early the next morning for another train, we decided that beds were beds, so dumped our stuff and went out for food. The food was passable, but took so damn long to arrive that we contemplated leaving before it arrived and just grabbing some biscuits and stuff from a kiosk, but it eventually turned up.
Well fed but grumbling, we headed back to the hostel, where Jacob spent the night enjoying a return visit from whatever delightful guest had been hanging around in his guts in Aguas Calientes the previous day. The Imodium had worn off. Hooray.
