Cusco

I could have happily spent a week in the desert at our own private slot canyon, but we had to keep moving. Our time near the coast was nearly done and the next stage of our journey would take us over the Andes mountain and to the city of Cusco.

The final point of interest for us here would be the world famous Nazca Lines. There are a couple of places to see these without paying for one of the aeroplane tours to see them from above. We decided to visit the first, this is a very simple tower built on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. You pay a couple of quid to climb up and from the top you can see three of the shapes. To me, it was nothing particularly extraordinary. I suppose the interest lies in the mystery, no one knows why they were made. They cover nearly 1000sq.km and depict a variety of shapes from geometric forms to designs of animals and plants. To this day they are discovering more, but still no one knows why they were created.

At least, it is something I can tick off my bucket list though. We continued on. 

The road to Cusco from the coast is a long drive of around 16 hours and one which it would take us several days to complete. Whilst being a beautiful drive, there is little to actually do and so we planned to spend three long days getting there. We'd need to negotiate the 4000m altitude gain at the same time, whilst stopping off at the best looking camping on the way. We finished that night parked in the foothills of Cerro Blanco, the highest sand dune in the world. 

Once again our new tyres did us proud and we easily made our way back out of the soft sand the following morning after a beautiful fresh night under the stars. A consideration for choosing our camping spots was not just the distance but also the altitude. As soon as we left the sand dune, the road headed straight for the mountains. In a short distance it climbed back to 4000m. After spending a while back down at sea level, we didn’t fancy our chances trying to sleep at this altitude straight away and so we planned to do a longer first drive over the first section and drop down the other side to a lower elevation to sleep. 

We hadn’t made it too far up the hill though, before the engine got too hot, forcing us to pull over. Whilst she does normally need a few breaks on steep ascents, this was slower than normal. We ran out of time to do a large distance and the regular stops for roadworks slowed us even more. After a while we figured out that the reason for our slow ascent was the fact that we had lost one of the radiator fans. Now we couldn’t help but be impressed we had made it all, we were finally up and at this height with the cooler air temperatures, driving was easier. We headed for a spot a few kilometres of the main road that was a bit lower and decided we would look at the fan issue there. 

Now it was time to pull out all the woolly jumpers again and put the heating on. It’s always a bit of a shock at first, the sudden change of temperature. 

In the morning, I had a look at the fan. It appears that the fuse for the fan was the problem. Instead of blowing, it had melted itself into the fuse board. It took a lot of persuading to pull the charred pieces out and even then, there was no way we could reuse the connections. Luckily, there was a spare slot in the fuse board and so I swapped everything over and put a new fuse in. not that we needed it right now, have made it up to altiplano it was an easy drive over the mountains. 

We spent the next two days cruising along in that beautiful sun that accompanies this altitude. Ruby was behaving again and we slowly re-adjusted to the altitude, stopping off at some lovely spots along the way. 

We entered Cusco on the 23rd of June, the day before its famous festival Inti Raymi. This festival honours the Incan god of the sun, Inti, and is celebrated every year here. It’s a big event that many travellers come to see and every local person is involved in. We opted to camp at Quinta LaLa, the go to camp spot for Cusco. It was pretty reasonably priced and also a little out of town, good for a quiet night in a festival. We didn’t fancy negotiating street camping at a time like this and we heard that there would be a lot of fireworks going off which wouldn’t be nice for the cats. So we drove in, negotiating some incredibly steep (but fortunately downhill) roads and passing a whole row of other campers who were happy enough on the street, before heading up the hill to the camping. 

We decided we would stay here three nights, enjoying the festival the following day and waiting out the weekend before heading on. I never like going anywhere on a Sunday anyway. We found out from our friends that the main site for the celebrations were in the ruins right next to us and then spent the rest of our evening in town where celebrations were in full swing.

From the balcony of Cerveceria del Valle Sagrado, we watched the parade on the street below. 

On the day of the festival, our friends got there bright and early the following day for a front row seat, while we rolled in early afternoon to a packed out site. The main stage sat in a flat grassy area with seating on either side. If you wanted access to the you had to buy a ticket. Directly behind it, rose a large grassy hill and this was covered in people viewing the celebrations from a little further away, for free. We walked over initially, but it was already too crowded and while Lee could see over the heads of the shorter latin american population, I wasn’t having much luck. We tried the other popular free spot, further away on the other side of the road. This too, was busy but there was still some space. We found a good looking rock to perch on it, waiting for the ceremony to begin. Vendors wound through the crowds around us, selling food, drinks and some slightly odd disposable hats. As ever, the start time of 2pm was very approximate. One the other hill, we watched the lines of police and wondered if all of they were really necessary. 

Eventually, things started happening. Costumed people starting arriving over the top of the ruins. There was a bit of a commentary, with the occasional sentence in English, but they soon gave up on that. A helpful local next to us explained what some of the costumes represented, as we watched from afar. 

We stayed for a couple of hours, until the sun dipped behind us and our spot fell into the shade. At this altitude, it’s pretty cold if you’re out of the sun and for us, things were getting a little repetitive. We decided to call it a day, and headed back to the campsite. From there, we had a crack at flying the drone back over the festival too. 

We hadn’t been there too long, before our friends Kartik and Sim came. They said it was getting too rowdy on their hill and they weren’t enjoying it anymore, so they too had left. Now the large police presence became obvious. When they left to get back to their hostel where they were staying with their friends, we headed out into town. With it being quite touristy, Cusco has a lot of fun looking places to eat and drink. Lee was eager to get to the back to the nearest microbrewery. With so many to choose from we headed to Cholo’s Brewpub first. They had a rather disappointing list of drinks however and we moved onto the very posh Jacob’s bar and brewery where we enjoyed two rather nice beers. Lee had been in contact with another overlanding couple, Brodie and David, and so we met back at the first bar to meet them for a drink. As the beer menu was still disappointing, we headed back to Molly’s Irish bar we had ended up in the night before where we spent the evening with them enjoying the stout and a pizza. 

We decided that we would spend our last day in the city, exploring. I had got myself set on buying a hat and the city itself wanted a bit of exploring. We walked once again down the hill from the campsite into town, enjoying the snow-capped mountains back drop and the sun. We passed the usual street vendors, including the ladies and their llamas.

The first thing to do was get some lunch and I had been craving some sushi for a rather long time. Being touristy, it’s not only possible to find sushi here but even vegetarian sushi and we were not disappointed by the feast we ordered. 

We then spent some time wandering around the town to walk off a bit of our very large lunch and I found myself a hat.

We had planned to go to a cheese and wine bar that evening, but we were so full that we decided we really didn’t to eat anymore. We even opted to walk back up the hill to the campsite, a slog up a steep hill out of the back of town. This did help the food go down however, clearly we had eaten way too much but it had been delicious and somewhat of a luxury. 

Our final night on the campsite was a relaxed one, punctuated by the arrival of another overlander, Brian. He too had Starlink but hadn’t been able to get his working and hoped to troubleshoot his with our now working 12v system. He arrived late that evening and we spent some time hanging out, with a promise to look at Starlink in the light of morning.

While we planned to leave that day, we had a few days to complete the drive over to the west. We had booked tickets for Machu Picchu in a few days time and so we were in no rush and happily spent the morning tinkering around with ethernet cables. We finally finished cutting up our cable, something I had been putting off for some time and after a while seemed to have pinpointed his problems to a faulty power supply. It had been a successful morning and now, we could set off for the next destination.