Travelbloggin': Peru (Part 1)

I arrived in Lima really early in the morning (6:30am) and after dealing with customs, I found the official taxi stand and got a ride to my hotel about 30 minutes away in Miraflores, which is a more touristy, trendy district of Lima. Day one was an adjustment day, where nothing was planned but I got to take several walks around, found the Starbucks (I was craving coffee and wanted something my system could handle safely), took a walk down to the ocean, and generally adjusted to being in a different country. We had our first GAP meeting that evening, where I met the others in the group for the first time, and where we were told we were going to wake up at 3am to get to the airport for 4am (yikes!) so we all pretty much crashed right afterwards.

The next day, we flew to Cusco, which is the oldest continuously inhabited city in Peru, and had the whole day to ourselves to relax, check out the city, and acclimatize to being 3500m above sea level. It was a really weird feeling at first; I could feel myself breathing more heavily, but it wasn't altogether as unpleasant as it sounds. The locals drink a lot of Coca tea, which is used to help with altitude sickness and it's many effects. I think it helped me, although I don't know how much of that was psychological. We didn't have long in Cusco, but I spent the day walking around the city a bit and getting some pretty nice pictures from above. We met our tourguide, Wilbert, in Cusco, who was going to take us on the Inca trail to Machu Picchu, and after packing for the hike we all had a pretty early night.

The next morning, we started on a tour of the Sacred Valley, which took us away from Cusco and into more rural Peru, through several small towns (Pisac & Urubamba are the ones I remember the names of), some lookouts, and through two Inca ruins. I felt like walking through the ruins was a bit of a warmup for what we were going to be dealing with on the Inca trail. This was also our first taste of what some of the views were going to be like for the next 4 days. We finished in Ollantaytambo, which was an even smaller town closer to the point where our hike begins. This was really my first look at a smaller community in Peru and we had a bit of time to explore the markets and walk around.

Next up: The Inca Trail & Machu Picchu (the highlight of my trip).