Waking up in Ollantatambo at pretty much 4:30am to pack up and get our butts on a train to go who knows where to hike for 8 hours or more sounded super excited and invigorating... :) This is what we came for. Well, not really. But I'm 34 now and I'm not getting any younger. These are the types of trips one has to take while they are young and able bodied. Keep in mind that I don't work out and I was not very prepared for all of this. I knew it would be hard. My friend Christy kept saying, "Maybe we should work out to prepare." Me, "Nahhhhhh!". So off we were in the wee hours of the morning to hand off our bags to Henry, a SAM Travel guide, in hopes of seeing it in Agua Calientes when we were done. Side note, the hotel rooms were pretty nice. Barebones, but they didn't smell of mold or mildew and they didn't have anything growing on the walls. So far so good! Here we are getting on the train. Here's a picture of Henry... you know... JIC I had to show someone that THIS was the person who stole our bags. lol In all seriousness, SAM Travel has been around for awhile and they want and need business. It would take one horrible review like they stole luggage to close them down. Who would want to book with a company who steals luggage? No one. We has a box breakfast that our hotel gave us for the train. I recommend getting a box breakfast every time you have to leave early. You need nourishment. I knew that we needed to eat something before this long, long day. Also, the bathrooms on the train are nice. Use them. You will have little to no bathrooms on the 2 day Machu trek. Trust me. Bring toilet paper. Always bring toilet paper. Ok. So ... look how beautiful it is. When we got to the end of the hike we made it to the overlook. It was breezy and nice. The perfect weather. It didn't rain. We were worried about that because we didn't have the footwear for the hike. Tennis shoes and trail shoes don't realllly cut it. Day 2 of Machu Picchu was going to be exploring the city.
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We woke up and had another awesome breakfast and said goodbye to our home El Balcon. SAM Travel picked us up and we were off. Now, the Sacred Valleh Tour was a lot of car riding. I’m surprised I didn’t hurl on anyone. Actually, I’m surprised I didn’t throw up one time on any form of transportation. Go me! 😄 Look at that morning view! It’s a little slice of heaven tucked in the mountains. ❤️❤️❤️ The Sacred Valley Tour was a bunch of stops. We went to the animal sanctuary, salt mines, terraces, various viewpoints and we had a buffet lunch. Here’s some photos from the tour. I didn’t indicate this on my feedback form because I just loved Marcelino... but I didn’t not like the buffet lunch. The food just wasn’t that good. There. I said it. Phew. I feel better. Fhe Switzerland couple we were traveling with were telling us how they trained for Machu Picchu. What does that even mean? I was getting pretty worried. The most training I have done is run to the border and couple of times and also to Wendy’s via my car. What did I get myself Into?!? The following day was Machu Picchu. I had to start mentally preparing. . . After the tour we were dropped off in ollantatambo at our hotel. The hotel was nice.The city was small, safe and warm. I’m pretty sure this is just a tourist town but it was lovely. I noticed that every single restaurant was a pizzeria place too. Too bad I wasn’t craving pizza. I know. How ironic. We dinner at the only little restaurant that didn’t have pizza. I ordered the fajitas. Don’t order that. It was ehhhhhh. Get the farmhouse chicken dish. I was between fajitas and that. I saw them bring the farmhouse out to someone and felt instant food regrets. Food regrets almost hurt your soul it’s so bad. Oh well. Live and Learn. At this point my head is laying on the table I’m so tired. Tomorrow is a super early wake up of 4:30. One train ride and on route to Machu Picchu. The longest 8 hours of my life. Supe excited... 😏.
How do you like the sound of free? Yeah. Everyone does. There are free walking tours in all the cities. They make their money in tips. It’s another great way to see the city. Most tours start in the Plaza de Armas. I suspect it’s because it’s the easiest to find. Im not going to lie. I can’t remember most of this tour. What I do remember is that it was cold. Hace frio! Here’s some photos of the city. After the tour we were starving. It was cold and rainy and we just wanted some good food. We were kind of in a crunch for time because we need to go to SAM Travel for orientation and I desperately wanted a pizza at the Bodega. My nose smelled it as we walked by and I knew...I had to have it. We stopped at Organika, a restaurant that as you could probably guess is all organic. Their farm is in Urubamba. We didn’t eat a lot because we planned on getting something later. We got the sweet potato ravioli and a pumpkin cream soup. Very tasty. Many of our neighboring tables had nice looking dishes. We ate and scadaddled to SAM Travel before it got too dark. At ST we met our guide Marcelino and our Sacred Valley traveling mates from Switzerland. It was all good until Marcelino dropped a bomb on us and said we could only take a duffel bag of items. What about my other 15lbs of luggage? No way I was leaving it at the building. It’s one of those fears you have when taking a trip out of the country. The fear that all your stuff will get stolen or you’ll get stolen... lots of things getting stolen. We trusted Marcelino and went with it. See SAM Travel review for more deets > We wrapped up with Marce and had to make a decision about food. It was dark, dark at this point and the pizza place was far. My heart was crushed but we decided to go back to El Balcon to grab dinner in the restaurant. We needed to rest up for the big tour and also... no one wanted to get stolen. I had the salami sandwich and my friend the veggie sandwich. All was well. Everyone was back safe. No pizza was had though. 😔
I can’t believe I forgot about La Lucha. A chain it seems in Peru but a very delicious one. It also seems clean. Bonus! 😬 La Lucha Lima was a meal before we left. It was across the street from Kennedy Park (cat park). Just a side. Daniel told us a Story about why this park was named Kennedy park. I couldn’t find the bust of JFK anywhere... So yes. LL. It’s hard to order here but they will help you. They definitely push the Lucha Sammy. It’s good. I was talked into the chicharron but I should have stuck with my original. It was all delicious. Hot and fresh. Dem fries tho. Can you say yum? Fresh juice too! Ok, NOW we were ready to fly to Cusco! Sorry. A bit out of order, but can't forget about La Lucha!
r↵It’s been less than 48 hours and it feels like weeks. We flew Avianca to Cusco. Let me tell you... there’s some serious hidden messages in terms of air fare. No one seems to give the same answer so let me give it to you in a nutshell.
Priceline is horrible. Ok. I’m done. But seriously... horrible and disrespectful. Ok. I’m really done this time. Anyway, we got a green taxi (safe) right at the airport and went to our hotel El Balcon. We got a taste of Peruvian driving. Man. It’s scary. 80-100mph down the road, weaving in and out. Stop signs are optional. So are turning signals. It was ... an experience. El Balcon is a little bit away from Plaza de Armas - Cusco. However, it’s really beautiful. It felt like a little retreat. Everything is organic and they have a fabulous onsite kitchen/restaurant. The food is damn good and fairly priced. This is one hotel I would totally stay in again. The room was so cute. A white painted stone wall. No TV. Comfortable bed. A door that was from Times past with a vintage padlock. They even had these little windows you could open to see outside. It felt like a little hobbit home. Seriously. How cute is this place? You’d stay here too. Errr you should stay here! 😄 The restaurant was great! They had a fixed menu but it was all fresh. I mean... everything was fresh. You could even see the pasta noodles draped over from them making them in the morning. I fell in love with this little hobbit town. The breakfast was free! Fresh fruit, oatmeal, eggs any way and some different jams and breads. Different kinds of tea and juices. Of course, there was coffee too. Often you’d find travelers just sitting by the wood stove for heat. It was cold in Cusco. We didn’t quite expect that but packed for blizzard and a heat wave. The food was aesthetically pleasing and delicious! Pasta with sausage, one of their salads and chicken soup was for dinner. Our Peruvian friend Daniel said that people from Cusco eat a lot of soup. He also recommended to eat light since the altitude is higher. Muuuuuch higher and digestion is slow. Good advice. I ate light and it still bothered me. More about altitude sickness, etc. later. Check out breakfast. I miss having someone serve me eggs in the morning. 😕
El Balcon. A diamond in the rough. Onward to free walking tour! I should probably be writing these while actually in Peru but I couldn’t. I literally had no energy to write. So hopefully my crap memory can remember it all. My friend and I decided to grab dinner and drinks at Amaz with Daniel, our new Peruvian friend. Daniel is a young Peruvian hipster of 27. Just a kid. Lol 😄 We we’re lucky because the restaurant was literally down the street. We grabbed some drinks. Bourbon for me. Pisco Sour for my friend. Daniel showed up and we were able to get a table. During that time we were fighting with Priceline to give us a refund. I finally was able to get a refund but then we had no flights. Tours booked for the next day but no transportation. So a little bit of a panic... We had to get flights fast. However, of course, we had no passports on us. I felt kind of rude because Daniel was in the company of two people stuck to their phones. My friend ended up running back to the hotel to get flights and passports. For a brief moment I thought... “I hope I don’t die here.” Who knows who this kid is? He’s but a stranger in a foreign land. Lol He turned out to be pretty cool. A very live and let live kind of person. The food at Amaz didn’t rock my socks off. Actually, I will say Amazonian food is not my thing. We had snails, empanada and ribs. I didn’t really love any of it. I’m picky. Not picky enough not to eat it though. 😬 We ended the evening eating some of Daniel’s ‘ex-girlfriend’ chocolate and went back to the hotel. The ex-girlfriend chocolate was a random story told by D. Basically, one of his serious long term used to be girlfriends came into town with her boyfriend and wanted to see him. She brought him chocolate. They must have ended on a good note. I don’t know anyone who wants to bring me chocolate. Actually for those that know me, you know I don’t like chocolate. However, it felt like I should have some of his particular chocolate on this particular night. I still don’t love chocolate. 😄
Daniel lives in Miraflores. He rides his bike everywhere. That seems silly maybe, but if you saw the Peruvian drivers you’d ride too. D walked us back to our hotel and then we parted ways. We actually booked our last tour with him on our last day in Barranco. So this was an hasta luego for now. Woot! Woot! Off to South America. Pretty awesome that the time change isn’t that great. Most of the trips I have been on the time change is killer. Even the 7 hour layover in Florida wasn’t that bad. Actually I spent most of my time writing a review of why you should never use Priceline. See reviews. We dropped down in Lima and we didn’t have but one day before we moved onto the next city. We booked a tour with Foodies Peru and honestly you should always do a little walking tour right when you come into a new country. It helps you acclimate to the environment and get to know your surroundings. In this case, get to know the food! We were hungry. Well... some of us are always hungry... 😊 We met Daniel at the gallery by Kennedy Park. The park is two million cats. They were all so cute. I wanted to take them all home. Anyway, back to food... Daniel took us on a nice little walk around Miraflores. Miraflores is basically where tourist stay because it’s the “safe” part of Peru. I cant remember all of the food had. Sorry. 😔 Unfortunately my memory is complete crap and I will normally forget names not never photos. I know we had ceviche, some potato and cream based dish, a lamb, two different kinds of drinks, one being Chicha Morada, chicolage dessert. i would have to say that my favorite part was walking around the market and trying the different fruits. We also had a smoothie type drink. I love fresh made drinks. Out of all of the. Food options the cerviche was the best. However, I would have liked a sandwich option or fusion food to try as well. Oh, before i forget, hereis a photo of one of the pieces in the art gallery. I love that this was community piece. Also, if you can’t read Spanish, The Google Translator app is pretty sweet. Just use the camera function and wave it over the words. It will translate it for you! Technology. How cool. 😏
We finished up with Daniel at the Choco Museo and then exchanged numbers to meet up later for dinner and drink. Stay tuned for Amaz. 😬 Sooooo someone wanted to get regular food after conquering Machu Picchu. The food so far has been decent. For some reason I just wanted a burger. So we stopped at Bembos. Yeah. I should have gotten pizza because the ‘beef’ burger was weirdly mushy in a way that told me I was not eating beef...I blame myself for this meal. we walked around the flea market shop area. Basically every stall has the exact same thing so it was hard to pick up souvenirs. I hate just picking up junk. We ended up grabbing a coffee and just hanging out in WiFi for awhile. It was really nice. The coffee was good. The music was soothing and no one was there. Perrrfect! We were heading to the train soon. it seemed like such a long day. Machu Picchu. Wandering. Packing. Train. Getting off. Finding SAM travel. A couple hours drive to Cusco. In the van I started to feel nausea from the car ride... or the food... we finally made it to Yawar Inca which was the nicest hotel we have stayed in and it also was the fastest stay. :( Basically we were there to sleep then up again at 4am... we had not eaten since Bembos... It was kind of late to have dinner but we went to La Quinta anyway. It kind of was a shady walk down the street and over a block. Some guy started talking to us and following us. It was weird. I think he was trying to take us somewhere. No thank you.
There was so many good sounding options on this menu but... since I wasn’t feeling well I opted for the kids chicken nuggets and fries. Lol Anyway, we don’t need to get into details but I was sickity sick. It just got worse and worse. We woke up early and was at the airport. I could barely keep my eyes open. I slept until we boarded the plane and just before the plane started its ascend I felt like I was going to throw up. I resigned myself to doing it in my cap. I felt bad for the guy sitting next to me. He probably thought I drank too much Chicha the night before. I made it to Casa Arequipa without getting sick on myself or anyone else. It was a win. I’m underplaying it a little. It was a bit serious. I’ve never felt so sick. It was a combination of weird food and dehydration. Maybe some altitude issues. No bueno. Make sure to take care of yourselves! |
"Ohhhh the places you'll go…" Growing up all I ever wanted to do was help people, learn, and travel. I'm lucky. I get to do all of those things and more.
This is just some food from some places I've been. CategoriesArchives |