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Cusco and Spanish lessons

Feeling completely knackered by all the travel and hassle over the last fortnight I decided to give myself a break and study Spanish for a week, a stones throw from my clean hostel overlooking the Plaza de Armas. My teacher, Rocsana is excellent and after a year of Latin at school, Spanish doesn´t seem that hard. There are even words that sound Afrikaans like: interesante, meubles, examen, pausa and so on. I have 4 hours a day of 1-to-1 tuition and about 2 hours of homework. I moved quickly from nouns and verbs to personal pronouns and finally swear words and feel confident I can deal with any situation using a mixture of the aforementioned.

Cusco is the start point for the Inca trail and Machu Picchu and so swarms with gringo´s most of the year. It is definately the best city for me so far - a well proportioned Colonial Spanish City, that is clean, fairly English speaking and safe-ish. Its a buyers market here so a walk anywhere near the centre of town can be fairly exhausting in the twilight as each enterprise employs touts to assail you with anything from menu´s to tours, not to mention the shoeshine boys and postcard sellers. It is possible to have a good night out without even reaching for your wallet with all the free offers and the pub and club life certainly is on a par with any other large city. Viva Mama America!!

There is also a lot to see and do in and around the city. I took a trip with some guys from the hostel up to see the 4 ruins within walking distance of the city, including Sacsayhuaman (pronounced sexywoman) with her huge boulders, each stone intricately carved to interlock with its irregularly sized neighbour. Another daytrip took us to Pisac with its market and Inca ruins with more regularly carved stonework. Walking into a local shop I eventually located the keeper sitting behind the door eating her guinea pig and chips. She generously tore a stip off the carcass and shoved it in my general direction but I politely declined. Perhaps I´ll try it another day.....hmmm.

Speaking of guinea pigs I was also fortunate enough to see the legendary ´Last Supper´, hanging in the Cusco Cathedral which is a typical Renaissance style painting of this important biblical event except for the rather large, rather dead guinea pig decorating the centre of the disciples´table. Details...details....

After a week of acclimatizing in Cusco a group of 8 of us took a 2 day break from Cusco to explore Machu Picchu which I have recorded on the next page.

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