Is That A Monkey?

Second day in Peru and I feel ten times better acclimated to the altitude, so that’s cool. Can’t say I’m zip-a-dee-doo-dah full of energy, but at least it don’t hurt so bad. We get on a local bus takes us up to this site where the Incas had some fountains and stuff. I’m all into using the public transport, how excitingly authentic. The bus goes for about half an hour and we’re getting a bit nervous so we stand up and Nepenthe gets the driver to stop and we get out and hey look at that there’s the Inca fountain place we were looking for! We walk up and there’s actually not that much to it, but it’s still pretty. Nepenthe has another ruin site pegged close by, we walk down the road a bit and it’s cool, used to be some kind of hunting lodge, got a great view of some valleys beyond. The guidebook thingy says you can follow the horse trail and walk back down to Cusco, it’s a lot more direct than trying to get a bus or car. And the road has been looking pretty much deserted since we got here so I guess that’s what we’ll do. Hey look, there are some horses and people! We find what looks like the beginning of a trail and it turns out to be quite horsey indeed, from all the horseshoe tracks and poo. And it actually turns out to be a gorgeous walk, gently downhill, passing bucolic farms, grand vistas of rolling hills and steep valleys, it’s beautiful journey over a dramatically varied landscape in a really cinematic they’re-taking-the-hobbits-to-Isengard way. We can tell we’re pretty close to town and then the trail splits and we’re not sure which way to go, we got about an hour left of daylight and being out in the countryside after dark is not high on the list of advisable things. Then we find a family walking along the trail and we ask them which way to town and they say no don’t take the one we’re on take that other trail. Holy god thank the lord we found them, otherwise who knows where we would have ended up and hey is that a monkey in that mans jacket? I’m totally serious, that guy has a monkey! From what I gathered from his conversation with Nepenthe, he’s a Frenchman who came here and married a Peruvian woman and has been here for years. This is the kind of thing that will mark this entire vacation, actually, serendipitous events that make things work out for us, with extra bits of magic, like a pet monkey.

Speaking of magic, we eat dinner in a restaurant named Macondo! It’s listed in the guidebooks as one of the hippest artsy-est tastiest restaurants in Cusco, and I’d have to go there no matter what just because of the name. There is color and art all over the place, and One Hundred Years of Solitude quotes painted spiralling on the wall, there’re playing excellent downtempo loungey techno, and everything feels perfect here on the other side of the world.