Don´t give me that altitude

Turns out I´m not as immune to altitude as I thought - my body is taking its time adjusting. What that means in practice is that I get to laze around and drink coca tea several times a day, so I´m not complaining. (Actually, Lizz says I complain all the time.)

I arrived in Cusco on Tuesday afternoon after a whopping 24 hours of travel time. Our hostel is up a serious set of stairs which at this altitude is a bitch, but there´s a beautiful view over the city. Turns out that the unofficial Israeli corner is also right near us, so we ended up having dinner among a bunch of twenty-year-old Hebrew speakers eating hummus and shakshouka.

On Wednesday, we went up to the Saqsayhuaman (or, as Lizz calls it, "sexywoman") ruins outside Cusco, where our guide´s name was Vladimir Ilyich - that´s after Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, for those of you who don´t know. His brother´s name is Ernesto Che Guevara, and they have a sister named after a Bulgarian communist too. Saqsayhuaman was an Incan temple of the Sun, which the Spanish took apart to use for their own cathedral in the city´s plaza. Vladimir made a point of referring to the Spanish as "invasores" rather than "conquistadores" and told us how chicha is really made.

Highlight of the day - finding the local food market and the hundreds of juice ladies.

Tuesday night we caught a night bus to Puno, a town on Lake Titicaca - the largest high altitude lake in the world (or so we read). After killing a couple hours in the bus terminal, we caught the slowest boat ever to Amantani. To my admittedly inexperienced eye, Amantani looked a lot like an island in the Mediterranean - well groomed, green, nice looking houses amid beautiful blue water. At night our hosts dressed us up in local wear, and we went to the town dance where French tourists outnumbered the locals.

Highlight of the day - seeing an insane number of stars from a whole new hemisphere. We saw the Southern Cross too. (Cathy, all I could think about looking at those stars was BSG - also they have cookies here called FRAC.)

Now we´re back in Puno waiting for our classy cama bus back to Cusco after burning all our money on alpaca sweaters, scarves, hats, and socks.