Helen Chick
Although I haven’t done much caching in the past many months I still enjoy doing it and I am always keen to find geocaches in new countries and towns. We had spare time on our first day in Cusco allowing us to spend the morning exploring some of the city by doing a multi-cache which visited a number of the historic plazas.
We got to see the San Francisco church …
Plaza Regocijo …
and the famed central Plaza de Armas (which we’d already seen as it was very close to our hotel). This spot is tourist central, and therefore hawker central. Although it feels rude to have to bluntly indicate disinterest in whatever someone is trying to sell you, there are so many of them and they are persistent in their pursuit of your custom that I eventually looked up the Spanish for “I already have one” (“Ya tengo uno”) and used it a few times!
… but not before getting caught out by the shoeshine amusement show and ripoff act. I had declined the attentions of one guy, who noticed that I was wearing my black runners and offered to clean and repair them (having observed that the sole was coming away from the upper at the toes (I had tried to repair them once myself)). Another guy approached me around the corner, offering to glue the shoe for one Soles (for the purposes of this tale, the name of the Peruvian currency is ironic), and so I accepted, but then the first guy turns up and says this isn’t fair, so I say one shoe each. Before long, however, not only are both shoes being glued but I am having them shined, polished and waterproofed as well … and Cath and I are very amused by the whole thing, with two guys at my feet. However, they charged a relatively small fortune each (much more than the originally quoted S1), and I am fairly confident the first pulled a swifty to make it look like I had only given him a S10 note instead of a S20, although I only realised this later. I’m not sure I quite got the level of amusement and entertainment from the occasion commensurate with what I paid, but it was still kind of funny and all part of the travel experience, and I’m prepared to be sanguine about the ripoff price (I failed to haggle after all!) though I was disappointed with the actual theft. [To give them credit the repairs are still holding up five months later!]
With shiny shoes the caching then continued, and we started to make our (slow and slightly oxygen deprived) way up the hill above the main part of Cusco. This involved narrow streets and steep stairways (and scary electrical wiring!), and I was glad of the cache for giving us this chance to explore a little of Cusco’s back alleys.
We ended up at a small park well up the hillside, with rock outcrops that gave great views of the city. Ironically, I had seen this location marked on Open Street Maps, with the curious label “Feel free to climb here” and I wondered what it meant. I am still not sure exactly, although one of the outcrops looked climbable, but at least I can say I’ve been there.
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