BT – Puno to Cusco

Today had a very early start, as we packed up and were taken to the bus station to catch our coach for the nearly-400km trip from Puno to Cusco, with detours to see some sights along the way. Our guide was an enthusiastic and voluble woman, which was okay to start off with, but I confess it got a bit wearing as the day progressed, exacerbated by the fact that she tended to give long explanations and was giving them in both English and Spanish and I sometimes struggled to concentrate or pick up when she changed from one to the other. To add to the madness there was also a German speaking guide, and so at times there were three versions of the commentary. The long explanations also meant that when we visited some of the sites en route there was lots of standing around when, after sitting in the bus, what I most wanted was a decent bit of a walk. Having said all of that, it was mostly a good trip with some very interesting sights.

We had five stops on the way. The first, at Pukara (S 15°2.55′, W 70°22.12′), was a small museum containing some stone carvings from a nearby Inca temple, now partly destroyed. Our second stop, very brief, was at the highest point on the road: La Raya at 4335 metres above sea level (S 14°29′, W 70°59.3′). Here there were still mountains above us, although apparently the small glacier that we could see has retreated quite a lot over the last 15 years. As expected (based on experiences to date) there were lots of roadside stalls, but it was all a little crazy with buses and tourists and llamas and locals by the side of a road in the middle of nowhere.

The Puno side of the pass had been quite arid and treeless; now, as we descended on the northern Cusco side, it was much greener, with rivers and small creeks running off the mountains. We had a pleasant lunch stop at Sicuani (approximately S 14°17′, W 71°13.5′), where the alpaca was very nice. Here there were a few more stalls, plus the ubiquitous dressed-up children with animals, and two excellent musicians who, bizarrely, were playing Beatles songs and Simon and Garfunkel on panpipes and guitar (one of them played a really lovely arrangement of “Sounds of Silence”, playing both guitar and panpipes simultaneously).

At Raqchi (S 14°10.5′, W 71°22.2′) there was a big Incan ruin comprising a temple and accommodation complex. The temple was massive, although only a central wall still stands along with the remains of structural columns. The houses were arranged very neatly and were impressive, but their remarkableness was surpassed by the set of 200 circular rooms, each about 5m in diameter, also arranged with geometric precision. It was all very impressive, though it was hard to capture the full scope of the place via photographs.

Google maps’ satellite view does, however, give a bit of perspective.

Our final stop, as the change in rock type turned the adobe houses from a pale pink brown to a more chocolatey one, was the Baroque church of San Pedro Apóstol in Andahuaylillas (S 13°40.5′, W 71°40.7′), with its ostentatious over-the-top gilded decorations and extravagant paintings. We weren’t allowed to take photos inside, and it seems that I forgot to take photos when I got outside! This was followed, incongruously, by a display of skulls suggesting that aliens had visited. And, yes, you could get souvenirs from the roadside stalls in recognition of all of these things.

Shortly after 5pm we arrived in Cusco (S 13°31′, W 71°58.7′), a city of half a million people. Like Puno it has impossibly narrow streets, with most of it given over to the side-by-side incomplete humble homes but there is also a ritzier centre … but we’ll save the photos for another post.

Oh, one final piece of advice: don’t sit up the front of the bus in Peru, because you get close up views of all the near misses and crazy manoeuvres that are de rigeur in a country in which the road system is nowhere near ready for the amount of traffic being imposed upon it.