Iheyna Jona Tochi(Phonetically prounounced Nigerian saying) means ¨Sad Things Make You Laugh¨:My Experience in Cuzco

So that phrase is from Chisara and there are several reasons for posting that, all of which I hope to include in this post...


So I´ve been taking entirely too long to post on the rest of the Peru experience so I´m going to try and be as brief as possible, but previous attempts have failed as evidenced by previous posts.

Taking a 20hr bus ride from Lima to Cuzco was an experience to say the least. It really wasn´t that bad because, theoretically, you sleep for at least 5-10 of it right?(not in my case) My body decided it would pic up some bug in Lima and then start destroying my body on the bus ride there. As soon as I stepped on the double decker bus, I knew it would be an especially long one. The only redeeming factor was that they showed a total of 6 movies on the ride there, but not after 1 and not before 7 inwhich we were turning and swerving up and around mountains, which looked ridiculously scary at night, not to mention we were at the front of the bus as to be able to see right out the impending doom.

We knew that before we got there that we probably didn´t want to go with the package that Kique´s friend Eduardo was going to offer us, but at the same time not sure how he was going to react to that granted, one of our members had already wired him $480 as per the professor´s request. Of course when we got there he was waiting with his buddy doing everything he could to rush us to his hostal...Rupa Rumi(****DISCLAIMER****AVOID THIS HOSTAL AT ALL COSTS). He said that everything was fine, and we were all trying to explain our professor-less situation and the Kique experience to him(not too necessary b/c Kique called Eduardo to give him the heads up on the greedy gringos).

So his original offer was going to be 800 for an 8 day package, however it was cut down to 500 after negotiating some activities out. The hostal was nice and so were the workers, the owner was just plain disgusting. He was very rude to his workers and nothing better than a pusher(drug dealer) of his package. All the while he claimed to be professional. So professional that his good bye words were ¨Leave my country, you mother fuckers¨, that´s after he called me liar of course. I guess I have some splainin to do as Ricky would say...

So it all started after returning back the second day we were there from visiting this amazing Incan area called Pisac(more on the fun stuff later). I return to no ipod or ipod charger in my room which was stupidly laying on my belongings beside my bed. The room I was staying in was right next to the entrance of the rustic hostal, near some couches, sorta of like a waiting area. I very calmly approached Eduardo of my at that point missing but at this point stolen ipod, cleverly not accusing anyone, simply stating the facts. There was an ipod there last night, and now there is none. He kept on asking if I was 100% seguro, and I repeatedly said yes. He responded with ¨I´m going to kill the mother fucker who took your ipod¨. He then proceed to belligerently ask his workers if they had taken it. After that he said he could get one on the black market for 100 on saturday and mail me one. I told him if he gave me $100 I´d be satisfied, after we all paid him $500.

500 x 10 = roughly...$5,000!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

He didn´t mention it the following days until the last day when we were there. And decided to throw in some extra charges that he was charged because of changing dates and this that AND the other, and figured out that as a group we owed him $100 and that we could just pay Teo(ME) that 100. Of course I told the group no. And said we´d like to talk to him before we leave about it. Of course, he comes within 20min of our departure back to Lima and says to me, ¨Did you talk to your friends¨ and I respond ¨Yes¨ but we´d like to talk to you and that´s when all hell broke lose and i called him unprofessional and then he went on a diatribe of expletives that don´t need to be repeated...BACK TO THE FUN STUFF!!!

Oh and my sunburn kicked in full force at this point, just my chest and shoulders(red hot...a first for my fresh mulatto skin,haha). So as I said the first day we went to Pisac. We hiked with our wonderful tour guide Cristobal all over this one mountain area where the inca ruins were ever present, and stunning. Every tour guide talked about the uniqueness of the Incan architecture because they used NO mortar or cement, but instead used fine carving to place the many ton rocks on top of each other through concave and convex carving techniques not evidenced on the outside but on the inside.

We traveled all day to several Incan sites, the names of which have vanished from my memory but the pictures are priceless.

The next day was Machu Picchu and as we can see I´ve already written a book, I´ll try and make another quick post for Machu Picchu to do it justice till then stay fresh....