South America Part 6 - Last day in Cusco

To pick things up where we last left off, we need to mention dinner. We went down to gringo alley aka tout central and got accosted by a couple of touts. Ant took pictures on his mobile phone which he is now using as wallpaper on his phone. We picked one restaurant, only to end up in a mosh pit of touts all offering “free” drinks. Usually once you arrive at the restaurant tho, the price goes up mysteriously. All of the restaurants we have eaten in at Cusco have been pretty empty. There seems to be more restaurants than people!

On our last day in Cusco, we woke up at 4:30am to the repetitive sounds of the panpipe guy who knew all of five seconds worth of melody. Ant was wanting to pay the guy USD $10 and break his f***** panpipe in half (but of course - we just layed in the room and watched the even more repetitive BBC World on TV).

After getting our supposed ¨mega-Cusco¨ pass the previous day, we attempted to see the Cusco art gallery and a couple of churches - but alas they were either closed for the ¨Feast of the Immaculate Conception¨(a Peruvian public holiday) or did not accept the ¨mega¨pass (despite Lonely Planet saying the opposite).

We did, however, check out the Inka Museum which was quite good in getting a 7 cities of gold fix. It covered pre-Inca civilisations as well as Inca and Spanish eras. Of note were the ghoulish skulls which were modified by the Incas. People of nobility (in Inca times) had their heads ¨modified¨ by various pillows and metal contraptions. This resulted in deformities which made their skulls look like ¨Mars Attacks¨ alien heads. Also - the Incas used to drug people with Coca (as a anaesthetic) to cut pieces of their skulls. According to the Muesum - these people suffered no ¨retardation¨.

We also checked out ¨Inglesia de La Compñia¨(another chruch that we thought the mega pass covered - but we had to pay admission). People inside were setting up for a wedding ceremony and were taking half an hour setting up a ribbon on one of the pews. I imagine that they´d have to take the rest of the week to do the rest. Of note were the various completely bloody statues of Jesus, which puts Mel Gibson´s The Passion of The Christ to shame. This seems to be pretty common in every church we went into.

Sporadic explosions rocked the sky, which made us think that the people from the train line blockade had got their hands on some real explosives, but it was all part of some religious whatsit going on in the square. Ant was taking some pictures of a parade, where people were setting off those little explosives that you throw on the ground. The parade dancers were either like Mardi Gras (for the women) or reject backup dancers from a Michael Jackson concert, circa 1991 (for the guys).

Being rank amateur art connoisseurs, we decided to check out Cusco´s gallery district. Unfortunately, it appears that there is a factory somewhere producing identical copies of people wearing sombrero hats, or with long moustaches and sombrero hats, or large women gathering the harvest in fields, of course wearing sombrero hats. Of course the only gallery that we really liked had the proper originals in it, which cost around USD $500 each. So we bailed from there to a place which had slightly more original works more in our budget range. After three visits and two walk outs in an attempt to not get fleeced, we eventually got a pair of paintings which should look ok in our place, assuming that they aren’t stuffed in transporting them the remaining 26,000 miles back home.

Lunch was at a hole in the wall where the only option was variations on pollo, or chicken. Ant had chicken soup and pollo “sandwich” (sic) and southern fried chicken with rice was Nick´s meal, plus Inka cola.

We then went back to the hostel and got our stuff to go to the airport, including the moist laundry, courtesy of the laundry service at the hostel. Ant accused them of stealing a sock, which of course later turned up inside a shoe three days later. The hostel people didn´t speak very much Engrish, so we did our best.