Cusco, Peru
After leaving Bolivia, our first stop in Peru was Cusco. Our guide book had warned us about elevation sickness in Cusco with its 3400m elevation but after spending over 6 hours at El Alto airport, which is at 4000m, Cusco felt like a welcome change. Continuing our streak of ignoring the guide book, we took a unofficial taxi to our hostel to save 5 soles ($2) between the 3 of us. After dumping our bags at the hostel we took a walk through town to see the sights. I noticed, to my surprise, that all the stray dogs in Cusco are very chill and just ignore tourists instead of hounding them for attention or food. When we began feeling hungry we had dinner at a vegetarian-friendly restaurant called Greens that had amazing food.
Thus sated, we returned to the hostel to shower and rest for a while before going to check out the local nightlife. Perhaps because it was a Sunday night, not much seemed to be going on. We ended up at a little club playing reggaeton and crowded by Argentineans smoking while they danced, taking breaks only to chant slogans villianizing Evo Morales, the populist president of Bolivia.
Despite having gone to bed quite late, I found myself awake rather early the next morning so I went to the living room and tried to use the hostel's wifi but it proved to be prohibitively flakey. While I was doing that a gorgeous woman walked in and inquired about brekki. I had forgotten that the hostel served brekki but I decided to join her and we got to talking. She was also a chronic traveller and we got along really well but she had to check out that morning and was stressed out about finding another hostel for her and her travel buddy. I regret not asking them to join us for dinner.
When the girls finally awoke we hit the town again for the first international hat brunch. The food was delicious and we polished off every last scrap the brought us, even though we were stuffed after that. After returning to the hostel and resting for a bit, we took a taxi to visit the four Inca ruins outside Cusco. That took a few hours but it was a fascinating experience, even without a tour guide. In the evening we had a mediocre dinner followed by a rousing game of Pictionary and then retired for the night.
