From the Andes to the Amazon Jungle

Back in Cusco, preparing for our flight to Iquitos. We'll spend 1 night in a hotel and in the morning we'll be picked up for a 3 hour boat trip to Muyuna Lodge. Will be there for 4 days off-the-grid jungle experience. So no posts for a week or so.

Another blue balcony, another festival. This time a sort of battle of the bands

 

Cusco University Research Centre for Social Sciences

Another airport gate

  

The view from our Iquitos hotel at midnight - 24 degrees

 

Cusco and Andean Textiles

We woke to another gorgeous day and saw the view from our hotel in daylight.

 

Our hotel being in the historic centre of Cusco, we were able to just walk and explore. What we found was one impossibly narrow laneway (although they are called streets and avenues here) after another with brilliant views at the end. As we, again, were out early we had a lot of the streets to ourselves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shops don't seem to open until 11am and we were able to witness what must be the Peruvian equivalent to Little Athletics. Lots of children were doing traditional dance drills and we watched from one of the blue balconies, a cafe in the Plaza de Armas.

 

 

 

 

Even though there's a shop, stall or seller offering 'authentic' textiles of the Andes every 3 steps, it took a bit of snooping to find the genuine article. One was a shop/gallery partnered by an American lady, who also happens to be a Professor of Textiles. She was able give the providence of each piece and when each of her articles were made. Very informative and I look forward to the website she is in the process of having built. Look out for 'Arte Anthropologia'.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The other place was the Inka Museum. Within its courtyard are artisans actually demonstrating, unlike a lot of people dressed up in traditional Peruvian clothes so that they can charge you for taking their photo, these crafts people are more than happy for you to photograph them and quality textiles can be bought at prices that more realistically reflect the amount of work that goes into these textiles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cusco being the base of tourists to visit Machu Picchu, it is a place rich in culture, beauty and history, juxtaposed against the crass commercialism tourism brings.

 

 

 

Spot the juxtaposition.

 

A bus trip full of surprises!

We expected a long bus ride from Puno to Cusco today and what we thought would be a ride on a regular commuter bus turned out to be a tour with wonderful stops along the way - after we cleared the insane traffic of Peruvian cities.

We visited a lithic museum, some Inka ruins, lots of examples of Inka architecture, an Inka pottery kiln, the worlds highest Faculty of Veterinary Science, a pottery, Spanish architecture in the form of churches, more markets, the headwaters of the river Urubamba mentioned in Great-Grandpa's papers and to top it all off a shop selling historic maps.

The latter we found after we checked into our hotel and went for a walk to find a bite to eat. Can't wait to explore Cusco in the daytime.