Where are the DeGroots?: Cuzco Day 1

As we said in our quick update, we had a great vacation in Cuzco starting last Friday and ending Monday morning. It was the experience of a lifetime! We're going to break it up into each main day of touring so we can include more pictures and you can pace yourselves!

On Friday morning, we flew from Lima to Cuzco, Peru after we fixed a tiny mishap because the travel agency booked us on separate flights for the way there. Keri's flight was what we expected, but C.J. was supposed to be on one that had left 2 hours before we arrived to the airport! Thankfully, we're in Peru, and all we had to do was pay $14 to change the ticket to the right flight. Our boarding passes were handwritten anyways, so it really wasn't a big problem, but it made us quite nervous for a little while.

Cuzco is a city in the Andes mountains at an altitude of about 11,500 ft and is famous for being the capital of the Incas. Everyone here warned us over and over about altitude sickness--a huge problem for tourists. We did okay with the altitude until later the first night, when we both had headaches. As suggested, we arrived to our hotel and slept for an hour. Then we went with Jean, a friend of someone at CASP to the travel agency to pay for our tours in Cuzco and start the city tour. The city tour lasted from about 1:30 in the afternoon until 6:30pm.

The first place we went was Qorikancha, which is a convent that was built by the Spanish conquistadors on top of a sacred Inca site. To show their dominance (and because the Incan construction was very solid), the Spanish built this and a lot of other Cathedrals right over top of the Incan temples as you can see below.

After Qorikancha and on other extremely huge and impressive cathedral with tons of beautiful artwork and colonial architecture (no pictures allowed), we headed out of the city a little bit to 3 different sites of ruins. Since you're going to be seeing a LOT of Incan ruins over the next few days (and they do start all looking very similar) we'll only talk about one today.

Saqsaywaman was the first ruins we visited. It is a huge site on some of the hills overlooking the city. One of the most impressive parts about this particular site was the HUGE rocks that were used to build the temple. The rock that C.J. is standing in front of in the picture below is over 100 tons, but we were told that it was dragged by hundreds of Incans from a quarry many miles away.

We look pretty small standing by 20 foot+ walls!

After the tour, we ate in our hotel restaurant and walked around the main square to buy some groceries and necessities for our trip to Machu Picchu the next day. We were TIRED and went to bed early in a haze from altitude sickness (we got up to about 3800 meters or almost 12,500ft that day), coca tea, and Dramamine for the headache. We're not really sure how strong (or narcotic) the coca tea was, but our eyes were really dilated...

Here are some additional pictures from the day: