Zero to 11,200 feet in 55 minutes......

Checked out of the hotel at 5:30 and took a bus to the airport and caught an early morning flight to Cusco. The flight is only one hour but is really strange in that you take off, reach cruising altitude and land without ever descending. You literally go from sea level to 11,200 feet in one hour. In Cusco we caught a bus to the Royal Inca Hotel—where we stayed last year—and everybody split up. I think we needed alone-time at this point. I don’t care how good of condition you’re in that altitude change tears you up—headaches and short breath. I started drinking Coca tea immediately which is a local remedy for altitude sickness and have done pretty well so far but two of our group are already pretty sick. I wandered around the ancient Plaza de Armias and adjoining cathedral plaza for a couple of hours—just looking and not buying anything. Monday we are going to the Pisac Market in the mountains so I’ll probably buy there.
Around noon I was hungry so I found a place on the main plaza—upper story with a great view of the main cathedral—and had a pizza and bowl of guinea pig soup. Guinea pig is a big menu item here and I’d always wanted to try it. Tastes like chicken.

After lunch I returned to the hotel and took a two-hour nap then wandered around some more and checked my email at an Internet Café—the hotel doesn’t have Internet.

In the evening a small group of us went to a restaurant on the main plaza and I had a local trout dinner and it was back to the hotel and to bed early. We leave for Machu Picchu at 4:00 am.