Vacation

Our day started early to the airport and flying to Cusco (only about an hour by plane but more like a day if we had gone by coach!); but Cusco is very high altitude and Overseas Adventure Travel designs the trip to give us a bit of acclimation time – immediately leaving Cusco and dropping to a lower altitude in Urubamba. But we got glimpses of the city as we left it …

During the drive to Urubamba (and our hotel) we stopped to look at Peruvian textiles – and the Alpaca from which the textiles are made:

We also stopped near Pisac to see splendid Inca terraces at Qantas Raqay:

Our trip to Peru with Overseas Adventure Travel began with us flying Orlando-Miami-Lima a day earlier than needed (in case of travel delays) and giving us a free day to explore Lima on our own … the city is huge (10 million people!) but we were in the Miraflores suburb which is quite touristy!

We began by walking to the Pacific coast – or at least a few hundred feet above – and finding a nice cafe stop for coffee; after that we walked back past the hotel to lunch at a “street food mall” then explored Kennedy Park (many cats!) and 7th June Park, before walking back again to the coast to Love Park with its “El Beso” (The Kiss) sculpture:

The next day we met our guide Ciro and the rest of the group and did a bit of guided exploring before heading to the amazing Huaca Pucllana pre-Inca archeological ruins of a pyramid structure built not of mud bricks!

Next day we headed to another part of Lima, the “historic colonial center” from the Spanish conquest.

From here we headed to the Larco Museum with many ancient Peruvian items – but we were tired and hungry so we had lunch there and looked at only a small part of the exhibits, the “erotic” section!