Ollantaytambo

Did I mention that Ollantay had breathtaking views?

Ollantaytambo

Ollantaytambo (Ollantay), Sacred Valley, Peru: amazingly cool ruins, breathtaking views, and a great prelude to Machu Picchu. Ollanty was a very small, dusty town filled with a hundred restaurants and shops serving and selling the exact same thing as one another. One could spend days deciding were to eat breakfast if one were the indecisive type. Thankfully we are not so indecisive, we had decided where to eat breakfast by dinner time. We stayed in the first hostel we looked at--the cheapest one of course--of the one's we researched online. It was super cheap with no frills at all, but had beds and hot water. Hot water, yeah, if you know how to use it. the water is heated by coils in the shower head, and like silly Americans, we turned the water on full blast and frowned when we found they were all out of hot water. Whoops!! Half way through the coldest--I'm talking 31 degrees cold--shower ever, the maintenance guy yelled in to us that he could fix it (granted that conversation took about five minutes through the door while I stood there naked trying to speak Quechua-Spanish). Pickle and I finally crammed into the little toilet room next to the shower and the guy came in, turned down the water pressure, and eureka, we had the best hottest lowest-pressure drizzle shower ever. Silly Americans!!

Funkie Flight

The third leg in our 4-flight, 48-hour trek from Durango, CO to Cuzco, Peru. We were in row 30, the last set of seats on the plane. Thankfully, we did not have any children behind us to kick the backs of our seats the whole way. However, the toilets were directly behind us, and I'm not sure if it was the food in Mexico City or the in-flight snack, but there was a line for those toilets at least three people deep for the entire 6 hour flight. The beer and tequila were coming from the galley behind the toilets and at one point the back of the plane was transformed into a nightclub. A big group-line waiting for liquor and toilet, and swaying and bopping so much from all of the turbulence it looked as though they were line dancing.