Chile

We hopped a flight from Cusco to Santiago, Chile and got in in the wee hours of the morning. For some reason it didn't really cross my mind that it was a different time zone, but turns out it was about 2 hours ahead of time from Peru...which is on East Coast time. So that put us at about 4am Chile time for getting to our hotel to check in. Clearly we were in need of a few hours of nap time before we did anything productive. We ended up spending most of the day walking through the city and wandering up a hillside park that had great views of the city...and awesome playgrounds!

Heading down from the park we took the tram down which was literally almost straight down the cliff. Definitely saved some time and energy after walking up it. We ended up in a cute little restaurant area of Santiago just in time for supper. After wandering around a bit we ended up at a little wine bar. We asked the waiter for suggestions on good Chilean wine and he brought the Owner/Sommelier out who spoke English. Turns out he also spent half his childhood growing up in Birmingham, AL at a high school that we know a lot of people from! Super random. He also was really good at suggesting wines and we ended up with a Chilean Pais. He also recommended some fabulous food, gave us a little Chilean wine history, and some recommendations of places to go in Valparaiso the next day!

After dinner, we decided to spend the evening enjoying the fabulous rooftop pool at the Ritz. We pretty much had the place to ourselves, and the bar tender brought us beverages in the hot tub, it was quite divine.

The next day (I don't even remember what days they were at this point...) we got a little bit of a late start before heading out to the bus stop and hopped on a bus to Valparaiso. Busses left for there every 20 minutes or so it seamed like, so we were able to jump on one really easily. I may have slept through most of the bus ride, but I did see a few mountains and tunnels that we went through on the way. We got to Valparaiso and I had a vague idea of where our hotel was so we just started walking. The streets were strangely empty and we soon found out why. As were kept walking our eyes started to burn and water and we couldn't stop sneezing...there was definitely residual tear gas in the air! Turns out the president of Chile was there earlier giving a speech and riots broke out and they were all gassed away. So we got there just in time to walk through a desolate tear gas filled downtown Valparaiso...not an awesome start. After consulting the GPS, we finally found our hotel which was up the hill from the downtown area in a super cute area! This is where Valparaiso started getting good!

After checking in, we started out with drinks on the roof deck while watching the sunset over the city. This hotel was pretty awesome and the views were amazing!

We spent the rest of the evening wandering around the hill checking out the AMAZING street art. It was everywhere.

The next day went about the same. We wandered even farther and onto other hills in the city checking out the amazing street art. It was so exciting to turn every corner to find out what's you'll see each time!

We spent one more night there before catching a bus back to Santiago and spending a couple of more nights around that area. We checked out the historic area of the city and did a lot more wandering and caught up on a little relaxing too.

Machu Picchu

This part of the trip was definitely the bucket list item that I was trying to check off the list ;) Apparently Ryan didn't actually really know what Machu Picchu was so he didn't seem quite as excited about it until we got there. I had been hearing reports lately that the due to the tourism in the area, the site was deteriorating rather quickly, so I really wanted to see it in it's prime. After being there, I didn't really see much evidence of deterioration so I think there's still plenty of time to see it in person.

After much research, I decided the best way to do this part of the trip was to fly into Cusco, Peru, take a taxi to Ollantaytombo, then jump on the train to Aguas Caliente. All means of transportation ended up to be a great way to see the Peruvian mountains and mountain towns, so that was awesome. I had read that it was good to spend your first night in Aguas Caliente in order to adjust to the elevations of the mountain towns. I'm glad we did either way because it's a super cute little town and it made getting up and going to Machu Picchu the next morning super easy. By the time we made it to Aguas Caliente, we checked into our hotel and just wandered the town and grabbed some supper before calling it a night.

A lot of people were saying that you should get up super early to catch the first bus up the mountain to Machu Picchu in order to be the first people into the ruins...we were not that motivated. I'm sure that would have been lovely, but I think getting there well rested was even better ;) After breakfast at the hotel, we headed down the street to catch a bus up to the ruins. It turned out to be a perfect day to be there. We wandered around for a couple of hours in the ruins before it was time to climb the mountain. They only sell about 400 tickets a day for entrance to the adjacent mountain (200 for early morning and 200 for late morning). I definitely wanted to get in of that, so I had purchased that with our entrance tickets months ago.

The climb up the mountain was pretty much all stairs...but really old and really steep stairs. I'm not going to lie, it was pretty tough especially in such a high elevation...luckily we're in pretty good shape, so we faired much better than most of the other people attempting the climb. We got to the top and enjoyed the awesome views of Machu Picchu from above. If you can handle the climb it's definitely worth it.

For the way back down the mountain, there are two options: back the same way we came, or down around the other side past and ancient cave ruins (the longer option). As we started along the cave trail down, we were stopped by guides who warned us that this route would take an additional 3 hours. I think that was good that they were warning people of the additional length, but they were rather far off on time estimates as it only took us about and hour and a half. Luckily we chose to press on mostly because it was much less crowded on that route. I would say out of the 200 people who went up the mountain at our entrance time, maybe 10 of the would have gone back down the cave direction, so we nearly had the trail to ourselves!

The cave itself was kind of interesting and would have been more interesting if there wasn't 3 people sitting at the mouth of the cave smoking pot the whole time making the entire cave a little hot box.

The trail on this side was much more interesting too and a little easier than navigating all the tiny stairs packed with people.

After we made it back off of the mountain we wandered the ruins a little more before grabbing lunch and heading back down to Aguas Calientes to hop a train back to Cusco. We spent the night in Cusco and relaxed in the pool for the night after a long day of exhausting climbing.

The next morning we got to enjoy Cusco for a while. We wandered around the streets and found an awesome giant market place to wander through. Being a mountain town, there were a lot of hills and stairs for us to traverse here too. We're definitely getting our workouts in at this point.

The other big thing I wanted to do in Cusco was to visit the Saksaywaman ruins. It's up the hill (of course) from down town Cusco, so we climbed up that way. The scale of these ruins aren't nearly comparable to Machu Picchu, but the construction of them were really unique. The rocks they used for the defense walls were ridiculously massive, and the walls were formed in a zig zag shape making some of the rocks curved at the edges. They were also jointed together impressively well...masters of tetris apparently. As if that wasn't impressive enough...enter the slides...yes these ruins had giant slides carved into a large rock hill. They were incredibly slick to slide down, but so much fun! That's definitely something I've never seen/done at ruins before!

After the ruins, we headed back to catch a flight for our next adventure...Chile!