Southern Exposure

Saturday, February 14

We decided to skip the scarce breakfast at the hotel and go to Jack’s Cafe Bar for a Valentine Day’s brunch. This was our second time at the place and the food was once again outstanding.

After breakfast we did some more shopping at the weekend market and the main plaza stores, and wondered around town.

Cusco is a former Inca capital and despite great efforts by the Spaniards to wipe out all signs of the Inca civilization, the impressive stone foundations laid by the Incas are still visible throughout the city. The stones were just too large and too perfectly alined for the Spaniards to be able to move them.

We couldn’t get a hold of the mechanic that was recommended to us, so I will have to deal with my steering problem until probably Santiago. We did however go to the moto stores district and purchased five quarts of oil for our ever thirsty KLR’s. Even if my oil leak is fixed my bike still eats a lot of oil on straight roads and since we will be venturing into Bolivia shortly, we need to have as much oil with us as possible knowing that it will be impossible to get there.

We then visited the Inca Museum. The overall exhibition was not that exciting, but the museum had the largest collection of Inca wooden goblets in the world and a fascinating showcase of the Inca burial tradition. All Inca mummies were found well-preserved and buried in a fetal position surrounded by artifacts like textiles, pottery, jewelry and coca leaves.

After the museum we went back to the hotel, gathered all of our purchases and shipped them off via Peru Mail to the US. For dinner we went to the Papa Picchu restaurant, which served traditional cuisine with an international flair. While we were having our meal outside in the restaurant courtyard, we felt a short but shaky earthquake. Thankfully, there were no aftershocks, so we thoroughly enjoyed our dinner and pisco coctails.

In as much as we wanted to watch the last episode of Dexter after dinner, we had to spend most of the evening working on the blog and emails while we had wi-fi at the hotel.