28/07/2019 - Cusco, Peru

We got up and had breakfast in the hostel. We got our stuff together and set off for a chilled day. We dropped our laundry off and then went to Prasada, a vegan restaurant. We had some fresh juices and lentil burgers, which were lovely, they even used metal straws instead of plastic straws, first time in South America, it’s nice to see some environmental awareness (in contrast to the man we saw throw his plastic drinking bottle into the road when he was finished with it later in the day!)

Metal straws!

It was a bright warm sunny day today. It can be so hot in the sun and so cold in the shade, I guess because we are up the mountains at altitude, so it is a constant jumper on jumper off scenario. We wandered around the San Pedro market and bought some vegetables to make dinner with tonight. We went back home to drop the food off and collect our passports so as to then head to the train ticket office to print out our tickets for our journey to Machu Picchu in a weeks time. After sorting this out we grabbed a coffee and drank it in the main square in the sun, watching the world go by.

Josh has been chasing pigeons around and taking photos of them, playing with his cameras shutter speed. Next we went to our trekking tour office and met our guide Alex, who will be taking us up the mountains over the next five days. He explained the plan for our trek, and told us his first language is Quechua, an indigenous Peruvian language. He wants to teach us some Quechua songs and traditions whilst we are away, which should be interesting (after swapping whatsapp numbers we had already been sent some Quechua song recordings from him by the time we got home!) We got given some duffel bags to pack our things into and told we would be picked up at 04:30 in the morning, bright and early! We wandered home to get ourselves packed, with the aim of an early night tonight.