The road to Machu Picchu part one: a truly sh*tty bus journey
Sixteen hours imprisoned in the faecal cage.
A very delicate hello from Cusco this week, specifically the Van Gogh Café in the historic centre’s Plaza Regocijo, where I am currently sat feeling quite broken after our final night out with Zlata and Greg. There were pisco sours, followed by beers and wine, followed by more beers and wine, followed by a lot of crying as we said goodbye in front of the Catedral del Cusco in the early hours of this morning.
Peru is a very big adventure playground, but between the four of us we did a good job of seeing several of the country’s greatest hits this week. There is far too much to fit into this newsletter in fact, but I will do my best – and maybe follow up with a part two newsletter in a couple of days’ time.
Casting my mind back to Nazca and the abandoned hotel where I left you last week feels like a lifetime ago… I can confirm that we survived both the electrified shower and the ghosts (I swear I saw a pair of feet walking across the ground floor when I tiptoed down to use the kettle one night…) Nazca itself seems to be mostly populated by taxi drivers, or rather hundreds of box-car racers who moonlight as taxi drivers as a way to justify cruising around the town in their very funny souped up bangers all night. We found the town quite charming, if very different to Lima (read: less touristy, very local). But clearly Nazca’s main draw is its famous desert geoglyphs, ie, the Nazca Lines.
The lines make up an amazing desert tapestry of plants, animals and geometric shapes on a really huge scale: according to this handy Unesco fact sheet there are over 800 straight lines, 300 geometric figures and 70 animal and plant designs covering an area of 450 square kilometres. Some of the straight lines are almost 50km long, and some of the drawings are as 366 metres long – almost the height of the Empire State Building, and larger than the Shard(!). Unsurprisingly, there is plenty of myth and legend surrounding the lines (aliens did it) but it’s generally agreed that native people drew them by painstakingly uncovering layers of sand and rock between 500 BC and 500 AD.
The best way to see the lines is by taking a short and terrifying flight in a tiny six-person plane across the Nazca Desert, but it’s also possible (and much, much cheaper) to take a bus out into the desert and view a handful from a small viewing platform. I also happened to be looking out the window of our bus into Nazca at the moment we drove past the poor lizard geoglyph, which was cut in half by the motorway (allegedly before anyone realised the lines existed, but that’s definitely a lie). That was very, very cool.
After some deliberation, Dave and I decided to go for the tiny plane. At $80 USD each, plus some airport fees, it was up there with the most expensive days out we’ve done in Latin America, but we had some dollars to use and figured… yolo.
I’m grateful that we didn’t eat breakfast beforehand. I have a pretty strong stomach but this was some ride. Our 35-minute flight took us over 13 of the most prominent images (and many more lines), with the pilot dipping each wing over each image in turn to give us all a perfect view. To ensure the plane was balanced, each of us were weighed and assigned a seat – putting Dave in the middle next to an incredibly tall Czech woman and me in the child’s seat behind them.
On reflection, I lucked out, because unfortunately the twists and turns proved too much for the lady sat up front who spent half of the flight vomming into a plastic bag. Thirty-five minutes was plenty long enough – we both needed a lie down once back at Hotel El Abandonado – but what an amazing experience all the same. I’m really glad we did it. My photos are bogus but you can get a better idea by clicking here.
Later that evening we enjoyed dinner at Restaurante “Los Angeles”, run by a very cute old man who prepared, cooked and served exactly one meal or drink at a time. We also took in a very trippy film about the Nazca Lines at the local planetarium, which is run by a quite chaotic man who may or may not be a scientist, but who does own a laser pen. Trippy: the film was shown in English but with an eerie voiceover that I’m fairly sure was written by AI and didn’t always make very much sense or correspond to what was happening on screen, but it was followed up by a very sweet short film our professor guy had made himself about Maria Reiche.
I don’t think any of us had heard of Reiche before visiting Nazca, but she was an amazing woman – a German mathematician who dedicated her life to studying the lines. For 40 years she lived in a shack in the desert and eventually went blind, (unsurprisingly) suffering all kinds of sun damage. She was clearly a bit mad, but Peruvians love her and she came up with some fascinating theories about the geoglyphs and their precise positioning in the desert. For example – astronomy was an important part of life for the ancient Nazca people – some of the desert drawings align to constellations, others align with the positioning of the sun during summer and winter solstice.
Reiche spent the last 25 years of her life living in room 130 of the Nazca Lines Hotel (where the planetarium was located). Her residence was gifted to her by the hotel owner, most likely after some local debate about what to do with the mad, blind German lady living out in the desert. She died in 1998 at the ripe old age of 95. I suspect our planetarium man may have been her young(er) lover.
Moving on from Nazca to our next destination, Ollantaytambo, where we were due to reunite with Zlata and Greg a few days later for our big hike up to Machu Picchu. Z&G had been down in Arequipa in the south of Peru, followed by a trip to Lake Titicaca, from which they were taking a very civilised daytime train up to the Cusco valley.
Naturally, Dave and I took the bus. And oh my, what a journey. That 35-minute aircraft puking session was just a warm up for what we had in store over the course of 16 hours lurching up and down through the Andes.
While Zlata and Greg enjoyed a three course dinner on the train, Dave and I sat waiting for our very delayed bus out of Nazca. While Zlata and Greg took part in a cocktail-making class on board their train, we boarded our ominously pissy-smelling bus. And while Zlata and Greg danced along to live traditional music as their train cruised into Cusco, Dave and lay awake on our bus to the sounds of not one, but two people squatting in the aisle next to us loudly vacating their bowels.
I have never experienced anything so close to dystopia. Everyone around us was evacuating something out of at least one orifice. A woman was crying. Someone else was managing to ignore the whole thing by playing the same TikTok video of a child screaming over, and over, and over. The sound (and smell) of one man’s realisation he’d just shat himself will haunt me until my dying day.
To really add to the horror of it all, the bus driver refused to stop even once to give people a breather. I am sure (I hope?) he switched with his co-pilot at some point during the night, but at no point was anyone allowed off the bus – it being more than two hours’ late by this point presumably putting the company under pressure to make up time in getting us to Cusco. I listened to a very long and dry audiobook to try and distract myself from the intense claustrophobia of being stuck in a faecal cage for the length of two working office days.
I realise now, after inspecting our rough route on the map, that the problem was most likely the altitude. Our journey from Nazca began only 520m above sea level and took us straight over the peaks of the Andes – reaching over 4,700m high at one point in the night. There was zero warning about this beforehand. I think Dave and I were the only people lucky enough to survive it sickness-free, although Dave said afterwards that he’d had serious stomach pains. I hasten to add he was not one of the aisle-squatting culprits.
When we finally made it into Cusco around midday on Tuesday, we had to drag our harrowed bodies across town to find a bus onto Ollantaytambo, still another couple of hours away. Peru is unusual in that it doesn’t tend to have central bus terminals – the different companies are usually scattered about with their own private bus stations, meaning the place you leave from will depend on the time you want to travel. After trying and failing to find wifi, we logged in to read the bus timetables at an internet café (hilarious, given my nostalgia about them in last week’s letter) and took a taxi into the city centre to find “Bus Pedro”.
Of course Bus Pedro didn’t seem to exist, despite what the internet told us, but a woman in the ticket office for another company (which wasn’t running that day) gave us the name of a road to walk down. Supposedly, if we went there and shouted “Ollantaytambo”, the spirits of Peruvian transportation would provide. By this point we were both delirious from sleep deprivation and lacking in alternative options.
Calle Pavitos was a quiet and nondescript road, but just as I was starting to lose hope, two men came running (literally running) towards us, pushing each other out of the way to get our custom. “Ollantaytambo?” I offered up. "Quince soles!” came the answer – about £3 – and we nodded and were bundled into a van (excrement-free) along with a few other commuters on their way to the Sacred Valley. Heaven.
Travel bits and tips from this week
In Nazca we stayed at the creepy abandoned hotel and had dinner at Restaurante Los Angeles (twice!)
Our trip to see the Nazca Lines was through AirMajoro on a plane called “Air Bragg” but other more official-sounding airlines are also available.
Visiting the planetarium (Maria Reiche Planetarium) was a laugh and did teach us a little bit of useful history about the lines.
We also enjoyed this museum about the archaeological history of Nazca and its people. There were also a family of peacocks using the museum as a toilet.
Our overnight bus from Nazca to Cusco was with a bus company called Civa. I do not recommend them.
It’s true the best way to get from Cusco to Ollantaytambo in the Sacred Valley is by walking down Calle Pavitos and taking a collectivo (shared van) for £3.20 or S/15. Other tourist providers would have been about £12 each, according to the internet.
And in Ollantaytambo we stayed at Paqocha Bed & Breakfast (booked via Airbnb). It was bloody cheap, right next to an archaeological site, and came with free breakfast. However: cold shower, dead llama on the bed, and they forgot our breakfast.
As ever, a thrilling mix of adventure, horror and amusement. Strangely relieved to be sitting at my kitchen table in boring Kentish Town with only the tortoise likely to evacuate his bowels nearby