Friday, May 24, 2024
Well, things are not going as planned. Yesterday after touring Machu Picchu and sharing the same Camelbak straw, Nathan started to feel like he was coming down with a cold.
Awesome.
Today our plans were to get up early with the chickens at 5 am and go up to the hot springs, but Nathan wasn’t feeling up to it. I thought about going by myself, but it just didn’t have the same appeal. So I went down to the lobby with my tablet and hung out fixing blog errors (what?!) and waiting for him to get up.
At 6:30 word came from upstairs that he was up and showered. Great. I headed up to hop in the shower.
At 7, we headed upstairs to the seventh floor restaurant and had their breakfast buffet. Nathan sat, while I grabbed both of our breakfasts from the buffet. Yesterday when we were here it was 4:45 am, but now it’s light out and we can see incredible views. I can see why they put a restaurant on the top floor.
Our train isn’t until 10:30, and Nathan’s not really in any shape to do anything, so we hang out in the room. Neither one of us got a lot of sleep because this hotel is in quite a noisy area, and due to infection control measures, ie, I don’t want to get sick, we slept with our balcony door open.
Somewhere about 9:45, we checked out of our room. By staying an extra night, we are an anomaly, and the front desk assumes we want bag storage so we can tour Machu Picchu. Instead, we want a map to the train station. We could have found it on our own, but to conserve Nathan’s strength, I didn’t want to walk all over trying to find it. The woman working the front desk grabs a hotel sign with an incoming guest name on it and says she’ll accompany us to the train station. She even carries our poles.
It’s a good thing she walked us there, because to get to the train station you need to walk through a labyrinth of market stalls. We got to the train station with ample time and we waited outside on some benches. At roughly 10:25, a train arrives and the passengers disembark the train, and within minutes we’re told we can board the train.
The line is much shorter today, and there are only two cars on our train. We find our seats, and sit opposite a very well traveled couple from the UK. We spent the 2 hour train ride swapping traveling stories and looking at the incredible views.
Once we were in Ollantaytambo, we hit the baño, and left the station to find a driver holding a sign with our names on it. Nada. So I Whatsapped Franklin. Our driver encountered a lot of traffic and will be there shortly. Franklin had us walk towards an arch, and within minutes the driver arrived.
We loaded up the car with our bags and settled in for a butt-numbing 2 hour drive to Cusco over bumpy and potholed roads with a decent amount of traffic. The views were nothing to write home about, and Nathan napped most of the way.
Once in Cusco, we paid the driver and checked into our new hotel. We are in a new hotel in a new neighborhood still close to Plaza de Armas. I got Nathan settled in the room, and I walked the 1.2 km to the old hotel to get our bags out of storage.
Once back at the new hotel, I did some laundry for us. Nathan mostly rested until dinner.
We have a big day planned for tomorrow and we are trying to decide what to do. Cancel so he can rest? Do I go alone? Do we wake up early and play it by ear?
