Cruising Over Cusco

The following has been edited by me (Caleb), and is composed of emails from Liz.

We have just arrived in Sicuani, which is about 200 km south of Cusco. Cusco is really beautiful, even though we only saw it from the airplane and for 10 minutes in a taxi to the bus station. There are mountains everywhere here! The weather is closer to Canada...really warm in the sun, but chilly in the shade, the air is very dry.

We can all notice the elevation as well, especially since we are coming from sea level. My heart was pounding carrying my bag up the stairs, and Maria has been light headed. Sicuani is also the first place we have been that is not even a little touristic. We stand out even more that usual, if that was possible, but the nice thing is that instead of the usual stares and whistles/catcalls, people (especially kids) stop and say hi to us. Tomorrow we will go to Mirangani to find the llama-alpaca research station and start work.

We are all really tired, so don’t mind my rambling. We never seem to get any sleep the night before our morning flights. We got home about 1:00am last night, packed until about 3:00am and woke up at 5:00am - we were supposed to get up at 4:30am, but I slept through the alarm and was responsible for waking everyone up:(