FAST ESCAPE

We woke up feeling horrible. Jared felt worse and I wasn’t feeling that great either. Plus it was raining. Cusco is 3,000 feet higher in altitude than Machu Picchu or Aguas, and that wasn’t helping the situation either.

We decided to try and go to AeroMexico to see if we could fly back a day early – Saturday afternoon – instead of on Sunday afternoon. We dropped off our dirty Inca Trail laundry with our hotel and left to grab a taxi.

The city was already in full party mode at 10:30am and the Inti Raymi festival wasn’t until tomorrow. It was gorgeous – the rainbow was a sort of symbol of the event and people had rainbow ribbons everywhere. People were dressed up in costumes, kids dancing, etc. Most of the streets were closed and we couldn’t get a cab so we walked to AeroMexico’s office. It’s not a far walk, maybe a mile or so, but when you have a sick spouse and you’re butt is still store from hiking 30 miles, every step is painful. And it was raining! If the sun was shining, I’m telling you we would have been in much better spirits.

We finally see a llama!

Cool costumes.

Music, vibrant colors and.... rain.

We showed up at the office, grabbed a number (about a dozen people were ahead of us) and after 20-30 minutes, this awesome lady helped us. She said that Saturday was completely sold out and poor Jared looked like he was going to pass out. She said that we had two options really: there was a 2:00 pm flight to Lima today (Friday) or we would have to wait until Sunday for the flight we were currently booked on.

It was 11:30am. We had to be at the airport, packed and ready to go by 1:00pm. We also still had to go to Q’ente’s offices to finish paying for our tips (Anika and Jon borrowed cash when they left early on the hike).

We went for it. As much as we wanted to see Inti Raymi we knew we wouldn’t enjoy it if we both were completely ill.

We booked our tickets and hurried as fast as we could. Getting back to our hotel was nuts… we realized that the best thing to do was to split up. Jared found a cab and went to Q’ente – I walked back to the hotel to pack.

When I showed up at the hotel it was noon and I completely forgot about the laundry service – the amazing people at Ninos Hotel tracked down my laundry and had it back to me in an hour. Can you believe it? They outsource their guests laundry to a place across the city and did all of this amazing maneuvering to get me our clothes so fast. I LOVE NINOS HOTEL.

I was packing like a madwoman… we left our hotel in a shambles when we left that morning. We basically dumped everything out so we could do laundry so I had to organize everything, fold it, pack it, etc. Jared showed up at 12:45pm – the same time our laundry got here. There was no way we could have packed and gone to Q’ente together.

We made it to the airport and got on our flight just fine.

Now all we needed to do was switch our LAN Peru flight from Sunday night to Friday night…