i heard that you like the bad girls, honey, is that true?

this video of me hiking along the ancient Inca Trail to Machu Picchu features mountains, all-terrain biking, zip-lining, monkeys, turkeys, duckies, hammock-ing, sacred valleys, heavy breathing, children playing, raging waters, Justin Bieber, beautiful incas, and lots of people waving and kissing my camera. oh, and many shots of my sweaty horseface. ENJOY!

i have realized that i took so many photos and catalogued so many experiences whilst in Peru, that i will need to break it up into several different blog posts. if i put it all in one post, it would be the longest post ever, and you guys would be scrolling and scrolling. no one wants that.

so this post will be about Cuzco only, the starting point of my hiking trek to Machu Picchu.

this is the centre of Cuzco, and also the view from my hostel. on the day i arrived, they were having a huge festival in the centre square Plaza des Armas.

why?

because they could. that’s just how they roll.

Cuzco has an elevation of 4000 feet above sea level, and they warn that you need at least a day of rest upon arrival to acclimate to the altitude.

by this point, i had taken four flights in three days (vancouver to toronto, toronto to san salvador, san salvador to lima, lima to cuzco), so my body was completely wrecked by all of the altitude changes i had already endured.

arriving in Cuzco, with my 12 kilo backpack on, i had to climb a series of steep steps to get up to my hostel, and not only did i run out of breath (me! out of breath! NEVER HAPPENS), i also became light-headed, dizzy, and very nearly lost my footing.

i drank a lot of coca tea when i arrived at the top. coca leaves are grown all over peru, and while they are the main ingredient for cocaine, exist in a sort of legal grey area in Peru. you can chew them for energy, and you can harvest them if they grow naturally on your land, but you can’t plant them, and you can only harvest so much. i think even Peruvians aren’t so certain on the drug laws there.

my hostel had a resident pussy….cat.

i was really lonely my first few days in Peru. the tour hadn’t really started yet, and i had been placed in single rooms in my hostels in lima and cuzco, whereas i’m used to staying in hostel dorms. while having a room to myself is great for having your own loo, telly, and bed, the problem is you don’t meet ANYBODY. in the dorms, you always meet people, some of whom end up being lifelong friends (in my case, some of my best friends are people i met in dorms while backpacking across europe).

so i was wandering around Cuzco for two days, pretty much keeping to myself, trying to explore the city, eat to keep my strength up, and find some graffiti and street art to keep my imagination occupied.

but really, i was just running in and out of doorways, trying to stay out of the rain.

one nice hotel clerk let me sit at the bar before it had even opened so i could come out of the rain. he was awfully nice. and i cowardly left when he was out of the room to avoid a lengthy goodbye.

incas are the first nations of peru and south america. their language is quechua. with the invasion, genocide, war, and slaughter of the conquistadors (aka the Spanish) in the 1400s, the incas were driven from their homes. now, although many incan descendants still speak Quechua, there is no employment or education available to them unless they speak Spanish. i didn’t learn this from my time in Peru, mind you. i pieced this information together from watching this scene in The Motorcycle Diaries.

llama and el paca’s rule like cows do in india. this one even has it’s own villa in the heart of cuzco. glass doors and shit.

oh you fancy, huh

i paid one sole for this photo. they all posed dutifully when i withdrew my camera and pointed it at them. then they bumrushed me for money. after years of travelling, i know this is the score. you can’t take photos of people without paying a little out of your pocket. it’s only fair.

nothing is free, and tourists shouldn’t balk at paying the small fee for a nice photo.

of course the scenery is lush and ornate. climbing the cobbled steps of cuzco isn’t really a chore if you’re in the spirit of things.

taking neurotic photos of myself is how i get in the spirt, i s’pose.

like many ancient cities that i have travelled to, the infrastructure is composed of ruins upon ruins. wreckage upon wreckage.

in the case of cuzco, it’s walls upon walls. that’s the original ancient Inca city wall that used to envelope the city. of course, they have built upon those walls now, but the originals still stand.

see the snake?

incans believed that animals represented the three states of existence.

the condor represented heaven

the puma represented life on earth

and the snake represented the underworld.

so i guess the incans built this section of the wall for satan? i’unno.

in my next post when i get to machu picchu, you’ll see how the condor manifests itself in its design.

puma coming up.

after years of backpacking and taking travel photos, i’ve learned that, especially in ancient cities, doorways are excellent for framing and centring your shots.

they draw the eye to the centre, they provide a classic frame, but most of all, they leave a sense of curiosity and wonder to the viewer. they catch of glimpse of what’s beyond the doorway, and it’s only a snippet of life. they want to see more of that life beyond the door. it makes them want to travel. doorways are interesting for a reason, they beckon.

try walking around amsterdam or warsaw or paris without stopping in some ancient doorway and finding yourself mesmerized.

see how they’ve built upon the ancient inca wall?

too bad there’s a canadian growing out of it now.

i did a city tour that day in cuzco, and was largely unimpressed by what they think tourists want to see.

they took us to a church called Qorikancha.

i kept thinking of Q’orianka Kilcher as a result.

she’s beautiful but her and colin farrell couldn’t actually kiss on camera in that film, otherwise it would have been considered child pornography.

Qorikancha used to be an Incan temple, but the christians destroyed most of it to build their dominican church in its place.

because Peru is subject to  many severe, violent earthquakes, the christian architecture has crumbled upon itself several times over (much like its leotarded belief system), but the incan foundations have remained unblemished, virtually unmoved. they didn’t use any clays or epoxy resins to keep their bricks in place, instead they used an interlocking system between the stones.

earthquake proof, devised by the incans.

you’re welcome.

q’orianka kilcher, on the other hand, has done nothing noteworthy since.

doorways. see what i mean?

i think i ended up taking so many poxy photos of myself because i was bored of the church.

Lonely Planet guides are the worst for this. when you travel, they ONLY recommend churches and museums. after stuffing my gob with nothing but churches and museums around europe, i can unequivocally say that, “you seen one, you seen em all.” fuck that, i want to do ACTIVE things when i travel.

like last year in british columbia, when i did whitewater rafting, kayaking, zip-lining, bungee-jumping, and downhill mountain biking in just a few days.

or the inca trek that i was about to participate in.

i hate churches and i hate museums (for the most part. some museums that are specialized are uber sweet. like the Bata Shoe Museum, that’s pretty kickass. but i especially hate museums that are about christian history, it’s like i paid entry for archaeology and history, and instead wound up in a fucking church, which i hate to begin with….. you see my dilemma?)

the tour took me from Qorikancha to Sacsayhuaman, which are incan ruins in the mountains that cup Cuzco in their bellies. it was, for the most part, unimpressive. the views were great, and so was the rainbow that decided to arc over our heads right before the sky sagged and capsized with rain again.

remember how i said that the inca’s used the puma to represent life on earth? look at this above photo.

see it?

Posing like raging pompous idiot gives me an immense sense of self-satisfaction. i ruined yet another kodak moment.

go me.

i think i was trying to give the wink and the gun in this photo, but i was wearing thick woolly gloves which made the act in trying ludicrous, thusly resulting in my hysterics.

i call this “inca woman with baby in the mountains, as seen from inside a wet, muggy tour bus, taken with a shit digital camera bought in 2006 in berlin for €200″

the sky is painted like an ocean.

this is the only souvenir that i bought in the whole of Peru – a keychain of two Inca figures going to town on each other. a scene from an Incan Kama Sutra if you will.

this was the cleanest one i could find. some of the other keychains had them going doggy-style. another was of the woman doing a hand-stand, spread-eagle, while the man’s tongue was all up in her ladybits. at the same time, her head was bent backwards, contorted, to give him some oral loving.

those were some talented incans.

suffice it to say, buying the missionary position one was the least offensive but still hella-funny version that i could find.

next post: machu picchu, or how chrissy got her groove back.

October 12, 2011 | Categories: Christine Estima, GIFs, love, Machu Picchu, movies, peru, portfolio, sex, travel, Vancouver | 1 Comment »