Cusco, Peru

So after Machu Picchu, what do you do in Cusco? Here's what:

In Chivay there's a HUGE market, full of all the tourist things you can find everywhere else in Peru. But here you can get some good bargaining done. We decided to hold off until our last stop in Lima to do any real shopping:

There are other things to see in the Sacred Valley besides Machu Picchu. Here's one, called Moray, an agricultural site used by the Incas that looks super cool. If you touch the middle its supposed to be good luck:

Unfortunately, you're not allowed to climb to the middle of the main one. But there's a smaller one that we were allowed to go down into. Here's Alex getting his luck:

Getting some good luck together:

Next on the stop were these salt mines. We went right before closing, so the sun was reflecting quite nicely on the pools. We bought some awesome looking salt (probably not different from any other salt, but at least it was way cheap) and left pretty quickly before it got dark 2 hours away from our hotel:

Church in the middle of Cusco:

One of my favorite days: We booked a class at "The Chocolate Museum" called Bean to Bar, that teaches you how chocolate is made, and we go to make some of our own! At one point we had to grind up the coco beans, and since Alex grounded (?) the best, he won a bag of chocolate tea (he's so modest):

Making THE BEST chocolate milk in the world from our ground up coco beans:

Drool:

We got to make little chocolates in the end and flavor them with spices and candies. My favorite were the salty chocolates (made with the salt from the salt mines we had visited):

Later that night we went to the Cusco Planetarium. Such an awesome experience; it's little known to the usual tourists but is starting to get more recognition on TripAdvisor. The tour was awesome, with a full tutorial on the differences between the Southern and Northern Hemispheres, the meaning of the stars to the Inkas, and observing the night sky (if weather allows). At one point we were looking at Saturn and I tried snapping a picture through the telescope:

But the best part, was this dog. All white, super friendly, SUPER SOFT, and best of all, his name was Gandalf. GANDALF PEOPLE:

And of course the best part of Cusco: getting offered Cocaine. We hailed a taxi to get our last nights sleep, and made small talk in Spanish to the driver. He kept saying something about how Cusco had the best something. We couldn't quite understand but we just kept smiling and saying "Si". I kept thinking, what the hell is Mar-yay-wa-nah??? Oh duh, Marijuana. We laughed when we finally understood and told him, thanks but no thanks. But then he started explaining that even better than the Marijuana, is the Cocaine. Ahh shit....is it okay to say no to the Cocaine offer from your suddenly very sketchy looking Peruvian Taxi driver? How do we explain in our rudimentary Spanish that we tend to steer clear of bad Lifetime movie situations? He didn't seem to be too offended when we said "No Quires", so it turned out okay.

We fit a lot into two days in Cusco, and left to Puno EXHAUSTED. The last two weeks are definitely starting to catch up with us, and luckily we're leaving on a three day trek into Colca Canyon in the morning. Yay......