I promised this to multiple people earlier last week, but the number of pictures to go through (just mine) was incredible and my only real desire last week was to catch up on sleep. I didn’t really choose the best pictures as much as the pictures I thought gave a good idea of how things unfolded. Also, I found most of the pictures I was looking forward to were ruined by random people getting in the shots…

Spoiler alert: there are a lot of pictures of ruins. I like ruins. They probably look the same or mean nothing to you, but bear with me.

Because it takes too long to insert images individually like I originally planned to, hopefully I can make picture captions meaningful enough…

Lima Part 1

After a long and tiring journey to Lima, I had a 15 hour layover until our Cuzco flight, and Leo and Jacob weren’t scheduled to arrive until 11 pm. Luckily the airport had lockers to store my baggage, and some tourism people found me some dinner with native Peruvian dancing near the Plaza de Armas. I met some locals there, ate some ridiculously tasty alpaca, and dropped way too much money on pisco sours, which aren’t very yummy.

Cuzco

After my short Lima expedition, Leo, Jacob and I hung out in the airport until our early morning flight. We proceeded to spend most of the next few days exploring Cuzco, eating food, and saying no gracias to the locals pawning off their goods. Also, in case you were wondering, and building larger than two stories in Cuzco is likely a Cathedral.

Inca Trail

The first day was a “practice” day, but was probably the second toughest day behind day 2, which was also the longest. Day 3 was fairly relaxing, and day 4 was a race against everyone else to get to Machu Picchu. Our days generally went: get up, have tea, breakfast, hike, lunch, hike, tea and snack, dinner, bed. Our porters afforded us the luxury of just walking, hiking, and sleeping, preparing everything and sometimes waiting on us.

Upon arrival at the Sun Gate, the place to get that iconic picture of Machu Picchu, we were greeted with cloudy skies. Fortunately, the clouds parted on our hike down and we were able to get some solid shots of Machu Picchu in the clouds.

Lima Part 2

Being fairly tired and picking up a cold after the trek, we mainly just hung out around Lima. I was tired of being a tourist, so I hardly took pictures of stuff.