The tourist bus lines all advertise that they would not travel this route to Cusco. CIVA drives the 830 kilometres over the highest Andean passes and the sharpest hairpin bends, 18 hours through the night and by double-decker spaceship.
At dawn, I wipe away the condensation in front of the panoramic seat on the top floor at the wrong moment. You wake up pretty quickly when a truck suddenly comes out of a bend to meet your spaceship as you overtake. On the left, the road descends almost vertically for 300 metres.
The route takes you over Andean passes up to 4,500 metres high, past remote villages, through several layers of clouds, into deep gorges – and all this several times. In total, the bus easily overcomes 12,000 metres in altitude on this 18-hour tour – Google Maps fails to calculate this with the statement “no route found”.
The acclimatisation from the start of the trip is completely gone after a few weeks of kiting on the Pacific. Cusco lies at an altitude of over 3,400 metres – you get off the bus and immediately start gasping for air. The old town with its colonial buildings and Andalusian balconies is by far the most beautiful of all the cities on this trip so far: not too big, not too small, wonderfully steep and finally almost traffic-free.
In the 11th century, due to a long dry period in their original homeland around Lake Titicaca, the Inca moved their settlement area further north into the humid high valleys around what is now Cusco. The centre of the Inca empire did not last long. When Pizarro invaded in 1532, over 100,000 Inca lived here. The Spaniards were vastly outnumbered and almost driven out several times – but their cruelty and the diseases they brought with them ultimately destroyed a great culture almost completely. The church is labelled “Convento de la merced”.
Some Inca walls and sanctuaries are still well preserved today. My hostel is also located in an old colonial building, the foundations of which date back to the Inca. In the inner courtyard, young American women mock the Peruvian police’s lack of helpfulness in investigating mobile phone thieves. They manage to include “like” 126 times in the 15-minute, deadly boring report. Sometimes the word really is a treasure – and sometimes the mouth is simply an upside-down toilet.
I wonder why Americans in particular use the same word for “visit” and “fuck”. “I did the Inca Trail.”. “I did her the night before.”. Yes, what now? You built the Inca Trail? Or visited it? And you’re the super stabber par excellence?
“To be is to do” – Socrates.
“To do is to be” – Sartre.
“Do be do be do” – Sinatra.
Frank Woelky, born in 1973. Kitesurfer since 1998. Since 2006, I have been combining kitesurfing and web design on trips lasting several months off the beaten track.