Sunday 13/05
Today is a chillax day for the kids. They love them!
After breakfast, Isabelle continues to prepare the US trip and I catch up with the posts (I post the ones related to Lima). We are nicely surprised by Ludivine, who proactively does one homeschooling session of math during her day off. Great job!
We eat toasts with tapenade and parma ham as lunch.
Around 4:30pm, we join our Canadian friends (the family that we met on the ferry from Puerto Natales to Puerto Montt) in a creperie (La Bo’M) in the San Blas district. It’s nice to share our experiences. The crepes are excellent. We have a table for the parents and a table for the (7) kids.
We leave around 6pm since we (again) have a briefing at 6:30pm in our apartment with our guide for the Lares trek and Machu Picchu. José is a bit late and arrives at 7:15pm only. We ask many questions. It seems that it will not be too harsh and that we will have a rather comfortable experience (if it’s in line with the yesterday’s bike day, it will be very comfortable indeed!).
We prepare a salad for dinner. The kids eat it in front of the tv; they watch the first part of the 2nd ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ (Dead Man’s Chest) while Isabelle and I continue to work on our laptops, mainly preparing the US trip. We work past midnight (1am for me).
Monday 14/05
The alarm clock wakes up all of us, at 8:15am.
Kids do 2 homeschooling sessions while I catch up with the blog (I will have published 9 posts in 4 days). Florence finishes the math courses for the 2 years that she had to do. We’re proud of her.
Today is the last day of our first stay in Cuzco. Tomorrow we leave for 6 days: 4 days of trek (3 days of Lares trek + the last day of the Inca Trail), 1 day in Machu Picchu (yippee!) and 2 days in Ollantaytambo, before coming back in Cuzco on Monday, for an afternoon only (we leave the next day to the jungle)…
I go and bring clothes to the laundry and then go to the nearby market to buy fruits and vegetables.
We eat a nice salad for lunch.
Isabelle and I go to town, on foot, to visit Qorikancha, located in the city centre. These Ica ruins form the base of the colonial church and convent of Santo Domingo. Qorikancha was once the richest temple in the Inca empire but all that remains today is the masterful stonework. A curved, perfectly fitted 6m-high wall can be seen from both inside and outside the site. This wall has withstood all of the violent earthquakes that leveled most of Cuzco’s colonial buildings. In Inca times, Qorikancha was literally covered with gold but within months of the arrival of the first conquistadors, this incredible wealth had all been looted and melted down. Today’s site is a bizarre combination of Inca and colonial architecture.
We walk to the Mercado San Pedro to buy nuts and dried fruits for our trek. There’s a wide selection. We buy 10 different fruits / nuts.
We go to a supermarket to buy a dinner for tonight but we eventually buy a roasted chicken, which comes with fries, rice and a 2.5l bottle of Sprite…
When we come back home, Ludivine and Jules are finishing the 2nd movie of Pirates of the Caribbean.
We have to pack our bags, in 3 different parts (which is not easy): one part that comes with us during the trek, one part that we get back in Machu Picchu Pueblo the night before the visit of Machu Picchu (after 4 days of trek) and one part that we leave in Cuzco, in Amazonas Explorer offices.
We eat one of the worst meals of our trip: the roasted chicken with disgusting French fries, rice mixed with many things and (much too) sweet apple sauce.
The kids present their presentation about Machu Picchu. Very interesting and nice presentations. Well done kids! It was a great idea from Isabelle to ask them to work on such presentation. It increases their interest in one of the most beautiful things that we are going to see during this world tour.
Isabelle and the kids go to sleep at 9:30pm
I work till 1am.