Here’s the first email that i sent my loved ones from our first few days in Peru:

we arrived in a little late to lima, so we missed our original flight to cuzco (which is a much better city and the location of macchu pichu.) with a 7 hour layover until the next flight to cuzco, we ventured into lima, where all the guide books say to avoid if you can. i can see why! the first thing i noticed was how many dogs there are just wandering around. muchos perros!! also, everyone is so poor there and the city is really filthy. there´s a horrible sense that everything there is covered with an invisible (and sometimes visible) soot or dirty film. i was starving, but i didn´t want to eat any of the things available. we made friends with some travelers from DC. they were really nice and were good at guiding us around. at one point we tried to cross the sad, filthy river across which was a foggy mountain, but we were stopped by a police officer who told us that we´d be mugged in slum land if we went across. he guided us out of the area back to dirty safety. ugh.

things improved when we arrived in cuzco. the andes are really breathtaking. i guess it´s the altitude sickness getting to me, but everything up here seems breathtaking! really though, the countryside is beautiful and the people are so different from what we´re used to. it´s like national geographic, complete with standing room only colorful buses, mud houses, women in traditional dress, dirty kids playing in filthy ancient lanes, etc. cuzco itself is definitely for gringos. our hostel was lovely and very comfortable. the city is filled with people offering everything from massages to silver jewelry. i never knew i had so many amigos!

today we tried bargaining at a market close to cuzco called pisac. there´s a ton of the same stuff with llamas on it and leather baseball caps, embroidered cellphone cases (who knew the incas were so visionary), and condor figurines. the prices are 3 times what they were in cuzco. eoin bargained people right down, but i was afraid to. in pisac we also saw some old ruins. they were really cool and well made. the hike was treacherous and the taxi ride up might even have been moreso. people here have no fear of cars and cars have a really lax attitude about where they should and shouldn´t drive.