¡Man! What a Country. (SR)

Cuzco, way up here, 10,000 feet and counting, a scrumbly sprawling adobe and tin roofed town snaked with Inca walls, huge stones smooth as glass, twisty streets paved with same. The altitude shift is massive, bought headaches, nausea, dizziness, the works, but they have all these rainforest herbs that are good for everything. The colors are intense, all the woven alpaca gear worn by indigenos, stripes and zigzags, and the light is this super bright white and powdery creature. I dreamed of an old man in a fedora whose hands turned into llama heads.

Feeling some better today, we´ll confirm our bookings to Macchupichu on Friday. It´ll be a 5-day hike with horses via an alternate route since the main Inca Trail is booked through October. All the flights to Puerto Maldonado are full, so we may have to go by truck. That´s the town on the edge of the jungle where we get a boat to Picaflor research center in the rainforest, southern part of the Amazon. We´ll volunteer there, take our antimalarials and dodge the vampire bats.