the chicken district
people are supposed to spend a few days in cuzco doing very little to acclimatise to the altitude. the enforced nature of this malingering does not distract, however, from what a pleasant, albeit slightly breathless, place cuzco is to loiter doing very little in general. having got off the bus at 5am we stumbled our way into the first hotel which presented itself to us thinking that we would check out the next day butsoon discovered that we had actually been remarkably fortunate. the hotel is very comfortable but about a five minute walk from where the main tourist drag is, in the unfashionable south of the city in an area referred to by cab drivers as the chicken district because of the roast chicken shops which are so prevalent as to be almost alarming (even for a man who likes chicken). the upshot of the location is that we get a lovely room for a price that would get us two dorm beds five minutes away and moreover we are surrounded by a cuzco that we would never have bothered to see had we been shacked up in gringo alley. there are few things i like more than milling around random areas with no discernible points of interest just watching the world go by, and we are located perfectly to do just that.as far as the picture postcard cuzco goes it is a very pretty little place, all green plazas and quaint buildings. it´s fair to say though that the spanish did a strong job on this ostensible capital of inca culture, generally razing all the old sites to the ground and building over them (with nothing but churches; would a bingo hall have hurt?) as such, you get the impression when in the middle of town of being in a european city, all redbrick churches and alpine looking houses. the incan history is totally subsumed into the tales that surround the (relatively) new structures, fleetingly supported by the occasional glimpse of an inca wall.
despite this (and to be fair we´ll be getting our fair share of inca shortly at pisac and then macchu pichu) i really like cuzco, a great place to while away a few days bustling through markets, reading vargas llosa in the sunshine and watching the world go by. off to have some chicken now, it would be rude not to!
posted by bicrom @ 10:21 pm
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