Two MORE to Peru!!

Ariel and I are here! Cuzco is eye-boggling. The landing pattern into Cuzco reminds me of soaring flights over Lafayette and Mt. Washington... with if anything more aggressive maneuvering.

This is a non-American keyboard, so I am amazed at the length of the blog entries Lisa and Kate have posted with nary a typo. To give you an idea of what one is up against, here is what this blog´s URL looks like if I touch-type:

http<Ñ--twotoperu.blogspot.com-

Ariel is currently napping. She got about 90 minutes of sleep during last night´s flight - I got none. We were too stressed out and frantic. You see, our plane from Boston left its previous location (JFK) an hour late, so we left Boston 75 minutes late, leaving only a 15 minutes Atlanta layover before our connection to Lima was supposed to leave its gate... and our arrival gate was over a half-mile from our departure gate. With full backpacks. As we rolled up to the arrival gate (after 10 minutes of nail-biting taxiing and 2 minutes of excruciating waiting for gate clearance) a cabin crew person got on the P.A. and said passengers connecting to Peru should go to gate so-and-so (even farther away from the boarding pass´s gate!), THEY ARE HOLDING THE PLANE FOR US! We began breathing again. And it turned out there´s an underground train that did about a quarter mile of the distance. Then, the question became would they be kind enough to also hold for our baggage. They did!

Our 4 hour layover in Lima was a picnic by comparison, but though we tried, neither of us got any significant sleep in the lounge area, even though it was reasonably quiet (being 5 am local time).

From there, everything has gone flawlessly. Well, nearly. We had to wait in the Cuzco airport parking area for nearly an hour to find out that the other people who were supposed to be on our flight and be taken to our same hostal, hadn´t been on the flight.

The hostal, the room, the people, and the views are all marvelous. I had three cups of coca-leaf tea while waiting for our room to be prep´d, and now despite being up for 32 hours straight, I cannot nap. But the weather is 60 degrees with a whisper of a breeze, the air is crystal clear and smells of interesting food, and I am quite content to gaze out at the tile roofs below our window, and wait for Lisa and Kate to "get home from school".