November 7, 2014:
Both of us sorry to leave so soon,
Susanne and I are ready for a 6:30 a.m. departure by boat for our
day-long ride to Cusco, from where we have a flight to Lima. Once in
Lima, I will have a layover plenty long enough for us to have a
farewell dinner at the very nice restaurant in the hotel across the
street. The only thing we're really looking forward to today is the amazing
food there.
This is the dawn view from the overlook
right in front of our cabins, looking westward over a large bend in
the Madre de Dios River, to a setting full moon.
Our trip takes us back upstream to Boca
Colorado, but we're leaving 23 minutes late because they discovered
that our boat had a leak and they have to move the motor, hundreds of
pounds, to another boat. It's 3 hours and 15 minutes for what took us
just over 2 hours going downstream a few days ago. From there we load
into a taxi, drive for an hour to another river, get on a boat taxi
to the opposite side, and then meet our car and driver from Cusco,
who drove six hours overnight to get here this morning on time.
Six hours, no problem (and we've been
told it takes that long as well) – we'll have nearly two hours to
kill at the Cusco airport. We stop for a half-hour lunch in the town
of Quince Mil (Five Thousand, but 5000 what, I wonder). Our only
other stop is for a quick potty break and photos of some amazing
scenery. I had no idea we'd be passing over a pass at 4750 meters
(14,385 feet), or that we'd be going right past the Cordillera de
Vilcanota and its peak Ausangate (6,384 meters, 20,945 feet).
But we did have to stop for multiple
road construction projects, a turned over bus that was being pulled
out of the way by a wrecking crew, and were slowed down by having a
Toyota Hiace that traveled uphill like the Engine that Could. Then
almost panicking as we drove into the knot of congestion that is
Cusco at rush hour, our drivers got lost for about 5 minutes trying
to navigate a huge construction zone. We finally pulled up to the
airport less than 15 minutes before departure, too late to check our
luggage at the counter. We had to race all of our luggage upstairs and through
the security zone, which meant giving up our pocket knives (but
somehow everything else we had carefully packed away in our checked
luggage was ignored), check it in at the departure gate, and we were
actually sitting quietly in our seats, heart rates slowly lowering to
normal, for nearly ten minutes before the plane pulled away from the
gate. There's some more I could go into about our physiological
reactions to having been brought from near sea level to such an
altitude in just a few hours, but I'll leave it with the sad note
that we did not feel so much like enjoying that farewell dinner that
we had been looking forward to since breakfast. We forced ourselves to eat
something, downed a pisco sour (because we're in Peru), and started
thinking about the next adventure.
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