The journey to Cusco passed quickly. Our drivers Luis and Jesus lived in Cusco and were pleased to be going home - Luis was wearing a smart white shirt, but still spent most of the journey dozing as Jesus drove.
We left before 7, and drove through Puno and Juliaca again. Fairly soon the houses fell away and we drove for an hour or so in desert before coming to the village of Bukará, a very small place dwarfed, like many other villages in Peru, by its church in the main square. The draw in Bukará was the museum showing the history of the pre-Inca civilisation of that name. We had a quick whizz round, looking at the weapons and stone sculptures.
Pressing on, we were driving alongside the railway that takes the same route from Puno to Cusco. Trains now only run three times a week, catering only for tourists, but I still looked enviously at the tracks and planned my forthcoming South American rail tour. We came to the watershed, marked by a mountain still with a few patches of snow (this was the day after the summer solstice): from here all rivers flow ultimately into the Amazon. From here we saw the landscape become greener and more cultivated in the narrow valley.
Our lunch stop was at the spectacular Inca site at Naqchi, which had two roles. The first was as a nunnery, the second as a point on one of the key land routes where people could stock up on their supplies as they travelled. There were the remains of 162 conical storehouses, and in the best-preserved ones we could see how they were designed to keep out light and rain. After looking round the site, we sat on a patch of grass nearby and had a delicious picnic, of which the star attraction was a huge avocado, which between the eight of us we weren't able to finish. Also some delicious fruits: grenadilla (a sweeter and larger version of passion fruit), and pepino, tasting like juicy melon. We gave the remains of the avocado to a rather nonplussed boy carrying firewood up the hill, and drove on into Cusco.
After the last few days in smaller towns, Cusco came as a change. Our hotel was in the old town, which felt European with its narrow cobbled streets. Around the hotel (Siete Ventanas), which was, I thought, the best yet, it seemed to be almost exclusively for tourists. Certainly there were many backpackers walking around town as we went for a stroll before dusk. In the large main square there were police standing in front of the cathedral and church, and tourist police walked around. We were going to spend three full days in Cusco after the Inca Trail, so we took it gently and went to bed after a meal of quinoa soup (delicious) and chicken leg (ok), washed down with a good Peruvian wine which we had bought and started a couple of days earlier.
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