Our Great Adventure: Cusco Day 267 12/06/2015

We were up at 8am, sorted and dropped off our laundry and had a decent American style breakfast at the hotel. We headed out and followed the narrow cobbled streets down to the centre of Cusco to Plaza des Armes. We were greeted to a riot of noise and colour, discovering there was a whole festival in flow, which centred around many different processions around the plaza and surrounding streets. We discovered it was in fact 2 festivals happening at the same time. The first was celebrating the end of Corpus Cristi (we had seen the start in La Paz) and involved many imageries of figures who were a mixture of Christ and Inca god, been carried around all the churches in the area, accompanied by their own individual brass bands. The other was the festival for "Ninos, Ninas y Adolecents" (Boys, Girls and Youths), we involved lots of cute kids dressed up in colourful local dress doing a mixture of song and dance. We spent some time in the sqaure watching them, then headed to one of the many outdoor shops to buy water bottles, a buff for Diane and some rubber ends for our poles (not allowed on the Inca Trail without these or no poles!). After visiting 3 different pharmacies to replish our toiletries, we headed back to the hotel for our 1100 tour briefing by our guide. On arrival we were told by the hotel reception that it had been put back until 1800 but no reason why (the poor communication continues!). We headed back down the hill to have lunch at Jacks, highly recommended in Lonely Planet. The downside of this meant we had to queue to wait for a table but it was only for 15 minutes and it was worth it as we had an excellent lunch comprising of antipasti and a BLT sandwich washed down with a beer for Simon and lemon bitters for Di. After lunch we had another hour watching more processions in the plaza and then, as we were quite tired still form yesterday, spent the late afternoon in the hotel updating the blog and also contacting various companies to start to get an idea of itinerary and cost for our planned trip to the Galapagos next month. At 1899 we went to the dining room to meet our Inca Trail guide, Wilfrado and also our 2 fellow KE travellers, Ted and Ann. Wilfrado gave us a thorough briefing of our trip from day 2 explaining what will happen on the Inca Trail and when we arrive in Machu Picchu on day 6. We asked what was happening tomorrow in relation to our trip to the Sacred Valley. Wilfrado advised this was a different company so was not sure. Luckily Ted and Ann had been collected from the airport by a representative from this company so were able to tell us we needed to be ready for 0630 in the morning. Good job they knew because if we were the only KE travellers then who knows how we would have found out. Another poor piece of comms and whilst we have had many successful trips with KE we were now getting quite frustrated with them on this one and concerned what was to come. We all agreed to meet up for dinner that evening and headed back to the same restaurant as yesterday. We had a great evening with Ted and Ann, who were excellent company and shared our passion for the mountains, hill walking and travelling. In fact they were just off a 3 week trek to Huayhush what we had done 2 years ago, led by Val, so we were able to reminisce about our respective wonderful adventure. Both Ann and Ted are now retired and have a big bucket list of places where they want to go. Living in Ponteland, Newcastle we were able to share stories of our respective walks in Scottish Borders, Northumberland and the Lake District. We had a relatively early night after sorting our bags (our kit bag needs to be a maximum of 8kg), looking forward to our next 6 days adventure but with some trepidation if the comms continue to be as poor!