Cuzco: Altitude Sickness

For the 24hrs that we are in Cuzco, I can't shake the impression that we're inhabiting a Heironymous Bosch painting. We're here along with the throng of visitors in transit to Machu Pichu, which practically speaking is reachable only by train or trail from this point of departure. Cuzco is a pretty sorry town. It has the decrepit look of a forlorn Soviet provincial capital, large and sprawling but unloved. 

The skies are threatening as we land. Maybe it's the altitude, or after-effects of gastric imbalance, but the place seems to me like a demented carnival. The shops we enter in search of snacks and socks to fend of the promised cold and rain atop Machu Pichu tomorrow all smell to me of formaldehyde or mothballs. 

We have a good meal at Cicciolina (!), but I can't shake the sensation that my lamb tastes like the leather binding of a Bible from the Middle Ages, all frankinsence and myhrr. Exhausted and short of breath at 3300m, we go back to a hotel room on our first night that smells like a latrine. 

Simon & Garfunkel killed that folksong about the Condor long ago, but it's exhumed and piped interminably through the night in the street below, in the restaurant above. The headache that comes with the altitude is skull-crushing. One can't sleep for the dreams of smothering and strangulation. 

Fittingly, here the religious iconography is one of gilded splendour and gruesome suffering. Christ looks like a goul, and but for the relief of modern-day cherubs depicted in Iglesia San Domingo, this is a world of pain, of the sudden and arbitrary rertribution of catastrophic earthquakes and fires ("Sito Seguro en Caso de Sismo" read the signs in some of the less dog-eared buildings).

Maybe we got Cuzco, "the Magnificent Capital of the Sacred Valley" on a bad day. Or maybe it's just me having a bad day. It's raining, cold, the streets are dirt and mud, the air is acrid with exhaust fumes of the car-clogged center. 

After progressive Lima, I was expecting something a bit more contemporary and wholesome for the antechamber to this Wonder of the World. Has none of the tourist wealth rubbed off, left traces of improvement? Granted, there are rich churches and impressive ruins to visit. But they feel obscured by the tacky tourist stuff. There's the uneasy atmosphere of mutual suspicion between tourists and touts, all the worst tat and rent-seeking of a tourist town, and so little of the charm (San Pedro de Atacama, I was too harsh with you!) 

The shabby, dirt poor settlements that lead out of town are further reminder of the grinding poverty in this part of the country, dogs competing for their dinner in the dumpsters outside the makeshift marketplace. But the road leads us closer to Machu Picchu... Another overnight stop along the way in Urubamba, and we'll be there the following day. The forecast is for dark skies and cold wind.