Peruvian Adventure Series 5 of 9 – Day Six 5/16/2008 City and Ruins Tour {Travel}

Welcome to Travel Tuesday! Today I’m going to walk you through Day Six – City & Ruins Tour. This is a nine part series of my excursion to Peru. If you haven’t read the Travel Tuesday entries please take the time to check it out.

Just a quick recap:

Sunday, May 11, 2008 Day 1 - Flying from LAX to Lima, Peru

Monday, May 12 2008 Day 2 – Sightseeing in Lima

Tuesday, May 13, 2008 Day 3 - Flying from Lima to Cusco

Wednesday, May 14, 2008 Day 4 – Traveling by train to Machu Picchu

Thursday, May 15, 2008 Day 5 – Tour Pisac Market & Ollantaytambo

Friday, May 16, 2008 Day 6 – Tour City & Ruins Tour

Saturday, May 17, 2008 Day 7 -Flying to Puerto Maldonado, boat ride to Posada Amazonas

Sunday, May 18, 2008 Day 8 – Tour Tres Chimbadas Lake

Monday, May 19, 2008 Day 9 – Walking tour to the Clay Lick

Tuesday, May 20, 2008 Day 10 – Airfare One Way Puerto Maldonado to Lima then Lima to LAX

In this blog entry I’m going to walk you through my day 6 in Peru Cusco City with a City and Ruins Tour.

Let’s begin Friday, May 16, 2008 Day 6 – Tour City & Ruins Tour

As you can imagine a trip full of tours can be a bit overwhelming! Thursday night I felt exhausted and really had enough of tours and ruins. I guess my body had enough. So Thursday evening after dinner I decided to call my tour company and cancel the City and Ruins Tour.

Friday morning I woke at 10 am after a restful night sleep. I straitened my hotel room and got things semi packed for my next adventure to the Amazon Jungle. I went through the gifts I purchased at the Pisac Market and noticed I didn’t buy enough Serpentine bracelets for the ladies in my life. So now the hunt was on trying to find more.

I spent half the morning running around in every gift shop trying to find the exact match of bracelet. I found a couple but not the amount I needed. So after a long and exhausted try I decided to purchase similar bracelets but different stones. This day was suppose to be an easy going one but turned out to be exhausting as I ran out of time and only had this day left to make my purchases.

The rest of my day I organized my photographs and uploaded a few to my Flickr stream so my family and friends could view the places and people I’ve seen and met.

When I did my research before booking my trip to Peru, I looked at many photographs of Cusco. A few photographs I wanted to capture myself. I photographed Cusco plenty in the day time when I arrived and now I wanted to photograph Cusco at night.

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I love the center of Cusco as it has so much spark. Below I wanted to photograph the fountain, the shops and the people who come out to rest or stroll through the main square. I’ve photographed the center during the day, now I wanted to capture it at night.

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I had some fun below. I set my shutter on 1/20 to capture no visible cars but captured their headlights as the drove past me.

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As I was photographing the church a police van passed by causing my camera to capture the flashing lights of red and blue.

One of my big must do’s is photograph Cusco from a vista point I have seen in many photographs. But what I’ve seen as a result were these yellow ugly looking photographs. The set of three images below are an example of what I call ugly. Cusco’s city lights give a yellow hue when photographed.

I had to adjust my camera’s white balance to get what I call a beautiful photograph.

Now to get the photograph below, I had to once again be daring! Cusco is semi safe during the day but at night I was even more intimidating specially being by myself. I remember a photograph I took from a vista point during the day. This is the spot I want to return to capture it at night. Now I wasn’t going to walk around trying to find it as I did on day three. I walked to the center plaza and waived down a taxi. In the back of my mind I remember what the tour guides said about only getting into taxi’s with government stickers in the windshield. So looked at all the taxi’s and passed up a couple that didn’t have stickers.

Finally a nice guy driving a small red taxi met the guidelines. I asked him how much was it going to be to get me to this vista point. He said 2 sols. I couldn’t be much happier by hearing this. So I agreed to go with him and off we went. Now these Cusco taxi drivers are a bit nuts, he raced up and down the streets almost knocking off 9 people in the street. Finally after 10 minutes of torture we arrived at the vista point. I asked him to stay for 5 minutes while I photograph this location and asked if he could take me back to the plaza. He agreed. Once I was done photographing this location I gave him 10 sols and thanked him very much. I told him it was my goal to photograph from this location ever since I knew I was coming to Cusco. He laughed and was overly excited looking at my photographs of his beautiful city at night.

This day was everything I asked for. I bought enough presents for people back home and photographed a location that was in my head. No regrets!

This concludes Day 6 evening in Cusco. Tomorrow I’m off to the Amazon Jungle! I’m so excited to see what is in store for me. So please come back and read all about it next week.