Not much to say here, except that the travel time was long, long, long! We woke up early on Friday morning to catch our flight to LAX at 9:45am, leaving for the airport at about 5:30am to be sure we arrived at the airport 3 hours before flight time since it was an international flight. We actually got there really early as the commute traffic on Highway 101 wasn't too bad, so we spent a couple of hours just waiting. My brother was nice enough to get up early and drop us off on his way to work in the city.
Sharon and I knew that one of the others on the trip, Cynthia and her 9 year old son, Nathan, were on our flight, yet neither of us had met them before. But, it was pretty easy to find them. Mom and her kid, both wearing hiking boots, just like us!
The flight to LAX was pretty uneventful. We only had a little over an hour between flights from LAX to our connecting flight to Peru. It was cutting it a little close, so by the time we got to LAX, we had to make it through the security lines, check-in, etc. and made it to the gate just in time, luckily they gave us our boarding passes for the Lima flight when we checked in at SFO. I got a little nervous when the guy called my name over the loudspeaker asking me to come to the desk a little after we got to the gate. He wanted to know if I was willing to switch seats so that an elderly couple could sit together. That meant that Sharon and I wouldn't sit together but of course, I agreed. In actuality, it turns out that it wasn't an elderly couple who wanted our seats, it was a young couple, errrrrr....
The flight from LAX seemed to take forever. You know its a long flight when you are served two meals, a couple of snacks, and have time to watch several movies and TV shows. Luckily, since it was a big plane, each seat had individual screens to watch movies or TV shows or play games. I watched three movies (two of them were Harry Potter movies) and a couple of CSI shows.
We arrived in Lima, Peru a little before midnight (Peru is 2 hours ahead of us). We did have a little bit of a scare at the Lima airport as Sharon lost her passport. We had made it through all the customs checkpoints after arriving and had just checked in for our last connecting flight that would take us from Lima to Cuzco when she realized she couldn't find her passport! We went to the security office, nope, not there. She then walked back to the Customs area to see if someone had maybe turned it in. It turns out the Customs person didn't hand it back to her when they were screening our bags. Phew! She would have been in trouble if it had gotten lost as throughout our trip, we always needed the passports for the hotels, Inka Trail, tours, etc.
It was more waiting as our flight from Lima to Cuzco wasn't until 5:30am the next morning. After the passport fiasco that killed about an hour, we sat and waited keeping our eyes open for our other travel partners who were arriving about a hour after us and would be on the same flight with us to Cuzco. Sharon spotted Lorry and her 13 year old son, Tucker first. Shortly after, we found Cynthia and Nathan who were on a different flight to Lima than us. We tried to sleep while waiting, finally it was time to board yet another plane for our final flight. Luckily, the flight from Lima to Cuzco is only a little over an hour. After almost 24 hours of travel, we arrived in Cuzco at about 6:30am on Saturday morning. There was little mix-up in Cuzco as we were supposed to have a van pick us up by the tour company to take us to the hotel, but nobody was there to meet us. We ended up taking a taxi to the hotel instead.
It was nice to get to the hotel, take a shower, and get a few hours of rest. Cuzco was our first exposure to the high altitude of Peru, it is at about 11,000 feet. I didn't notice anything different at first, but I did start to get a bit of a headache. We knew we had to take things slowly to acclimate to the altitude. You know altitude is a problem when you check into the hotel and they tell you that they carry oxygen if you are having trouble with the altitude! Luckily, I didn't need to use it...
We had a few hours to rest, had some soup in the hotel restaurant, and at about 1:30pm we were scheduled for a tour of Cuzco city. More on that later....
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