Cusco, Peru

After a few hours of sleep, we got up again when it got light out and started to drive, anxious to see if we would run into more trouble before Cuzco. The roadblocks had seemed to have subsided in the last half-hour of driving last night, so we figured we might be out of the protest area. To our relief, we didn’t encounter anymore, and it was smooth sailing all the way to Cuzco. Once in town, we found a hostel, ate, and took a long nap…

We were up at 5:30 today, and met what we thought was our guide by 6:30. It turned out he was just someone to get us to the right bus, which would take us an hour and a half out of Cuzco, where we would catch a train to Agua Callientes, the village that sits at the base of Machu Picchu. He whisked us onto the bus, and said we’d get the rest of our documents and tickets from a gentleman that would meet us at Aqua Callientes. That’s where the day began to go awry. The bus and train rides were scenic, and it was nice to just take it in and not be at the helm. Once we got to Aquas Callientes though, there was no man standing there with a sign with our names on it as we were told. Crap. We had paid for the trip in advance, and we were realizing that we might have just walked into a scam. We were initially relieved when a few minutes later a man walks up to Noah and asks ‘Erik?’ But soon we realized that he only had our pass to get into Machu Picchu and our bus pass up the mountain, but no return tickets for the train back towards Cuzco.

After fighting with the guy for a while, he finally got on the phone, and assured us that our tickets would be available after 4 p.m. He informed us that since we had just booked the trip the day before, they hadn’t been transferred yet. So we set off to Machu Picchu, and spent the rest of the afternoon exploring the ruins and just taking in the awe inspiring site before our eyes. At about four we caught a bus back down to town and went to the restaurant where our tickets home were supposed to be. The lady inside told us that they weren’t here yet, but that at five, someone was going to bring them. We were starting to see a pattern here. After having a beer, we wandered back to the restaurant, and sure enough, the same man we dealt with earlier in the day was there, but he didn’t have our tickets. He said we could pick them up at the train station. So off to the train station we went, now getting nervous about time, since we had to be on the 6 p.m. train in order to catch our bus back to Cuzco. As expected, the train station didn’t have our tickets either, so back to the restaurant we went running.

We confronted the man and he finally came clean and said that he wasn’t given any money to buy train tickets, so we didn’t have any. As you can imagine, this went over real well, since we had paid for everything back in Cuzco. After a lot of yelling and threatening, it was apparent that he wasn’t going to buy our tickets, so we ran back over to the train station to try to buy them ourselves. Unfortunately the train we needed to be on was now full, so we’d have to wait another half-hour, which meant we would also miss our bus back to Cuzco. We finally caught the later train, and then hopped in a mini-van for a white knuckle ride back to the hostal.

Today we awoke with one goal in mind. Like Mel Gibson in Payback, we just wanted our money. First we had to track down Gustavo, the man we bought the tour from.

Unfortunately we bought the trip at what he told us was his mother’s restaurant (smart right?) and not a tour office. We had been told that he would probably be by the restaurant at around 11ish, so by ten, we were scoping the streets and hanging around on the lookout. After about an hour and a half, I headed back to the hostal to get some work done. Noah stayed, and eventually Gustavo, and Fidel (the gentlemen who Gustavo subcontracted the tour through) showed themselves. Noah argued with them for awhile before they agreed to give him the money back for the additional train tickets we had to buy. Of course they needed to get money, so we couldn’t have our money now, but instead would have to come back at three.
We were there at three on the dot, and not to our surprise, there was no sign of Gustavo or Fidel. We were supposed to meet them at Fidel’s tour office, so we at least had a place to start. Fidel’s employees were inside, and so we started questioning them on Fidel’s whereabouts. Of course, they said they had no idea, so we just waited. We stood in the doorway and as English speaking tourists would come in, we would stop them and tell them our story. We figured if they screwed us, we at least weren’t going to let them do it to anybody else. After about an hour, we got bored, so we asked the employees if we had to get the police involved. They called our bluff and said ‘sure’. So Noah went off and to my surprise, returned with not only a policeman, but specifically the tourist police. He demanded that the employees give him Fidel’s cell phone number, which he promptly called and told Fidel to come to his office immediately. After a little while Fidel came around the corner and the policeman made him open his wallet and pay us on the spot. Payback.