PERU: Walking the Saltankay Route to Machu Picchu, Day 2

We took advantage of the extra days before the official tour started to acclimatize to the altitude  - or that's what we were hoping.  So we huffed and puffed the mile down to the "market," a tourist extravaganza with stall after stall of stuff to buy.

While the parents tried to sell to the tourists, the kids hang out and play.

These boys were having great fun playing with some colored disks and rolling them down the ramp.  I'm guessing that none of them were older than 4.

What?  No Ipads?  What is the third world coming to?

We left the market and went to hang out on the park bench across the street.  Pretty soon we see a two and a half year old wandering across the park.  We kept an eye on her because we didn't see any adult that was claiming her.

But soon someone comes and claims her and tries to sell us some jewelry.  The woman was towing this little girl along with her, as well as the "escapee" that we saw initially.   

ML does a great job of helping people out and getting some good local objects, so she bought a nice pendant.  I got a picture of the youngest displayed with the jewelry.  Grandma is in the background selling her own trinkets.

We walked back to the main square, with two Catholic churches, of course.  In a twisted sense of humor, we couldn't resist going to Starbucks.  ML had me take this picture. 

We sat on the narrow balcony and watched the people in the square.

This photo shows the Cusco town square from Starbucks. 


Serve me up an "alto" cafe!  Hmm, I thought the sizes were in spanish to begin with?