Can't thInca a pun

Cusco is the base for the famous Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, but it's also a beautiful place in its own right. It's at the highest altitude we've ever set foot on, so you're advised to spend a few days here before doing anything as strenuous as trekking. Not kidding. Our hostel is less than 5 minutes' walk from the main square up a reasonably steep hill. On our first night we were gasping for breath by the time we reached the top. The other effect of altitude is basically to dehydrate you, so we tend to wake up every morning feeling slightly hungover without having drunk anything. Fortunately you do adapt, unless you're one of the unlucky few who feels absolutely terrible.

The historical quarter of Cusco is lovely. It centres around a very large square with two large and well-preserved churches, and pretty much all the buildings that line the square fit the feel of the place, most with nice wooden balconies. Even the McDonald's makes a rare concession towards blending in. Away from the square is a warren of narrow cobbled streets, with more squares and churches thrown in for good measure.

It is touristy - probably on the brink of being too much so, with a lot of little shops and stalls selling same-same souvenirs (which do at least have some local charm) and people trying to sell you things in the street, but they're not annoyingly persistent.

The tourist industry is so important here that learning English is compulsory in schools. This is the gateway to Machu Picchu and pretty much every visitor spends a few days in Cusco. The city was hard hit by the closure of MP for a few months after the landslides 6 months ago. All the museums etc seem to have responded by jacking up their prices (more expensive than Argentina or Brazil); I'm not sure if the highly competitive local shops and restaurants have had that luxury. So I don't for a minute think that Cusco gives a picture of Peru (which is a very cheap place) - you can pay the whole range of prices from local to luxury. Any shop with prices in US$ is easy to mark down as expensive! But for a touch of authenticity, our hostel did spend 48 hours without water due to local shortages, sending Lilly up the wall and forcing her to resort to a succession of headgear to cover up her unwashed hair.

We arrived on Tuesday, shattered, and took it fairly easy for the first couple of days - getting a sense of the place, a bit of shopping, and most importantly sorting out our trip to MP.

We also popped into the Iglesia de San Blas, paying an extortionate (by local standards) fee to see an intricately carved pulpit, crowned with the skull of the artist. And the Museo de Arte Popular, a bizarre but fun collection of clay sculptures.

On Friday we kicked into gear. We spent the morning visiting four Incan sites just outside town: Saqsayhuaman (a large site, mainly remants of large stone walls remaining, not essential though Lilly liked it), Q'Enqo (a good place to get a coffee and see where they used to sacrifice llamas, but time has taken its toll), Tambomachay (small but well-preserved), and Puka Pukara (impressive from a distance). You can walk to the first, and pop in to see Cusco's own statue of Christ a la Rio while getting lost on the way to the second. Then grab one of the frequent local hop-on hop-off minibuses up to the last two for 25 pence, and another back to town. They get ridiculously full, and we hit the lunchtime school rush...

For lunch Lilly finally got some ceviche, which she's been looking for all over South America, but turned out not to be quite as good as the one she made herself back home.

Then onto the Museo de Sitio del Qorikancha (small underground museum most notable for some interesting skulls - some trepanated, others deliberately deformed as young children by the parents , which is not pleasant).

Santo Domingo is a Spanish church which was built on top of an Incan site, Qorikancha - from the outside, you can clearly see the two distinct styles of building. You can also fight through the tour groups to see a nice cloister inside.

The Museo de Arte Precolombino is a small and picky museum, with only the very best examples of historical artefacts from Peru. Very good. The Museo Inka is where you can find all the other relics that aren't as good, plus more skulls and some sinister mummies, but worth a visit if you have time.

It seems to be common for local musicians to pop into restaurants and play for tips. We got lucky on Thursday with a decent group who even covered 'The Girl From Ipanema', but on Friday in a Chinese restaurant we had the misfortune to hear the worst music ever - an old guy playing what looked like a harp with two mandolins attached to the bottom. We saw a blind man play perfectly acceptable music on the same instrument the next day, but the first guy sounded like a particularly tuneless 3-year-old attacking a piano with a squeaky balloon.

On Saturday we took a trip out of town into the Sacred Valley. Word has it that most of the organised tours rush you round and prefer to take you to shops and markets, so we got our hostel to fix us up with a driver and itinerary, which cost a little more but worked out really well.

First up was Chinchero, a church in need of some whitewash - perhaps the Vatican is hogging it and an amazing set of agricultural 'steps' (a steep hillside that they had cut into steps wide enough to cultivate, held up with rock walls - although I think this benefitted from being our first stop since this is a recurring theme).

Moray is even more impressive, a small valley turned into concentric circlular steps. Theory has it that this was a kind of agricultural laboratory - testing which crops grow best at which level. Very well preserved, with a few plants still around but mostly grass. As with Chinchero, climbing down and back up is hard work!

Part of the fun of our day is just the drive, surrounded by beautiful mountains, but we also got to see a bit of rural Peru here: mud-brick houses and boys herding donkeys carrying crops.

Nearby is Salineras de Maras, an amazing salt mine. As far as I can tell, a salty spring bursts out of the mountain. At some point long ago some cunning chaps set up a complex irrigation system on the mountainside below it, forming lots of small rectangular pools which in turn fill with water, evaporate leaving a layer of salt, and are dug out. It's huge. Never seen anything like it.

Saving the best for second-to-last is the unmissable site at Ollantaytambo. Up another huge set of grass steps are the remains of a religious centre (later a fortress). The massive quantities of rock - including a few huge square rocks - that have been dragged up here to build this are almost unthinkable. At the bottom is an irrigation system; at the top is a throne which faces across the valley, perfectly positioned for the rising sun at the equinox, facing elaborate buildings and a huge (carved? Natural? Hybrid?) face complete with 'crown' on the far mountainside.

Last but not least: Pisac. This really feels like a fortress, perched high on a mountain and almost inaccessible (by which I mean there's no clear or wide path up to it, though I might also refer to the road here which features various landslides and fallen rocks, and has partially subsided into a river!). Another path hugs the mountain through a hewn-out tunnel and, if you have time, leads down the far side to more ancient buildings. Fabulous views.

All in all a great day out, which has us raring to go for Machu Picchu. Back in a few days...