Day 8 - PeruRail Tititaca, Puno to Cusco

ride with me one way to go
we go big we go bold
go bold

Bold - The Highfields

Day 8 was spent on a train. By luck I found out about PeruRail Tititaca train. It runs between Puno and Cusco. It doesn't run everyday though because (I think) there's only 1 track, so the train needs to take turn running in each direction. I had to adjust our schedule to take this train. The train ticket price varies depending on the period you're travelling in. We took it on May 27th and it cost us 245 USD per person. Yeah it's not cheap. I'm quite lucky that Gioia didn't need to economize on this trip. The train ride takes about 10 hours 30 minutes and for that price we get a welcome drink, 3-course lunch (which was really good), tea break which included savory and sweet items (I didn't care much for the savory sandwiches), and 2 performances with snack. The morning performance featured culture from Puno and the afternoon performance featured culture from Cusco.

The train departs at 07:30 AM and we're told to be there half an hour before. I arranged for a taxi to get us to the train station the day before and it arrived quite promptly. The train station is actually quite near and you can walk there from our hotel, but with our luggage it's just not possible. When we arrived at the train station, we checked in and they took care of our luggages. Before long the staff which looked like butlers took us to our seats. Here's what the train looked like from the outside. By the way there would be a lot of pictures in this post and I used a lot of filters for some of them.

Inside it's like the Murder on the Orient Express train. In fact that's how I sold it to Gioia :D Me and Gioia had the 2-seater table. There's a table between us because of the meal. Not long before we arrived we had the welcome drink. I just stuck to tea. You could order breakfast, but we already had breakfast at the hotel. They also asked us what we wanted for lunch and I chose bacon wrapped beef. Anyways it seemed there were 2 compartments for passengers but we only used 1 because in total I think there's only 25 people or so. Our compartment was not even full. There were a lot of french speaking people, some Spanish, a few Americans, 1 toddler, and 2 Asians (me and Gioia). Well the toddler's mom was half Vietnamese, so maybe we can count her in. The fact that the Asians were just us made me wonder if many people just don't know about this train. Like, where are the rich Chinese? Also Japanese would definitely like this. For the meal I wondered if they just re-heated packed lunch like what airplane would do, but when we got down I saw there's a compartment for the kitchen and it looked professional like a proper kitchen.

As we departed Puno, I remember feeling how thankful I was that I was doing this. It's definitely nice to not be in a bus anymore :) The first view that we saw was of Lake Tititaca. I couldn't really see the floating islands we visited the day before. The islands must be further in. The lake is very big and in fact it's shared with Bolivia too.

The last 2 compartments of the train are the bar and the observatory compartment. You have a nice seating area with open window in the observatory compartment. Leaving Puno, we entered the town Juliaca. There's a security staff here standing in the observatory compartment, I guess since it's still a town area, he just needed to make sure no one would jump in. Somewhere along the line I didn't see him again, I wondered if he got off or was somewhere else in the train. Anyways in Juliaca, we passed by a market. The people were putting their things on the track and as the train passed along, they're covering their things. It was kinda uncomfortable there for me because it felt most snobbish being on that fancy train and looking down at these people :| The kids would wave at us though and I did my best to wave back, not that it actually made things better.

Around 1 hour or so of passing Juliaca, we had our first performance of the day. It was song and dance. A lady was dancing and I admired how enthusiastic she was. At some point she asked the people to participate. Of course I didn't, but Gioia did. After that I spent some time in the observatory compartment to take pictures. The landscape was big open plain with mountains, cows, and beautiful blue sky. Sometime at one point I saw a flamingo by a watering hole, but just one and it was kinda tiny. It's pink. I alerted Gioia and she saw it too. I wonder why it was alone among other birds. Truly I'm thankful that I did this.




The train made one stop at a place called La Raya. I googled this, it could be the name of the snowy mountain overlooking the stop. There were locals selling souvenirs. It's like in a middle of nowhere. I think the locals just came for the tourists coming with the train and after we left, they would pack up and go home :) There's a small church too in this place. I like that middle of nowhere feeling being there.


There are so many good views and so much time to spend on-board that I took a lot of pictures. I also tested out the effects that my Canon has. The first 2 pictures below are the toy camera effect and the third picture is the miniature effect.






By the way this is a picture of the dancer from the afternoon performance. I have to say that people were perhaps not as energetic for this compared to the morning one, but the dancer as you can see here was still enthusiastic - very admirable. In this afternoon session, we were given a demonstration of how the national cocktail, pisco sour, is made. Apparently there's egg white involved.

The landscape changed as we went along. Somewhere along the line, the open plain changed to a mountainous area. There were little villages and farms. This picture of a river is among the last pictures I took.

When we arrived in Cusco, the sun has set. Cusco seemed crowded, even more so than Lima to me. Our hotel was nearby the train station so we walked there. I was a bit worried of getting lost because I wasn't sure in which direction the station exit was and also because it's already dark, but luckily we didn't get lost. Something bad happened though. When I was on the train, I received a text from booking.com that the hotel couldn't process my credit card and I was supposed to update it. It didn't tell me by when I needed to do it so I thought since we're on our way, we could just do it when we arrived. Also the train didn't have wifi and as mentioned before when I was in the mountainous area, I often didn't have phone signal. I did get a bad feeling when I received that message but I still didn't do anything. There's so many what ifs that played in my head about this. What happened was when we arrived, the hotel just gave away our rooms and cancelled my booking and they didn't have any room left. What the fuck?!?! Of all the places I've been, this has never happened to me before. I was pissed, beyond pissed, wanted to cry and I have to say that Gioia handled this better than me. The usual me got stuck into this ordeal and couldn't really snap. I wonder if it's because she's there that I stubbornly didn't want to snap out of it. Like if it's just me alone, obviously I had to take charge. One of the manager of the hotel was perhaps feeling bad that he's trying to get us other accommodation. You know every time I travel, the anxious me always think that something bad might happen and yet God has been kind to me. That moment there when I was quite broken I thought that perhaps my luck had finally ran out, but as Gioia pointed out at least the manager was helping us, which also meant God had our backs. However still I wasn't graceful in gratitude. The manager got us a room in the hotel next door, but it's a room which meant me and Gioia had to share. That fact that I had somewhere to sleep wasn't suffice to lift my spirit just because I had to share a room. I know I'm being an ungrateful ass. Can I explain why I'm complaining even though I will still sound like an ass? All this time traveling alone, I'm used to having a room often with a big bed for myself. There's a freedom to it. When you share a room, that means you have to work out things like shower and toilet situation which means people may have to wait or wake up earlier. I know this is like a minor thing but I just want to do all this in my own time and take whatever time I need. This thinking of mine made me think how I'll be when I have to share a room with my husband in the future and I know that's overly optimistic of me thinking I'll have a husband.

So anyway the manager then took us to the hotel next door and sorted out things with the manager there. We're going to stay there for 2 nights and then back to our original hotel. Then the manager called the 2 tour operators who were supposed to pick us up for the day tours we're taking the next 2 days. Another shitty thing happened. The tour operator who was supposed to pick us for the tour the next day again unilaterally cancelled on us. What's with these people? Their reasoning was that they called the hotel, the hotel said our booking was cancelled, so they assumed we're not coming. Fuck!!! I was like, no you cannot cancel on us. We're supposed to go to Palccoyo nmountain the next day. The guy was like asking if we just arrived in Cusco because I do hear that some tour operator wouldn't take you hiking if you haven't acclimatized. I told him we came from Puno. He then said he had no choice but to put us in another group and it's cheaper so they would refund us 100 USD. The refund process took days but it did came before we left Peru. In conclusion, things were sorted out but darn it was such a shitty ending to a good day :| For pictures from the PeruRail train ride, please go here.

:) eKa @ 9:10:00 PM •

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