Shawna's dream honeymoon most of her life was to go to Hawaii. Instead, we decided to hike the Inca Trail in Peru! However, as a small bow to the original plan, we decided to finish the honeymoon in St John to do a little relaxing after the week long of wedding festivities!
Peru
We flew from Colorado to Cusco via Lima and stayed at the Hotel Libertador. We spent a couple of days in Cusco getting acclimatized and looking for a tour group to take us on the trek.
Cusco
As we were preparing to leave on the four day trek, we got our packs in order and found a couple of presents from Steve, Jan, and Mia: a couple of heavy rocks that they had signed in Colorado and hidden in our backpacks! We did the hike with a group, so we were all shipped by van to the beginning of the trail where we began our days of hiking. This was the first trek we had ever done where we paid porters to carry our backpacks - all we had to do was carry day packs with jackets, water, and snacks. Shawna is now officially sold on this trekking technique! These porters were amazing -- often carrying a backpack or two along with camping supplies, wearing flip flops made from car tires and passing us up like they were on a casual stroll.
The scenery along the way was gorgeous, with the massive terraced valleys and the cascading rivers at the bottom. We saw several ruins where we stopped and learned about the history from our guide. One day, we hiked over Dead Woman's Pass (it sounds worse that it really is) which was at 4200 meters. The day before we made it to Machu Picchu, the porters decided to challenge the hikers to a game of soccer and thus on a terraced field overlooking a beautiful valley, we played soccer -- I'm sure I don't have to tell you who won!
Dead Woman's Pass
On the last day, we got up at 4 am and hiked a couple of hours so we could arrive at the Sun Gate at the top of Machu Picchu to watch the sunrise. It was magical - and the best part is that we beat all the day tourists to the site so had a couple of hours with just the few hikers before the entire place was overrun by tourists. We were prepared to take the train back to Cusco, but found that for a mere $100 we could take a rickety old Russian helicopter back and cut the travel time from hours to only 45 minutes or so. Definitely worth the money! We were back at the hotel, showered, and rested via a nap before the rest of the trekking crew were back in the city for a post-trek celebration.
We spent a few more days in Cusco touring the city and the surround area. We walked around the Plaza de Armas (the main square in town) and visited the Cathedral of Cusco with the painting of the last supper complete with a Guinea Pig! There was guinea pig served on lots of sidewalk grills but we both decided to opt out of that part of the culture. We also took a day trip to the Sacred Valley, visiting several of the famous ruins including Sacsayhuaman and Ollantaytambo.
St John
Westin Hotel
After only a few days in Peru we flew to St Thomas where we then took a quick boat over to St John where we stayed at the Westin. We chose St John since it is mostly a national park. However, after a week of wedding events and then hiking the Inca Trail, the last thing we wanted was to do anything! So pretty much all we did was eat and relax at the pool for four days.....glorious! We were so lazy that we only made it the beach once. The only time we left the resort was for the "Informative Island Tour" which was pretty much anything but informative.
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