Italy in the Andes
It felt nice putting on jeans after wearing nothing but the same three pairs of hiking pants for a week. We were only about halfway done with our trip around Peru, and clean laundry was already becoming a luxury. Our hotel in the center of the small town of Machu Picchu had showers with hot water, and windows with actual glass in them unlike the jungle research facility we’d previously stayed in, which just had mesh screens where the windows would be. It must have been a sight for the staff at the Tierra Viva Hotel to see eight exhausted and dirty travellers haul their duffel bags up the stairs and transform into actual human beings excited for another adventure.
It took over an hour for everyone in our group to gather in the hotel lobby to work out the statistics of dinner that night. My dad, the resident TripAdvisor expert, came prepared with a list of possible restaurants within walking distance where we could find good food. The boys immediately spoke up in favor of the Italian place, which made sense considering how willing my brother and his best friend had been to try Peruvian cuisine in the past week. Amari quickly became excited at the thought of a place that could serve her plain pasta with parmesan cheese and agreed with the boys.
“Please mommy? Can we go there?” she asked, unintentionally pulling her mother out of a conversation with mine.
“Yeah sure sounds good. Is everyone else okay with that?” Jodi asked the group. We all nodded in agreement and our dinner location was settled just like that. Now came the hard part; actually getting there.
We left the hotel with the three children in the front, followed by me somewhere in the middle, with the four adults bringing up the rear. The boys bounded down the narrow cobblestone streets with Amari trying as hard as she could to keep up. It had already gotten dark, and a little chilly, so we all walked fast through the maze of streets with sweatshirts pulled tight around our shoulders.
“I think this is it.” My dad motioned to a well lit door a few feet ahead of us on the right. We piled inside the small restaurant and were immediately taken out of South America and straight into Italy. The lighting was dim, but just enough to where you could see the person sitting across the table from you. A big roaring fire was contained in a round fireplace right in the middle of the restaurant. Racks of pasta hung drying along the edges of the wall. A host dressed in a white button down shirt, black pants and a black bow tie gestured for us to follow him, and then proceeded to lead us to the largest table I think I have ever seen in a restaurant. The chairs surrounding it were huge, heavy wooden things stained a dark, dark brown. They looked like they came from some rich person’s outdoor patio. The armrests made it difficult to get in and out. I was put right in between my mother and Amari, so I had to resolve to the fact that I was not going to be getting up to go anywhere during dinner.
Pisco sours were promptly ordered for all the adults, and Inca Cola for the kids. Everything on the menu looked so good that everyone had a hard time deciding what to get. Usually in this situation, everyone would get something different and then we would all try a bite of someone else’s dish, but communication was slightly more difficult considering how far apart we were all sitting. We all just had to go with our gut on this one. However, once the food arrived, communication was suddenly not the most important thing. I was too focused on the best plate of gnocchi I’d ever eaten to hold a conversation, while the boys were too busy trying to eat their entire pizzas to care.
Once the pizza was gone (miraculously), and the second round of drinks was ordered, we all settled back into our oversized wooden lounge chairs to glance at the dessert menu and suddenly realize that there was no way we were going to be able to eat dessert after the wonderful meal we just had. My brother tried to claim that he still had room for dessert, but we all knew that even a thirteen year old boy could not possibly still be hungry after finishing an entire pizza by himself.
After leaving the restaurant, we took the long way back to the hotel. As all of us walked back through the center of this amazing town, it suddenly dawned on me where we were exactly, and how lucky I was to be here. The black outline of the mountains around us stood up from the tops of the buildings while the moon shone down, lighting the way back to the hotel. Here I was, in Machu Picchu Peru, about to experience one of the seven wonders of the world. The ruins were something I’d only seen in pictures, and here I was going to bed with them only a bus ride and a short hike away. A part of me wondered if they would be everything they were always hyped up to be. Spoiler alert: they were.