Driving in Cusco

The slick stone streets make it feel like I am driving on ice. The dinner-plate sized tires on this tiny Toyota Yaris sedan aren't brand new, and the clutch is not behaving like I expect it to. There is absolutely nothing like the hill assist I enjoyed in my last manual transmission rental car last year in Spain. The steep hills around the Plaza de Armas are crowded with taxis and pedestrians. My friend Jesus is riding shotgun, but I've just met the three people crowded into the backseat. They are all American friends or associates of Jesus, like me, visiting Cusco for his birthday. The two men are making unwelcome jokes about my lack of driving skills and discussing between themselves what "she" is doing wrong. It's about 7 pm, but it's dark here in the tropics.

The last turn before we reach the Plaza is clogged with traffic which means I have to stop on a hill in a cross walk with pedestrians walking in front of me and behind me. The car stalls as I try to move forward gently. I can only move forward without rolling backwards and hitting the people behind me by using the parking brake and revving the engine to embarrassing levels. Tourists are staring. (Although Jesus notes laughingly that none of the Peruvians even notice.) "I don't think the clutch works like you think it does," a man I met twenty minutes ago offers from the backseat. I want to cry, but I don't.

Instead, I take the car full of people on the scenic tour Jesus has suggested. Around the Plaza de Armas, up some amazingly steep and narrow streets to a view point where I have to parallel park (with more comments from the men in the backseat about my reluctance to park between two cars). Then I drive out to the residential part of Cusco to the restaurant my friend suggests where we eat a meal I don't enjoy, and I listen to the other Americans explain how awful the American South is. (I am from Georgia. They are from Colorado and Utah.) As much as I want to abandon them all at the restaurant, I don't. Although I do pointedly revoke my offer of driving them anywhere else while they are visiting. I drive them back almost all the way to the pedestrian streets of San Blas. It's been a truly awful night. The guidebooks tell you not to drive in Cusco.

You don't need a car in the city of Cusco. You can walk almost everywhere, and if you need to go further than you feel like walking, taxis and Ubers are inexpensive and widely available. Almost every tourist gets around the larger Cusco region through private or shared van tours. Intrepid types take the buses used by locals. My husband and I had planned to share a private driver and van with Jesus and the group for the week. We had plans to have the driver take us out to the treks to Rainbow Mountain, Waqra Pukara, and Humantay Lake. We reserved a rental car for the following week so we could spend a few days exploring the Sacred Valley on our own.

Unfortunately, Randy ended up with a work conflict. Since the trip was arranged around Jesus's birthday and the planned trekking, we decided that I would go on my own for the first week, and he would join me later.

Then Jesus's doctor put him on a new medication that meant he could not be outside between 10 am and 4 pm. His other friends had major flight delays and were stuck in Miami. All plans for treks were abandoned. I could have signed up with one of the many tour companies in Cusco to try the treks on my own, but I wasn't that keen on high altitude hiking. I had been willing to try with a private driver and a group I knew, but I wasn't willing to be part of a group of strangers. I did find a horseback riding stable that I wanted to visit (more on that in a later blog). But that was just one day out of a very long week. I had to occupy myself for a solid seven days. For reasons I no longer remember, I decided the best way to fill my days would be to extend my car rental and drive around the region.

When I did get my car, a Toyota Yaris sedan, I realized right away that the clutch felt unlike any I had used before, and that starting from a standstill without stalling was unusually tricky. I drive manual transmissions from time to time. I drove nothing but manual transmissions until my late twenties. I'd happily driven a manual transmission around Spain a year before. I naively assumed I would get used to the clutch.

Once I did get the car moving, I headed away from the central city, out of town on Don Bosco toward Sacsayhuaman. Going up hill almost immediately, it was obvious I would also have to adjust my expectations about acceleration. Even with the Premium gas that was required, this little car struggled up hills. It did always manage to make it to the top, but it was hard to maintain my speed and impossible to accelerate on an incline. The driving style in Cusco is...shall we say "competitive," "aggressive" or "insane"? Quick reactions to obstacles and oncoming cars are essential. Driving a car with weak acceleration made me an obstacle.

Downhills proved to be a challenge as well. The finicky clutch meant I couldn't downshift to control my speed as I normally would have. I usually ended up coasting downhill with the clutch fully engaged, fighting the urge to ride the brakes.

Still, I made it out of town and thought I'd head to Pisac. I was using Google maps, but I could not make it connect to the car, so I relied on spoken directions from my phone. After a wrong turn (my fault) I ended up in San Jerónimo, a suburb of Cusco. The GPS directed me down a progressively smaller and smaller series of streets until the road ended in a staircase. After backing up down a narrow road with no back up camera (managing to miss the dog sleeping on the street), I made it back out to a main road and took a series of good guesses about how to return to the city– I'd save Pisac for another day.

I had spotted a likely parking spot the day before. I couldn't quite get a clear answer about whether it was legal or not, but a lot of people were parked along the street and it did not seem to interfere with traffic so I left the car and felt pretty pleased with myself for returning in one piece.

My first full day with the car was mostly wonderful. Even with the tricky clutch. Jesus and I started around 6:30 am for a drive to Laguna de Huacarpay. I had seen this lake described on the internet as a birders' paradise, and Jesus had fond memories of training for a marathon with daily runs around the area. We thoroughly enjoyed our early morning visit. We saw a kestrel hunting for its breakfast. We even saw a wild guinea pig. Unlike the domesticated ones this was a lovely gray. In all his years in the Andes, Jesus had never seen one before either. On our drive back in to town I stopped at a roadside bread stand in Oropesa, a city known for its characteristic sweet bread--pan chuta.

The morning traffic was heavy and slow. We started calling the car "Bad Bitch" after a car Jesus saw in a movie once. I shortened it to "BB" for polite company.

Driving in Cusco isn't like driving in the US. Everyone drives everywhere. Lanes and speed limits are mere suggestions, but red lights and stop signs are obeyed scrupulously. Cars get much closer to each other than I am used to, and buses just go wherever they want. The roads are laced with horrendous speed bumps. Some are so tall and steep that cars have to approach at an angle to avoid scraping. These bumps are not always painted so they are often a surprise.

I noticed there were not many women driving. Once I think some young guys let me in because they were amused by a woman their mothers' age actually driving. They had been in the process of cutting me off when they saw me and started laughing and smiling and giving me the right of way.

I wasn't frightened that morning because the pace was so slow that any collision would have been minor, but I will say it pushed my driving skills to their limits to handle BB in such traffic. But I did it. And after I dropped Jesus off, I went on to try and find my way to the terrace ruins at Pisac. I remember seeing them on my first trip to Peru and I wanted to revisit them.

I know where those ruins are now, but only because I eventually drove on every paved and some unpaved roads around Pisac in an attempt to find them. Turns out that in Peru Google gets you to the general area--then it's up to you to figure the rest out.

That first day, I drove through the town of Pisac and then up into the Altiplano. At some point I realized I wasn't on the road to the Incan terraces, but I was enjoying the drive and the spectacular scenery so I just kept going. I stopped at some unidentified location and walked to a cross decorated with flowers. I took a picture on my phone so I could figure out the location later, but it's too off the grid for that work. The location for that picture is unknown.

I parked at a roadside picnic table and walked a trail to some pre-Incan rock paintings.

One stretch of road worried me because it had sheer drop-offs along the outside lane, and I was concerned about how my fear of heights would be on my way back down. Fortunately, on the way back I picked up a couple of ladies looking for a ride to Pisac and managed to have a conversation in broken Spanish about how hard it is to learn a language in your fifties; how you worry about your adult children for your entire life; and how dangerous that road was. Talking with them about the danger made me much calmer. I went slowly and we all agreed that it was better to be slow and safe.

By the time I made it back to my possibly legal parking space I was exhausted. I looked forward to meeting Jesus's friends and having a beer at dinner. I did not plan to drive anymore that day. But when Jesus said that he was worried about me leaving the car there, and he suggested that I drive them around on a quick tour before dinner, I agreed. My mistake.

Ultimately I did leave the car on the street after our disastrous dinner. My confidence was badly shaken by the comments.

The next day I found a parking garage for BB. I looked at the closest garages in person and ruled them both out because the entrances required a 90 degree turn over the curb and I knew BB couldn't do that. I found one across town and looked at it on Google street view. It had a curb cut. The guy charged me $10/day which was probably a rip off but at that point I didn't care. It was a 20-minute uphill walk or a taxi ride back up to my hotel in San Blas. I was tempted to just leave the car there until Randy arrived, but I didn't. I drove myself out to the Sacred Valley for a wonderful day on horseback. I moved everyone's luggage to the house we were sharing for the weekend. I picked Randy up from the airport and drove us out the Sacred Valley for site seeing and to Ollantaytambo for the train to Machu Picchu.

Jesus told me that in all the years he's run a Spanish school in Cusco (Amigos Spanish School) he had never had a foreign visitor rent a car before.

Having that car and the freedom it offered me was an important part of my experience that week. I can't imagine the trip without it. Still. I wouldn't recommend driving a car in Cusco to everyone. If you expect other drivers to stay in their lane or even on their side of the road, you will find it fairly terrifying.

And I'm glad I explored on my own by car rather than attempt the wildly popular treks that require walking more than a few feet at 16,000 and 17,000 feet above sea level. Give me oncoming traffic anyway.