Give me sea level or give me death.

So I just thought I'd write a little bit about our Cuzco (Cusco in Spanish) experience. On Thursday night, Heather and I caught an overnight bus down to Lima. It was about an 8 hour bus-ride. Before we left Utah, we had an orientation meeting where they talked to us about taking local buses, how more Americans get killed in bus accidents abroad than any other way when they're traveling, and about being super careful. We decided with our girlfriends from Africa that buses were the international symbol of death...but when it came down to it, $15 for a bus ride was much better than $100 for a plane ticket. So we took a bus to Lima. We arrived in Lima around 7:15 or 7:30 and had to head immediately to the airport to catch a flight to Cuzco (we couldn't afford to fly both legs, but we got HUGE discounts on the Lima-Cuzco leg).

Once we got off the plane in Cuzco, I immediately felt happy just breathing the air. Cuzco is in the mountains and the air feels like the air in Utah or Germany. Cuzco reminded me a lot of both places with mountains, crisp air, etc. Trujillo and Lima are both on the coast, so the air is heavier because of the humidity.

Cuzco was absolutely beautiful. From the plane we could see all these green mountains and when we landed, it was much more picturesque than either Lima or Trujillo. As we drove through the town from the airport to our hotel, we could tell we were in a third world country, but at the same time I kept thinking, "This is not Peru." The standard of living is so much higher because of tourism.

Heather and I got to our hotel courtesy of Cesar Rodriguez. He is the owner of a travel agency, Lamanita Travel. Our friend Alberto hooked us up with him and Cesar got us such amazing deals on our flights, hotel, visit to Machu Picchu, etc. He was soooo helpful. We were at our hotel for about an hour or so when we decided to go to the Plaza de Armas to look around and then head over to the Eagle Condor office to meet up with Dan and Clint (the other BYU students in our pictures with us).

We got to the Plaza de Armas and Heather wasn't feeling well. By this time we'd probably been in Cuzco about two hours. She wanted something to eat immediately, but when we tried to pick a place, she was just tired and couldn't think of where she wanted to eat. Meanwhile all these Cusqueños kept trying to tell us to eat at their restaurants. Heather just wanted to throw up, so we walked around trying to find a public bathroom. We walked about two blocks in the direction of a bathroom, but Heather couldn't go any further, so she laid on a bench while I ran around trying to find drugs, buying some sprite, stuff like that.

When I got back, we gathered up our stuff and went to the Eagle Condor office there in Cuzco. After talking for a long time with the guys about what we were going to do for the day, we finally decided to take Heather back to the hotel. We went back to the hotel and called a local doctor who is a bishop and who had seen Clint a few days early for something completely different. He came to the hotel and diagnosed Heather with altitude sickness. He gave her some oxygen and prescribed her some pills. She immediately felt better breathing the oxygen. He left and Clint and I ran to get the pills.

When we got back, she was doing really poorly again. We gave her the pills and she thought she would be okay within the half hour. The three of us had found a "guide" (really just someone's nephew who is from Cuzco), so we went out to look around and get some food. When we got back a few hours later, the doctor was back and Heather was again breathing oxygen. It was sad. She'd been so bad while we were gone, that she had called the doctor. The boys gave her a blessing and then went home. The doctor gave Heather more oxygen, another pill, he waited for a while and then gave her more oxygen. Then he left. This was around 10:30.

Heather was still horrible, so we changed rooms to a room where she could take a hot bath (our other room just had a shower), we called Heather's best friend Mallorie (our U.S. doctor since Mallorie is in med school), and the hotel brought us their oxygen tank. Mallorie gave us a little advice on oxygen, Heather took a little more and finally around 12:30 at night, she fell asleep. It was a horrible day and night for Heather, but in the morning, she was finally feeling a little better. Well enough to go to Machu Picchu. We were really grateful both that she was better and that we could all make the trip.

The altitude of Cuzco is about double that of Provo and roughly the same as the top of Mt. Timpanogos. Heather had hiked Timp this past year and had experienced similar altitude problems at the top, so basically we've decided that Heather doesn't do very well around 11,000 feet. After this experience, the case that we studied this year about Mt. Everest and all the problems the hikers had makes even more sense.

We'll try to share more about our experiences a little later. Right now we're trying to get ready to give a presentation tonight, so we have a ton to do!