Picnic at Hanging Rock

When we first arrived in Cusco, I saw a flyer for the Sacred Valley with a small typo, rendering it the Scared Valley. Indeed. As many of you may know, I have a serious aversion to heights. Even more so to climbing two-foot wide stone steps carved out of a cliffside with a sheer drop of around three hundred feet to one side, in the rain. They are circled in red on the photo. (The other photo shows what awaits you when you’ve made it to the top of the steps.) But I managed, and by the time we had reached the bottom, I was feeling positively elated. I thought I might be on the way to curing my phobia.

Then, as we were driving down the mountain, I looked up. There was a bus in the lower car park, with the whole of its back end, bar the wheels, jutting over the cliffside, just hanging over a drop of a couple of hundred feet. I think that’s what did it. That night I had nightmares about heights. I’m not cured.