Posts Tagged ‘doctor’

We had a very pretty flight from Istanbul to Barcelona, flying over Greece and Italy. The public transportation is really good in Barcelona, so we got the bus and then the metro to our hostel and pretty much crashed.

This was a good thing because I had to be up early the next morning for something I had been dreading…a trip to the dentist!  Before I left the US I had some trouble with a tooth.  There wasn’t time to get it taken care of and it only hurt very rarely, so I didn’t worry about it too much.  But as we traveled around Europe I was having pain pretty frequently.  I thought long and hard about where to go to the dentist and decided that Spain was the best choice – after all, I know some Spanish, the costs there are reasonable, and they even seem to have something of a medical tourism thing going on, which gave me confidence that they would do a good job.

It ended up being a pretty interesting experience.  The dental office I went to looked brand new and was lit a little like a nightclub.  At least, a nightclub with a bunch of dental stations.  The office staff spoke quite a lot of English and the dentist spoke a little.  They got right down to business and ended up giving me three fillings!  I was so happy to have this taken care of!

Perhaps appropriately, it is not as easy as you would think to get to Machu Picchu.  This is good for a couple of reasons – keeps crowds down (a little), brings in money to keep things nice there, and makes it feel like a real adventure when you finally make it.  We did plenty of research about getting to the site.  Turns out, it is not accessible by road alone.  You basically have three choices about how to get there and then within those choices are lots of variations.  The main methods are:  hike, take a long bus ride and a short train ride and a short bus ride, or take a shortish bus or taxi ride, medium length train ride and a short bus ride.  We went for the last option since it is generally considered the easiest and the safest.

We set off the day after we got back from the jungle and headed for a minivan taxi thing.  They leave as they fill up and take you to Ollyantaytambo, a town about half of the way to Machu Picchu where you can get the train the rest of the way.  We met a new friend in the van, a really nice guy from Helsinki, and had lunch together in Ollyantaytambo before catching the train.  As we were walking from lunch to the train I got a horrible churning in my stomach and just knew that I was getting sick.  Not convenient considering we had a 1.5 hour train ride ahead of us and were going somewhere fairly remote and not accessible by road!

Well, I survived the train ride.  The train itself was really nice, leather seats, windows in the roof so you could see the views, snack served.  And the ride was scenic.  Really beautiful in fact.

Peru Rail Train to Machu Picchu

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