Of course we can’t avoid excitement and adventure being the people we are and chilling in the afternoon after walking the 8 kms down the mountain back to town, we decided to not head back to Cuzco the way we came in and decided to check out the crazy cost of train tickets. As we headed out to the town plaza alarms started to sound and people started grabbing their children under their arms and running. A official ran up to us and started jabbering ¨arriba, arriba´at us meaning Up,up!! Trying to figure out why while others are panicing and in a different language is entertaining. We figured out that there was a landslide on the mountain above us, above the town, it took us a while to figure out that a bucket load of mountain landing in the narrow valley the town is based in can greatly affect the river that the town sits on. So we were now running from a giant wave that was threatening the town. Luckily our hostel was on the third street away from the river so we weren’t to worried (except about another landslide), each time the alarm went off and life appeared to return to normal it would sound again and everyone would flee. Children and the elderly were standing in the streets crying. We rescued a English chica that kept standing in an alleyway near our hostel with about 30 locals and got her to come with us to our hostel and settled her down. She was staying at the fancy place in town that was on the riverside so she was stressed about her tour group she had lost when the siren sounded and waiters instructed them to ´run!´. After a bit over a hour life returned to normal and we walked this lass back to her hotel seeing the debris that had been left by the river wave.
We’ve never seen a town shut down within 4 minutes or realized the amount of panic that can be caused by panic. Just another adventure!!
