Altitude sickness is not what I expected at all. I’d heard about people getting dizzy or queasy – but to be honest, I brushed off the warnings quite naively. After all, I’d visited plenty of mountains around the world: Jungfrau in Switzerland (standing at 13,642 ft) and Tai Shan in China (which involved an 8-hour hike up a ridiculous 6,666 granite steps). Our destination: Cusco, near the Urubamba Valley of the Andes mountain range, sits at 11,200 ft high. This was going to be easy, I thought. Unfortunately for me, it didn’t quite go down this way. [Continue reading...]