The Sacred Valley of the Incas

Ha, fooled you, its not Machu Pichu. We're getting there honest. After a brief hop through the grockle central of Cusco we headed for the Sacred Valley, the area spread around the ancient Inca "navel of the world", Cusco. The region is crammed with archaeological sites including crop testing facilities, palaces, forts, baths and busy towns built by the blood and sweat of thousands of captured slaves and cunning Inca know-how. First stop on our exploration of the Sacred Valley was Pisac, a hillside town, fort and temple all rolled into one with typical Inca efficiency. With our freshly purchased boletto touristicos (access-all-areas in Inca land) in hand we scaled the terraces, suffered from the altitude, explored the deserted buildings, got lost in amongst the rooms and tried to work out how to get between the three different sites without having to backtrack down and up the terracing which lined the hillsides.

With our first chunk of Inca culture under our belt, our next challenge was to hit the local Sunday market, a biggie by all accounts and check out the locals' handiwork. Stalls as far as the eye could see, some with little locals selling the bits and bobs you see them weaving, spinning and knitting as they chase their llamas, work their fields and go about their Quecha lives, and others with opportunistic traders out to scalp the grockles for every Sol they can. Ohh and cute local kids, clutching well behaved photogenic beasties in their finest traditional (or actually day to day) dress, offering their modeling services. All good fun.

Next stop, Ollantaytambo, a huge Inca fort on the hillside and interestingly the only place the Spanish conquistadors got their butts kicked (briefly). Towering above the town are huge levels of terracing, buildings constructed of gigantic blocks of solid stones shaped to fit perfectly together (cue lots of silly B&W photography from Stu) hauled from a quarry miles away (gotta' love them slaves). A recurrent theme of the Sacred Valley seems to be a sub-set of gringos getting all mystic over the ruins. This site in particular had more than its fair share of rock hugging hippies and creepy mystic guys with pony-tails talking about Atlantis and alien interventions. We have chosen the path of cynicism ourselves and prefer to give the Incas and the big sticks they beat their captives with the credit. This didn't stop Stu trying his own gravity defying stunts on the ruins (probably not strictly kosher). Pretty impressive stuff though. The town itself is still made up largely of the original Inca buildings, arranged around tiny lanes with irrigation channels running down them and cute little old ladies sporting yet another variation of the indigenous hat.

One of the more obscure things the Incas are famous for is the humble spud. Peru still produces one hundred different types of potato, giving the Irish a run for their money. These, and other crops were developed, bred and perfected at a site called Moray (the concentric circles above). Moray is a series of levels and a huge bowl of terracing designed to test crops in the different altitudes and climatic conditions created by the concentric arrangement. Not sure how the Incas made it up here to do all this but we had fun working it out. Is there a road or not, how many kilometers will we have to walk, how much will the taxi drivers sting us and how on earth do we follow the overly complicated map our friendly publican produced? In true mochillero style it all worked out and we felt a bit smug with our bus, chirpy taxi driver (who picked up an archaeologist needing a lift to the site in exchange for some inside info) and scenic walk back combo.

The Peruvians are doing a spot of reconstruction to the site as they are using it for their own crop experimentation. Not sure if the Incas would approve of the tools used in the stone masonry though, check out the funky mallet!

The walk back to town from Moray took us by another working Inca site. On the hillside a spring gushes forth with hot, highly saline water which the locals divert into salt pans to extract the salt. The whole hillside is covered in pans in various states with locals from the salt extraction collective running around barefoot scraping it up and bagging it. Their feet must have been pickled!

Scrambled and bargained our way back to Urubamba from Salinas for a well deserved cold beer in the back garden of Hostal Los Geranios followed by a hamericano coffee (no typo there, just a confused barman) and semi-defrosted "home made" cheesecake. Moral of the story - stick to beer ;-)

Love Stu and Kaz

"What the heck is that?!" of the week: Finally snapped the huge bizzare cactus flower stalks which the main cactus around here produce. Some go straight up for 4 or 5m, others are crazy snakes like this fella'

Man-made Wonder of the Week: Great Wall of Peru (in the middle of nowhere - amazing what these guys can do with mud bricks).

Worst Meals of the Week: "lunch" & "dinner?!!" on board 11hour journey of hell with Ormeneo Royal Class - humph!