Hello all
I am finally getting done writing about the last 10 days or so of my trip. I have decided to break it down into 3 separate and more managable parts. Enjoy.
Cusco is a really cool city despite being very touristy. To say the least all the people trying to convince you to go to their restaurant by shoving menus in your face and selling you tours was very annoying. However I guess that is just the price you have to pay when you are a tourist. I was also a little taken aback by the large numbers of people selling gifts, film and memory cards, food, etc on the sides of the road and in front of every possible tourist attraction regardless of size or location. Just goes to show you that the economy in Peru still has room for improvement because these people must be able to make more money selling exactly the same thing that the person next to them does rather than finding an alternative job. All in all a sad commentary on the economy in Peru.
The reason you go to Cusco is to see Inca ruins and shop for Peruvian gifts… both of which Jessica and I did. Our first day in town we took a city tour and visited 2 churches (one of them is built over and incorporates a number of former Inca temples to a variety of their gods…sun, moon, lightening, rainbow, etc and the other was really 3 separate churches integrated into one massive building with lots of gold, silver, and a very impressively carved choir area) and then we visited a series of 4 Inca ruins with the highlight being Sacsayhuaman (mnemonically it sounds like sexy woman) which is a site with a series of 3 stone walls composed of interlocking rock blocks with the largest weighing over 130 tons. The current thought is that the site was a temple for the god of lightening which would explain the zigzag shapes of the temple walls. After that we quickly went to 3 other Inca ruins including one site that is considered to be a fountain of youth.
Day 2 was spent on a tour of the Sacred Valley (Machu Picchu for reference is at the end of the Sacred Valley about 70 miles from Cusco…of course this is a 4 hour train ride but that is another story). The first couple of stops were to a couple of the markets where we did a fair amount of damage picking up knitted good and other textiles…the weaving from this region is very impressive. Just watching the women weave is a lesson in finger dexterity and I still have no clue on how the weaving actually works…guess I won’t be doing any weaving any time soon.. Once again the blue plastic tarp was everywhere protecting the goods from any threat of rain…the markets were very colorful and would have been even cooler if the tarps weren’t everywhere. Good to see these tarps have spread all the way across the world.
The highlight of the tour were the ruins at Ollantaytambo. The site is actually a miniature Machu Picchu as it had 14 terraces, temples to both the sun god and the water god complete with a fountain which can have its water flow altered with the touch of your hand, a small residential area, and storage granaries. The last stop on the tour was a 16th century church complete with fresco paintings and a small market full of intricate weavings in the town of Chinchero.
I found the following things to be the most impressive about all the Inca sites that I have seen:
The amazing workmanship that goes into the walls and buildings. The Incas carved very intricate walls with almost seamless integration, utilized concave and convex shapes to lock the various bricks together, and the walls were trapezoidal in shape all of which helped earthquake proof the buildings. The engineering was so exact that in a lot of places you can’t even stick a piece of paper between the seams in the bricks. Terraces…the purpose was to prevent erosion and increase the surface area on which to grow crops. In addition the Inca’s used the terraces to acclimatize their crops to different altitudes and climates; therefore, enabling them to grow more crops in a variety of locations. It doesn’t sound like the Incas were very innovative but instead did a great job of taking existing technologies but utilizing them in highly efficient ways and by developing a governmental blueprint that they were then able to replicate as they conquered new territories. They were able to build all their infrastructure by requiring all their citizens to pay a tax…in this case the tax was a couple of months of physical labor building their buildings…instead of using slaves or prisoners. They also build very elaborate fountains and irrigation systems…they were beautiful both in their carvings and how efficient the systems were especially since a lot of times the irrigation channels were buried underground. One last thing…we don’t know the Inca names for all the sites that I have visited as they have been lost over the years. So the names Machu Picchu, Winay Wayna, etc were names that the Spanish or someone else gave to the sites sometime in the last couple of hundred of years. For example Winay Wayna is the name of an orchid that was found at that site.
Love
Scott
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