4-28 to 5-5 Peru, Machu Pichu

Our trip to South America started with a flight to Lima, Peru. We stayed two nights in the Marriott in Miraflores before the Adventure Life tour started. We paid for this stay with Marriott points and we also used them for the flight down on Continental. The Wolkerstorfers arrived in the afternoon of the second day. During our stay in Lima, we walked a lot, took a tour of a very old ceremonial site, Huaca Pucllana, took a bus tour out to Pacha Camac, the site of the Oracle, and took a bus tour of the old downtown. Two days was just fine. The society in Lima supports lots of manual laborers working on the streets to keep them clean, lots of security people (and they make a big deal of it), money changers, .... and everyone has a distinctive uniform or colored vest to wear. While the downtown has some really old Spanish buildings, it is all sort of rundown. To make up for that, we were introduced to Pisco Sours, the Peruvian specialty. They were so good and so sneaky! Great fun.

The journey to Machu Pichu started with a flight from Lima to Cusco. Cusco is the central large town in the Inca Highlands where one leaves from to see the sites around it, including Machu Pichu. It is high, at 11,600 ft and both Sue and I felt that altitude. I had a headache, which coca leaves and tea didn't seem to help, and Sue got sick, to the point of nausea.

The theme in the Inca lands is that the Incas were a great engineering society, that conquered neighboring peoples in the 1400-1700 period, and conscripted them (temporary service, not slavery apparently) to build the massive compounds, terraces, buildings, temples and such, for which the Inca are known. The key feature of the construction is the smoothness of the walls and the close fit of the huge blocks of stone - all done with crude hand tools. Below is a picture of the "12-angle" stone, a sort of archetype of the craft. Also below are corner stones smoothed to round the corner.

The Spanish came in and took all that apart, disassembling anything Inca and using the materials to build cathedrals and towns. In many places, all that remains of the Inca influence is the foundations. (See the Spanish balconies on the houses built on Incan foundations.) That is why Machu Pichu is so special - the Spanish didn't get there. In fact the Incas seemed to abandon it while it was still in construction - perhaps to not draw attention to it.

So we toured Cusco - it really is a tourist trap. Good things to see but one is almost always falling over someone selling some trashy tourist goo-gah. Most of the vendors are not obnoxious, just ubiquitous.

On the way to the train terminal, Ollaytatamba, we went through Chinchero, a village full of weaving tourist traps and vendors. A picture of a person costs 1 Sole (.30). This was where Sue got ill again. She had been sick back in Cusco that morning and Chinchero was at 12,500 feet. She looked pretty weak and I thought her lips were turning blue. But after getting sick she seemed to perk up and we went down in altitude after that by 3000 feet, so she was much better.

I wished we had more time at Ollaytatamba, an Incan fortification built on a mountainside at the head of the Sacred Valley. It was our first opportunity to see the massive Incan structures with the amazingly smooth and precise stonework (I hope you can see the extremely fine and sharp edges in the bathing fountain photo - with stone tools!), as well as their well developed construction skills and organization. Also here, we visited a very, very rustic house - dirt floors, stone walls, original Incan construction - but still a residence, with a gaggle of Guinea Pigs running around loose inside. GP is a delicacy in Peru - the restaurants charge $60 and up for a meal - and the reviews say it is an "acquired taste", to put it mildly. We didn't have any.

From there, we left the next day to the Machu Pichu pueblo at the foot of the mountain the site is on. These mountains are just straight up, towering thousands of feet over the valleys. And there are terraces everywhere on the sides of these mountains, used for agriculture. People would go up in Spring, plant and then return to harvest. It was a huge hike to get to some of them - our guide Alex said that with a mouthful of coca leaf the natives could climb straight up for day without food and water - maybe a bit of exaggeration - but folks here put great store in the coca leaf. (Wikipedia: "When chewed, coca acts as a mild stimulant and suppresses hunger, thirst, pain, and fatigue.")

Our group of 8 fissioned with half getting off the train to hike to the top and the W's and us riding to the pueblo. So we and the W's got the MP tour in the morning. Alex walked us around the site (MUST be accompanied at all times by a guide). Took bazillion pictures. A really good day to do it - not too sunny but not cloudy, not hot either. Lots of llamas and even chinchillas. We were left to our devices in the PM so Sue, I and Don walked up to the SunGate on the ridge overlooking MP - a good walk, not too hard. We saw the other 4 folks coming down after their hike - as one guy said, "It was sporty." A very steep long climb I take it.

We poked around MP pueblo the next morning - saw the street parades for the various Church groups celebrating the Feast of Three Crosses - this feast goes on all week and we had been hearing fireworks at night ever since we got to Cusco. Costumed dancers and bands processed to the town church and had a ceremony - great photo Op and not touristy.

We returned to Cusco and visited the massive ruin outside of town, Saqsayhuaman. Huge stones in this fort where the final battles with the Spanish took place. That night we went for desert to a fancy restaurant that was deserted but for us. There was a group of four young people doing native dances and for the last one, we got "convinced" to dance with them. Great fun. Next day we headed to Ecuador and the next part of our journey - Galapagos.