Peru Tour - 3 - To Machu Picchu

27 Dec 2005 - Cusco -> Machu Picchu

Buenos Dias!

It’s not cloudy today and we are in no hurry today. The tour bus will be here at 8:30 am to pick us up. The bags were packed for 2 nights. We will be back in Cusco for one night. Went for the delicious, simple breakfast.  We gave our hotel manager a small gift (part of Christmas too). Our guide came at 8:30 am promptly and we were off. Left the rest of the luggage at the hotel.

We were the 2^nd group to be picked up so we had great choice of seats in the bus. We met some of the same tourists as yesterday as they got picked up. Our guide today was Elizabeth, was an older lady and very good in speaking English.

During the drive to Pisac we stopped in a couple places to take pictures. We were descending from Cusco. The scenery was just lovely – huge mountain ranges with valleys below for agriculture. All the spots we stopped at had nice shops and kids dressed locally ready for photo shoot. Its interesting business.

We drove to llama farm owned by a family. There were different size and color llamas – who knew there were so many types! And they were quite tame, we could get close to them and take photos and feed them.  There was a little tour thing too – they showed how they would dye the llama wool and some handloom work. It all ended with a gift shop – of course. Everything was very expensive there. It was all good but too expensive. And for me – not quite useful as I don’t wear sweaters or shawls. A very good stop…

Out first real stop was Pisac, which is an agricultural town. It has a great market! It was about 11 am and we had about one hour to shop around.  We thought it would be more than enough – wrong! We had barely seen half the market in one hour. We started with having boiled bhutta, and then walked around. The shops were amazing, so much to buy! A lot of them had the same stuff, but it was good stuff. And the jewelry – so much jewelry – I had to buy some. Walked around some more. Every time I thought I was done with buying, I was buying some more. I think I will be needing a couple of llamas to carry my stuff.

From there we drove to Urubamba, which is a town near Rio Urubamba. For lunch six of us got down at hotel Alhambra while the rest of them went to hotel Tunupa. Apparently ours has all natural food. The food was good. Salads were all tasty, macaroni and cheese, some spinach and cheese pastry. The potato vegetable was very tasty (it could have been just the potato being tasty itself).  Deserts were okay. Peruvians seem to eat their rice kheer with purple corn syrup. Nothing too exciting for me.  The best was the quinoa soup! Amazing! And finally we had tea – real tea – no coca business.

Walked around for the 5-10 mins we had to take photos – there were beautiful flowers all around. Elizabeth came promptly at 2 pm to pick us up.

We drove about 20 mins out to Ollantaytambo ruins.  I like how Elizabeth is doing the tour, very relaxed. We walked about 1 km to get to the site. The ruins were primarily huge blocks of stones, there was farming going on the steps. On the top was the sun temple. It was a huge area. It was about ½ km high and wide. There were 300 steps leading to the sun temple. After a little intro from Elizabeth, we all braved the 300 steps. These were not just steps, they were high steps! It was not as hard as it looked, but still!  

The top was wonderful, little windy but good view of the town and the steps below. The walls were made from huge rocks cut very nicely and placed on each other with quite precision. And they were not all squares either. A number of rocks were quite odd shaped, but still were not cemented together. They were just placed on each other.

The sun temple was for huge stones – about 10 ft. high and 4-5 ft. wide joined by narrow blocks of rocks. There were some carvings on it too. The zig zag carving seemed very common as is the number 3 – which for Peruvians signifies the sky, earth and the earth below.

We walked around the terraces to other terrace, past the storage house and dam. Quite a good tour. We finished off by seeing the water temple where people would take ablutions. The only sad part about all this is that a lot was ruined by the Spaniards and there is no clear historical description describing the structures. A lot of it is speculation.  Most of it was written in the 1920s – so quite recent. There is no sculpture or any paintings showing the life of Inca people.

We were done here by 5:20 pm. The tour was going on to Chenko but we were going to be dropped off at a hotel in Yucay. The hotel was a beautiful setting. Lovely courtyard with flowers all around, even better than the Cusco hotel. Our room was very nice – great view of the mountains on one side and the courtyard on the other. We walked around a little bit, but it started raining so we came back.

Good day!!