The Sacred Valley

Last Friday, school was cancelled for some reason, and as a result, I had another free day.  I decided that it was time to start exploring the Incan ruins in the area, and the first place to start was the ruins closest to Cusco, Sacsayhuaman.  After purchasing my 10-day tourist ticket that gets you into all of the ruins in Cusco and the nearby Sacred Valley, I headed towards the San Blas neighborhood to hike the mile up from the Plaza de Armas.  The hike was steep, but nice.  The panoramic views of the city could not be beat, and it felt great to get away from the car exhaust and dust of Cusco.

When I got to the top, I had my first encounters with Incan construction.  It was incredible.  I decided at first to go without a guide and walked around admiring everything.  The sheer size of the stones and precision of their cuts was astounding.  After 45 minutes of walking around aimlessly, I realized that I had very little idea of what I was looking at and I headed back to the entrance to hire a guide.

For the next hour or so, I had a personal tour of the ruins.  My guide, Edwin, explained how the main structure was both a fortress and the outdoor Temple of the Sun.  The temple, like many Incan structures, was built with three levels, each representing something.  The bottom level represented the snake (knowledge).  The middle level was the puma (strength), and the top level was the condor (peace).

In addition to the sun temple, there was the giant water reservoir and its corresponding temple to the god of water.  There was, also, a graveyard where the nobles´ mummies were placed, when they were not being paraded around town for ceremonial use in festivals, and the corresponding temple to the god of death.  After the tour, I spent around two hours hiking around the ruins and the nearby ¨Christo Blanco¨ statute of Jesus that overlooks the city.

The next morning, Saturday, Nina, Alex, Marcia and I met at the Urubamba bus stop to go on a weekend trip the various ruins in the Sacred Valley, which lies between Cusco and the Machu Picchu region.  Alex is from outside of New York City, graduated from the University of Wisconsin this past Spring, and in the Fall will be moving to work in San Diego.  Marcia is an elementary school teacher in her late twenties from New Brunswick, Canada.  Both Alex and Marcia are volunteers with my program but work at other sites.

The four of us hopped on the bus and headed off for our weekend in the mountains.  On the bus, we ran into a group of college-aged volunteers from a different program that I had met the first Monday night here.  The group is here for three months, working for the Center for Traditional Textiles of Cusco, which is an organization that promotes traditional fair trade textile weaving in the region.  We had been planning on going straight to the town of Moray, but the other group convinced us to come see one of the center´s operations in the town of Chinchero on the way to Moray.  At the center in Chinchero, we got to watch the indigenous women hand make the various blankets, purses, scarfs, etc., and also how they made the different color dyes for the fabric.  (Red comes from a certain type of small beetle that they crush.)  The whole operation was fascinating and each lady sold the products that she made.

Chinchero also had some ruins to see, and after the textile center, we headed up to the park entrance.  At the entrance, we were surprised by another volunteer, Ariel.  Ariel is from Los Angeles, graduated from UC Berkley a year ago, and just finished his first year of medical school at an American program in Tel Aviv, Israel.  I had briefly talked to him when we first met on July 4^th about doing this weekend trip to the valley, but without a local cell phone, I had not talked to him since.  On Thursday, however, I emailed one of the program advisors to ask them to tell anyone that might be interested that we were taking this trip.  Apparently, Ariel had gotten the message, and head to Chinchero in hopes of finding us.  Our chance encounter with the textile group volunteers on the bus led to our chance encounter with Ariel at the ruins.

Chinchero was a breath of fresh air, literally.  The ruins consisted of agricultural terraces along the hillsides of a valley, and the five of us spent all morning hiking and enjoying the clean, exhaust-free, mountain air.  Once we got back into the town, we grabbed lunch and then caught a bus/van to the stopping point for Moray and Las Salineras.  I knew nothing about Las Salineras, but Alex and Marcia had heard they were worth a visit.  After a cliff-hugging, overloaded cab ride, Las Salineras came into view.

Las Salineras are pools constructed by the Incas to collect the salty spring water that bubbles up from the mountain.  The water sits in the pools until it evaporates, leaving the salt behind.  Peruvian families to this day still harvest the salt out of the pools.  The process is simple, but the scene is surreal.  As you pull into view of the side of the cliff, you see hundreds of symmetrical pools hugging the steep side of the mountain.  The pools are crusted over with bright white salt deposits that even from up close look like snow.  The whole sight is completely out of place in the landscape, but incredibly beautiful.

Part of the deal with the cab driver to fit five passengers in his small four passenger car for a bargain rate was that at both Las Salineras and Moray, we would only have 30 minutes site.  If we were late, he threatened to the jacked the rate back up to the pre-bargaining amount.  This was not much of a hindrance at Las Salineras because it is really just a stop-and-marvel kind of place, not somewhere you would need a tour.  Moray was too in a sense, except that it sits 200 hundred or so feet down the hill from the cab drop off spot.  Moray is a set of agricultural terraces formed in massive rings in the valley between some hills.  Although there is not much else at Moray in the way of houses or temples, the rings are so large and so perfectly circular that it is an amazing sight.

After racing down and back up the rings in the 30 minutes, we got back into the cab and headed back to the bus stop on the main highway.  From there we headed to Urubamba, the de facto crossroads town in the Sacred Valley.  We had originally planned on going on to the ruins at Ollantaytambo, but with it quickly growing dark and still twenty miles from there, the question was now where to spend the night.  With the group torn between getting the cab ride to Ollantaytambo out of the way or making the most of Urubamba, we decided to get out and walk around for a little while and get a better feel for the town.

A few blocks from the plaza, we found a quiet bar and tucked inside to relax for a bit.  There was only one other customer in the bar, a man named Patrick who appeared to be in his mid-30s.  Patrick was a former high school teacher in Phoenix, who decided to move to Urubamba, Peru a couple of years ago.  Now he works for a group called Pro-Peru that builds projects like clean water systems and cleaner emitting stoves for the small, rural villages in the valley.  Meeting him turned out to be a stroke of luck.  He walked us to the best hostel in town (a place that finally had steaming hot showers), pointed out a close bar to go for the night with some sort of fashion show going on, and told us about the best Sunday breakfast in town.

After shamelessly devouring a really-was-meant-to-be-shared sized pizza at a pizza place, we headed to the bar that Patrick had pointed out.  The place was pretty interesting, almost all outdoors with a campfire burning in the back.  We huddled around the fire and somehow missed the inconspicuous fashion show, but still managed to meet a couple of very weird interesting characters.

Although the bar owner had a facisnating background (born in Russia to a Peruvian dad and Romanian mom, lived in Canada for five years, spoke perfect English in a very heavy British accent, and in his 20s owning a bar in rural Peru), the ¨Most Interesting Person at the Party¨ award was actually split between two other people.  A former child psychologist from California (that I would never allow within a 100 yards of children), probably in her 30s, and her 18 year old or so sidekick from Maryland won that award handedly.  Around the campfire, the lady told us how she recently opened a bed and breakfast in the valley, which the 18 year old girl from Maryland worked with her at, and at which their customer promotion method was based more on divine providence than actually advertising its existence.  While the lady was telling us all of this, the girl from Maryland, who refused to speak to any of us in English, was running all over the place, chain smoking, and on and off again talking to someone on the phone.  It turns out it was her husband, who was home with her two year old child, and, to her astonishment, was pretty upset that he was doing that while she was out at the bars.  I guess the baby-husband thing was cramping her style.

Outside of that, the owner of the bed and breakfast was acting pretty normal, if you ignored her attempt to finish a carton of cigarettes in a single evening as well.  But then, out of nowhere, she took a hard turn towards crazy.  Somehow the conversation turned to U.S. politics.  For the most part it was a pretty educated and elevated discussion.  That is until the lady added her two cents.  She began by declaring that she is an excellent researcher, so as to try and add some minuscule validity to what was about to follow.  Due to her ¨excellent research skills,¨ she explained how she had learned of U.S. government cover ups.  Cover ups of what, we asked.  Cover ups of how every planet in our solar system had life on it, but that the life on each planet had been destroyed during separate civil wars, all of which ended in a nuclear apocalypse . . . .  The lady countered our blank and incredulous stares with authoritative support like ¨trust me,¨ ¨I´m telling you, I´ve done the research,¨ and of course ¨no really, trust me.¨  She cited no facts, nor provided any information that could be considered the foundation of rationale and logical thought.  That was our cue to go, and shortly after, we headed back home.

The next morning after breakfast, we headed to Ollantaytambo.  The plan was to try and see that in the morning and then head to the village of Pisac in the afternoon to see its ruins and popular Sunday market.  Ollantaytambo is the furthest town in the valley, and it was one of the primary fortresses used by the Incas when they rebelled against the Spanish.  The area was gorgeous and the ruins were breathtaking.  Perched on the side of steep mountains with the snow covered Andes in the background, the elaborate ruins were overlooked the picturesque village below.  The ability of the Incas to carry such massive stones up to those heights, and without the invention of the wheel, really is astounding.

As we climbed up the ruins, we came across a trail on the backside of the mountain.  It was steep and took a little while, but a group coming down from it promised that it was worth the hike.  At the top of the trail, sat the ruins of the Incan jail, and with it, one of the most incredible views that I have ever seen.  We stood on the edge of a nearly sheer cliff hundreds of feet from the town below.  Looking into the valley, you could see for miles.  It was one of those views that a photograph cannot do justice.

We sat up there for probably a half hour, and in the process, decided that Pisac could wait for another day.  There was no way we wanted to rush through something like Ollantaytambo.  After taking our time all morning in the ruins and grabbing lunch, Ariel split off from the rest of us.  He was headed to Machu Picchu a couple days later, and it was further past the Sacred Valley.

Since we missed out on Pisac, we decided to go to the Qosqo (Cusco) Center of Native Art Sunday night when we returned.  The center holds a show every night of traditional native dances and songs.  It was a very touristy show, but still interesting to see.  That was the end of our weekend.  Alex, Nina, and I did make it to the Pisac ruins a couple days later on Tuesday.  They were quite impressive.  Larger than Ollantaytambo and Mach Picchu, visiting the ruins proved to be quite the hike.  If anyone is considering ever visiting Cusco, the Sacred Valley, and Machu Picchu (which I would very highly recommend), be prepared for the hiking.  Whether you decide to backpack it or take a five star bus tour, you´re not going to see much of anything unless you are willing to put some steep miles on your legs.

Scott