Swooping Through the Sacred Valley

The sacred valley

We got up really early for our day through the Sacred Valley. We rented a taxi for the day and he picked us up at 7am. This was a good idea because it meant that we had the ruins of Pisac almost to ourselves. The ruins are huge and well spread out, but connected with an elaborate set of terraces. Near the center of the ruins is a barracks for the soldiers  It's perched on top of the hill and the stonework isn't as fine as the famous Incan stonework. That kind of stonework was only for temples, palaces and other very important buildings. Regular buildings used mortar. It was fun the clamber through all the buildings since it was somewhat like a maze.

More pictures are in the Peru album.

Temple at the Pisac ruins

Behind the barracks was a very large burial cliff with hundreds of spaces. When somebody important died, they would bury the person in the sky by placing him/her in a fetal position in an alcove. This would mummify the body.

The last major component of the ruin was the furthest away and most impressive. It is a temple and baths which included a stone pole for astronomical measurements. This stonework was much finer and integrated directly into the stone. The baths were even still working! They were built by channeling a flow of water around and under the temple, at times falling into small ponds that acted as baths.

After the ruins, we stopped at the Pisac market for a few hours. We heard that this was a good market in the area for handicrafts; it wasn't all just mass produced stuff at high prices (although it did have some of that). There were some unique items and prices were cheaper. So, we finished off our X-mas shopping.

Terracing at the Pisac ruins

It was early afternoon and we were getting hungry. Our taxi driver recommended going to Urabamba for lunch, so we drove north along the sacred valley. The valley is sacred because that's where the Incans grew a lot of their food. It is significantly lower than Cusco, so it has a longer growing season, and, in a land of mountains, had a large amount of flat land that is great for crops. That being said, they still farmed up the hillsides using terracing.

In Urabamaba, we wanted a place with a menu of the day and specifically not a buffet. Our driver wasn't sure exactly where to go, but we stopped first at a tourist place. The usher out front assured us that they had a menu of the day, but when we walked up to the restaurant, there was a buffet and that's all they had. Plus, it was expensive (40 soles). Catherine was very mad, so we left. We spent a little while wandering around town until we stumbled across a great little place in a courtyard with a menu of great quinoa soup, chicken and rice, and a jug of chica morada (a purple corn beverage made with spices including cinnamon). It was a fantastic meal and only cost 5 soles.

The Maras evaporation salt pans that
are used to harvest salt.

After lunch we went to the salt pans. They're a mind boggling human construction. The hills around them are heavy in salt and there is a stream that forms a valley. The water in the stream in salty. So, people have harvested the salt by construction a sequence of hundreds of shallow pools. They control the water into the pools using a series of narrow channels that can be plugged, or opened using rocks and cloth. The strong sun and dry Andean air then causes the water the evaporate, leaving the salt behind for gathering.

Finally, after a long day, we made our way to Ollantaytambo for the night, where we settled in and had a terrible dinner at one of the near-identical restaurants with a tourist menu that rings the central square.