Trevor's South America Trip: Peak performance

Day 10 - 8 de junio: Cuzco to the Sacred Valley

Another early wakeup call awaited me this morning. And it was most definitely a wake-up. My shower wasn't getting any hot water this morning, so getting ready was brief, to say the least. By about 6:45, i was eating breakfast in our Cuzco hotel. At 7am, our tour manager had arranged for us to receive a mountain blessing by some original descendants of the incas. Our tour manager herself is actually a descendant herself, and has learned all her ancient traditions as well as an ancient language. She keeps bringing up that the Spaniards never succeeded in crushing the Inca way and that her descendants are still strong. In a way, I can see that. Apparently, when the spaniards were putting in churches and evangelizing, the Incas would secretly pray to their gods in the name of christian saints so as to not be punished. I wonder what the ratio of spanish to native people is in Peru. Anyway, they did a little ritual in the dining room of the hotel - it was fun to watch despite being half asleep at the time. We then put our bags into the coach and began our next journey (yes, another transit day). This one was good though, lot's of interesting stops! Our first stop was a little tourist stand off the side of the highway. It wasn't a place we'd usually stop at, but our tour manager (Gaby) said she had a surprise for us. We were shown some peruvian textiles before Gaby revealed to us that this stand was run by her mom. I was a little low on cash at the time, but apparently we'll be stopping by her mom's place again on our way back to Cuzco. We then carried on to a close next stop called the Pisac ruins. This ancient city was situated at the very top of a mountain, making the views spectacular! Apparently, every ancient Incan city is built, exactly surrounded by 4 mountain peaks, each located at one of the 4 compass points. The Incans were very intelligent in their designs of their cities - so much detail put into coordinating their cities with the sun, moon and sky. Anyway, our group walked through a thin trail with many uneven steps through the city. When we arrived at the highest point, we could see the entire canyon below. Everyone was in deep appreciation of the view... that is, until Gaby told us that we had to hike to the town at bottom of the mountain. I really loved it though - this active stuff is right in my element. I found it cool that although the trail seemed so dangerous, there were next to no railings or safety nets. Back home, the whole way would be fenced and signed (but I think this is as good a way as any to let natural selection do its thing). After nearly 1000 steps downhill (not an exaggeration), we ended up in the town for lunch. We were taken to an empanada place first to try the local specialty, then told to find food before 2pm. A group of us took a look around, but found nowhere that could serve us in time (service is notoriously slow here). We ended up ordering sandwiches back at the empanada place; the choice was chicken or meat and I was feeling a bit adventurous so I chose meat. Still don't know exactly what kind of meat it was, but it was good. The big problem though was that our waiter was a little time challenged - his 10min estimate turned into over half an our and one girl didn't even get what she ordered. Luckily, Gaby was their to hold up the bus for us, but it really was a pain to hold up the group. Nevertheless, we carried on. We had one more little stop to make before our final destination. We all got a demonstration on how they make corn beer in a little house here. It was neat, but I can't say it tasted all that great (sort of like apple cider vinegar). This place also had a fun little game which we all played. It was kind of like a bean bag toss game, just with coins instead of beanbags. Unfortunately, the girl's team beat the guys, but it was still pretty fun. Finally, we carried on all the way to the town in the sacred valley that we would be staying at tonight - Ollantaytambo (try saying that 5 times fast - it's hard enough just to write out). Ollantaytambo is very similar to Pisac in that a functional town lies just outside an ancient city, adopting its original name. As the sun was beginning to set, we booked it over to this Incan site and climbed up to the top. Luckily for us, this city was significantly shorter than Pisac, making the hike a piece of cake. We learned a bit more about the site before hiking back down and checking into the hotel. I got wifi in my room this time which is nice. We were more thinking about food than wifi at this point though. We ended up at a nearby pizza place where i got a personal pizza topped with steak and zucchini. It hit the spot perfectly. A lot of people in our group were able to sign up for the Inca trail hike tomorrow, but unfortunately I was too late when I booked this tour. There are a few bright sides tho - I get to wake up at 8 as opposed to 5am tomorrow, and I've signed up for mountain biking here tomorrow morning which should be really fun before we take the train up to meet the rest. Machu Picchu is close now, I can't wait to tell you all about it!