Hello all! We just returned from a terrific spring break trip to Peru that took us through Cuzco and the Sacred Valley area. Before the play-by-play of the trip, a couple of general items:
1. We haven't blogged in a while. In between our last blog and now, we have visited the States, seen about 1000 people and met, or became reacquainted with, about 10,000 babies/toddlers including: Jacob, Cameron, Owen, Louise, Eli, Charlie, Eden, Ryan (he is a full little boy), Maddy, Aaron/Alison's pre-baby, Craig/Larissa's pre-baby, Tim/Jenny's then-pre-baby now real nephew Cameron, and we also met Sambone over skype.
2. We returned to Chile in mid-July to the sickest bunch of students ever. I immediately got the flu and then bronchitis, which included coughing my way to some really painful ribs that took about 4 weeks to heal. Blech.
3. My uncle Charlie and his girlfriend Tamra came to visit and she suffered a TERRIBLE, immediate-surgery worthy leg break that kept them in Chile much longer than their scheduled stay. It was great to spend time with them, but we were sad that they didn't get to enjoy Chile! We're wishing Tamra a speedy recovery.
With that out of the way, back to Peru! Here are some general observations about Peru:
1. I have not negotiated when visiting another country as much as I did in Peru. We negotiated over EVERYTHING.
2. There are llamas and alpacas all over the part of the country where we were. All over.
In the photo above we're going to this woman's house with her son and her llama to look at some of the woven goods she had made.
3. There are many types of potatoes in Peru. Three different guides at three different Incan ruin sites claimed that there are either 300, 700, or 1,400 different types of potatoes in Peru. I'm not making those numbers up (although the guides probably were).
4. Peruvians have a much better understanding of "spicy" a.k.a. "picante" than Chileans. As in, when they say something is spicy, it actually is (albeit not very).
5. Peruvians eat guinea pig for real. There is very little actual meat in guinea pig. You do the math...Or just look at Justin playing with his food.
A typical Peruvian kitchen (In this picture I am getting to know a really adorable gray kitten who didn't seem to mind sharing the kitchen with a herd of guinea pigs)...
6. Peru is very proud of its indigenous heritage and they have a right to be. The Incans were amazing!
7. Speaking of "Incans," the whole name is a bit of a misnomer. The word "Inca" in fact only refers to the king of the empire. The more appropriate name for the empire is "Quechua" which is the word for the rest of the people in the empire, except the king. This is what our Peruvian guides used.
8.The typical street dog in Chile is brown and German shepherd-looking. The Peruvians have an incredibly distinct street dog that we saw all throughout both Lima and the Sacred Valley. It is mostly hairless, but has a white mohawk and a white tuft of hair on the tip of its tail. Pretty hilarious:
Our trip started with an overnight (literally about 6 hours) in Lima, which from what we can discern is a dismal city. Not worth saying anything other than that.
We flew to Cuzco the next morning and immediately left the city with a driver. Our first stop was in the town of Pisac to view our first Incan (yes, I'm going to use the word anyway) ruins, visit a market, and have a fantastic lunch. The ruins were pretty incredible--all of the Incan ruins are.
This is a view from above some agricultural terraces. The diagonal patterns are actually stairs connecting the levels.
Here is a better shot of what the stairs look like:
More Pisac:
There are two remarkable things about all of the ruins:
1. The walls that they built for holy and sometimes other very important places basically defy modern technology. They are made ONLY of granite rock. There is nothing in between the rocks themselves and you cannot fit a piece of paper between any of the rocks--not even a centimeter in. There is NOTHING growing between the rocks because of the exactitude of the shaping, and in addition they have fairly complex tongue and groove patterns to secure the rocks in place. All of the walls are deliberately built at a slightly obtuse angle to help them withstand earthquakes (and they have thus far withstood two major ones while all Spanish structures crumbled). The Spanish, even when they took apart Incan temples and used the stones to build Catholic Churches next door, could not replicate the walls. They had to use mortar to keep the walls together. Stupid Spaniards--this was a sentiment we often felt on this trip. There are plenty of buildings in the region we visited that still rely on walls built by the Incans. I was obsessed with these walls. They are perfect and amazing.
2. The Incans only built on TOP of mountains. When they built on mountains with large boulders on top, they incorporated the boulders into their structures--sometimes carving rocks in bizarre shapes to do so. Because they considered the mountains sacred, they removed nothing from them. Terraces were built by adding gravel and soil, temples were build around rocks that aligned perfectly with the sun, the natural setting was made part of the manmade...extremely beautiful and cool.
We continued on from Pisac to Urubamba where we stayed for the next two nights. Our hotel was very nice, complete with a zany/sometimes obnoxious owner and yoga room that we discovered on our first morning and made use of twice. The next day we headed to Ollantatambo (I might be misspelling that) to see the ruins there. These were military in nature as well as religious and much of Ollantatambo still uses original Incan walls. Both Pisac and Ollantatambo are on the route to Machu Picchu, and, as the name depicts, are part of an area considered very holy by the Incans (the Sacred Valley). When we asked why this area was considered so holy, we got answers that basically revolved around the mountains. The mountains were considered sacred because of some combination of their beauty, the fertility of the valley they created, and because of their magnetism. When we asked how the Incans knew that the mountains were magnetic, we were told that there were people, most likely religious leaders, who could "feel" their magnetism (?!). Sounds ridiculous, but they were totally right and these mountains are full of iron. To our knowledge, Incans didn't make use of iron as tool. Interestingly, there was a massive push to start mining iron in the Sacred Valley years ago that the local people were able to resist because they said the money generated by tourism outstrips (no pun intended) that made by mining. I can't imagine that they were wrong about this.
From Urubamba we went on to Aguas Calientes, the town used as the jumping off point to Machu Picchu (pronounced by locals mah-chu pik-chu). We took the train and it was probably the nicest train we've ever been on. We arrived at our hotel and immediately bought our bus tickets and park tickets for the next day. At the site Machu Picchu there are the ruins and several side treks, including one that basically goes straight up about 600 meters to the top of a mountain called Hueynapicchu (pronounced wu-ay-na-pik-chu). Only 400 people are allowed to do this hike each day, and in order to be one of those 400, you need to be one of the first 400 people to get on the buses in the morning. To do that, you need to line up at 4:00 am. This should give you an idea of just how many people visit the site per day. So, of course we had to do this.
We arrived to Machu Picchu around 6 am, got our Hueynapicchu ticket stamped, and first toured the main grounds. This was great because the crowds were small and the sun was still coming up. To us, the most incredible part of the placement of MP is not that it is so high (it IS high off of the valley floor, but not that high), but that a) the walls of the mountains are so steep and b) it is surrounded by equally amazingly steep, and higher mountains. They circle it like a crown and the sun comes up over them through the morning mist--wow.
I'm going to mostly let the pictures speak for themselves but there a few things to add:
1) MP is divided into two areas: agricultural and city which included housing and religious sites. The terraces are the agricultural area.
2) MP was intended to be a place for only elites: social and religious. About 1,000 people might have lived in the city.
3) MP was abandoned BEFORE the Spaniards could discover it. In fact, most Quechuans did not even know that it existed. It is not totally clear why this happened, but there are a couple of theories:
a) They knew the Spanish were rampaging the Sacred Valley and trying to basically destroy everything, so they abandoned the city to protect and preserve it.
b) The Incan history, which was kept orally since they lacked a written form, intentionally cut Machu Picchu out of the Incan history because of some wrong the city committed. In other words, the city was disowned by the empire.
4) A local Quechuan had begun living at Machu Picchu before the Yale anthropologist, Hiram Bingham, "discovered" it. In fact, someone led him there and he was shown around the site by the 9 year old son of the guy living there. After his "discovery" they began the process of clearing it out of all of the stuff that had grown around it (the climate is called a "cloud jungle"). Then Bingham took everything found there back to the Peabody Museum in New Haven, and Yale has hence refused to return it to Peru. Apparently, in 2012, basically the 100 year anniversary of its "discovery by white people," Yale has finally promised to return the Incan items. Sorry Finns, but this is a bit lame.
5) Most religious buildings are built in coordination with special, naturally occurring rocks, and, equally importantly, with sun positioning. The winter equinox is very important (more so than the summer equinox because it is more aligned with the harvest, etc) and there are many structures that do cool things like caste no shadow at exactly 12 noon on the winter equinox.
6) A key element of the Incan religion was the concept of the trilogy or 3 dimensions. There are many examples of this: sky-earth-subearth, future-present-past, condor-puma-serpent. These levels all overlap: sky-future-condor, earth-present-puma, and subearth-past-serpent. The trilogy was evident all over the ruins.
7) Incans had complex and beautiful canals systems to move water throughout their cities. These canal structures remain and in many cases are still functional.
The final picture above is us with our Peruvian traveling crew. From the left: Ian & Lissa (our buddies from Nido), Madeline (Lissa's cousin and sweet Chicago resident!), Justin, me, and Chevigne (Lissa's sister in-law). A very fun group to be with.I think that my favorite part of the ruins was the clear effort to incorporate what is manmade with what is natural. Instead of constructing high points at certian angles whereupon to put a temple, they built these temples where the sun shone perfectly on the winter solstice around the existing landscape. I can't help but think Americans could do a better job of this.
We also visited a botanical garden outside of Aguas Calientes and saw some awesome butterflies, flowers, and hummingbirds:
From Aguas Calientes, we backtracked to Cuzco (the highest in altitude of all the sites--MP is actually the lowest), the heart of which is beautiful. We spent two sunny days strolling around, visiting museums and markets, and eating great food. There were some cool ruins just outside of Cuzco called Sasquaywaman (literally pronounced "sexy woman"). Justin and I both got a bit altitude sick, weirdly on our last days there, but it didn't take away from Cuzco too much. I think the pictures capture just how picturesque this city is. Since it was the capital of the Incan empire, there is still strong remnants of the Incas despite the strong presence of Catholic Churches.
All in all we had a great time and would high recommend Peru!
