I feel like before this trip I would have simply titled this post, "The Day Before Machu Picchu" because that's what it was for me going into it, but there really were lots of interesting things on this trip and some really cool places we went. We started things off with a 12 or so hour bus ride to Cusco starting at 9 a.m. in La Paz. Normally that would really suck, but we were on this double decker bus with these huge seats that reclined so far it was like a bed. Also, I was in the front so I had this cool thing I could put my feet up on and a huge window to look out, which was cool until the sun started setting but we had drapes for that. We arrived at Cusco around 8ish I think. They're behind an hour though in Peru. We got a taxi to our hostel which was a pretty nice place to stay at. We found dinner and checked out the city which is really quite beautiful. There's lots of really old stone churches and museums and the whole place is just very alive. We couldn't stay out too long though because we had to wake up for our bus the next morning.
So here's Cusco as taken from the bus. You can't see it in this picture but on the sides of one of the mountains they have "Viva el Peru" and some kind of coat of arms of the city drawn onto the mountain so that you can see it from really far away. It's pretty cool.
Our first stop was at a farm to see some llamas, alpacas, and guanacos (they're what you get when you smoosh a llama and an alpaca together). Of course the real reason for the stop was to get us to go in the store they had there but we just loved these guys. Especially the shaggy ball of awesomeness that's front and center in this picture.
We named him Alpaca Marley for his dreadlocks. He's the dude.
But he wouldn't let me feed him.
A little further down the road we stopped to see a great view of the Sacred Valley or el Valle Sagrado. That's the Sacred River running through it. It was a big deal to the Inca and we saw a lot more of it the next day at and around Machu Picchu.
This is the Inca settlement of Pisaq. The terraces always had to be built first before they built anything on the mountaintops. They prevented landslides during the rainy season by storing and releasing the water at a controlled rate. They did this by filling the bottom layer of each terrace with large stones followed by a layer of gravel, a layer of sand, and finally a layer of soil on top so that the terrace could be used for farming as well. Our guide told us that the buildings on top were for the nobles in the area and also served as an astronomical observatory.
This is also the site of the largest known Inca cemetery. The Inca used to place their dead in the sides of mountains so that their spirits could be reborn again out of the Earth.
Here's a better view of everything on the top. I wound up climbing all over those rocks in front of the cloud on the left half of the picture.
This is the modern town of Pisaq. We stopped here to check out all the shops and silver stores.
This is part of the main market street. They had tons of stuff here. Peru has lots of really nice stuff you can buy, but it's a more expensive country than Bolivia. It's about 2.6 soles per dollar as opposed to 6.9 bolivianos per dollar.
These are the Inca ruins in Ollantaytambo. There's some pretty cool stuff around and on top of this place.
For example, this mountain which is across from the last picture has two Inca faces carved into it. One of them, which I don't believe you can see in this picture because it's on the far left side, is positioned so that the sun rises right behind the tip of the face's nose on the summer solstice. So when they saw from the observatory on top of the ruins that the sun was rising behind the nose, they knew it was time to plant their crops. The other face is in between the two structures you can see built not quite halfway up the mountain. It's a profile.
I just thought the way they fit these huge stones together which such precision is nuts. It really is difficult to find any kind of a gap in between these, and they had to drag them up a ramp on the other side of the hill.
The Inca were also crazy water resource engineers. I actually took a whole bunch of pictures on this trip of the channels and drainage systems they used. This one transports water from a glacier all they way down to a temple dedicated to water. Oh and it travels underground too and then finally through grooves cut into stone.
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