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Published: September 29th 2007
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Last day in Cusco today. Am feeling pretty sick (sore throat and coughing), so cancelled the rafting trip I had signed up for and went to a bunch of museums instead. The ones you can visit which come with the Tourist Ticket are all very small and not too well looked after, except maybe for the one at Qoricancha, which showed some deformed sculls---apparently it was a sign of prestige to have an elongated head. The Inca Museum which you had to pay for separately for was really good though. There were some people weaving in the courtyard, in addition to all the displays about pre-Incan pottery and the like.
Am off to the Sacred Valley tomorrow, and then on to the Inca Trail, so will not have internet access for a while. I should really be packing instead of sitting here, but I want to keep this up to date...
So, after Puno, we went to visit the islands of Lake Titicaca. The first island was called Taquile, and the villagers there are famous for their weaving abilities. I bought some nice items from their collective store, and might have got more if I had had more time.
It's getting too touristy there though, and little girls harrassed us continuously to buy their wristbands, old men tried to get us to take their pictures for money, and there were a couple of beggars too.
After a couple of hours, we headed off to AmantanĂ Island, where we would get to stay with a local family (we had already bought beans, oil, sugar, and the like as gifts). Our rooms were not as bad as I had imagined, as they actually had solar-powered lights, but we did have to go outside to use the bathroom. After a walk up the hill and dinner at home (we helped peel beans, but that was just to keep us occupied more than anything else), we were taken to the community centre where they had put on a party for us. There were two bands playing Andean music, and we were all made to dance.
The next day (after a pancake breakfast), we sailed to the Uros floating islands, which were made of reeds. There are no full-blooded Uros people anymore, but their descendants have married the Aymaras and carried on the floating island tradition. We got to ride in a
reed boat, and again, this island was very touristy, with people trying to sell us things everywhere.
We returned to Puno afterwards, and I took a tour to see the chullpas (funerary towers up to 12m high) at Sillustani. Apparently, the bodies were mummified and placed in the towers, sometimes entire families at a time. There were 6 bodies discovered in one anyway. The Incan stonework was amazing, as was the view from the mountain top. On the way back to Puno, we stopped at the home of a local family, where we got to meet their animals (llamas, alpacas, guinea pigs, sheep, rooster, dog) and were offered quinoa bread, roasted potatoes and other delicious things. There were bulls on the roofs, which were supposed to bring luck---a sign of the Spanish influence.
Have spent a couple of days in Cusco now. Did a city tour on the first day, where we visited heaps of Incan ruins, including the church of Santo Domingo which has Incan foundations. In the main Cathedral, we saw a mix of religions. For example, in the picture of the Last Supper, they were holding tortilla instead of bread, and were drinking
chicha morada instead of wine, with a roast guinea pig in the middle of the table. There were figures of a naked woman (Mother Earth) in the choir hall and some cabinets had Arabic praising Allah. There was hidden symbolism in a lot of paintings and statues, such as a sun behind the halos, and snakes in the folds of dresses.
The second day, I joined a tour to Moray and Maras, which were really beautiful sites. There are circular terraces in Moray where (the theory goes) the Incas experimented with growing different plants at different altititudes and tried to create new species. In any case, there was a difference of up to 5 degrees between each terrace and the difference in height from top to bottom was 600m. At Maras there were the spectacular salt mines. I can't believe that some of them formed naturally.
Yesterday morning, I tried to share some
frutillada (which I had bought the evening before) with the rest of the tour group. Recall that it is a fermented corn brew mixed with strawberries. Nothing prepared me for the pressure which had built up inside while it was in the refigerator---as soon as we opened
the bottle, it spewed forth foam, until half the bottle was practically gone! I was worried whether the stuff was still drinkable, but our tour leader assured us it was fine, and we tried some hesitatingly. I don't like the taste that much, but then I never like beer or anything like that anyway.
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Stephen
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Cool adventures Sarah .. Lookd\s like you are still having lots of fun... How's your Spanish coming on.. I bet you are fluent now.. How come you weren't out dancing with the room mate till dawn??