Sacred Valley Tour In a country, where there is hardly any level ground and where hills and dales abound, why this particular valley alone should be sacred? The answer leaps to the eye. This is not a valley but a vale, broad and fertile with special climatic conditions. It also controls the route to the Amazon jungles. No wonder that it was thought to be sacred, and was heavily fortified against the incursions of the jungle tribes. In fact, the massive fortifications of Ollantaytambo are a mute witness to the might of Incas that was concentrated here. The Incas were masters of stonework. How did they cut and polish the hard stone like the granite? Our guide told us about a technique, which I am just repeating here. I take NO responsibility for it, because ... read more

Cuzco, Peru For those who are interested in Cuzco’s history, geography, landscape, architecture, culture, handicrafts, folklore etc. I would rather refer to more authentic sources like the link below: http://www.cusco-peru.org/ For others, I am giving my own impressions for what it is worth. (Worth maybe about 50 clicks on the blog.) Cuzco, variously spelled as Qusqu, Qosqo, Cusco etc. means ‘The Navel’ or The Center’. This is a sort of euphemism, because Spaniards literally translated its original name Akamama as ‘Chicha’s Mother’. However, if we consider Qusqu as a corrupt form of ‘Kukshu’ in Sanskrit or ‘Kokh’ in Hindi, it still means ‘Womb’ or ‘Uterus’. What the originators of the name had in mind was probably “Mother of Civilization”, not the physical part that denotes a mother. In Spanish language dictionaries, Cuzco is a rather ... read more

Peru - Introduction No, please do not misunderstand me. When I am writing about ‘Nasca Peru’ or ‘Cuzco Peru’, I am not writing about a rotten guava. (in Marathi or in Konkani.) We had taken a tour of Peru in November 2006. Cuzco was the capital of the Inca empire and Nazca (or Nasca, because nowadays, there is a movement in Peru to change the spellings of these words, which were spelled by the Spaniards and in Spanish language, Z is pronounced as S.) is the place where those mysterious ‘Nazca Lines’ are etched into the desert on a very large scale by a bygone civilization. Peru attracts tourists the way a powerful magnet attracts iron filings. It has everything from a touristy point of view - the ‘Lost city of the Incas’ i.e. Machu ... read more

Thailand - Part II Ayutthaya I was researching the Net during the lunch-hour and came across the famous photo of the “Buddha head in a Bo tree” at Ayutthaya. I was highly intrigued. How this was at all possible? Stone idols do not grow on the trees after all. I called my junior colleague over. “Dev, Just look at this, How this sort of thing came about, I can’t imagine” I said, showing him the photo. He also could not imagine how a stone Buddha head can appear in the trunk of a ‘Bo’ tree. It looked more like a miracle than anything else. We researched further and found a very simple explanation for the photo. The Buddha head was encircled not by the trunk of the tree, but by the ‘arial’ roots of the ... read more

Serendipity in Sri Lanka (2004)-Part II Ratnapura I went to Ratnapura alone on a bus, and at the bus-stand, hired an auto rickshaw for the half day that I was going to spend there, visiting the gems shops and the gems mines and an authentic National Gem Museum (This last is actually a Government-owned scientific museum, not a shop masquerading as one.) Ratnapura is a very lovely village, surrounded by lovely blue hills, and dark, green forests. The gem-mine that I visited looked like our own coconut groves, in the midst of which was the dry pit. The water for washing the dirt came from a pipe, and was diverted away from the pit. The gems mines of Ratnapura are still worked in the most traditional fashion. They are practically deep, dry wells dug into ... read more