Mountain Biking

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This is an experience, if challenging yourself to the extreme and visiting exciting and wonderful places this is something you must do when in Cuzco, we travelled by local bus, chickens and all to a bus stop in the middle of no where, unloaded the bikes and headed off, at first it was very pleasant a nice gravel road through villages and onto Moray,( pronounced morraya) this was truly amazing, It is hard to describe so have attached pics, it is terraces forming circles, declining, our guide explained that the Incans built this as a kind of labratory to cultivate plants and seeds to supply to their communities, the area in the centre was filled with water to create a micro climate and is always warm,

After visiting Moray, we headed to a village called meraya, (not sure of the spelling for this) this is a quiet little vilage which was around during the Incan times, above the dooorways to the houses were stone carvings, which symbolise the proffession of the residenses who live inside, on our journey to this village we had the most magnificent views, to the right were snow capped mountains, and to the left was only what I could describe as a miniture grand canyon, to get there we had to travel a trectorous road with sheer drops off the side, not for the unskilled or faint hearted.

After we left the village we headed to these amazing salt pools, the journey was daunting to say the least, sheer rock faces and jumps with an extremely rocky terrain which made braking impossible with-out coming off, very exciting, as our guide explained the salt pools were created by hand and terraced so the water flow from each pool would create a more intense salt as it passed to the bottom one, this looked like something from the moon,

All up the trip took about 8 hours and covered nearly 35 kms, was the most extreme experience and from what the guide and local tourists have told me this was far more extreme than the most dangerous road in Bolivia.

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