Cusco and the Sacred Valley


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South America » Peru » Cusco » Sacred Valley
April 16th 2009
Published: April 16th 2009
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And so began the longest journey of our lives. It started better than we had anticipated when the bus finally arrived; looking rather like a real bus, rather than the tin can we'd been expecting. However, we saw the result of our cost-cutting almost immedietley; limited leg room, burning radiators overcompensating for the cold outside, and "50 First Dates" in Spanish did not bode well (Adam Sandler is even creepier in spanish.) And of course we'll never forget the sound of a mother and child vomiting in sequence all night. We got about 3 hours sleep each and arrived in Cusco at about 10 am the next day, our bags smelling oddly of fish.

We had decided on our hostel beforehand and so went straight up to downtown Cusco to get a room. The hostel didn{t quite live up to it's reviews however, and we were shocked by the price - a combination of Easter Week price hikes and our newest guidebook being nearly 2 years old. Although we did decide to stay one night as they offered a very reasonable price for a tour of the Sacred Valley for the next day.
So for the remainder of the day we pootled about Cusco and ate food - which was pretty and yummy.

Cusco is something of a tourist hub, but has managed to retain much of it's old Colonial/Andean charm, mostly down to very clear aesthetic rules - there are no garish shop fronts or advertisements - for instance all the ATM signs are on little wooden plagues. However the idle is broken annoyingly frequently by the hordes of street sellers lining the most popular streets, offering everything from chewing gum and photos with baby llamas to cocaine and suspect massages.
Cusco is also the old capital of the Inca Empire - the greatest civilisation in South America before colonial times - and as such has dozens of sights within the city and around, especially the Sacred Valley; which we went to see the day after our arrival. We almost missed it though as we rushed out for breakfast before the bus came - to my major embarrassment.

The tour would take us to 2 of the most major sites in the valley as well as some village markets and smaller sites. Our guide was the self-proclaimed "Sexy" Karen who consistently made jokes about her single status, but then assuring us she was indeed Catholic. We drove for about 30 minutes to Pisac and the ruins that loom above it which share the same name. The ruins rest on the peak of a small mountain on a corner of the valley, the site was a ceremonial complex mainly used for worship of the Inca gods, no one but priests and aristocrats were allowed on the site. If thieves were caught at the site they would be thrown into a pit of rattlesnakes; if after a day they were still alive the gods had clearly forgiven them, but as Sexy Karen pointed out, no one ever survived. This is why however the Inca empire had no need for jails.

Like all the other sacred Inca sites the masonry is exceptional, each stone is perfectly carved to fit with all the others around it so that no lime or mortar is needed, the walls are just stone on stone yet many of the sites, especially the foundations built on top on by the spanish, have outlasted many of the colonial buildings.

One nice thing we left with was that after the Spanish invasion and the collapse of the Inca society some locals from Pisac town built a house right in the middle of the site as a kind of "up yours" to the old order.

And so on we went back to the bus with Sexy Karen and onto Urubamba for a buffet lunch. We realised we were lucky that we were going with a smaller more amateurish tour as it meant all our logistics were much quicker, meaning we got everywhere ahead of the huge coach loads of baseball cap-wearing americans.

From there we moved on again to the best thing of the day: the Fortress Temple and Village of Ollantaytambo. The quiet village is totally dominated by the massive terraced construction that spreads down from the mountain side on the villages north edge (so that the sun always beams above it). The village is very pretty and many of the houses are original Inca constructions. The ruins are immensely impressive, with huge terraces stepping down from the top of the complex and massive polished stones (one approximately weighs 50 tons) making the huge altar at it´s summit. The stones were dragged from a quarry high up on a mountain across the valley and were dragged to the site (the Incas did not have the wheel). The fortress was so ambitious that it was never actually finished, despite 120 years of construction before the Spanish arrived, and this means there is little archaeogical evidence of what was actually practiced here. There are also lots of large stones lying around the site called the ´tired stones´, stones that never made the construction.

On the other side of Ollantaytambo are more Inca constructions, store houses for the village below that were positioned exactly so that they would be battered constantly by the cold valley wind to keep their food refrigerated. Also by the warehouses on the mountain is the face of the overseer of the Inca lands.

From this massive site we moved on the much more quaint, yet still fascinating, village of Chinchero - the place where the Incas believed the rainbow was created. The village sits in a very bizarre landscape high up in the mountains in a kind of minature altiplano, the quilt blanket fields and rolling hills could almost be English if it were not for the brightly coloured dress of the locals and the vast surrounding mountains. There was an impressive temple dedicated to the planet Venus here before the Conquistadors flattened it to build a church on it´s site, the foundations are still visible however in and outside the church and are just another example of the brilliance on inca architecture. The church itself is a very early example of the strange version of Andean Catholicisim. The church has no real european design template as the locals had no knowledge of the history of the Catholic church and so is a mish-mash of spanish and andean design. The religious art in particular is very obviously peruvian (the faces, skin tone and dress) and the style formed the great Cusco school of artists in the 17th century.
One particularily interesting story was that of the great Andean artist Zapater when he was commisioned to paint the last supper for Cusco´s cathedral. He was intructed to paint Jesus and the disciples European, but as a sneaky protest painted Judas with the face of Francesco Pizarro - the great Peruvian Conquistador. Oh and I (Tom) bought a silly wolly hat.


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17th April 2009

I can't seeeee your pictuuuuures---! Whaaaaa!!! Sounding jawsome. I'm so glad you're both still alive. As Aristotle once said; May the seeds of your loins rest peacefully in the belly of your woman. Boomshanka.
25th May 2009

I can't see the pictures either :( Although Tom's brilliant description has conjured up the fires of my imagination sufficiently well.

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