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Published: January 24th 2013
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We honestly do not know how to write this day’s blog, or even what to say, but it was not about the day in as much as it was about learning about an amazing culture that existed many years ago. We studied about the Mexican, Central and South American Indians in school, but Steve slept through most of high school…. The Incas are a fascinating and incredibly talented culture, who had engineering, architectural and agricultural skills that rival anything we have accomplished today, especially given most of the ruins we are visiting came during the final 100 years of their cultural apex, prior to the Spanish invasion. What we will find tomorrow at Machu Picchu has us both very excited.
We spent the day with our guide and driver in the Sacred Valley region of Cuzco (which is sort of like a county, as well as the county seat here), which lies just above the ruins of Machu Picchu, which we begin exploring for two days tomorrow. After a clear night, the Andes region showed again how quickly it can change, as we moved between sun and rain in downpours, mild to very gusty winds, but all with
a fairly constant temperature. Our guide explained to us that is has not snowed in this particular region for many years, but her parents remember snow here when she was young, and they also told her about the melting snowcaps of the Andes. There are two season in this region – wet and dry. We are on the cusp of the beginning of the REAL wet part of the wet season – this entire region was destroyed by floods in 2010, and much of the damage remains unfixed today. We have acclimated well to the altitude in our 30 hours here, which is good, because all of our hikes today BEGAN at above 9,000’ and we will actually be going down to about 8,800’ at Machu Picchu.
It is just very hard to put into words what we experienced today, and the photographs do not come close to doing the ruins we toured justice. The stone work is just unbelievable, the layout of the actual cities of the Incan empire, the vast acres of farms and irrigation systems they built, the 500’ carved depiction of their Creator carved into a sheer rock face by hand, the fact that the
geometry of the alignment of their icons, temples, stars and the sun are nothing short of amazing. This was all done with nature in mind and the terraces and buildings were built into the actual mountains, and were designed and constructed to blend into the natural curvature of the mountains. Given there were no power tools in those days, given the fact that their entire population numbered just about 14 million, and given the fact that a vast majority of this work was completed in just about one century, it is truly mind-boggling in 2012 terms. We cannot wait to see what tomorrow brings, and we hope our guide tomorrow is just as excellent as the two we have had to date. More tomorrow.
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