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Published: October 13th 2009
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Our Inca trail tour group visited a village within walking distance from Urubamba, a main town in the Sacred valley. We reached the town by foot from the Urubamba bus terminal within 45 minutes finding a few houses on either side of the one main dirt street. We went around the back of the first house that we visited to see how the occupants of the house made chocolate. Cacao is grown locally and the women demonstrating put some roasted cacao with some sugar into a manual grinder (that looked like the manual meat grinder that I bought Dan years ago), where the 2 ingredients were mixed and grounded together. The grinded output was then hand pressed into a metal mould which would be put into the sun to sit for a few hours to solidify. Simple! We got to try a few samples with some containing peanuts. The flavour was strong, but not unpleasant if you like dark chocolate and it gave you a real caffiene kick! We bought a peanut one to supplement our energy levels on the Inca trail and also a few plain ones as gifts for our porters.
The next house in the town that
we visited had a red bag on display at the top of a long pole. This is a sign that the occupier of the house sells Chicha, which was the purpose of our visit. Chicha is a beer or fermented drink typically made from corn that has been brewed ever since Inca times. Originally virgins made the beer, as the corn that had been soaked had to be grinded and the best way to grind was to have virgins chew it! Once the corn is masticated, it was spat into warm water where it would ferment. In modern times, the women don't chew the corn, but it is still traditional for women to make the drink. An older women made the drink at the house that we visited. She demonstrated how she use straw to filter the drink and also how she processed the drink from beginning to end by still using very primitive means. We all had a taste of the drink, with most people screwing up their nose once the liquid hit their tongues. It leaves a sour after taste in the mouth and wasn't something that I would like to drink again, especially after seeing how and
where it was made! Dan gave it a good go and so the lady got out a big glass cup especially for him to drink more. Our tour guide really liked the beverage and had 2 large cups by himself before we headed off to see a man about his pottery.
A local man showed us his spinning wheel, which he rotated using a wheel by his feet. He demonstrated how to create an Inca style mug, before taking everyone into his painting room, discussing the whole process from beginning to end of how he created his pottery. He didn't have his own kiln and we were told that there is a communal one in the village that people share the use of. I couldn't watch the whole demonstration in the small stuffy room, as I was still recovering from a bout of food poisoning from dinner the night before at a restaurant in Cusco. We were taken into a showroom of completed pieces, where he made a few sales to people in our group. There were possibly a couple of items that we would have liked to buy, but thinking logically we knew that we wouldn't be able
to get them back to Australia without breaking them.
After walking back to Urumbamba, we took a bus to Ollantaytambo, an Inca town in the Sacred Valley that still has ruins close to town and Inca design still in the architecture of the buildings. I went straight to bed without dinner to try to get well, to allow me to trek the Inca trail the next day. As much as I had really wanted to see the town that we were staying in, I wanted to trek the trail more, so the choice to go to bed early had to be made. Dan went out exploring the markets, buying me an Alpaca scarf for the trek and eating out with the members of our Intrepid group that evening.
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