Machu Picchu!

On Saturday morning, we took off for a 2-day trip to Machu Picchu. I have to admit, on the one hand, it´s such a tourist trap that for a short while we talked about not going, but on the other hand, it´s one of those places in the world where I´ve wanted to go for as long as I can remember. And there´s a reason why there are so many tourists from all over the world--it truly is an incredible place and I´m so glad we went. But yes, it was quite the racket, too. If you don´t sign up a year in advance to be on the 400 person limit to hike the Incan Trail, then you have to take the only train there. And being the monopoly, they can charge whatever they want. Welcome back to USA prices! But oh well, it´s just one weekend.

The train turned out to be a very nice one, and kind of fun:
The scenery from the train was beautiful:
We arrived in Aguas Calientes, the town below Machu Picchu, which turned out to be in one of the most beautiful places that I could possibly imagine. It was surrounded by sheer faces of mountains falling into the jungle and weaving river below:
We took a walk through the jungle the first day there since we had a lot of time (you have to pay a lot daily to enter Machu Picchu, so we decided to save that for the second day). There were pretty birds in coffee trees:
And beautiful tropical flowers:
Bridges built into the cliff, and a dog that we would see the next day on the top of the mountain:
Although we were led to believe that Aguas Calientes would be quite a dumpy and overcommercialized tourist trap, it actually had quite the charm in my opinion. Yes, it had some trashy spots, and yes, it had too many pizza places serving the same thing and waiters chasing you down the streets with their menus, but it was nonetheless breathtaking, nestled in the canyon:
And of course, the namesake of the town is the thermal baths. OK, the water was a little dirty looking, but we went in and had a wonderful time. And again, I´ve never bathed in a more beautiful place (it even rivaled the hot springs of Uyuni):
And of course there were the requisite dogs. This one almost could have given the chinese crested a run for its money in the ugliest dog competition. So ugly it was almost cute:
So the next morning, we woke up at 3:30 am to walk up the hill and catch the sunrise. The idea being that we might be able to beat the busses up the hill. Everyone else who got up that early apparently was trying to race to the ticket booth to get the very limited 400 tickets daily to Huayna Picchu, the steep mountain above the famous ruins. It has a very steep switchbacking staircase built into it with some steel cables to keep you from falling to your death. Not my idea of fun, so we weren´t in any particular hurry, except to get up to Machu Picchu early. There are not many pictures of this hike because it was pitch dark, but fortunately a Christian shrine was lit up to mark the trailhead:
And when we finally got to the top (it´s basically a very steep staircase that goes up about 1000 feet, shortcutting the switchbacking road to the top), we were met by a long line of tourists waiting to get in. This is about the front tenth of the line.
Although there was not much of a sunrise to see there (The sun wouldn´t rise above the mountains until 9:00 or so anyways), the cool morning brought a fog over the whole place, which brought us this first view of the ruins:
We later made it up to the famous view point near the watchtower for a misty view of Machu Picchu with Huayna Picchu towering behind it (the taller mountain in the backround with a stairway going up it [you can´t see the stairway, but just try to imagine it]):
There were views of the mountins through the windows of the watchtower:
This is the watchtower, which is at the top end of the ruins:
The clouds kept coming and going that morning:
Just to be honest about what the adventure was really like, many of the pictures were chosen from locations and times when there weren´t many people visible, or they were far away. But this is actually a good representation of what many of the more popular areas of the site looked like:
There were also gardens with orchids throughout the place:
And incredibly steep terraces falling into the clouds below:
The bread that we brought for lunch that day was not your good ol´ USA bread; without sufficient preservatives, binding agents, and softeners, our Peruvian loaf was reduced to crumbles in our backpacks. We had breadcrumbs with cheese and salami for lunch:

During our 2-hour guided tour in the morning, it was still cloudy but beautiful.
One of the most important buildings there was called the temple of the sun. It was the only round building, and the stonework was a lot tighter:
Beneath it was an underground temple that was carved into pure stone with some very interesting stonework fitted into the cracks:
We got to meet some of the groundskeepers who were mowing the lawns. They were very people friendly:
They were much better at mowing steep and difficult-to-reach terraces compared to your typical power mower (I had my camera on a funny color setting, but I guess it ended up interesting in this case):
Later in the afternoon, the skies cleared up and we braved the hot sun again for another shot at the viewpoint. I don´t have my software here to flatten out the fisheye, but we used it for some wide angle shots. Here´s one of the two of us:
Some other views from within the complex:
Here´s Kate looking out over the mountains and valley below:
And another view with the fisheye to see how Machu Picchu is perched in the saddle between two steep mountains:
After a full day there we returned for a tired train and bus ride back home. We did take the bus to the bottom of the hill to maximize our time at the site. We returned home late that night, tired and sore. It´s actually Monday night now, and we did another trip this afternoon after classes, but I will save that for another blog post later, since it´s getting late here. Cheers!

Sexy woman and the navel of the world

¡Hola amigos! Sorry it´s been so long since we´ve written anything here, but we truly have been busy over the past few weeks. I´ll try to start more or less from when we arrived in Cusco and show some of the mundane aspects of life here before moving on to some of the gems of Cusco.

First of all, just so you all know we are in good hands, here are some pictures of where we are living. As I mentioned in the last post, we´re staying with Maike, the director of the Academia where we are studing. We have a very nice, clean, and modern room:
Here´s the view from outside the room. You can see that most of the yards are surrounded by walls and gates for security and privacy:

Then there´s our spanish school, Academia Latinoamerica de Español. Like most buildings in Cusco and in any of the colonial cities, the buildings have inner plazas that offer respite from the traffic, noise, and smell of the streets. This is our sunny plaza where we hang out during our half hour break. That´s Kate with the wide brimmed hat:

Although the patio is hot in the late morning sun, the classrooms are cold all day long (there is no heating anywhere, and recall we are at about 11,000 feet elevation or so). Here´s my classroom with my classmate Natalia, from Brazil, and our teacher Jose. The class and teacher changes each week, but this week it´s just me and Natalia in the class, which makes for a pretty nice teacher-student ratio. Last week we had four students in the class. I think five is the max here. Jose is laughing about the spanish slang book I brought to class. We´ve been learning a lot of conversational spanish and slang for the first couple hours of class, which is really helpful for everyday situations.

On our walk home, all the students in the secondary schools are getting out for lunch (which is usually a 2 hour break for everyone). They all pack onto little minibuses and we have to squeeze through the people traffic and dodge crazy taxi drivers on our walk back home from school:

A couple days ago there were protests in the Cusco district of Peru. Some people are upset about the taxes and policies of gas processing and exporting here. There is a big gas industry from reserves in the amazon forest part of the district. The march shut down our street on the way back home from school one day. Other travelers in other cities had troubles getting to their destinations, but it didn´t affect us here:

We also went out to the disco last friday night. It started as salsa dancing but after 10 it turned into a big gringo party that lasted all night. I think we got home at the reasonable time of maybe 2am:

On Saturday, we had an afternoon tour of some of the important parts of Cusco and the nearby archeological ruins. Here´s the downtown part of the city from the top of one of the adjacent hills--you can also see how they write and draw on the hillsides:

And a close up view of the main plaza in the city center:

Here´s the jesuit church in the plaza that was built in competition with the catholic cathederal on the other side of the plaza. We had a wonderful tour of the inside of the cathederal as well, but you are not allowed to photograph the inside of the churches here, so all I can do is describe it. The churches here definitely rival the best of the european churches that I have seen. The stonework and architecture is beautiful, and all the altars fill the entire wall with detailed carvings plated in gold and decked out with virgins and saints encrusted in jewels.

Cusco was basically built on top of the ancient capitol of the incan empire. The name roughly translates to the center of the world, or the navel of the world, depending on whom you ask. You can see the foundations of many of the buildings in town are ancient incan walls. Unfortunately, I don´t have pictures of those walls yet. The first thing we saw on our tour this weekend that was truly unique to this area, however, was Qoricancha, which is a spanish colonial buildign that was built on and around an Incan temple, and in this case, the temple was preserved or rebuilt within the spanish building. It was one of the more important Incan temples in the area, evident through the extremely careful stonework, which was saved for the most important buildings. Here you can see the Spanish arches around one of the incan buildings:

And from the inside of the incan building you can see how careful the stonework was. There are absolutely no gaps between the stones, no mortar, just perfectly fitting stones. This was all made with hand tools of bronze and stone. As our guides always pointed out to us, this work would be extremely difficult to make with modern tools. Most of the Incan temples have the niches that you see in this picture, in which offerings were placed:

This is the view of Qoricancha from the main street in Cusco. You can also see the different architecture styles here too. In addition to the later spanish buildings built over and around the incan buildings, you can see a few different types or eras of incan stonework:

Next, we went on the hill above town to see some other important incan ruins. We started in Q´enqo, in which there was an underground temple that was basically carved into solid stone. Our guide showed us an altar that was used for ceremonies and sacrifices:

The next site was Pukapukara, which had some beautiful landscapes:

On our way to the incan springs of Tambomachay, the pathway and ruins were lined with people selling weavings and artwork. This is a really common site here. Around Cusco, they are especially persistent with us gringos (this is one of the most visited cities in south america, so the locals know where the money is). You really learn to not make eye contact when they run up to you with items they´re selling, otherwise they will not ever leave you alone:

The last site we visited was one of the most famous in the Cusco area, Saqsayhuaman. It is not just famous for being mispronounced by gringos as "sexy woman;" it also has a magical air about it. It was my first taste of really experiencing something overwhelming and otherworldly here. The size of this ancient city, the size and the precision of the stones, and just the beauty and the layout of everything was hard to grasp in the hour or so we had there.

The picture above may not do the site justice, as it´s hard to see how big those stones are. So Kate and I posed with our friends from the school, Sarah and Bas. The stones were also warm from the sun, and when the sun sets here, it gets really cold really fast. I don´t know if you can see it well in this picture, as I currently have a computer screen that doesn´t work very well, but those are 50 ton stones that all fit together as if they grew together there. You could hardly fit a piece of paper between the stones, and to think, they were all carved with stone and bronze-age tools. Not to mention the fact that the stones were transported up to 30 miles from their quarry. Nobody knows exactly how the incans were able to carve the stones to fit together they way they do. Each one is individually carved, some have multiple sides and inside corners fitting around other rocks. I could just stare at them all day and wonder how they were built, and why anyone would put so much energy into such precision.

Our next tour was all day of Sunday, a tour of the Sacred Valley. The first stop was an overlook of the valley with the requisite ladies with alpacas and llamas hanging around and selling artwork:

On the way to the incan site above the city and market of Pisac, there were a lot of landslides and boulders in the road, but there was always at least one functioning lane:

I was not expecting the size, extent, and development of the ruins we saw that day. I think in my mind there was Machu Piccu, and then there would be a bunch of other ruins and things hardly recognizable as incan cities. Each place we went to, however, was more or less like what I had been expecting of Machu Piccu and I was truly overwhelmed. The site above Pisac had this city adjacent to a major burial site, which is not shown. The burial site was basically hundreds or thousands of caves carved into an adjacent cliff. We didn´t even get to visit the part of the city shown because of time limitations and a very talkative and repetetive guide:

Below the ruins of the city were extensive terraces built into the steep hillsides. You can see some of the buildings built into the hills between the terraces for scale, but the terraces were much bigger than I would have imagined--perhaps 10-15 feet high on each level--in any case, you could easily break a leg falling off one:

The next site, Ollantaytambo, was even more impressive. It was built into a very scenic canyon with dizzyingly steep terraces and a dizzying amount of people visiting it:

There were trails cut into the cliff faces connecting different buildings and different parts of the city. And did I mention there were lots of tourists? At least they are useful to show off the scale of the place:

One of the more impressive parts of Ollantaytambo was what was known as the temple of the sun. You can´t see the face of it in this picture very well, but it was made of these 15-20 foot high monoliths of stone that, once again, fit together tighter than a jigsaw puzzle. There were patterns carved into the front of the temples, although they were weathered from time.

The upper terraces around the temple were made of those famous fitted stones again. I just couldn´t stop taking pictures of them:

On the way to the next site, we drove out of the valley and back up into one of the high plains. You could see the villages in the valley below, surrounded by snow capped peaks:

The last site of our Sunday trip was the incan city of Chinchero, which now houses a big artisan community. They put on a demonstration for us of dying alpaca wool with different natural dyes from native plants and bugs:

Afterwards, we went to the ruins around the city right after sunset. In the fields around the ruins there were kids flying kites. I think they were showing off for us, because they kept running in front of me while I was taking pictures, a feature that I took advantage of:

That sums up the pictures for now, but rest assured: we have thousands more stored in our cameras. Kate has to write a paper for her spanish class because she is taking a university class for credits. Since I´m not working for credits and I´m pretty much done at noon, I signed up for private lessons in the afternoon this week. So our daily schedule this week has been school from 8:30-12:40, a long lunch at home until about 3:00 that includes long conversations with Maike and Sarah (in spanish, of course), and then we head out for studying and private lessons until 6:30, after which we meet with some students for dinner and drinks, and then head to bed. That´s why I haven´t had time to do much updating here lately. I purposefully left one afternoon free of lessons--right now--which I´m using to get updated and Kate´s using to work on her paper, which will be on the geology of Peru (and has to be written in spanish). We were actually going to go salsa dancing tonight, but we´re so tired and so behind on the blog and her paper, that we´re skipping the dance class, which starts right now. It´s just a free beginner lesson at the school, but we did it last week and it was fun, but tiring.

Our next plans are to visit Machu Piccu this weekend, which basically takes the whole weekend since it´s quite a few hours from Cusco. We also want some quality time to hike up to and see the ancient city. We know to expect thousands upon thousands of people there, but I think we got a taste of what´s to come at Ollantaytambo this weekend. It was a bit of a zoo, but the site was so amazing that it was worth every second of the visit and every inconvenience of the tourist traffic. After all, there´s a reason why there are thousands of people from all over the world here. However, we are still hoping to do a trek to Choquequirao after the following weekend, which will be during our last week here. Choquequirao is similar to Machu Piccu, but much harder to get to (a 3 day hike round trip minimum, no roads), so there are significantly fewer tourists. We´re still figuring out the details of booking the trip, since we need a guide and usually you get a cook and a horse or mule or two to carry the whole kitchen and tents and stuff, so we need to plan carefully. It´s hard to believe that we only have one more week here in Cusco after this weekend. Three weeks (plus a week for travel afterwards) in Cusco sounded like such a long time when we planned our trip, but now it seems like hardly enough time to even scratch the surface here.

Ok, I think that just about sums it up for us now. We hope to be able to share Machu Piccu stories next week, cross your fingers for us that everything works more or less as planned!

Getting to know Cuzco

Hi all, no new photos yet, but I´ll give a quick update. We arrived in Cuzco early on Sunday morning after a sleepless night on the bus due to the high altitude of the pass we were crossing (although it was probably otherwise the most comfortable and least stinky bus ride yet). Our host "family" is actually the director of the spanish school and she has a few extra guest rooms, so always seems to have guests in her house. Kate and I are living there with Sarah from England who´s a language teacher. Although it´s not quite the family experience that we had in Bolivia, Maike, our host mother, has been a really great host. We have already spent a lot of time together at meals and in the evenings, and she speaks Spanish very patiently with us, so we´re getting a lot of practice outside of school. With patient speakers like her, we really get the feeling that our spanish is superb--it´s only when we return to the real world of slang and fast speakers that it gets frustrating again.

School started again yesterday for us, though the first day was mostly orientation. Both of us have good classes and we´ve already learned a lot in the first two days. During our orientation yesterday, we got a tour through the city of Cuzco, which we are very excited about having almost a month to explore. Cuzco was built around the heart of the incan empire, so there is some amazing history, archeology, and architecture here. The center of the city is all in old spanish colonial style, but it was built on top of an incan city, so a lot of the stones around the city were borowed (pilfered) from the original incan buildings. There are amazing jigsaw-puzzle-like stone walls all around town that are original or rebuilt incan walls. The city is surrounded by incan ruins, which we have not yet had a chance to visit. Instead, we´ve spent our evenings exploring around town. It is touristy as we had anticipated, but it is really beautifully maintained and not over-the-top overflowing with tourist trash like Prague was. The city just has a beauty and energy about it that is hard to describe. We purposefully have gone without cameras the first few days to just enjoy and absorb the sites. We will, however, get a camera out soon and start posting pictures. But since we have so much time here, we want to take our time.

Our school also has extracurricular classes, all in spanish of course, but for fun. Tomorrow night we´re taking salsa dance lessons and we just got out of a class on how to make a pisco sour, the national alcoholic drink. It´s a very well-rounded education we are receiving. We´re thinking of all our friends and family and home and wishing everybody well! Adios!