The Peruvian whirlwind, part VIII

26 May 2013

Sleep ins are a distant memory. Today we left our hotel by 7am for a jam packed day of ruins, markets and bus rides.

First stop was a look out near a church we walked by yesterday, with a view encompassing the entire township. Then we moved onto the Planterra community in the hills nearby. The Planterra Foundation is a charity that helps to support the local community, where locals work in tourism and receive 85% of the profits. The other 15% of the profits goes into the community to build things like schools and soccer fields. We were given a tour of the village and demonstrations of weaving and cooking, and we fed camera-shy llamas and alpacas. It was a lovely sunny morning, with a clear blue sky, but was cold enough to entice us tourists to swap our precious cash for super soft, knitted goodies (in our case, a scarf, beanie and bright green poncho).

As we made our way to our next stop of Pisac, the landscape was very pretty, with lush green valleys and rugged hills littered with Incan ruins, little farmhouses and villages. The houses are decorated with two bulls, which represent the residents’ hard work, and a cross to attract God. Crosses also adorn most hill and mountain tops. Our guide told us this was a sneaky way the Spanish converted the hill/mountain worshipping Peruvians to Christianity – diverting their worship from the hill/mountain to the cross on top of it.

The local houses also have two bowls on the roof – one filled with water (to attract blessings from God) and the other filled with chicha (corn beer; to attract celebrations) – and a rainbow flag (the Cusco flag) flying outside. (This gets a bit confusing when rainbow flags represent gays and lesbians back home.)

At the Pisac market, I watched the herbalists sell their wares, all sorts of fresh and dried local plants, from tarpaulins on the ground. Medical care in Peru is expensive and quite bad, and there are very long waiting lists (for the poor, anyway). So these herbalists are the peoples’ GPs, and are kept very, very busy. The rest of the stall holders sold a range of fruit, vegetables, meat, other food and household goods, plus the usual craft, crystals, ornaments, clothes, rugs, jewellery, manchester and souvenirs.

We stopped to play with some smoochy kittens, which were about 12 weeks old. Although they looked pretty scrawny, a little girl was feeding them her yoghurt and her mum was feeding them cooked meat, so coupled with their boisterous personalities, they had a fighting chance.

The ruins at Pisac are spread up the mountainside, across terraces upon which the Incas grew potatoes, beans, corn and other vegetables. The Incas actually came in and took over the area from the locals. The locals thought the Incas were Gods from the sea, and the Incas played on this by living above them and controlling them. They built their temples and houses high up on the mountain so they could look over the villages and valley below. It’s incredible to think they could build these enormous stone structures atop the mountains, dragging heavy rocks up there to do it.

The cemetery was built into the side of a cliff, across a ravine from the villages. Everyday people were buried in holes in the cliff face, crouching down so they could leap into the next life. Rich people were buried in a similar way, but with the entrance to their crypts bricked up. I guess that was to protect them from grave robbers, or they weren't so eager to move on from this world.

We moved on to Ollantaytambo, from where we’d start our trek in the morning. Chris and I joined a couple of the others in our group for an impromptu tour of the town’s ruins (also built up terraces on a hillside) and market.

Ollantaytambo is quite pretty, with several little shops, cafes, restaurants and hotels for trekking tourists. It was built where three valleys meet, in an important Incan location. At one of end of the main street lies a whole complex of Incan ruins, including temples, houses, terraces for crops, food stores and so on. Breezes from the valleys keep the food stores cool in summer, and at certain times on certain days, the sun lights up the faces of Gods that the Incas carved into the hillsides. On other days, the sun lights up the eye of a carving of a llama, ‘awakening it’ and the temple it protects.

Creating this Incan town was an absolute engineering feat. Rocks that are bigger than cars were brought to the area from quarries across one of the valleys. To do this, the Incas put the rocks on a cloth and pushed and pulled the rocks to slide them down a path/ramp, across the valley, then up to the top of the hill on a zigzag path. The Incas left ‘handles’ on the rocks so they could carry and lift them. They also diverted the river in the valley, so they could cross it with the rocks (returning the river’s normal flow later).

The Incas carved rocks so they slotted into each other, without the need for cement or mortar. The buildings were built using certain angles, with spaces between the stones that made up the walls, and different sized rocks used in different places, to prevent the buildings cracking or collapsing during earthquakes. The town’s temple even has expandable joints, so rocks can easily contract or expand (due to their mineral content), and the smaller rocks in the structures do the opposite, to make it stable.

Chris and I ditched the group at dinner time, and found a lovely little not-for-profit style restaurant that had delicious vegetarian food, free wifi and decent Pisco sours. We ate more than our fair share of food, thinking we needed all the energy we could get for coming three days of hiking, then headed back to the hotel for some well-needed rest.

Interesting Peruvian food fact: there are more than 4000 types of potatoes and 42 types of corn in Peru. These are two of the main crops that will grow in the variable temperature there.