7. Peru - Cuzco and The Sacred Valley

Plaza de Armas, Cuzco

After two months or so away my hair was looking like the secret love child of Stan Laurel and Art Garfunkel so I ended up with a Cuzco haircut which included the wielding of a cut-throat razor.  We do have hazardous activity insurance so that was OK.  We have really moved to higher altitude

now at a bit over 10,000 feet and bar a few ups and downs we’ll be at 8,000 to 14,000 feet for the next few weeks.  No symptoms to speak of apart from hills and stairs being more difficult, puff-wise.   However, bags of crisps and fizzy drinks bought at lower altitudes are interesting.  With the lower air pressure bags of crisps swell to bursting point and fizzy drinks are positively explosive.

one of those Inca walls

Cuzco was a city we really enjoyed, well the centre anyway.  This is the Americas longest continuously inhabited city and is surrounded by archaeological sites in what’s known as the Sacred Valley.  Cuzco (also Cusco or Qoosq’o in the local Quechua language) had been an important Inca city and had some of the amazing stonework for which the Inca are famous.  These walls are constructed of huge stone blocks, many roughly rectangular which to my untutored eye look like granite and which are fitted together without mortar.  They’re all neatly chamfered and so tightly fitted that a playing card wouldn’t fit in the gaps.  To be honest the quality of construction makes a really good dry-stone wall look like the work of a complete beginner.  Fortunately these walls are so good that in many places the Spaniards just used them as the bases of their own buildings when they conquered and destroyed the Inca civilisation.

 

parade for the Immaculate Conception

Cuzco Cathedral's Last Supper with Guinea Pig main course.
It really would take a miracle to make that feed thirteen people

I had the unique experience in Cuzco of ordering a Cuba Libre before dinner at a restaurant and was advised not to by the waiter “because the rum is too weak”.

Bear in mind that all this stonework and buildings by the Inca were achieved by a culture without the wheel or writing, or indeed the knowledge of forming a self supporting arch.  There was a form of documentation for accounting purposes called Quipu which was a complicated system of knotted cords of various lengths tied to and hanging down from a horizontal cord.  None of the other American civilisations had writing or wheels either except for one tribe in Mexico who had a form of writing and one tribe, also in Mexico but I don’t know if it was the same tribe, who had wheels but only on some toys.  I checked out ‘wheel’ on the jolly old interweb and it seems that many innovations, like agriculture or writing had a variety of locations where the ideas developed independently.  The wheel however appears to have been invented in just one place in the central east’s Sumerian civilisation and the use spread from a single location.  So, perhaps just one clever dick, who wasn’t quite clever enough to patent the idea.

one of Laura's Quipu pieces
-about four feet top to bottom

Quite by chance we came across a permanent exhibition of modern fabric artworks in the most amazing intricate patterns and shapes.  The artist was a fella called Laura and he is apparently a ‘Living National Treasure’.  Wonderful pieces which reminded us of the work of Dale Chihuly, the glass sculptor.

the famous twelve angles stone

We had decided not to stay at the Hotel Ruinas and our chosen hotel was only about 300 yards from the main square, the Plaza de Armas (every town’s main square around here is called the Plaza de Armas).  It was in a hilly area called San Blas and we had views across the old town from our room.  Between us and the main square was the most spectacular piece of Inca wall with a famous (for wall fans) twelve angles cut stone.  I’m not sure if anyone really knows how the stones were worked although there are plenty of, shall we say alternative ideas.  We looked online and one very sensible sounding chap was explaining that it was all very simple.  Briefly, all these walls were 


constructed by an as yet unknown civilisation over 11,000 years ago with just bags of sand which by the process of some huge also unknown heat catastrophe were all turned to stone.  Sounds like the perfect way to build a cheap wall between the USA and Mexico.  

Cuzco old town from our hotel room

Street hawkers here specialize in garish paintings and/or massages and every few yards we’d be approached and offered one or the other.  Massage touts who were always young girls sometimes stood around in pairs or threes all trying to persuade us.  The paintings, which would be a very

"that's right, tell them they can
 have a short walk or a long walk"

suitable souvenir to take home for someone you didn’t like were almost all pretty awful.  The approaches were quite light hearted and un-pushy though.  One conversation with a painting seller where we were trapped sitting on a bench went as follows.  “No, gracias” “perhaps later senor ?” ”No, gracias” “perhaps tomorrow, next week, never ?” so I said never and he just laughed and wandered away.  The more disturbing hawkers to us were the women in traditional dress wandering around with what appeared to be unusually docile and possibly drugged tiny lambs.  The intention is of course a photograph and until after the photograph an unspecified fee.  Some women lead a larger and groomed Alpaca.

You just have to haggle, from taxis to woolly jumpers and even though you know that at too low a price they just won’t sell you that jumper you still get the look that says “you swine, my children won’t eat tonight”.  Heather did get the jumper and was short-changed one Sol (about 20 pence).  Attempting the short-change happened several times that we noticed and it was of course always ‘a terrible mistake’.  Naturally we don’t know how many times it was successful. 

Alpaca

There was one shop we saw which had what could be called a mixed marketing message.  It was an ‘alternative’ treatment type place.  The sign offered ‘chakra balancing’, ‘cleansing’, ‘soul readings’, ‘crystal readings’, ‘coca leaf readings’ etc…….. and hallucinogenic drugs.  Another, a restaurant offered “Typical Peruvian Food”, Cuy (Guinea Pig), Alpaca, Pizza, Fondue, thus confirming my earlier blog’s definition of Peru fusion food.

Cuzco from Sacsayhuaman

Cuzco is set in a valley, rising steeply on all but one side and that end of the valley has a snow-capped volcano sitting on the horizon.  On the outskirts and high above the city is a large set of Inca remains called Sacsayhuaman, sexy woman in English pronunciation and this was very impressive.  The same huge stones cut to fit without mortar with a steep drop on one side and a triple rampart

of stone work on the other.  There was what looked like an arena with low walls and gaps in the rocks near it where blocks of stone had been cut out.  Now this was a puzzle to me because some of the holes were straight sided for the four external cuts, two vertical, two horizontal but the rear face was also a flat cut.  I can’t see why they would smooth the rear face or be able to cut it flat to begin with.  Sacsayhuaman was looted for building stone by the Spaniards and it’s possible to see some re-use in Cuzco.  It’s obvious when you can see beautifully cut stones built up in a complete mess.  It’s believed that only about 20% of the original structures of Sacsayhuaman remain.

Sacsayhuaman triple ramparts

Further out from Cuzco in the sacred valley we went on a couple of trips.  The most interesting included a place called Moray which had a series of pits perhaps four hundred feet deep and a

stone walled terracing in a Moray pit

quarter of a mile or more across.  Each of the giant bowls have stone wall faced terracing all the way down, rather like a huge amphitheatre, with different depths and types of soil in different areas.  As all the different directions and different soil types would produce a whole variety of micro-climates this is believed to be an Incan crop test centre.  I can’t imagine what else fits the bill here but how could they remember which areas were optimal for each crop from year to year without writing down the results.  I suppose it could be recorded as accounting with a sort of Quipu spreadsheet.

one of the Moray pits

We had been thinking we wouldn’t visit Machu Picchu because of the crowds and what we’d heard about the walk to it being the Andrex Trail.  However, everyone we know who has been says it is wonderful and not to be missed.  So our laissez-faire travelling style looked as if it was going to backfire.  We read in various places how booked up it gets with a limited number of visitors a day allowed in and that the only way to get there is by train which also gets booked up.  You must book in advance was the message.  Oh !  So instead of online we walked to the Machu Picchu ticket office in Cuzco to enquire and were told there were plenty of places – when did we want to go.  We were advised to book the train first at the office 50 yards away.  Train tickets ? Plenty, when do you want to go ?  The train has to be boarded at a station solely for foreigners and the train is only for foreigners.  Surprise, surprise, the tickets are expensive but Machu Picchu is a story for the next blog. 

the 2019 Cusco Special Edition VW Camper (limited supplies)