Ollantaytambo and the Sacred Valley

Above the Sacred Valley

I started my morning by getting a taxi with all five of Susie’s and my bags to Hotel Cahuide, where we were meant to the meet the others at 9am. I was the first one in the lobby, Susie was messaging me saying she had to wait for her IV to be taken out and was running late.

Then an American mother and daughter called Sam (or Mary) and Katie joined me. A nurse called Ashley, also from California, joined shortly. Mary-kate and Ashley was an easy way to remember their names. A German father and daughter, Jana and Leandro (or Papa Leo) also joined. Everyone else was coming from the airport and like Susie, they were running late.

I had to pack a day/night pack for staying in Ollantaytambo, then hiking Machu Picchu with all my belongings, as they were keeping our main luggage in storage at the hotel in Cusco. So in my tiny backpack I squeezed my pyjamas, toiletries, extra jackets and I wore all my hiking gear. In highsight, I could have easily done without pyjamas. As I packed my toiletries, I had a really strong sense of multiple deja-vu – that I had done this twice already and one of those times I hadn’t taken enough medicine. Was it just a strange coincidence? The Incas did believe in reincarnation, although I’m not sure about foresight.

Susie arrived looking very pale and then had to repack all her bags too. Once everyone was ready, we hopped in the van and sped off to the Sacred Valley. I’m sure everyone is getting sick of me saying it, but the valley looked an awful lot like Queenstown and Otago with the shotover river running down the middle. We had a stop at a llama and alpaca park, where we saw all the different types and got to feed them.

We also learned about traditional dye methods of the Andean people. 

Then we went to a viewpoint where our very enthusiastic guide, Santiago, acted out the journey of the Incas but I couldn’t hear him over the trucks rumbling past.

Next up was a visit to the Inca ruins of Pisac. These incredible terraces were up a very high mountain. This is where the Incas experiemented growing different types of crops and creating hybrids. The believed the sun was God, and that growing plants was a way of worshiping – mixing together God’s sunlight power on earth to create new life. It’s actually a pretty reasonable religious justification when you consider what other religions worship.

We learnt how the Incas would store seeds at these high altitudes to preserve them, and lived on mountain tops to be closer to the heavens. They were a peaceful, educated, hardworking people, similar to Buddhists – anyone could ‘become’ an Inca by living by their principles. They stopped the pre-Incas from doing animal sacrifices (a common misinformed stereotype) and instead focused on agricultural technology, creating all their cities without even having the technology of ‘the wheel’. Their stonework, the way it fits together in a crazy but perfect jigsaw pattern is incredible.

One of the more seemingly-kitsch aspects of the Inca sites are that many of them are in the shape of animals. For example, Pisac was built in the shape of a condor (giant eagle they reverred). You can never see these shapes when you are in the sites, but when you see a photo from a plane or elevated view, the animals become clear. We saw a photo, and sure enough, where we were standing was the Condor’s head, and the terraces down the mountainside created it’s wings.

In the next site we visited at Ollantaytambo city, the agricultural terraces were very clearly shaped like a giant llama sitting down. In was dusk and we watched the light move up a steep mountain cliff face, where you could see two warrior’s faces etched into the mountains. In some instances these formations are natural, but it others, the Inca actually carved them. All their sites are chosen for their positioning to the sun. For example, on the winter solstice each year, the sunrise lights up the llama's eye. The other site we visited faced the sunrise direction of the winter solstice too.

We ended our day with a visit to the Chocolate museum, where we heard all about how to make chocolate from an Australian working there. I had a soy-milk Mayan hot chocolate. You added chili and honey to your taste. Then we went out to a tourist restaurant for some carbo-loading for our big hike to Machu Picchu.

I think they must have mixed up the soy milk with someone else’s order because when I got back to our nice hotel I was very ill. Perhaps that deja-vu this morning had been something more? I was lucky I had packed some re-hydration electrolytes and probiotics in my toilet bag. Neil, our tour guide, had very kindly given Susie and I different rooms so Susie could get a good rest, which proved lucky for me.