Day 1 - South America seems to be our jam lately as our last few trips have knocked Argentina, Brazil and Ecuador off the “to do” list, and we are now headed to Peru for two weeks. The first thing most people ask when we say Peru is “are you going to Machu Picchu?” And to that, of course the answer is yes. But truth be told, the primary reason I am going to Peru is to visit the SkyLodge. All I will say for now, is that I have friends who regularly send me oddball adventures, and this one has been on my bucket list for about 5 years. Since Covid pushed all our other trips back, we are finally doing it! SkyLodge is happening days 4-5. Stay tuned.
First, to address the sadness of this trip. We said goodbye to Thorkey a few days before leaving and while we had a wonderful two weeks in the country planned for her, she went downhill so fast, that we had no choice but to say goodbye. We know that Thorkey lived the most amazing dog life, and she was healthy and happy for almost every day of it. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of her and miss her, but getting out of the house for two weeks is the absolute best medicine since every minute we spend in our house is a reminder.
Normally I would say our flights are uneventful, but this time around, I nearly had a throw down with a man in the row behind me. Our six-hour leg from Houston to Lima was in the evening from about 6pm-midnight with no time change. A few hours in, I went to the lav and when I got back into my seat and belted up, the guy behind me pushes my seat, leans forward, and starts yelling at me in two different languages. Apparently, he was trying to sleep with his head on the back of my chair and when I sat down, it jostled him. And apparently, I had moved several times in my seat prior to that, also disturbing him. I had no idea what he was talking about, so
I proceeded to exist in my seat the way any normal person does. Over the course of the next few minutes, he got in the aisle twice and violently shoved my seat forward several times. So, I stood up and basically asked him what the heck (I didn’t use the word heck) his problem was. He was beyond distraught and was like I’m going to make the next few hours miserable for you if you don’t stop. Having literally no idea what I was supposed to differently as I had just been sitting in my seat watching movies on my iPad, we argued a bit, I told him he was a crazy person and I had no idea what he was so upset about, and then I sat back down. Luckily, that was the end of it. Maybe I’d feel a little bit bad if it was 3am, but it was like 8:30. Oh well. We landed, got to our hotel by 1am, and crashed hard.
Day 2 – Another travel day, luckily drama free. We had an early afternoon flight from Lima to Cusco. One thing I’ve noticed so far, is that fewer people speak English than we are used to. Damon has been taking Duo Lingo Spanish lessons and he is definitely improving. Sadly, he has not gotten to the Duo Lingo lesson on ordering airport fast food. We were at some chicken place that didn’t have a menu we could point to. Instead, it had digital pictures behind the cashier as a menu, but the pictures rotated. So we get up to order and I’m pointing at the wall for a grilled chicken and the picture kept changing. Eventually we got our order in and tried to pay with a credit card. The woman holds up her credit card machine and Damon starts swatting it with the card’s chip. Nothing is happening and the woman is looking at him like he is a lunatic. She takes the card and puts it in the machine. The worst part, she and the woman next to her start making fun of us, and then another lady the next register over joins in, so we try to laugh it off – yes, stupid tourists…
Peru has not lifted Covid restrictions yet, so there is still a double-mask mandate for airplanes. Yes, double masks. That was fun. We landed in Cusco about 3:30pm. Cusco is at over 11,000 feet in elevation, so recommendations are to try to get to lower ground ASAP to acclimate. We had a driver meet us and drive us the 1:40 minutes to Ollantaytambo in the Sacred Valley – at a mere 9,200 feet -where we will spend most of the next 5 days. You enter the town on a cobblestone road through a super narrow alley type road with shops and restaurants. Then you just pop out into this super cute square that has a giant park in the middle and is surrounded by restaurants. And dogs. There are dogs everywhere – big, small, medium - all breeds. We learned that most, if not all, of these dogs all have owners, but, in the words of a local “They are like William Wallace… ‘FREEEEEDOOOOM’” and they spend their days roaming the streets. Some even wear sweaters.
There are also backpackers. Everywhere. Ollantaytambo is the gathering place before people hit the Inca Trail. It seriously looks like North Face threw up in the middle of town. I can’t really say anything wandering around in my Patagonia puffy coat. I’m not entirely sure yet, but it is possible that Damon and I are the oldest people in the entire town. Why didn’t I do this in my 20’s??? As this is the Sacred “Valley”, the entire area is surrounded by mountains – it is stunningly gorgeous; however, because we are over 2 miles up and the mountains are tall, the sun sets at 5:30pm and it is pitch black by 6pm. We checked into our hotel, the Tunupa Lodge Hotel, and walked back to the square for dinner. We selected a small family run place and wondered why it took forever to get our meal. And then they brought a feast that showed up on sizzling platters and was fantastic.
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| Damon's sizzling platter of meat |
We had our first taste of Alpaca – a very common meat served everywhere. There was a little girl sitting near the front door eating dinner – she was about 3 or 4. She wanted to talk to us but didn’t understand that we don’t speak Spanish. We figured out that she wanted us to look at her feet because she had no shoes on. It was cute and she thought we were weird because we just smiled at her and told her no hablo espanol.
After two long days of travel, it was nice to walk around, but we were tired and ended up back at the hotel early. We were greeted by some free range llamas at the hotel - a bit startled to see them at first since there were four and a baby roaming around.
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| Me and the llama mama |
In our room, we were slightly concerned that we didn’t see any thermostat in the room as night temps dip into the 30’s, but when we pulled back the covers on the bed, we found literally 6” of blankets – a sheet, two wool blankets, and a thick down comforter. And the room is not actually cold. We darn near sweat to death and kicked everything but the sheet off of us.
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| Lots of blankets |
Day 3 – Sacred Valley - Today is our first official day of the fun part of vacation. We hired a tour to take us to the historic sites in the area and lucked out by getting a private tour with our own driver and tour guide. Luis & Luis. Our first stop was the ruins at Ollantaytambo, a mere 3-minute drive away. With less than 24 hours of acclimation, hiking up the ruins seemed like an idiotic idea.
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| First look at the ruins (steps) at Ollantaytambo ruins |
Tour guide Luis gave us a solid 20-minute history lesson on the Incas, the valley, the area, and how Ollantaytambo got its name. It was a long story and involved love and treachery and best friends turning on each other and war; plus, we learned about the construction and use of Incan terraces for farming and retaining walls, and we learned the whole history of the Spanish invasion, 300 years of Spanish rule, and then the Peruvians taking back their country in the early 1800’s. My best tidbit is that I came away knowing that Inca is the title of the primary ruler, like the King, and does not refer to an entire group of people. And even if it did, they were pretty much all wiped out by the Spaniards. But then there are native Andeans and I still have to figure out how they fit in to the full historic picture.
We started walking up the terraces and thankfully, Luis understood the lung capacity of a flatlander and took it very slow with us. At 9,000 feet, 20 steps had us gasping for air. I felt a little bit better when I saw a group of 20-somethings panting at the same first level as us, also trying to breathe. What I can say with certainty, and I am sure I will repeat this throughout our trip, is that the Incans and other people who lived in the area prior to the Incans were spectacular builders. The construction of the terraces and other structures is insanely complex, and they did not use any type of mortar – they just fit rocks together in ways that have lasted more than 500 years and made them smooth with an alpaca/llama poop scrub. Some of these rocks are enormous and weigh 10’s of tons. It is just mind blowing to think about what went into the construction.
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| Wall construction |
We survived our first physical exertion at elevation. A few pix from the top...
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| View down to the town of Ollantayambo |
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| Us looking not winded at all |
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| Another view of the town |
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| Incan grain storage bins on the side of the mountain across town |
On our way out, we started seeing small canals running next to the buildings. As it turns out, the Incans built an elaborate system of aqueducts throughout the entire area. Everywhere you walk, there is water flowing. Again, the foresight that went into creating the routing of water throughout the entire village, now thriving town, is insane.
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| Drainage system - sometimes visible, sometimes under the sidewalks |
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| Street with small canal running through |
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| I really think the canals are cool |
Our next stop was a ruin called Moray. To get there, we drove up a mountain to about 11,500 feet. By my standards, we drove on a single lane dirt road. By Peruvian standards, it is a 2-lane road that is big enough to accommodate small tour buses passing farming trucks. There were a few hair-raising passes. The scenery on the way up was spectacular. Here we are at over 11,000 feet, and there are crops and fields surrounding us. We saw one corn crop with a bunch of people hand harvesting the corn.
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| Scenery on the drive up |
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| More scenery and crops over 11,000 feet up |
The ruins at Moray are unique in that they are completely circular. Archaeologists guess that these terraces were used as a lab for modifying seeds. Another engineering marvel, the water is routed through a drainage system that allows the levels to get watered and then pool in the lowest circle. The Incans picked this specific location because the lowest level has a natural drainage so that the bottom circle will never flood the higher circles. Again, I am amazed. One of the crop circles, the largest, has been fully restored and there are two others that are in process, but restoration was stalled due to Covid.
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| Lots of salt |
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| Lots of chocolate |
I’ve seen pictures of the salt pools, but photos just don’t do the sheer size justice.
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| View from a road above the pools - 4,000 pools! |
I learned a LOT about salt harvesting over the next hour. Maybe I am an idiot and everyone knows how salt is made, but I thought salt was mined out of the ground. Which, it is. But it is also created by pumping salty water into pools and then letting the water evaporate and leave the salt. As luck would have it, this area was ocean millions of years ago. When nature happened and the ocean was replaced with mountains over millions of years, it left an enormous block of salt underground. When the freshwater river, also underground, passed over the salt block, it created salty water that has been filling the salt pools for at least 3,000 years. There is a series of mini canals that run throughout the salt pools that are used to fill the pools as needed. There are about 4000 salt pools owned by about 400 people. Fairly recently, they created a cooperative called “Marasal” that allowed them to pool their salt and sell more consistently, and also benefit from a more formal tourist attraction. Salt is harvested roughly every 2 months and each pool creates about 400 lbs of salt per harvest. And that is everything I know about salt production.
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| I don't know why they have a giant heart at the salt pools... |
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| Close-up view of the pools |
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| You can see the canals running through the pools - crusted with salt |
Our next stop, after a local lunch, was the ruins at Pisac. We had about an hour and a half drive and the Luis’ had us rocking to Air Supply & Bob Marley. No complaints. The Pisac ruins consisted of 4 different villages – we were able to visit two – and we learned more about how the Incans lived and farmed. The villages were separated by class with one village having the land farmers and another having the livestock farmers and maybe the local rulers. Archaeologists discovered a cliff face that was full of tombs of Incan families that, sadly, the Spanish had completely looted during their occupation. It is our understanding that the skeletal remains still exist in the cliffside tombs.
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| First look at Pisac ruins - village off in distance |
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| Another view of terraces |
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| Close up of one of the villages |
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| Cliffside with tombs - hard to see, but there are small holes all over the lower cliff side |
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| Another village view |
The drive back to Ollantaytambo was long and we got back around dinner time and had another fabulous dinner. More Alpaca for Damon! And back to our hotel for much needed sleep.
Tune in for our SkyLodge experience tomorrow!!!!!
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