Alpaca-the other other white meat?

It´s only been about a week since I posted last but it´s definitely been one of those weeks in which I shouldn´t have procrastinated since now this will be a pretty epic post. I´m writing right now from Cusco, Peru which is a beautiful and historic city full of colonial buildings, Incan ruins, and foreign tourists. Ecuador is touristy but it always seems like at least the Ecuadorians out-number the tourists. I´m not so sure about Cusco. Nevertheless it really is deserving of its status as a tourist Mecca. Beyond even the obligatory Machu Picchu visit Cusco has several amazing churches and Incan ruins within walking distance that rival their more famous neighbor in many ways.

I arrived in Cusco 5 days ago and immediately tried to find out if I could join a group to hike the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. Apparently tours fill up around 6 months in advance (which I actually probably should have assumed) and so I had several humorous interactions with tourist agencies when I´d ask for an Inca Trail trip and they would ask when I wanted to go. I said "well, when´s the soonest I could go?" and they answered "um, October." I usually followed that up with, "so nothing leaving like, tomorrow then?" which received a wide range of responses. With that option scratched off my to-do list I set about tackling the sights around Cusco.

The first place I visited is a a site on the mountain just above Cusco called Saqsehuaman which was a large ceremonial complex. Although considerably smaller than Machu Picchu Saqsehuaman was mind-boggling for a different reason. The compound is composed of three terraced levels which lead to the top of the mountain where three huge stone tours stood before the Spanish arrived. What´s crazy about this place is that the terraces are about 10 meters high and composed of enormous blocks of stone weighing up to 30 tons. Obviously the entire place was built before modern machinery and imaging the process of cutting the stones only to drag them several kilometers over ramps and rolling logs is impressive to say the least. Saqsehuaman is also an amazing site because of the seamless stonework involved. Each stone is so perfectly carved to fit with the next one that it creates almost perfectly smooth walls that have survived centuries of earthquakes as the colonial buildings crumbled about them.

The next day was a huge national strike protesting the rising cost of living and failed promises on the part of the government to improve the Peruvian quality of life for its millions of citizens living on $1.50 a day. Since I was already in Cusco I only knew of the strike as a huge protest in the city with most of the shops closed but several travelers were stranded throughout the country due to the striking transportation workers. I´ve heard so much grumbling from people on planned tours whose entire vacations were messed up by the strike which made me feel better about traveling by the seat of my pants. The tourist congestion made Machu Picchu much busier when I finally got there, but I´ll get to that in a second.

After Saqsehuaman I bought my bus ticket to Aguas Calientes, the town closest to Machu Picchu. I arrived at the train station thinking I was just within the "30 minutes early" request for my 12:30 train but when I showed the guard at the train station my ticket he said, "you´re just on time, there goes your train." Apparently I´d confused my 9:30 return with my 12:10 departure and got to the station just in time to jump onto my moving train. Woops.

The next day I arrived at Machu Picchu at around 6:30 in the morning. It was really cloudy and misty but that really just made the experience that much more magical. MP is perched on this mountain with the Urubamba River roaring thousands of feet below on both sides. The place is so amazingly well preserved I could hardly believe it. When you first walk in you see the agricultural terraces that fed the city and then you enter the royal living sector and the temple section. Everything was just so beautiful,tragic, and alarming in its way thinking of how such an advanced civilization was toppled in a matter of months. I battled the tourists for the whole morning (between 1500 and 2000 people visit Machu Picchu every day!) and unintentionally disrupted tons of pictures. People didn´t seem to understand that with 2000 other visitors walking around they weren´t going to get their pristine postcard picture. I also got there early enough to be one of the 400 people allowed to climb Huayna Picchu, the mountain looming behind Machu Picchu when you picture the famous view, and it was amazing. It was a reasonably strenuous hike but it ended in this little tunnel that ends up at the very peak of the mountain. From the top I could see all of Machu Picchu (it was built to resemble a condor from above while Cusco was originally built as a puma with Saqsehuaman as the head) and the mountains surrounding. I have a ton of pictures to share when I get back but I can tell you that Machu Picchu is absolutely deserving of its hype. Hopefully I´ll be able to get back some day.

After all of the Machu Picchu hustle I settled into a café in Ollantaytambo for a quick lunch of alpaca kababs. They were actually really really delicious but I realized a couple minutes into my meal that an alpaca was actually staring at me through the window of the café. Although the cows at home obviously never bothered me, this alpaca seemed to understand what was going on and its piercing gaze was a little unnerving. I still finished the amazing kababs though.

Then I walked around the fantastic ruins at Ollantaytambo (a town in the Sacred Valley en route to Aguas Calientes) which were almost as inspiring as Machu Picchu itself. The Ollantaytambo ruins are situated really precariously on the cliffs overlooking the town and were one of the last outposts of Incan resistance after the Spanish invasion. The place was refreshingly empty after Machu Picchu and I had a great time walking around the terraces and climbing the mountain for a better view. Getting from Ollantaytambo to Cusco was almost another transportation disaster when I went to buy a bottle of water after the van driver told me they would be leaving in 20 minutes. When I came back 5 minutes later the van was pulling away and only stopped for me when I banged on the door and jumped out in front of it. People in the van were yelling for it to wait but I´m sure the driver thought he could make something out of the backpack I´d loaded before I left. Oh South American transportation...

Now I´m back in Cusco for a while hanging out and seeing a few more sights. Hopefully I´ll have another meeting with a friend of Juan Carlos who will be able to help me out with information on my research and maybe even a family to stay with for a few days. We´ll see what happens. Thanks for sticking with this post to the end, more coming soon!

Coming soon: "Overheard in Cusco," and Peruvian families or Lake Titicaca