December 13
Today we did a day tour to the Sacred Valley which is the 60 or so kilometers of fertile farmland and colonial villages in the Andean highlands.
Our first stop was overlooking part of the valley:
We then headed to Pisac to see the market which was cool, but mostly very similar stuff to what we’ve seen in Cusco. We did linger in a few art shops – but nothing was that impressive compared to my Milky Way painting from yesterday. I’m going to be ruined on art for a little while I guess. Btw – that artist is Miguel Araoz Cartagena. I just found him on Facebook… too weird to friend request? Probably.
After the market, we headed to the Pisac ruins.
This was a nice hike up to the top. Of course after we went up and came back down, Michael wanted to do it again but had to basically run it since we were low on time. So here he is in blue, doing it again while I relaxed and watched.
Another cool thing about these ruins was the cemetery. The Incas would burrow holes in the mountain to bury their loved ones. You can see the holes in the below picture, but there are no longer any bodies. When the Spanish arrived, they pulled all of the nearly 3000 bodies out of this mountain, stole anything valuable and then set all of the remains on fire. Good work, guys. Jerk of the century award goes to…
After this, we had lunch and then headed off to Ollantaytambo which is a massive Inca fortress with large stone terraces on a hillside. This was 250 steps up to the top (we think). Any climb is tough in this altitude. Here’s us selfying the terraces. I think most people know, but the terraces were used for growing crops. It gave the Incas more mountain space to grow. Plus, in this area, the temperature can change quite radically depending on whether the sun is out or not. The stones would heat up in the sun and then would give off heat as the temp cooled to help maintain a more controlled temperature on the terraces throughout the day and nights.
In addition to the terraces, were buildings, of course. The Incas designed their empire to have resting points between all of their cities. Along the route between cities, you would find a half day hike to a small resting point. After that half day hike you’d find a full day hike to a large resting point, such as this fortress that would have lots of supplies and safety. So it may look like this: city, small resting point, large fortress, small resting point, city. That is how the Incas would keep their routes secure and their people safe. In this fortress, which I believe our guide said was mid build when the Spanish arrived, there was a lot of supplies, crops, buildings, etc. There also was a food storage facility across the valley in a different mountain. You can see it in the picture below. It is the rectangle that looks like it has three or four levels in the bottom third of the picture to the right of the middle. Something I thought was interesting – the Incas have a ton of different potato varieties and some of them can be dehydrated and saved for years. After the Incas dehydrate the potatoes, and they save them for years, they only have to rehydrate them in hot water for 3 days and then they taste similar to the regular potatoes and have all of the same nutritional value. The Incas build this storage away from their fortress so it would be higher in the mountain and cooler to help preserve the food.
OK – so if you can see the storage facility in the picture above, to the left of it, in the center of the mountain you can see what looks like a person’s angry face. This mountain formation was believed to be part of the reason that the the Incas built here. An omen or something. Now, if you look at the top third of the picture on the far left of the mountain, if you use your imagination, you can see a profile of a person. Every year, on the winter solstice, the sun peeks directly through the mouth area of that profile and projects perfectly on these altar stones. All things Inca are done on purpose.
After this fortress we headed to our final stop in Chinchero. Something sweet that they say about the town is that the Incas believe it to be birthplace of the rainbow. The town is believed to be the country resort for Inca Tupac Yupanqui who was the son of Pachacutec who I spoke about in my last blog who did all the empire building. And yes – Tupac Shakur was named after this Inca leader.
First we stopped in to get a demo on how the Quechuan people make their amazing textiles. Now, we know that the point of this is to convince us to spend money. And it worked. The woman who gave the demonstration was funny. Seriously funny. She walked through the steps of how they use all natural items to clean and color the wool. Plus it was stand up comedy the entire time.
She also showed women who spun the wool and were weaving.
It was great, so… we bought a table runner. It’s made of baby alpaca (she made us touch what adult alpaca feels like and what sheep wool feels like so we’d know how fancy it is) and has all of the sacred animals to the Incas – the Condor, Llama, Snake, Fox – and then some other stuff – man and woman and some animals that I can’t totally decipher. It’s beautiful and has deep red and blue colors even though the picture below looks grey and rust colored. We love it.
Final stop of the day: a beautiful church in Chinchero. Here is one picture of the entrance. No pictures were allowed inside.
Some cool things about the church:
1. This adobe style church was built around 1607 by the Spanish on top of the remains of an Incan palace, probably Tupac’s.
2. The incredibly ornate painted ceilings and walls combine Catholic and traditional images. The thought behind this is two-fold. As with much of the Catholic missionaries – when trying to evangelize it is easier to combine some indigenous traditions with Catholic traditions to make it easier to convert (think celebrating Christmas in December to coincide with pagan winter solstice festivities). Also, our guide mentioned that the missionaries brought three important European painters over to teach the indigenous people how to paint Catholic art and then let them do the majority of the work. As such, instead of depictions of a slender Mary, you have a more cone shaped Mary in this artwork. That was the indigenous attempt to work their own beliefs into the religion that was being forced on them. The cone shaped Mary represents the mountains which circles back to the Inca’s worship of Mama Pacha.
3. A point not so much about this church, but about much of the religious art we’ve seen in Peru: most depictions of Virgin with child has her breast feeding Jesus. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before. If our religious scholars could step up with any insight into why this is frequent in Cusco, but we haven’t seen in other areas, that would be great.
4. They still have mass in this church and every Sunday, the first mass of the day is spoken entirely in Quechua and the people all wear their indigenous clothing. I thought that was cool.
This ends our visit to the Sacred Valley – all of it was beautiful and I was excited to get to know a little more about the people, even if it was sometimes in a super touristy way.