Cusco

Throughout the week in the Sacred Valley we had also been heading into Cusco to delight in some of the city's sites of interest.

As with the whole of Peru, you have to be choosy in Cusco as to what you are going to realistically see in the time available.

The most important building of all in the area is Quri kancha (Quechua quri gold, kancha enclosure, hispanicised spelling Coricancha). A bold statement maybe, but here is why I think that to be the case.

When I arrived in Cusco for my 3 month stint last year, on day 2 I asked a local chap in the school where I should visit first expecting to be told the main square or the cathedral or Sacsayhuamán or Machu Picchu.... But without hesitation or deviation he pointed straight at Coricancha.

I raised an eyebrow but followed his guidance and now, having visited all of the above, stayed in Cusco for a good length of time and read loads on all things Incan, I explained exactly the same to Mum, this is where one should begin, it was the centre of the Inca universe after all.

Coricancha was the most important temple in the Inca Empire, dedicated to Inti, the sun god. The walls and floors were covered in gold, literally, and the central courtyard filled with gold statues. It is difficult to imagine today what an incredible sight the south facing exterior wall must have been in the bright Andean sunlight, 'bejazzled' doesn't quite do it...

And inside in the middle of the main courtyard there was the eight-sided sacrificial font (still there today) covered in 55 kilograms of gold (no longer there). The rooms that surround it may once have been covered with silver and dedicated to the moon, stars, and thunder.

Then the conquistadors arrived. The gold and silver were removed from every surface (revealing incredible stonework) and everything melted down in under a month. What busy little bees they must have been.

Then the Dominicans took over and dismantled most of the temple using the polished stone to build their church and convent atop the sun temple's walls. And there it stood, the original Incan stonework concealed until 1950 when a severe earthquake struck causing large sections of the convent to crumble revealing the Inca walls beneath.

The wall running along the temple’s eastern side is 60 meters long and 5 meters high, and each block is perfectly interlocked with its neighbor. But the highlight is the curved retaining wall beneath the facade of the church, which has not budged an inch in all of Cusco's earthquakes.

So you see Coricancha represents everything that has gone down in Cusco, both physically and symbolically, for the past 800 years or so, since the beginning of Inca imperialism, followed by the conquistadorean then Catholic church and now the touristic versions. What better place to begin?

And that historical mix is the key to understanding Cusco and its people. Everywhere you go there is evidence of the melange of ancient and modern cultural practices, dress and architecture.

The cathedral, for example, a slightly odd building with bits here and additional naves there (built as luck would have it on top of an Inca Emperor's palace) contains many intricate carvings as one would expect in a catholic cathedral, except that every now and then you can make out jungle fruits among the leaves and palms.

There are also paintings that include oddities such as Christ eating a guinea pig at the Last Supper and a rather pregnant Virgin Mary.

Looming over Cusco sit the incredible ruins of Sacsayhuamán, a hilltop fortress with walls running for 300 metres of perfectly cut stones where the largest are 8 metres high and reputed to weigh over 350 tons.

Despite the huge workforce that would have been available - every citizen had to work a few months of the year on public works - with only the use of levers and log sleds engineers still find it hard to imagine how such enormous stones were fitted so perfectly together.

Unfortunately until the 1930's Sacsayhuamán was used as limitless quarry of precut stone, builders just carting away wagon loads of the stuff, so it is hard to imagine today just how impregnable the fort must have been, but it is still an imposing sight and with great views over the city below.

Back down to the city and one place that must be visited is the permanent exhibition of the photographer Martin Chambi (on the second floor of Scotiabank on Maruri).

Chambi took incredibly beautiful photographs of Cusco, its people and the surrounding landscapes in the 1920's to 50's.

And along with the markets, coffee shops, restaurants, chocolate museum, more churches if you want them and always something going on in the main square Cusco is a fabulous place to visit, eat in at all times of day, party (not this time but rumour has it) and people watch.

We were sad to leave but on we must go, so we filled the car with decent fuel (the last until Arequipa) and set off across the altiplano to Puno...

Machu Picchu and the Sacred Valley

Bit of a long post but no apologies as it was all incredible. We began with the big one, Machu Picchu, then worked our way back up the Sacred Valley, the magnificence of Ollantaytambo followed by the little visited Tipón (not in the Sacred Valley) then the market and ruins of Pisac before the weird and wonderful salt mine at Maras and the sink holes of Moray...

There are many theories as to why Machu Picchu was built, what it was used for and why it was abandoned.

During his life time, Hiram Bingham (a man often given rather too much credit) postulated that it was both the birthplace of Inca society and then the legendary 'lost city' of Vilcabamba, where the last Inca rulers waged a length battle against Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century.

Wrong it turns out on both counts. And for the record, the Spanish conquistadors never discovered MP, fortunately, which is why it is in such good nick.

Bingham also speculated that it was a holy nunnery, a temple devoted to the virgins of the sun, based on finding many 'small' skeletons that were thought to be nearly all females. This was also proved false when modern analysis techniques in 2000 showed that actually the skeletons included about equal numbers of males and females. It seems that Bingham mis-attributed their 'diminutive size' to be lady nuns of a holy order ready for sacrificial acts when in fact they were simply Andean. 

Ooops - well done Mr Bing!

Another theory is that it was an agricultural testing station where different types of crops could be assessed in the many different micro-climates afforded by the location and the terraces; these were not large enough to grow food on a large scale, but may have been used to determine what could grow where.

This is also the thinking applied to Tipón (more below), which for both sites appears far too prosaic and unimaginative an explanation to do either place justice.

Yet another asserts that it may have been built as a prison for a select few who had committed heinous crimes against Inca society.  Really? I would have been one of many in that case queuing for the menu of heinous crimes to entitle me to spend some time here on full board...

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More recently (1980's) a most popular idea was seeded that it was the royal retreat of the 15-century Inca emperor Pachacuti, a place the emperor and his court to relax, hunt and entertain - seems far closer to a possible reality.

And then we move up a layer or two into the more spiritual; another theory suggests that the city was built as an abode for the deities, or for the coronation of kings.

Another insists that Machu Picchu occupied a special place in the "sacred landscape" of the Inca, built atop a mountain that is almost completely encircled by the Urubamba River, which the Inca named the Vilcamayo, or Sacred River.

Our thoughts? Mostly yadda yadda yadda / every archaeologist clearly needs a theory for the research grant / stop with the blah blah and enjoy the view!

And the best place for the view is Huayna Picchu,the mountain at the end of most photos, which Mum was determined to climb and did so with great gusto, which was commented upon by most of the other people on the climb and descent! 

After two days of clambering around MP we made our way back to Ollantaytambo, which was definitely a ceremonial centre and royal estate and is one of several amazing places in the Sacred Valley that most of us just rush through without really appreciating its full splendour.

Which is still celebrated today...

And the town itself, below the terraces of the palace and temples, has apparently hardly changed in the last 500 years in terms of layout and how the inhabitants live within it. So if you want the full Incan experience this is probably as close as you can get today, with some pizza and trinket sellers thrown into the mix.

At the other end of the Sacred Valley is Pisac and its famous market.

If you ever visit this part of the world Pisac market will be on your itinerary, every tour operator will make it so. 

What most people don't do is appreciate the full extent of the ruins on the hill above the town, only a small amount of which you can see without climbing.

Top tip - get to the market at about 10am (partly to avoid the bus loads of tourists), scoot around the market to your hearts content, and then start climbing the hill behind the town with 2 hours to spare and lunch in your rucksack. You will not be disappointed at what you find up the hill, the views to the valley below and the whole aspect of Pisac town and ruins.

Just over 20 kms on the other side of Cusco is Tipón, a beautiful, highly underrated and severely under visited site. There is little written about it, other than that it was an Incan agricultural experimentation station, the various terraces being utilized for their micro climate qualities to test varied crops and conditions.

Perhaps you need to go there to really appreciate this place, but as mentioned above this explanation seems wholly inadequate, if that is all it is purported to be.

The lower section which is the one normally visited is an incredible series of neat terraces, irrigated by stone lined channels, all extremely well preserved. Towards the back of this section is a beautifully finished stone faced 'mouth' around the spring, probably, it is suggested supplied by a subterranean aqueduct. One gets the impression that it hasn't run dry since it was built.

The upper section of the site goes on for miles, way up the hill.  Starting with a big ol reservoir, a stone aqueduct crosses a gully before continuing up the hill to a huge zone of unexcavated terraces and dwellings, beyond which over the lip of another hill is the upper valley literally covered in Inca terracing, homes and storehouses many of which are still used by locals.

For a region where a significant proportion of the visitors are oh so keen to write up some fantastically fanciful tale about the spiritually symbiotic harmony between the heightened energies of the landscape, all pointing to some deified mummified religious overtones focused on a sacrificial career of pure essence of otherworldly incredibleness all representing a Puma....An agricultural testing station? Really? Is that the best the imaginative archaeologists can come up with?

What is wonderful is that the Tipón site receives so little attention and is still used by local farmers as it must have been for the last 600 years. As we were there this time a traditionally dressed lady was cutting the grass with a scythe as her kids ran around playing with the cut grass among this intricate network of beautifully engineered water channels and terracing  - a timeless scene that for once was not a contrived show for the tourists. Long may that continue.

Back towards the Sacred Valley are the famous salt terraces of Maras, where salt has been produced since pre-inca times. Salt from Maras is the finest in Peru (probably South America) and sells at a premium in the deli's of Lima.

It's an extraordinary sight as the highland dirt track traversing fields of wheat begins to drop and the white and brown of the drying pools appear in the valley beneath.

Pam and I were here last year in July, which is when the photos below were taken, when production was in full flight. This time (March) all we saw was the brown of the disused out of season muck.

Sorry Mum! This is what it should have looked like!

The process (courtesy of wikipedia) - salt is obtained b evaporating salty water from a local subterranean stream. The highly salty water emerges at a spring, a natural outlet of the underground stream.

The flow is directed into an intricate system of tiny channels constructed so that the water runs gradually down onto the several hundred ancient terraced ponds.

Almost all the ponds are less than four meters square in area, and none exceeds thirty centimeters in depth. All are necessarily shaped into polygons with the flow of water carefully controlled and monitored by the workers.

 

The altitude of the ponds slowly decreases, so that the water may flow through the myriad branches of the water-supply channels and be introduced slowly through a notch in one sidewall of each pond.

The proper maintenance of the adjacent feeder channel, the side walls and the water-entry notch, the pond's bottom surface, the quantity of water, and the removal of accumulated salt deposits requires close cooperation among the community of users.

It is agreed among local residents and pond workers that the cooperative system was established during the time of the Incas, if not earlier. As water evaporates from the sun-warmed ponds, the water becomes supersaturated and salt precipitates as various size crystals onto the inner surfaces of a pond's earthen walls and on the pond's earthen floor. The pond's keeper then closes the water-feeder notch and allows the pond to go dry.

 

Within a few days the keeper carefully scrapes the dry salt from the sides and bottom, puts it into a suitable vessel, reopens the water-supply notch, and carries away the salt. Color of the salt varies from white to a light reddish or brownish tan, depending on the skill of an individual worker. Some salt is sold at a gift store nearby.

The salt mines traditionally have been available to any person wishing to harvest salt. Usually there are many unused salt pools available to be farmed. Any prospective salt farmer need only locate an empty currently unmaintained pond, consult with the local informal cooperative, learn how to keep a pond properly within the accepted communal system, and start working.

Another 30 kms or so further along the highland road, taking in more of the spectacular scenery, are the natural depressions of Moray.

Apparently they are sink holes caused by rains eroding the calcium rich soil. At 150 metres deep and with their perfect terracing they appear at first glance to be a Greek style amphitheater, but the highly considered explanation is that, with such a variety of micro climates due to gradations of sun and shade and altitude changes between terraces, they are a giant agricultural testing centre.

Well I'll be jiggered, not heard that explanation before!

This time it seems that the experts are probably on the right track. But that doesn't stop the odd group of tourists hiring their very own Shaman to light some incense...

...do some chanting and take them even deeper into the Incan consciousness....

maybe...