Ollantaytambo to Cusco

 The Sacred Valley is wonderful...It is a super important part of the Inca Empire.  The Urubamba River runs the length of the valley and it is beautiful.  We took the train from Aguas Calientes to Ollantytambo to spend the night.  We stayed in a wonderful hotel with alpaca and surrounding mountains.

When we woke up in the morning, we went to the Inca ruins of Ollantaytambo.  It was a fortress and a temple where virgins were sacrificed and where the Inca managed to fight off Pizarro.  It's huge and terraced and a real climb with our low-land lungs.  We really needed to rest.

This is looking up

We hiked up and looked at all the gates and stones.  It's amazing how tons of granite were taken from a quarry about 8 km away and transported to the site.  The theory is that they got the blocks of granite to the Urubamba River and dammed it up so it flowed around the stone and took it to the site of the temple.  The Inca were ingenious.  An aside:  they were happy to build on the knowledge of previous cultures and used architects from what is now Bolivia to help build Macchu Picchu whereas the Spanish simply destroyed all that was Inca because it was blasphemous and they had a holy edict to wipe out any heretics.  The Inca even had a sure-fire way to build seismically safe: they fit convex and concave stones together so in case of earthquakes the stones fell into each other and stayed up.

Here is a photo of the terraces and the lookout sites.  They also had these amazing echo chambers built into the rocks.  If you clap inside, it can be heard all over the site and the hills.  They communicated this way and passed warnings.

Clap here

Next we checked out the temple of the virgins and the fountains were they were purified.  The fountains are next to the temple and you can see more of the amazing ways the Inca channeled water for irrigation and such.

Next we went to Salinas, where salt has been mined since Inca times.  An underground spring sends salt water up and the salt is mined and sold for cooking and body products.  It's a special pink salt that is very expensive.  Prices are similar to lavender farm on San Juan Island.

Salinas Salt Mines

It's huge...next stop Moray, a huge amphitheater of terraces for agriculture.  Theories are that the Inca experimented with different microclimates to determine the optimal growing conditions for crops.  I am amazed by all they did.

Moray

We viewed a few more sites before heading back to Cusco.  Cusco is huge!!  From up high as we climb out of the Sacred Valley, we can really see the size.

Cusco from up high

Look behind the church.  Our hotel is on the mid left street.  We could hear everything going on.

I also took a picture of part of the Plaza de Armas so you can see where our hotel is and how close we were to the action.  Festivals!!!  There are over 450 festivals per year in the Department of Cusco (think state).

The day before the big festival, there was a mini-festival:  started at 9:00 am and went to midnight!!  All the different groups of dancers paraded past crowds through the plaza de Armas.  When they were done they headed up a couple of blocks away to a smaller plaza where the party began:  drinking and more dancing all night.  And that wasn't even the big one.!!

More about Cusco and Inti Raymi later....