Sacred Valley of the Incas

It took the Spanish Conquistadors four years to overrun the Aztecs in Mexico but the Incas in Peru held out for forty years and won some significant battles because ... there are mountains here.  Riding a horse in full armor at 10,000 feet does not get you very far.  Cusco sits at over 11,000 feet but just below Cusco there is a beautiful valley - el Valle Sagrado de los Incas.  I had decided to come here first to acclimate to the altitude since it is only about 8,000 to 9,000 feet in elevation.
















I got to Lima on Monday night, making a ten minute connection in Newark, but my luggage did not.  On Tuesday I few to Cusco and was driven immediately to Ollantaytambo, a small Inca town of 3,000 people at the far end of the valley.  There are rumors that my bag will catch up with me tomorrow, but I'm not betting on it.  Clean clothes are overrated anyway.  I bought a new shirt today at the local market, although there is not much selection in a town this small.

Today we visited the Inca experimental farm at Moray.  No one is quite sure how they dug out the hillside and terraced it so perfectly.  Each level down is half a degree warmer, so the Incas were able to develop new varieties of plants that could grow at different altitudes.  There are only fourteen varieties of corn here, but ninety five varieties of potatoes.  That does not include sweet potatoes which, of course, are not potatoes at all.  I needed to know all about potatoes.



Then we went to the salt mines.  A very small stream of warm salty water flows out of a certain mountain.  They think there is a sodium deposit in the mountain.  The water is fed into small individually owned sections that are only about ten by twenty feet.  For a month the water evaporates and the salt crystallizes.  Then the owners harvest it and start all over again.  There are only narrow walkways between the pools, so everything has to be carried up and down by hand.  And there are three layers of salt - the flower (top and best), pink salt (middle), and dark salt for medicinal purposes at the bottom.  This was really fascinating.





We also stopped at a shop where women weave clothes and blankets from sheep's wool and alpaca using only natural dying.  They showed us how they used plants and seeds to dye the wool.  Call me a city girl, but it did seem rather magical they way they put nondescript leaves into water, dipped in the wool and it instantly changed colors in front of my very eyes - and not necessarily to the color of the leaves or seeds.

The most interesting thing I learned today:  in the local Quechua language, Cusco is pronounce Costco.  Duh.  Of course.