Odds and sods on in the sacred valley

Ok, so there weren´t any sods, but there were lots of other things that we saw.

The sacred valley is THE place for corn. They grow a gazillion different varieties in the valley (Cusco is the place for potatoes - most of the varieties in the world are grown in this region). They make a couple of drinks from the corn. One is chicha morada - which is red and I think it is about 4% alcohol. It´s quite nice.

We stopped at a weaving community on the way to Ollantaytambo where they make various things from llama wool. Llamas are shaved only 3-4 times during their lifetime - which is why it is so expensive. The first shave is called the baby wool - even though the llama isn´t a baby at the time - and this is the softest wool. The women in the village (whose husbands are porters on the Inca trail) spin and dye the wool themselves. They use natural dyes such as some worm thing that lives on the prickly pear. They dry them, crush them and then add lime juice or salt to change the colour so that get ranges of reds to orange. The also use the crushed worms as lipstick. Mmmm, yuck.

They keep a couple of llamas in the village, mostly for the tourists I think and they mostly buy in the raw product. I wanted to get a photo of Debbie with one of them and kept telling her to get closer. But then one spat on her. Some nice green stuff. Needless to say, she wasn´t very happy with me.

We also stopped at a number of Inca ruins.

Ollantaytambo is the place where we stayed before we started the Inca trail. The town and the temple of the sun located there are amazing. There are water channels through the town that are a remnant from Inca times.

The Incas had some amazing technology. Temples and palaces were made from the interlocking rocks that most people associate with the Inca civilisation. These were incredibly complex to make as they didn´t have any tools, only harder stones for shaping the rocks. Some of the temples took 50-70 years to complete, and some - such as Ollantaytambo - were never finished. The Inca civilisation (in its expansion phase) was from 1438-1532 and building on many of the temples didn´t start until well into that period. They had aquaducts that carried water quite some distance and you can still see it running in many of the places including Machu Picchu.

After we´d been to Machu Picchu, we went down to Aguas Calientes (water hot). They have some hot spring pools there that I´d been looking forward to the whole tramp. But they were a bit of a disappointment really. They were tepid rather than hot and I think they were quite dirty.