Cuzco and the holy valley of the Inca's

Thursday the 28th of October until Tuesday the 2nd of November 2010
Cuzco is one of the touristiest places we have passed on our journey, but it is also one of the nicest cities. All over the town you can still find original parts of Inca walls and the place is covered with colonial buildings. Because there is so much to do in and around Cuzco we decided to stay in the city for three days. We purchased a tourist ticket that gave us access to a number of colonial buildings and another one for the sacred valley of the Inca's, close to Cuzco. In the city itself the Cathedral appealed most to us, as it is one of the first cathedrals in Peru and it is filled with pieces of art from the Cuzcan school - Catholic stories told with Indian images.
To visit the sacred valley we joined a day tour that normally brings you to 3 Inca ruins. The first stop on this tour is Pisac. An incredibly large site with numerous terraces, a whole bunch of administrative and military buildings (among other function, the site of Pisac was there to control the people coming in from the jungle on their way to Cuzco) and the largest know Inca cemetery in the flanks of a nearby mountain. Because the idea of the organized tour is to see as much as possible in as little time as possible, we only stayed in Pisac for little over an hour. Way too short to really enjoy the beauty, history and culture of the site. After lunch, our next stop was Ollantaytambo. Before embarking on the tour we had already made up our mind; we would stay in Ollantaytambo to give this site the attention it deserves. We followed the guided tour in the ruins of Ollantaytambo with the group, but spent another hour on the site when our van had already left the place. The city of Ollantaytambo is the only one in Peru that is entirely build on the foundations of the Inca city that was there before. The layout and water supply system is therefore identical to that of 600-700 years ago. The Inca city of Ollantaytambo was - like Pisac - a place for soldiers, pilgrims, messengers, the Inca, etc. to rest along the spread-out Inca road system (all towns ending in tambo served the same purpose by the way). After visiting the terraces and (unfinished - the Spaniards were there too quickly) temple of the sun, we climbed the flank opposite the agricultural, military and religious site to the barns from where we had a great view on the whole place. The next morning, we visited the site that was now beading in the morning sun, again.
After this quick visit we headed for Maras, a small village in the sacred valley from where you can visit the historical site of Moray. In the days of the Inca's Moray was a site for agricultural science and experiments. The Inca's built terraces here at different heights to see which crops grew best at which heights (and therefore temperatures). From Morray we were lucky enough to be given a ride by an older couple from Lima back to Maras, where we had lunch in an improvised restaurant on the town square. After lunch we walked 7 kilometers to a place called Salinas de Maras. At this spot people are still "mining" salt in the same way as they did in the times of the Inca's and even before. The approach to the Salineras is pretty impressive. You are walking through a Wild West scenery and suddenly you see over 4000 white, yellow, grey, brown, salt basins. You can walk in between the basins, see the locals at work collecting the salt from them after all water has evaporated, etc. Pretty nice experience. After visiting the Salinas de Maras we walked towards the main road in the sacred valley where Julio, a guy from Cuzco gave us a lift to Chinchera, the next site worth visiting in the area. Again we were stunned by the remainders of the Inca-terraces. We surely do believe now that the people were never hungry under the rule of the Inca's. The colonial church that was built on the place where the temple of the sun used to be - as so often - did not impress us that much. The last bit of road to Cuzco we did by collectivo - a shared taxi ride.
The last full day in Cuzco we spend separately. Nele wandered through the small streets of the cozy San Blas area, while I visited the ruins of Tambomachay (the sauna and whirlpool resort of the Inca), Puka Pukara (a slightly outlying defence post for Cuzco), Q'enqo (a temple complex partly cut out of the natural rock surrounding) and Sacsayhuaman (the military and administrative center of Inca-Cuzco) close to Cuzco. All that was left then was preparing our backpacks for the 4-day Inca trail trek to Machu Picchu. We were ready...