The goal of this post is to put up some of the pictures I took at Ollantaytambo and detail the last bit of my trip to Peru. So first things first, Ollantaytambo.
Ollantaytambo
So the day I went to Ollanta (that's what the locals call it) I had drank the night before and I think the grogginess which greeted me as I awoke sort of set the tone for the rest of the day. The whole thing sort of felt surreal. First of all, I didn't get started till way later than I had planned. Then, in the van on the way to the ruins, the British guy sitting right next to me is like, "God I can't stand Americans. One or two of them is ok, but when you get a bunch of them together and they start talking in their stupid (said with a lot of inflection) accents, I just can't take it." And I'm right next to him, just staring out the window like, 'I can't believe this is happening. I thought we (Americans) were supposed to be the clueless jerks'. His friend has to lean over and whisper to him that I am an American. Then comes the awkward apology and the back pedaling. Classic.
After the obnoxious British guy left with his otherwise-not-obnoxious friends, I asked the driver and Peruvian passengers for a good place to eat typical food and drink some chicha, which is a local alcoholic drink, sort of like beer, made from fermented corn. My Inca trail guide said it was like Andean Red Bull because the locals would drink it all day and never get tired in the fields. He also said it could give you gut rot if you weren't careful. Of course, based on this description, I had decided that I had to try it. So they tell me about this place and I go there. It seems really nice, like a bed and breakfast and restaurant combined. While I sat waiting for my food, it was really quiet and the clouds were moving across the sky really fast, giving this weird light to the whole place. And there was some kind of a domesticated bird like a goose that kept making this really crazy noise. Anyways, I get to talking to my waiter and he tells me that they don't sell chicha there, that I have to look for the places with a red plastic bag on a stick outside. Talk about subtle advertisement. He also tells me that if I want, I can go drink with him after I get done at the ruins. I'm like, 'sweet' and I head over to the ruins.
In my last blog post (read it. it's good) I detailed in words my experiences at Ollanta, so I figured here I would just throw up some pics with some explanations.
The weird little goose guy I was talking about? Is it straight up a goose or something else?
Ok so this is pretty sweet. The town of Ollanta sort of sits right between these two small mountains; on one of them is the main ruins and on the other is some smaller ruins and this guy. Apparently the Incas saw that this rock outcropping resembled an Inca man, so they went up there and improved the likeness. Don't ask me how they got up there to do it. It was sweet to look up and see this huge face sticking out of the mountain.
The main ruins as seen from the town below.
This is a cool shot I took through one of the windows in the ruins. There were a lot of little areas of running water like this one because a river was diverted to run through the whole complex and it was used in temples like this one.
Perfect example of the crazy walls they had at Ollanta. All the blocks are irregularly shaped but they fit together perfectly and they have those weird knobs. Just really ascetic.
Perfect example of those crazy perfectly shaped stones I was talking about in the last post. No power tools here baby.
Some of those huge perfectly shaped stones were used to make big walls or structures like this one. The cool thing is that the thin line of rock in the middle is actually there in order to protect the structure from earth quakes. Sort of like jointed sections in place of a solid, breakable wall. Pretty sweet.
Putting the timer on my camera to good use. This shot took me forever to get and it didn't even turn out that great. The camera kept falling over. I had like 9 pictures of blue skies before it was all said and done. Pretty funny though.So I got done at the ruins and I headed back to that B and B to find my new friend Guillermo. He was sitting right were I had left him and at the mention of going to drink his eyes lit up and we headed off. He said he knew a place right around the corner. In America when we say that phrase it could mean a couple of blocks or more. Guillermo walked 30 feet down a stone path and took a right into a little shack, with the tell tale red bag on a stick out front. When we entered the tiny room, there were already 4 or 5 old Andean men and women sitting on the benches lining the walls or at the one table in the room. The room was plain, with only a calender and a couple of pictures on the white walls. I sat at a bench and Guillermo went up to the old lady in the corner of the room, who served our chicha from a big clay pot the size of a garbage bin. She ladled the murky yellow drink into glasses the size of Route 44 cups from Sonic. We sat and began to chat about the ruins and the chicha. The chicha isn't super alcoholic and tastes like a cross between beer and juice. Guillermo knew a lot about Inca stuff, but that seemed to be the norm for people from this part of the country. Very proud of the heritage. Turned out Guillermo was even good friends with one of my Inca trail guides, Rojelio. Around us, the other people chatted in Quechua or sat quietly staring into space. To say I stuck out would be an understatement, but after a while no one paid me too much mind. We got another round and the talk moved to adventure sports (climbing duh) and the current socioeconomic state of Peru. It was somewhere in the middle of this second round that I had a moment of sublime awareness. Here I was, sitting in a little room, surrounded by a bunch of old Andean people just doing their thing, drinking corn beer (which is delicious and did not make me sick), and talking politics with my new friend in Spanish. It was this sense of privilege, like 'how many people who come to Ollanta, or Peru for that matter, have ever gotten to experience something like this?' Really cool.
As we finish the second round, the evening transitioned into full blown night and I decided I should head back. I offered to pay for the drinks and I asked the lady how much it costs. 2 soles. We just drank like over two gallons of beer and it is going to cost me like 80 cents American. Crazy. Guillermo walked with me through the narrow cobbled streets of the town to the bus station and put me on a cheap bus to Urubamba. From there I caught a bus to Cusco. All in all a really good day in Peru.
Like I said in the past post, the next day I went climbing and watched the world cup final. I also fiddle farted around such that when I tried to go to the bus station to buy my ticket to Lima I was too late. So my last day in Cusco I got up early, ran some errands, went and bought my bus ticket. Wanting to make the most of the tourist ticket I had bought, I then went to check out some of the ruins that were a little closer to the city. Unfortunately despite the addition of new batteries my camera still wasn't working, so I have no photographic evidence of the cool stuff I saw that day. My apologies. Now I had already been near a lot of these ruins because the climbing is also in that same park so I decided to just walk up there. The first one I hit is called Q'enko and it is the site of one of the craziest things that happened to me on my trip.
Q'enko
Q'enko is a religious site thought to be important even to pre-Inca peoples as a sacred place.
Many of the Incan sites in this area, especially the religious ones, are located in places where there was already a sort of natural sanctuary created by the weird limestone boulders that dot the landscape. Of course, this means that a lot of these places also have significance for the local climbing community. Q'enko is no exception. In fact, it's the anti-exception. Huge limestone boulders with perfect overhanging faces and flat ground beneath them. A giant shelter cave. Huge tufas than run from the bottom of a wall to the top ( if you don't know what that is it's ok). The only reason you can't climb there is because a park ranger office sits right in front of it. Now, a lot of the what makes the place so cool (the narrow passages between the boulders, the massiveness of the cave), was created by the Incas when they shaped the stone for their religious purposes. Even so, it will make a climber's palms sweat. So of course when I first entered the natural courtyard formed by a cluster of massive boulders, I was staring up at everything in awe, gingerly and reverently touching the rock. My mouth was probably hanging open. I think this was the cause of what happened next. There was a man in the courtyard trying to sell small artisan stuff to a group of tourists. Typical Cusco. But, when he saw me playing the part of the arriving pilgrim, he put his things away and approached me. "Do you believe in the energy?" he asked me in English. Here is where a more reasonable and cautious person might have just walked away or said no. Typically I am that person. For whatever reason on that day I answered in Spanish and told him I didn't know. And, when he asked me to follow him into one of the narrow passages, I did.
Sounds dumb right? But when he told me my stuff and my money were safe, I believed him. And I figured he just wanted to guide me around and then hit me up for money. I wanted to learn about the place so I didn't mind losing a couple soles to hear more about it. He took me to the end of the passage and told me to stand at an exact spot in the path. Then he told me to close my eyes and breath deeply three times. I did. A part of me was thinking, as you probably are right now, "What are you doing?! This guy is going to punch you in the face and steal all your stuff!" I wanted to grab the pocket knife I kept for self defense. But I didn't. Something just told me I should trust this guy and see how far down the rabbit hole went. After I did the breathing thing, he told me he was going to clean my energy. He had me raise my arms out to the side and close my eyes and breath deeply. I peeked of course because part of me was still wary as hell. As he chanted, he ran both hands along the length of my arm, as if he was pulling a sleeve down it. As his hands left my finger tips, he threw them away forcefully and then clapped. I have seen people do this on TV, but this was way different. When he was done he told me the stomach is a person's source of power and he drew an Incan cross on my stomach with his finger. Then he told me to walk down the passage way and asked if I felt different. I didn't really but I didn't want to offend him so I just said maybe. He took me into the cave, which he said was a source of feminine energy. He had me do the breathing thing again while touching the cool stone. Then he said he would take me to a source of masculine energy. I had the brief thought that this dude was trying to get frisky with me, but something told me that wasn't the case. So I followed him. On the way I asked him what we were doing and he explained that he was a shaman-in-training. 3 more months and he would be a full blown leader of an indigenous religion. He said I was only 25 percent spiritually developed and that he was going to help me develop myself further. He actually used percentages, it was pretty funny. I asked him why he would do that for free. He said it was part of his training. This is crazy right? One minute I am just walking around some boulders and the next I have become the pet project of a shaman-in-training. Or a psychopath. Or a con artist. So he takes me down the hill a ways away from the ruins. As he chants, he has me do the breathing again. Then he tells me I have a couple of bad spots in my energy and he needs to find them. He puts his hand on my stomach and makes me flex. Then he grabs different parts of my arms and makes me flex those. He was so normal about it, it was like being at the physical therapy clinic. Then he runs his finger along the grooves between my arm and my chest. He asks me a bunch of questions. Where my family came from before America, the last time I was in a serious relationship, all kinds of stuff, each time nodding knowingly at the answer. It was like a spiritual physical. He then tells me the two bad spots are in the joints he ran his finger along earlier and that I did not get them on my own, that I got them from loving a person that was not honest with me. This is reasonably true. A part of me thought he would then tell me he had the cure for the spots and I could buy it from him. Instead he said I had to drink muna tea 10 times a week to make the spots go away. Muna is a native plant that grows all over. I could pick it myself. He also told me that my spirit wasn't Swiss-German or Czech or Scottish or Irish, my spirit is French. Pssshhh. He got that wrong. My spirit is Texan (what what!). And he told me I was now 50 percent spiritually developed and for the rest of the job I would have to come back and study with him. I gave him a couple of soles for his time and headed off to the next ruins, unscathed. It would seem that my instinctual trust of this dude was justified. Or maybe I just dodged a bullet. It's been over a month now and I still don't know what to make of it, except for that it was crazy and it makes for a good story. After Q'enko I headed off to main attraction in the regional park, the ruins of Sacsayhuaman.
Sacsayhuaman
So the ruins of Sacsayhuaman (pronounced 'saxy woman' which is pretty funny) are the remains of an Incan fort and they are really cool. and big. Imagine the same building style shown in the pictures above, but the stones are even more massive, up to 70 tons! The thing is that at Ollanta, some of the walls are like in the pictures, but most of the walls are simpler and not polished or fitted. At Sacsayhuaman all the walls are like that. Imagine a super-sized Lego fort, but the Legos aren't just people sized, they are giant sized. And they think the polished stone would have been covered in gold plates. So now imagine a giant lego fort made of gold. Crazy Incans. It was really cool and peaceful because there weren't a lot of people around. I wandered from there into the boulder field surrounding the ruins. Everywhere the Incas had left their mark, perfect angles occasionally gracing the corners or faces of the natural rock. It is crazy to think how it must have looked before the Spaniards came and destroyed what they could. From there, I mosied back into town and killed a bit of time before I boarded the bus. So ended my last day in Cusco.
Lima
The bus trip to Lima passed by like a blink, albeit a blink made up of bad movies, reading and sleeping. The fact that it felt like a blink is crazy because it took 23 hours. When I got to Lima, I took care of some stuff at my hostel, namely I got reimbursed for the things that got stolen last time I stayed there. Shout out to Mike at HQ Villa hostel. Thanks man. Then I had the pleasure of going out with a beautiful girl I had met while in Cusco. The next day I hung out with a friend I had made my first time in Lima and got to see the pretty girl one last time before my flight (although I almost missed the flight in the process). Before I knew it I was back in the land of the free and brave and grossly overweight.
So that was my trip. I hope the blog wasn't too boring or detailed, especially here at the end. Sally and Terry, I am sorry it took me so long to put up this last post. I hope everyone keeps checking in on occasion because I still have more travels ahead of me, and I want to tell you about them. I am thinking Australia and New Zealand this Christmas break. I'll keep you posted.
As we finish the second round, the evening transitioned into full blown night and I decided I should head back. I offered to pay for the drinks and I asked the lady how much it costs. 2 soles. We just drank like over two gallons of beer and it is going to cost me like 80 cents American. Crazy. Guillermo walked with me through the narrow cobbled streets of the town to the bus station and put me on a cheap bus to Urubamba. From there I caught a bus to Cusco. All in all a really good day in Peru.
Like I said in the past post, the next day I went climbing and watched the world cup final. I also fiddle farted around such that when I tried to go to the bus station to buy my ticket to Lima I was too late. So my last day in Cusco I got up early, ran some errands, went and bought my bus ticket. Wanting to make the most of the tourist ticket I had bought, I then went to check out some of the ruins that were a little closer to the city. Unfortunately despite the addition of new batteries my camera still wasn't working, so I have no photographic evidence of the cool stuff I saw that day. My apologies. Now I had already been near a lot of these ruins because the climbing is also in that same park so I decided to just walk up there. The first one I hit is called Q'enko and it is the site of one of the craziest things that happened to me on my trip.
Q'enko
Q'enko is a religious site thought to be important even to pre-Inca peoples as a sacred place.
Many of the Incan sites in this area, especially the religious ones, are located in places where there was already a sort of natural sanctuary created by the weird limestone boulders that dot the landscape. Of course, this means that a lot of these places also have significance for the local climbing community. Q'enko is no exception. In fact, it's the anti-exception. Huge limestone boulders with perfect overhanging faces and flat ground beneath them. A giant shelter cave. Huge tufas than run from the bottom of a wall to the top ( if you don't know what that is it's ok). The only reason you can't climb there is because a park ranger office sits right in front of it. Now, a lot of the what makes the place so cool (the narrow passages between the boulders, the massiveness of the cave), was created by the Incas when they shaped the stone for their religious purposes. Even so, it will make a climber's palms sweat. So of course when I first entered the natural courtyard formed by a cluster of massive boulders, I was staring up at everything in awe, gingerly and reverently touching the rock. My mouth was probably hanging open. I think this was the cause of what happened next. There was a man in the courtyard trying to sell small artisan stuff to a group of tourists. Typical Cusco. But, when he saw me playing the part of the arriving pilgrim, he put his things away and approached me. "Do you believe in the energy?" he asked me in English. Here is where a more reasonable and cautious person might have just walked away or said no. Typically I am that person. For whatever reason on that day I answered in Spanish and told him I didn't know. And, when he asked me to follow him into one of the narrow passages, I did.
Sounds dumb right? But when he told me my stuff and my money were safe, I believed him. And I figured he just wanted to guide me around and then hit me up for money. I wanted to learn about the place so I didn't mind losing a couple soles to hear more about it. He took me to the end of the passage and told me to stand at an exact spot in the path. Then he told me to close my eyes and breath deeply three times. I did. A part of me was thinking, as you probably are right now, "What are you doing?! This guy is going to punch you in the face and steal all your stuff!" I wanted to grab the pocket knife I kept for self defense. But I didn't. Something just told me I should trust this guy and see how far down the rabbit hole went. After I did the breathing thing, he told me he was going to clean my energy. He had me raise my arms out to the side and close my eyes and breath deeply. I peeked of course because part of me was still wary as hell. As he chanted, he ran both hands along the length of my arm, as if he was pulling a sleeve down it. As his hands left my finger tips, he threw them away forcefully and then clapped. I have seen people do this on TV, but this was way different. When he was done he told me the stomach is a person's source of power and he drew an Incan cross on my stomach with his finger. Then he told me to walk down the passage way and asked if I felt different. I didn't really but I didn't want to offend him so I just said maybe. He took me into the cave, which he said was a source of feminine energy. He had me do the breathing thing again while touching the cool stone. Then he said he would take me to a source of masculine energy. I had the brief thought that this dude was trying to get frisky with me, but something told me that wasn't the case. So I followed him. On the way I asked him what we were doing and he explained that he was a shaman-in-training. 3 more months and he would be a full blown leader of an indigenous religion. He said I was only 25 percent spiritually developed and that he was going to help me develop myself further. He actually used percentages, it was pretty funny. I asked him why he would do that for free. He said it was part of his training. This is crazy right? One minute I am just walking around some boulders and the next I have become the pet project of a shaman-in-training. Or a psychopath. Or a con artist. So he takes me down the hill a ways away from the ruins. As he chants, he has me do the breathing again. Then he tells me I have a couple of bad spots in my energy and he needs to find them. He puts his hand on my stomach and makes me flex. Then he grabs different parts of my arms and makes me flex those. He was so normal about it, it was like being at the physical therapy clinic. Then he runs his finger along the grooves between my arm and my chest. He asks me a bunch of questions. Where my family came from before America, the last time I was in a serious relationship, all kinds of stuff, each time nodding knowingly at the answer. It was like a spiritual physical. He then tells me the two bad spots are in the joints he ran his finger along earlier and that I did not get them on my own, that I got them from loving a person that was not honest with me. This is reasonably true. A part of me thought he would then tell me he had the cure for the spots and I could buy it from him. Instead he said I had to drink muna tea 10 times a week to make the spots go away. Muna is a native plant that grows all over. I could pick it myself. He also told me that my spirit wasn't Swiss-German or Czech or Scottish or Irish, my spirit is French. Pssshhh. He got that wrong. My spirit is Texan (what what!). And he told me I was now 50 percent spiritually developed and for the rest of the job I would have to come back and study with him. I gave him a couple of soles for his time and headed off to the next ruins, unscathed. It would seem that my instinctual trust of this dude was justified. Or maybe I just dodged a bullet. It's been over a month now and I still don't know what to make of it, except for that it was crazy and it makes for a good story. After Q'enko I headed off to main attraction in the regional park, the ruins of Sacsayhuaman.
Sacsayhuaman
So the ruins of Sacsayhuaman (pronounced 'saxy woman' which is pretty funny) are the remains of an Incan fort and they are really cool. and big. Imagine the same building style shown in the pictures above, but the stones are even more massive, up to 70 tons! The thing is that at Ollanta, some of the walls are like in the pictures, but most of the walls are simpler and not polished or fitted. At Sacsayhuaman all the walls are like that. Imagine a super-sized Lego fort, but the Legos aren't just people sized, they are giant sized. And they think the polished stone would have been covered in gold plates. So now imagine a giant lego fort made of gold. Crazy Incans. It was really cool and peaceful because there weren't a lot of people around. I wandered from there into the boulder field surrounding the ruins. Everywhere the Incas had left their mark, perfect angles occasionally gracing the corners or faces of the natural rock. It is crazy to think how it must have looked before the Spaniards came and destroyed what they could. From there, I mosied back into town and killed a bit of time before I boarded the bus. So ended my last day in Cusco.
Lima
The bus trip to Lima passed by like a blink, albeit a blink made up of bad movies, reading and sleeping. The fact that it felt like a blink is crazy because it took 23 hours. When I got to Lima, I took care of some stuff at my hostel, namely I got reimbursed for the things that got stolen last time I stayed there. Shout out to Mike at HQ Villa hostel. Thanks man. Then I had the pleasure of going out with a beautiful girl I had met while in Cusco. The next day I hung out with a friend I had made my first time in Lima and got to see the pretty girl one last time before my flight (although I almost missed the flight in the process). Before I knew it I was back in the land of the free and brave and grossly overweight.
So that was my trip. I hope the blog wasn't too boring or detailed, especially here at the end. Sally and Terry, I am sorry it took me so long to put up this last post. I hope everyone keeps checking in on occasion because I still have more travels ahead of me, and I want to tell you about them. I am thinking Australia and New Zealand this Christmas break. I'll keep you posted.
