Cuzco

We got to Cuzco Saturday.  Cuzco is an amazing place.  Yes it is touristy, but the drama of the landscape, colonial architecture, baroque and gothic churches and locals milling about is very cool.  Looking up and down every street is so neat because the city is very hilly and therefore you can see far into the distance or at a perfectly framed cityscape.  We spent the first afternoon and evening just walking and wandering.  We caught sunset looking out over the city and the surrounding mountains. For dinner we found a really wonderful local restaurant up on the hillside and ate alpaca and beef dishes.  On our first full day we woke up and wandered the Sunday market.  There were clothes, household goods, jewelry, fruit, vegetable, meat and random knickknacky vendors.  It's funny before Cuzco people came up to Ching Jen and inquired, china? Here they ask koreano? Japon?
> After the market we wandered the city some more.  We found the stone with 12 corners.  The inca architecture, especially their stone cutting, stone carving and wood car ing is incredible.  How they fit and measure the stones, which are heavy, into perfectly straight allignments without a mortar is amazing.  For lunch we continued our streak of peruvian food and had a local poultry soup with once frozen potatos, meaning potatos that are harvested in winter and papa rellena, stuffed potatoes with beef and vegetables. In the afternoon we went on a your of the city and nearby archaeological sites. The first stop was the cathedral at the plaza de armas.  The plaza is by far one of the most amazing scenes I've ever seen.  The cathedral and other churches are beautiful.  The plaza at the center has a fountain and lots of flowers.  The other surrounding buildings have exquisitely restored, ornately carved balconies.  Inside the cathedral there is so much gold and silver!  Everything was gold and silver.  The Spanish who built the churches built them on Quechua religious sites and inca palaces.  The Spanish took the gold and silver from those sites as well as the stones and used it for their buildings.  There were a lot of instances of local cultural touches in the cathedral sculpture and paintings like a last supper mural with guinea pig at the center. After the cathedral we walked down a narrow street with original inca walls on both sides.  Sadly earlier this year, while a store was underconstruction, hidden under scaffolding, a developer removed an entire section of the wall fir storefront.  The government has no authority over this type of action- guess the developer has influence.  Our next stop was qoricancha, an inca temple that is located within a church.  Again the Spanish built their church on the land of inca significance as a way of impearializing the Quechua. It wasn't until a strong earthquake made the plaster walls fall off that it was revealed that an inca temple was at the foundation of the church.  From here we went to saqsaywaman a site above Cuzco.  It's a massive monument of a three tiered wall.  The stones that were used to built it are over 100 tons and again somehow fit together with complete precision.  It's a mystery. Small bits of stone can crumble from the touch of a finger yet somehow the transported these heavy stones, lifted the up to 4 stories high and put them in place without breaking or smashing.  Qenqo was the next site.  This is a huge rock where the Quechua carved a cave.  It's not clear what it was used for but inside there is a slit of light that falls on an altar, tracking the summer solstice.  The last site was tambochaya a natural spring where the Quechua built a fountain for bathing and an irrigation system for the valley.  The tour concluded with a stop at an alpaca garment factory/store. The wool certainly is soft.

On our last day we took it easy. We stayed in Cuzco and soaked up some sun. After breakfast we went to the Museum of the Incas. It was a grand overview of the history of Cuzco from pre-Inca period and well after the Spanish conquest of Cuzco. In the courtyard, there were three ladies in traditional dress weaving. Ching Jen´s mom would have loved to watch them weave their colorful and intricate cloths. Afterwards, we went to a small plaza with three fountains overlooking the cathedral where Jon sketched and Ching Jen wrote in her journal. The plaza is next to an elementary school and when they got out at lunch time, some of the young boys watched Jon draw. We found a great local place for lunch, where we got a set menu of soup and an entree (Jon had white beans, steak, egg and rice; Ching
Jen had rice and chicken with onions and tomatoes). We ended the day with
some more time in another park just writing. At night we went for a briefing for our Machu Picchu trek, we are told we will reach a height of 4000m and cover 46km of ground. It will be challenging, but we are excited.

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