Cuzco Day 3 - The Sacred Valley

The third day in Cuzco didn't start quite as early as the second, but we still had to be at our tourist agency pretty early. We had slept much better the after our exhausting day at Machu Picchu, so we felt a lot better. From the agency, we got in a van with about 10 other people for our Sacred Valley tour. The other people on our tour were from all over the world and most of them were about our age, so it fun to share the tour with them. In our three days of touring, we met people from Australia, Ireland, England, Germany, France, and Hawaii.

The Sacred Valley is a very fertile valley near Cuzco. The valley and the mountains on either side were home to a lot of really important Incan cities. The weather was amazing, our tour guide was really knowledgeable, and the people we were with were a lot of fun, so it was a really fun day.

Once again, we stopped on our way out of Cuzco to take some pictures overlooking the city. Cuzco currently has about 300,000 inhabitants, but this is just over half of what it had in Incan times. It's pretty hard to imagine an ancient city that large!

We were gone pretty much all day on the tour (until 7:00pm) and saw a lot, but the highlights of the tour were Ollantaytambo and Chinchero.

Ollantaytambo, like Machu Picchu, was the site of both a city and huge temple. There is still a small town there that is built almost completely on top of the old foundations of Incan buildings. Because they did build on Incan foundations, a lot of the roads between the houses were only about 2 meters wide.

The Incas built a lot of their cities to in the shapes of their sacred animals (Cuzco = puma, Machu Picchu = condor) and the temple at Ollantaytambo was built in the shape of a giant llama. One other amazing fact about Ollantaytambo is that the first place the sunrise of the summer solstice falls on the temple is the eye of the llama--incredible! You have to be on top of one of the adjacent mountains to see the entire shape, but we did get some good pictures of parts of the temple.

Chinchero was our last stop of the day and the highest place we visited in our three days at about 4000 meters above sea level. Even though we had gotten much more used to the altitude during our stay, we were still out of breath by the time we got to the colonial church at the top of the hill (again built over top of an Incan temple). Chinchero was the hometown of our tour guide, and it is home to a lot of people that are still pure descendants of the Incans. Our tour guide was pretty proud to tell us that he is pure Incan. We stopped to take some pictures of some snow capped mountains before we got to Chinchero and took some great sunset pictures on our way back to Cuzco.

When we got back to Cuzco we decided that we should head out for at least one night on the town. We asked some of the people from our tour if they would like to join us for dinner and ended up going out with a couple from Ireland (his name was Fergus...how perfect is that!?!) and two people from Hawaii. We were craving some more "American" food, so we ended up going out for pizza. It was a great end to another great day.