botwerks

tuesday – 24-november, 2009

we got a slow start to the day and ended up sleeping in a bit longer than we’d hoped. after grabbing a quick bite at the hotel we ducked down to the ATM machines to extract the balance of the necessary cash to pay the balance of the inca trail tour. we were able to quickly settle up with llama path and made our way to the Museum of Art Precolumbian (MAP). it bears noting that this place seems to have the toniest cafe in town. you got the opportunity to eat in a stylish glass cube in the middle courtyard of the museum. we were sufficiently non-plussed by the menu to skip it for lunch.

the MAP is actually one of the nicer museums in cusco. the displays are nicely laid out and there’s a considerable amount of content. they had a large collection of ceramics and sculpture from all over peru. it was well documented in both spanish and english which made it a fairly engaging museum for us. in addition to the ceramics they had a surprisingly large collection of wood sculpture, metalwork and some post-columbian painting. all of this was well organized and largely, well documented.

lunch – chez maggy. if you read the local reviews and the lonely planet writeup on this, you’d think that this was some orgasm inducing pizza. it’s not bad, but it’s not worth writing home over. we opted for the “super macho” pizza (sausage and red onion) which was tasty.

after lunch, we struck out for saqsayhuaman (aka: sexy woman) in typical fashion, this involved hauling ass uphill. both in town and on the stairs / trail leading to the ruins. an interesting (and annoying) feature of cusco is the presence of stair streets. resbalosa is one of these, “stair streets”. after reaching the top/end of resbalosa, we hugged the edge of a winding road leading up to the entrance of the trail to saqsayhuaman. it was a little disheartening to see so many people on their way down while we were climbing up. then it started to sprinkle.

when we reached the top of the trail to saqsayhuaman, the officials descended on us for our boleto turistico. at this point we also appreciate that it would have been a 5 minute taxi ride and there was no shortage of offers to take us back down. the easy part.

saqsayhuaman is a truly impressive site and it’s interesting to note that it’s still under active excavation. while we were up there they were actively digging out portions of the site and documenting it. it’s easy to see why the inca’s chose it for building their defenses, there’s an impressive view and assaulting armies would have a hell of an ascent.

we got about halfway down the trail to the winding road leading back into town when it started to rain in earnest. the descent in the rain while on the road wasn’t at all difficult. however, descending resbalosa when it’s wet is a bit taxing. this stone stair street has had years of foot traffic and flowing water to wear the stones smooth and it’s quite slippery.

kathy woke up the next day feeling much better than she went down. we decided to take it easy and acclimate gradually as opposed to hitting it hot and heavy with the climbing. this largely translated into keeping it local and meandering around town and the traveling equivalent of running errands. we made our first pass at the ATM machines and discovered to our dismay that we would quickly run up against the daily withdrawal limit. normally this wouldn’t be a big deal and we’d be running along with minimal cash expenditure. however, the tour guide for our inca trail tour basically demanded that their balance be paid in peruvian nuevo soles. this meant that we absorbed the nastiness of any exchange rate variability and was largely understandable. however, it meant that we had to pace ourselves and hit the ATMs on a daily basis until we’d amassed enough cash to pay the balance.

we’d visited llama path, our tour operator to see if there was an option for us to pay the balance via american express or an alternative credit card, but they were adamant that the balance be paid in cash. annoying to say the least. while we were at llama path we took the opportunity to book the sacred valley tour. this amounted to a full day tour of a number of notable inca ruins which we were interested in, as well as a couple of villages in the sacred valley area.

another one of our errands was to purchase the boleto turistico, this would get us access to a number of the archeological sites as well as a handful of museums around cusco. though the nasty gotcha here is that there are a number of interesting museums which you’d really like to see that don’t use the boleto turistico. we discovered this quite quickly as we went to go check out Qoricancha. aka, the nads of the jaguar.

Qoricancha was known as the temple of the sun. apparently when pizarro arrived in cusco and took control, the spanish got busy stripping the temple of all of its gold, melting it down and shipping it back to spain. a task they were apparently able to accomplish within a month. the church and aboveground structure is built upon the ruins of the original temple, and is not covered by the boleto turistico. what is covered by the boleto turistico is the underground museum. this is a sad, dank underground affair that’s accessible from avenida del sol. it’s about 6-8 poorly lit rooms with correspondingly poorly lit and documented displays. there are some potential nuggets within that little basement museum but they had no english translation to the labels. of particular interest, to me, was the display on trepanning. they had a handful of skulls which had been operated on and it was clearly apparent that there had been some healing that took place. this would have been a fascinating topic to dig into when you had the skulls right in front of you. unfortunately, there was zip. you eventually end up climbing out of this museum to emerge in the middle of the grounds of qoricancha, which is actually quite pleasant.

the above ground museum on the other hand is quite interesting. you really get a feel for the spanish ability to build on someone else’s foundation. there are a large number of existing walls from the temple of the sun days, which the spanish simply opted to cap with colonial architecture. today, most of this has been opened up as a museum, where you can check out the masonry and earthquake proof trapezoidal doorways left behind by the incas. oh, and there’s the santo domingo convent on site.

while wandering about we also took the opportunity to check out the 12-sided stone and snap some photos with local students. kathy proved to be quite popular. those hot chicks always are. the stone was impressive and underwhelming all at the same time. you have to appreciate the skill in crafting it particularly given the toolkit available at the time, but it does come down to it being a stone, in the middle of a wall.

don’t get sucked into buying the augmented reality issue of esquire.  about the 3rd time you hear “boo-yaa” from robert downey jr.  you’re pretty tempted to throw the magazine through your monitor. cute and clever?  yes.  tedious as hell? definitely.