botwerks

27-november, 2009 – 1st day of inca trail

we woke right at 4a and hustled to pack the rest of the gear.  my pack feels crazy heavy.  we got a 1/2 porter for kathy to carry her clothes and sleeping bag.

we got on the bus at plaza regocijo and we met celia a hardy mid-20 something french woman who was sick the evening of the briefing and wasn’t able to make it.  she seems to be ready for this trek.  we took the bus to ollayantaytambo where we have breakfast and buy our bag of coca leaves and ash.  at this point we start to get a feel for the group interaction.

we also got to check out a guinea pig castle and the frog drinking game we’d read so much about.  i can see how this would be a mess you up drinking game.  it clearly takes some practice.

from here we ended up taking the bus to kilometer 82 – which has something of an interesting staging area next to the train tracks and the river.  it’s a essentially a village that pops out of nowhere with a helluva  lot of bustle and no shortage of touts.  folks pop up to sell you water, gatorade, walking sticks, ponchos and a litany of items which one might actually need but really should have had beforehand.

a slight aside re: the roads – the bus ride from ollayantaytambo to kilometer 82 gave us a first hand look at road conditions in rural peru.  in short, they’re pretty rustic.  a good hunk of the trip was on relatvely well paved single lane road.  at various points it devolved into single lane gravel road.  what isn’t always evident is the fact that the road often abuts a steep drop or in some instances a cliff.   driving here requires no small amount of concentration and situational awareness.  not to mention planning and coordination in the direction of what’s coming at you from the other driection on the road. there seems to be something of an unspoken coordination between drivers where the party closest to the workable shoulder moves to use it to allow the other party to pass.  this is not something to try in the U.S. where every self important prick assumes that they have the right of way.

at the staging area we were herded to the first check piont where our passports are stamped and we’re checked into the trail.  we get to cross the rio urubamba on a swinging cable bridge.  it’s an auspicious start and sets you in the mood for a haul.  the first few miles on the trail aren’t as rustic as you might think.  there’s some meandering through farmers fields, plenty of folks offering to let you rent their bathroom and selling stuff on the trail.  there’s a surprising number of families who live on or next too the trail.  there’s also a surprising amount of donkey shit on the trail.  you spend the first couple of hours expending a lot of energy dodging donkey shit.

at first, there’s nothing particularly challenging about the the trail, and you’re fresh and eager.  towards the end of the day however, we got a bit of a taste of what was to come.  we hit a number of steep sections and got some healthy climbs in.  by the time you hit the camp after that first day, you’re ready to crash.

kathy left dinner early the evening of the first night on the trail. pretty tired and there was some rather spirited discussion about continuing; with her feeling under the weather.

26-november, 2009 – misc. cusco

inka museum – bring your own tp.  note, this is one of those places that you would think is included in the boleto turistico, but in reality, it’s not.  i run hot and cold on this one.  there’s some interesting stuff here.

very few of the displays here have english translations. so you have to puzzle through the explanation if you’re spanish challenged as we are.  there are guides available for hire based on tips only.  in retrospect, it might have been useful to get a guide to tell us the stories associated with the displays.  i don’t mean for the word “stories” to come off as pejoratively as it does, but you always have to go back and balance the account that you’re told when you’re on a tour with the research that you can dig up as an obsessively detail oriented individual.  in most cases, it’s close enough or romanticized appropriately.  sometimes you just want to hear a good story.  remember, if it bleeds, it leads.

getting back to the inka museum … they’re pretty aggressive about enforcing the ticket policy here.  there are guards all over the place and they ticket number at entry.  kathy couldn’t find a bathroom and they almost didn’t let her back into the museum.  a little bit of local explanatory help got her back into the mix, but seriously people …

the displays here are no where near as polished as the displays at MAP there’s a lot of card stock and fading ink-jet printing with ye-olde english font action.  there are however, a lot of artifacts that are well worth checking out and a few dioramas that are more than a little entertaining.   that said, the artifact displays are haltingly covered in english.  if you’re not conversant in spanish, you’re screwed.

almost worth the price of admission alone are a handful of large format aerial photographs from the 1930s.  these were clearly taken before exhaustive restoration and excavation had taken place.  ollayantaytambo looks practically native and machu picchu looks like it was just discovered.  there are a number of pictures from the 1912 national geographic expedition led by hiram bingham.  this had to be the first expedition of note since the “discovery” of machu picchu by bingham a year earlier.

as a side note – these pictures had me dig up the original national geographic articles from the natgeo archives.  fascinating stuff from a time when there was still active exploration to be done.

the first floor of this museum has a couple of small textile production exhibits.  one of the exhibits has a number of interesting displays detailing various textile patterns and their symbolic significance.  (star pattern / mountain range / etc.)  apparently, there’s a lot of interest in the part of the peruvian government in insuring that there’s a repository of native skills and they’re supporting a number of initiatives to teach and document the original techniques.

thursday evening – the briefing …

this was the pre-inca trail briefing at the llama path office.  this was more interesting than i thought it would be.  first off, it’s the first exposure to the people you’re going to be slogging 30+ miles on the trail with.  our impressions were very favorable.  there’s an underlying dread at the possibility that you’ll have to slog the next 3-4 days out with a bunch of douche-bags.  fortunately, we got a good crew.  largely non-U.S. in composition, we had a handful of australians, a portuguese couple, a woman fromt he isle of man, a couple from michigan and a venezuelan by way of seattle.

• day 1 – looks to be relatively chepa
• day 2 – looks to be a bitch
• day 3 – looks like stair hell with a break in the afternoon
• day 4 – wake up @ 3:30a – hike in the dark, wait in line, hike and tour within machu picchu – bus to aguas calientes and a train to poroy for us.  llama path bus to cusco.

25-november, 2009 – sacred valley tour

we hauled our asses to the llama path office at 8:30a and were picked up by a tour bus marked “valle sagrado” only after i repeatedly said to kathy, “awesome, that must be our bus,” about a hundred times in the 15 minutes between our arrival and the actual pickup by the bus. we hopped on and proceeded to make number of loops through cusco picking up additional folks with no clear guide emerging. it was only after we got to a gas station on the outside of town that our guide boarded the bus. marco antonio, who was quite the player and drew numerous comparisons between himself and marc anthony, the singer.

our first stop was carao, a nondescript little village en route to sacred valley notable only for a big hunk of cement with a dog that i took numerous photos of and a clear relationship between the tour operator and the folks selling schwag at a roadside stand. we were also graced with a number of llama photo-ops.

from carao, we made our way to pisac. pisac is a surprisingly sprawling site, placed the crest of a mountain it contains some royal housing with a considerable amount of agricultural terracing. despite it being the offseason, we had to really hustle around this site to check out the elements that were interesting. of particular interest to us were the follwoing items.

• this was the first time we were able to see inca fountains in action. there was an elaborate routing of water from the moutainside through the “urban area” of the site.

• pisac has the largest known inca graveyard. this is actually a hill side facing the urban area with a large number of holes exposed. apparently each of these holes corresponds to a tomb, which had been looted at some point. the incas would bury their dead in the fetal position. a reference to the return to the earth mother (pachamama). buried as such, the tombs were on the small side.

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.