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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.

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.

it’s a little irksome to be greeted by this when you’re filling up.  the fine folks at marathon have positioned this as if it were some sort of grassroots advertising.  but in reality it’s just shilling for their preferred mode of operation when it comes to cap-and-trade.


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yesterday, i horked up something in my .emacs file which broke the manner in which my on-the-fly spell checker (flyspell) worked inside of emacs. if i’d been thinking i would have had the whole thing under the current version control system. but somehow, this portion of the home directory tree missed out on that.

setting aside that bit of silliness on my part, i noticed something. while i was grinding out real work and answering emails between the discovery of the breakage and repair, i discovered that my work flow had developed a dependency on having an automated “checker” come back and clean up after me.

now, i’ve had this realization in the world of MSFT Word and other packages with built-in spell checkers, but clean-up of typos was one of those things that i did in a batch manner, my fingers hadn’t actually adapted to the use of an integrated spell checking function like they had in my normal work tools. (read, emacs)

i’ve always had some level of pride in having relatively decent spelling skills. but the power of ctr-; and _knowing_ what your tool would do, has had an interesting impact on my productivity. one that i’m not entirely convinced is for the best in the long term.