Honeymoon in Peru! Installment 1: Cuzco and Ollantaytambo

10 months after getting married, Rosie and I went to Peru for our honeymoon. It was a good time. We flew from Boston to Lima via Panama City and had an overnight (barely) layover there.

We ate some really good roasted chicken around the corner from the hostel while watching Gigantes Pequeños, a TV show where small groups of 5-10 year old children perform song and dance routines. It was magical. Then, at about 2:30 in the morning, we got our wakeup call (also magical) to take a taxi back to the aeropuerto and we were off to Cuzco.

We flew over the crest of the Andes, past mountains almost as high as our flight path.

We landed in Cuzco, which sits at around 11,500 feet. The first order of business was to get a taxi into a part of town where we could catch a bus of some sort down to the corridor known as the Sacred Valley, the valley of the Urubamba river, a river running from SE to NW about an hour north of the city. Getting there, we took a van up and over Cuzco's immediate ring of mountains, across a high plain filled with wheat and barley fields, and down a sequence of switchbacks to about 9,000 ft and the river.

View out the front end of the collectivo van.

 The last of the glaciated peaks before the mountains give way to the Amazon.

About 7 hours after our wakeup call in Lima, we got off the van at the end of the line, Ollantaytambo. We had eaten basically nothing, so we had breakfast. I confused juego when I meant to say jugo with my meal.

Cats happen in Peru, too.

Next, we walked around to find a hostel or other accomodation. We went in to one place and asked if they had any available rooms, and the guy looked at us as if we were crazy thinking we could just walk in like that. This temporarily terrified us, as if maybe all the rooms in town were booked. However, this was not the case and Ollantaytambo is actually a pretty sleepy little place. We found a charming little place which was charging a bit more than we planned on paying, but we took it anyway...unexpectedly, this became a pattern for the whole trip.

For the afternoon, we toured the Ollantaytambo ruins. Photo below not mine-- from http://2totravelperu.blogspot.com/2009/04/day-6-ollantaytambo-ruins.html.

The town of Ollantaytambo in the background. The Ollantaytambo ruins were the site of a major battle between the Inca and the Spanish not long after the Inca were initially driven out of their capital of Cuzco. Although they won the battle, the Inca eventually had to withdraw, and for several decades existed as an empire in exile among some of the upper Amazon tributaries to the west and south of Ollantaytambo.

 The famous Inca stonework. Couldn't fit a knifeblade between any of these stones.

A notable, and very fine, doorway.

Some of the countryside downstream from town.

 The six upright stones shown here are truly monumental. This was one of the sacred areas within the larger complex.

 Nobody knows the purpose of the bosses protruding from the stones. Maybe just aesthetic, considering the way they cast cool shadows, or maybe vestiges from when the site was being built, or maybe something about heat transfer out to reduce thermal expansion.

 Various baths and fountains are at the bottom of the complex.

 The stepped chacana motif shown below is a big deal.

More photos coming later.