Ollantaytambo

     There is on-again off-again wifi in Ollantaytambo, but I am not complaining because it is pretty amazing that there is wifi at all.
    Yesterday we boarded the bus around 2.00.  It was an amazingly nice bus, a double-decker with seats that recline almost to a horizontal position and were very comfortable.  In the evening we drove by the desert coast.  There are villages here and there, but we don't know how they get water because of the miles and miles of empty sand that touch the shore.
     In the morning we were in the mountains, and we seemed to go up and up and up.  It doesn't seem that we are particularly high her, because of the mountains that are so mucher higher than we are, but we are about 9,160 feet and we are feeling the saroche so we are glad to have come down a bit from Cusco (11,200 feet) to acclimate.  We are drinking a lot of the coca tea, which is the natural remedy.
     There were many small villages and terraces on the mountains, and it was amazingly beautiful.  At points the mountains seemed almost mossy because of the vegetation on them, and other times they were more industrialized, or had crops and cows and sheep and pigs.  The one thing that we didn´t really see was forests, because they were deforested in the Incan times because they have been used for crops and grazing.
     Once we arrived in Cusco, we took a taxi to a place we could get a bus to a town to Huabamba, where we took another taxi to Ollantaytambo.  The trip from Cusco to here took about an hour and a half, so we were travelling about 25 hours in the entirety of the trip from Lima.
     The streets of Ollantaytambo and at least the bottom half of the houses date from Incan times.  There are canals running through the city, and ruins on the mountains on all sides of the village.  We have spent most of our time here exploring the town.  There are many small streets not wide enough for cars that we wander down, and the whole town is so ancient and beautiful that we cannot stop looking.
    Last evening we hiked up a part of a path to some Incan storage houses, but we left in the evening hoping to avoid the heat of the day (the sun is very intense this high in the mountains) but it got dark a lot quicker than we expected and though we made it to the nearer buildings we couldn´t see all of them.  The path was almost invisible in many places, and when there wasn´t a ledge beneath you there was a sheer drop to the town.
     This morning we went to ruins on the other side of the town.  These were mostly terraces, but there was a temple to the sun as well and a water temple.  The complex that we visited this morning were built in the shape of a llama, and the town is built in the shape of an ear of corn.
    The temples are built so in the winter solstice the sun shines and illuminates the temple of the sun, and rises at the precise point where a massive rock formation in the mountainside forms the shape of a head.  There is another part on the mountainside that takes the shape of a man carrying a bundle on his back, and a building was built on his head to look like a crown.
    The temple of the sun is built without mortar; the rocks are shaped to fit perfectly together.  Some of the rocks weigh thousands of pounds, and were carried without the help of pack animals from a nearby mountain.
   This afternoon we visited the Bio Museo, which is a museum full of native plants and herbs and vegetables.  The guide told us about the several thousands of varieties of potatoes, some of which are dying out because they can´t be sold commercially, and about some traditions and rituals.
     The Incans believed in three worlds.  The Kay Pacha is the world that you see; the world that you go to when you die is Uku Pacha; and the world of the spirits is Hanan Pacha.
     This is a picture of the face in the stone--you can sort of see the crown but not what he is carrying.  His bundle looks like a large semi-circular shape.

   

     These are the ruins that are built in the shape of a llama, but you cannot see that from this angle.  The stair-like things are terraces, and are very big--maybe 5 to 6 feet high and wide, and varying in length but some of them being quite long.

 Something not very important--this computer is one at the hotel we are staying at, and is set up in Spanish so it is telling me that I am spelling everything wrong, but a new tab is a ´Nueva Pestaña´ and ´pestaña´also means eyelash.  That is not related to anything.