Take a tour with me

Hello there! I hope this is finding everyone well and that the week is going great. I had a adventuresome weekend with my friend Sophia Marie from Germany. We bought this thing called boleto toristico which is a ticket that valid for 10 days and it gets you into all the major museums and ruins around cusco. We booked two tours for Friday and Saturday so that it would be easier to get to all the sights and so that we could learn all the interesting facts. Friday took us to Koricancha, Saqsayhuaman, Pukapukara, Tambomachay, and Q´enqo. Saturday took us to the sights in the Sacred Valley: Pisac, Ollantaytambo, and Chinchero. It was seriously an amazing experience. I learned so many things. Instead of blabbering on and on I just decided to put captions to a bunch of pictures. Slideshow time.

Where´s waldo? This is the inside of Koricancha. There are three Incan temples on the inside of these walls. Unfortunately the Spaniards came and tore down 80% of it and built a convent up ontop of it.

The incans built their temples so perfectly that nothing had to be put in to hold the stones together. This tiny one is special because it´s only the size of your thumbnail but its length is about a foot long. They said it´s almost impossible to get a stone like this. The legend is that if you touch it, you die within 7 days. Ooooo.... you gotta be careful around those incans.

Saqsayhuaman (pronounced something like sexy woman). It was one of my favorite sites. You are only seeing half because I´m standing on the other half.

This rocks were HUGE! They said that this is only 25% of what it really was. The spaniards went and ruined everything as usually. Apparently, the shortest wall was over 12 meters and the largets was over 30. (I´m 1.83 meters)

This is the view from Saqsayhuaman over Cusco.

This is Tambomachay, also known as the waters of fertility. The women would come here and bathe and drink from the water. You would bathe from the top if you wanted a girl and the bottom for a boy. 

The Sacred Valley and Sacred River.

The view from Pisac. How would you like to wake up every morning to that?

Sofia wasn´t quite ready haha. The top of Pisac. Those steps were carved into the mountainside to cultivate and help hold up the mountain during rock slides.

If you look closely, this is the ruins of Pisac. At the top there were little houses. It was quite a workout to climb it.

Sofia and I at Ollantaytambo. Behind us is the unfinished temple of the sun. While they were building this, the were fighting the spaniards and never got it finished.

The mountain side of Ollantaytambo. Guess what this is? Food storage! No joke! I took this specifically for my mom :) They used to store their food there in the case of a bad season. The little windows served to keep it cold, like a natural refrigerator!

Chinchero was a little town that still pratices the old ways of weaving. They said it talks 5 hours a day for 2 months just to make a runner for a table. It´s sad because they can only charge about $60 for it, which means that they earn a dollar a day. They showed us the process of turning the alpaca fur into yarn and dying it with natural dyes like roots and beetles.

Well thanks for coming on my tour! Love you all!