Machu Picchu (Cusco, Sacsayhuaman, Q'enqo, Qorikancha), Peru, September 2012

Cuzco, Peru

After our visit to the Peruvian Amazon we flew back to Lima and turned around and flew back out the next morning to Cuzco.  We have a beautiful view from our room where we eat a light lunch.  Rules of enjoying high altitude: hydrate, rest and eat light.

We have an afternoon tour of Cuzco highlights with Elga.  She is knowledgeable, organized, fun to chat with and keeps our walking pace slow so that we don't tire out.  She also knows what the usual tour route is and takes us 'backwards' so we don't run into any crowds-brilliant!

Cuzco was the center of the empire so it has a lot of important sites.  The philosophy is that in the beginning, everything was here, but it was chaotic.  Important Deity then takes everything and organizes it-my project management heart loves this!  This means that many things are sacred-mountains, rivers, people-and you can enhance what is already there.  They also have the aesthetic that functional simplicity is beauty and I felt the look had a lot in common with modern Scandanavian or Japanese beauty.

Tickets from the sites we visited-many have nice pictures and handy maps on the back.

Sacsayhuaman
This is a great site to start with because only 10-20% of the original structures are left, and it is all foundation.    These folks knew how to make earthquake proof buildings, starting with solid foundations and here it is all open to the sky.

How beautiful are these puzzle pieces?!  Note how all the edges are rounded, like a pillow, that is a sign this was a holy place, worthy of some extra work.

They keep some alpacas on site just for us tourists.

 If you can climb to the top you have a great view of the city

Q'enqo is my favorite of the sites we visit.  It is special because on the solstice the shadow of the rock is a puma and underneath is a small cave.  The cave represents the womb of mother earth, which is clearly sacred, so they, expanded the passage into the cave, carved in an alter and added niches to hold sacred objects.  I love the way they combine the natural and the man made.

Onto an important cathedral.  The most interesting items here are those that were made by locals which adds a twist.  There is a fairly famous painting of the Last Supper where the main dish is guinea pig, a local staple. The locally made statue of Jesus has a secret slot for petitions-though it is not accessible any more.

Finally Koricancha (have you noticed there are about 3 different spellings for everything?  yup, just go with it), originally the temple to the sun god, stripped by the Spanish down to the foundations, who then built on top, only to have most of that fall down in the earthquakes.  There is a neat exhibit of how the the stones were held together from the inside.  Carve a hollow that matches with the stones next to it and above, and then use metal or wood fasteners.

Everyone comes here to look for the famous stone with 14 visible corners.  One of the ways to hold up against earthquakes is to not make the individual stones meet at corners, but instead carve the corner into a single stone.  More interlocking pieces, less falling down.  These designs have lintels, no keystone for the arches, so you have to build in the sturdiness below.

Elga gets us back to our hotel where we take a quick nap before our shopping trip.  We walk around Cuzco-it is having growing pains, too much traffic on the small cobbled roads and some older parts of town torn down for newer buildings.  But it still has charming plazas and is very walkable (except for the altitude!).  We peak into a monastery that's been converted to a hotel to see the last ceder tree in the area.  They used to be common, but the wood is good to build with and now they are basically gone-so the garden with the last tree is beautiful, but sad.

I was pretty sure I wasn't going to get out of Peru without an alpaca sweater.  The trick would be to find one that didn't depict alpacas ON the sweater itself.  Throughout this part of the trip there are about a gabillion places to buy sweaters and hats, folks in the temple parking lots, a marketplace next to the train station, on the train to Peru, and individual stores.  The piles of merchandise can be overwhelming-so have a plan.  I knew that I wanted one nice sweater and some yarn.  I found this Montse Bello for the sweater, which does NOT have alpacas on it, and she directed me to a yarn wholeseller-so that was a big success!