Next up on our adventure was a day tour of the Sacred Valley of the Incas. In many ways this was the most amazing tour of the holiday as we saw many of the Inca sites, everyone thinks about Machu Picchu but the Incas were very busy around this region and this tour picked up many of their structures. I’d say I learned more on this trip than the Inca Trail, that is how good it was.
One of the problems with the Inca history and previous civilisations, is that they couldn’t write. Unlike the West where we have written or documented history from the Egyptians and other early civilisations, nothing like that exists for Peru and written history is largely attributable to the Spanish conquistadors, and only a limited number of academics who wanted to preserve their legacy.
There were a couple of highlights of this tour, the first was the amazing, terraced valley near Pisac. As a geographic spectacle it is stunning, as you stand at the top of the valley it is difficult to believe ancient people could have turned a valley into this terrace. Even more amazing was the scientists, belief that the terraces were used as a biological observatory to test the ability of plants to survive at difficult altitudes.
The Incas were basically engineers, they build incredible walls with amazing scientific accuracy in the angle of the walls to ensure their stability. The thing we learned over our time in this valley was that the terracing of the valley was the only way it could be inhabited.
The walls of the valleys are so steep with unstable rocks that the only way to flourish in the valley was to create stability and that is why the Incas built all the terraces.
We then moved on to an amazing terrace of salt pools, this too dated back to the Inca civilisation, they had spotted that the underground river was carrying salt and built these pools to trap them. This is still a commercially viable site and one of the big products is, surprisingly, chocolate.
Then we headed to Ollantaytambo this little town was the place that the train to Macchu Pichu leaves from, and also the trail head for the Inca Trail trek.
This little town had an amazing, terraced structure of it’s own, called the Temple of the Sun and on the other side of the valley there were tombs built into the mountain rock face that were hundreds of feet above the valley floor. It was very difficult to imagine how people climbed up the rock face along narrow paths to build these structures way up on the rock face.
We then set off to climb the terraced temple, which was steep but nothing compared to what was coming on the Inca Trail. it was then that I noticed that Wooksie was struggling, she had been recovering nicely and was getting back to herself at the lower altitude, but clearly when put under strain it became very difficult and we were still at a much higher altitude than normal
So a long drive back to Cusco, a very well organised tour and if you only have time for one tour I would say this is the one, you don’t see Macchu Pichu but you do really get an impression about the amazing the Inca nation before the Spanish eradicated it in their search for gold, fortunately, some of it was documented.
With Wooksie still struggling we had a very difficult decision ahead of us. The Inca Trail had been booked 6 weeks before, postponement wasn’t an option so our decision was “go” or “no go”. We had another quiet day in Cusco mooching around the museum and taking it easy to help Wooksie recover.
A tough decision in our world always comes down to the same question, “What’s the worst thing that could happen”, and that is where we got to with the decision on the trek. Wooksie wasn’t really up to it, but we had the option of completely cancelling or giving it a go. We concluded that we were better off giving it a go and if it didn’t work out, we would just have to pull out of the trek and the costs of being extracted.
So we committed to going and turned up the pre trek meet that evening, but we weren’t feeling particularly confident – onwards and upwards, although the name of the high altitude pass, Dead Woman’s Pass, wasn’t exactly encouraging.
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