Cusco & Macchu Picchu

Cusco is a city of around 400,000 people, & maybe that many tourists! It is situated across a valley, with the poorer houses on the steepest parts of the slopes. In the rainy season, there are a lot of mud slides, with houses, bridges, roads & railway lines lost in the destruction. I am staying in the old colonial part of the city, with a steep walk down & up hill to reach the Plaza del Armas, or central city square. Other than the 1st day when it rained a little, it has been fine & sunny, cool nights warm days. There are archeological sites throughout the city, where Spanish buildings sit on top of Inca stonework, which has lasted through many earthquakes, unlike the colonial buildings. The Cathedral here is huge, designed to totally overwhelm the locals with its size & spendour, & I saw the Cusqueno painting of the Last Supper, featuring a meal of either cuy (guinea pig) or chinchilla. There are lots of interesting museums, & many churches, & of course many shops! It was very interesting visiting the many small towns in the Sacred Valley, where again we had the opportunity to see how the local people live. We visited Pisac, where there is a small town & an amazing Inca site on a hilltop where the Spaniards were defeated through the Incas flooding the Urubamba River Valley. At Maras, we visited a site where several meteors fell & created huge holes, which the Incas turned into terraced experimental farms where they worked on growing different vegetables at different levels, using these ingenious aqueducts for water. At Ollayantaytambo, another important Inca town, we visited a home where multiple generations were living in harmony with dogs/puppies, cats/kittens, ducks/ducklings, chickens/chicks, & lots of indoor guinea pigs. There was electricity connected, & the water supply comes from snow melt flowing through the old Inca aqueducts. We had a delicious lunch at a converted hacienda, with macaws & many alpacas, vicunas & llamas in a small pen for viewing by tourists. From Ollantaytambo, we caught the train to Aguas Caliente, a small town deep in the Urubamba River Valley, & then took the bus early in the morning up a very steep narrow switchback road to the entry for Macchu Picchu. With our guide, we then hiked out to the old Inca suspension bridge, with some fantastic scenery as well as various seismology & weather monitoring points. I could understand why they describe the area as cloud forest, as a lot of times we were lookong down onto the clouds. It is a jungle region, with fuschias, orchids, bamboo etc in profusion, as well as mosquitos! Surprisingly, there was mobile phone coverage on the top of Macchu Picchu, with many people making & taking calls. Only 2500 people per day are allowed onto the site, & even thiugh we arrived in the first 200, by the time we had visited the Inca bridge & the agricultural section, & got to the city ruins, it was very crowded, with some difficulty navigating the steep stairs when other people were going in the opposite direction. There were some parts of the stairs (no railings) where you are hanging out over the drop to the valley whilst turning a corner! The site is spectacular, surrounded by mountain ranges with glaciers, & it must have been an impressive city in its time, but no one knows why it was abandoned by the Incas. There were beautiful gardens still there, with lovely flowers, as well as many temples, a school, burial sites & residential areas. There was also a carved stone monolith showing the Southern Cross, which was spcial to the Incas, as the mountain peaks surrounding Macchu Picchu align with the stars in the Southern Cross. We were there for a few hours, but all of us were pretty sore by the time we left, with stiff knees, & wary of stairs for the next few days, so I am glad I didn't do the 4 day trek! On weekends, local artisans bring their wares in to sell in markets in the chrch squares, so we are going to visit the one in the old town this morning.