Martin and Sylvia in Japan: Day 3: Sacred Valley

We woke up to a cloudy day in the Sacred Valley which somehow was even more beautiful.

Our room is near where the baby llamas live so we went to say hi en route to breakfast (they ranged from neutral about us to scared of us).

A side note on llamas (skip whole paragraph if tired of llama content): later, after we asked, our guide told us that llamas are only domesticated for tourism. Plus, they actually need to live at super super high altitude because short rough grass grows there, and they need that to clean their teeth. Without it, they can get gingivitis, get infections, and die. Which puts a damper on the whole llamas-at-the-hotel situation but it is impossible to boycott them because they are so cute. Plus we asked at the daily 4pm baby llama feeding and they only stay at the hotel one year before heading back up to the higher higher mountains. One more llama-family note: the most special kind of llama-type creature, vicuñas, are protected by the government and live on preserves. Every now and then the government permits the locals to shave them.

Then we got back in the car and headed to Pisaq, another town and Incan archaeological site.

On the drive, we saw three exceptional things

1- there are a lot of unfinished houses. Our guide told us it is cheaper for people to build houses up while they are living in the ground floor rather than renting another place to build, so it’s very common for the full construction to take 3 years.

2- political parties and candidates have started surprise-painting peoples houses to use them as giant advertisements—without asking. The locals are understandably annoyed.

3- there is a huge guinea pig cuisine situation in the sacred valley. And they way restaurants advertise to you from the street is by having giant statues of guinea pigs welcoming you in to eat…Guinea pigs.

This next one is inviting you in right behind his dead friends. Gotta make a living, I guess.

Once we got to Pisac, Sylvia needed coffee so we stopped in the town itself, where this cat lives (can you see him?):

Then we saw there was the Sunday open air market going on, so we decided to do that before heading to the ruins. We ate some sweet popped corn.

Then we went into the very tourist-focused market, including into one shop owners “Alibaba cave.” We considered getting Hadar a full Peruvian outfit but then thought--what will that really look like in Seattle?

Our driver requested an empanada from this giant traditional oven, so our guide obliged.

And we met another relative of Lucy Willner! She said she hasn’t heard from Lucy in a long time—did she do something to offend her?

Finally we got to the Pisaq ruins. Our guide advised us to put more sunscreen on. The result is that we look slightly like Casper's relatives in the following pictures, please disregard.

Our guide talked to us here about geography, apparently the Spanish showed up and divided Peru into coast, mountains and jungle. But recently, a geographer has reclaimed Peru's geography and categorized it by elevation, because there are different climates at each elevation. Peru has 80 microclimates.

These are “sunflower stone” arrangements—note the central stone with the others around it.

The fountain below was a ritual bath the Incas would take before they could enter the temple-- and sacrifices would have been burned on altar above it.

In this hillside below is the oldest preserved Inca cemetery. You can see holes in the hillside where people were buried in the fetal position. We asked if the tombs had been excavated and our guide said yes, by locals, who come to take the gold and silver. Turns out the Incas didn’t think of gold and silver as precious but rather decorative, gold symbolizing the sun and silver representing the moon. It’s illegal to raid these tombs but people do anyways and sell what they find to tourists. When the police ask them, they just say they made them themselves.

Oh did you think we were done with existential llamas?

This is our guide explaining with her handy book how the Incas locked doors.

Now we have a mama and baby llama...

And then dad(?) makes an appearance?

Meaningful eye contact??

Maybe happily ever after? Totally unclear.

And now for a scenic llama:

Martin made friends with scenic llama:

Then we hiked for a while to see even more ruins. This is when Sylvia's heart rate got to 145 when Martin's was at 121 and she reluctantly admitted that it was time to start running again.

^this picture was taken party for the views but also partly because an australian tour guide, seated to the right of this picture, was regaling his tourists with his account of having seen a giant ball of light come from deep in the valley up to this mountain only to disappear into the sky: "I can't say if it was an alien." The thing I forgot to mention about Pisaq is that it's full of posters for yoga and ayahuasca and spiritual experiences run by foreigners like above australian tour guide.

We finished our day with a late lunch with our guide and driver in this pleasant courtyard where Sylvia almost had a heart attack thinking her beef might be alpaca meat. It was not.