Sacred Valley

We woke up in the morning and left our big backpacks in Cusco. Today we planned to visit the sacred valley and take the evening train to the Machu Picchu village. Most of the tour agencies offer sacred valley day trip. In this day trip you can visit most important sights from Inka empire apart from Machu Picchu. The trip has following route ~ Chinchero, Moray, Maras, Ollantaytambo and Pisac. Some passengers which wish to continue onward to Machu Picchu village usually stay directly in Ollantaytambo to avoid traveling next day there for 2 hours. Unfortunately in that case you miss Pisac the most impressive Inka town in Sacred valley and famous market. The market is really spectacular, especially on Sundays when the local communities from mountains coming down to exchange their products as in the old times. We decided at the end to hire a taxi for a day and visit Pisac first and skip Chinchero. Our driver was nice and was explaining us a lot of things about the history and stopped several times for pictures. In the morning it was raining heavily but luckily once we arrived in Pisac it stopped raining and we could enjoy the sacred valley without rain and fog. Pisac was the biggest sight of the all sacred valley places. The monument is located high up in the hills few kilometers after Pisac village. There is a cool hike from the village to the archeological sight which takes 3 hours. I highly recommend taking a guide. It helps you understand the Inka culture, astrology and agriculture knowledge. Our second stop were Salineras Maras. This place was already found in preinka times when the spring with salty water was discovered. Nowadays this place produces the best salt in the world and additionally they produce 3 different types of salt ~ medical salt, pink salt and classic salt. After that we continued our trip to Moray which is an incredible Inka Agriculture Laboratory. The terraces were built in place which got hit by meteorite and the Inka people found out that in the bottom there is a different climate zone then in the upper terraces. They plants in each terrace all the crops in order to find out the best recipe / climate zone for each product. After that seeds and instructions were sent all over the Inka empire. On the way to the incredible lunch we saw impressive sky lodge hotel built on the rock 😅 you have to climb for 1 hour to get up to the hotel room and on the way down you take 7 zip lines. Really cool but pricey experience (320€ per night). Last stop of our day was village Ollantaytambo where we said goodbye to our driver and visited the Inka sight by ourselves. This is the newest sight and the construction was not even finished. The village was supposed to be 2 bigger but then the Spanish people arrived and the temples were destroyed. At 19:00 we took train to Machu Picchu Village which felt around 9 in the evening more like ghost town. It was really sad to see how the local people suffer due to the conflicts and how it effects their daily lives.Read more