Cusco, Peru

Free day in Cusco. Hotel Ananay Quinta San Blas

We had an unhurried breakfast and then set off for the Plaza des Armas to find the Scotiabank and the Tourist site to buy a ticket that will let us into many different Inca sites and museums over the next 10 days.
The walk down 3 or 4 blocks involved navigating very narrow streets with cars going down and very narrow sidewalks, made of cobblestones, and steep steps down, as everything is on a hill. We also had to go around ladies with Llamas and Alpacas who want you to take a picture and pay for it. We are in a very different country and loving it.

Once our transactions were complete, we headed back up to the hotel to drop off our money and pick up our backpacks to go on a hike to test out how we handle the altitude and walking up many steps in preparation for doing the 12 km of the Inca trail. Gary said that if we could handle that, we could probably handle the Inca Trail. Before we left, we decided to eat the leftover pizza from the night before and oranges purchased in Arequipa and then we had a little rain so a change of clothing and finally after fiddling around for at least an hour, we set out for our walking adventure.

We walked uphill on both cobblestone roads and many steps for about 20 minutes, stopping to catch our breath as we went. Another 20 minutes and we reached the entrance to the site called Sacsayhuaman (many different spellings for this site) Pronounced a bit like Sexywoman, which is the second largest Inca site next to Machu Picchu. It covered 2000 square meters within a 3000 Hectare park. We started hiking up some more grades that Gary and Karina said would be similar to the Trail. Most of these steps in the rock were much higher than the normal step height. It was difficult and we had to keep stopping to get our breath, but we made it to the site. With Gary’s help he asked a taxi driver if he could find an English-speaking guide and he found Amelia who was wonderful, a bit quiet but very knowledgeable.

Sacsayhuaman is located 2km. from the city. In 1983, together with the city of Cusco, this monumental complex was considered the first of the new seven wonders of the world. The Incas called it the House of the Sun and the Spaniards called it a fortress because of its zigzag shape. The construction, which is made up of three platforms one on top of the other, was one of the most important religious complexes of its time. The enormous boulders that form part of the construction were put together perfectly without using mortar. The heaviest weighs up to 125 tons. Archaeologists are currently excavating and have discovered water fountains, canals and rooms. The site is at an altitude of 3,701 m. It is located on a steep hill that overlooks the city. The fortified complex has a wide view of the valley to the southeast. Archeological studies of surface collections of pottery at Sacsayhuamán indicate that the earliest occupation of the hilltop dates to about 900 CE. According to Inca oral history, Tupac Inca "remembered that his father Pachacuti had called the city of Cuzco, the lion city. He said that the tail was where the two rivers unite which flow through it, that the body was the great square and the houses round it, and that the head was wanting." The Inca decided the "best head would be to make a fortress on a high plateau to the north of the city. However, archeologists have found that Sacsayhuamán area was originally built by the preceding Killke culture. On 13 March 2008, archaeologists discovered additional ruins at the periphery of Sacsayhuamán. They are believed to have been built by the Killke culture, which preceded the Inca. While appearing to be ceremonial in nature, the exact function remains unknown. These structures occupied the site for hundreds of years before the Inca, between 900 and 1200 AD. The Inca expanded on what they found, beginning about the 13th century.

Francisco Pizarro (Spanish Conquestor) sent men to transport the gold and silver from the Temple of Coricancha to Cajamarca a city in northern Peru and the base of the Spanish encampment. They found the Temple of the Sun "covered with plates of gold", which the Spanish ordered removed. Seven hundred plates were removed and added to two hundred trucks of gold transported back to Cajamarca.

The best-known zone of Sacsayhuamán includes its great plaza, capable of holding thousands of people, and well designed for ceremonial activities, used during rituals. The stones used in the construction of these terraces are among the largest used in any building in pre-Hispanic America. They display a precision of fitting that is unmatched in the Americas. The stones are so closely spaced that a single piece of paper will not fit between many of the stones. This precision, combined with the rounded corners of the blocks, the variety of their interlocking shapes, and the way the walls lean inward, is thought to have helped the ruins survive devastating earthquakes in Cuzco. The longest of the three walls is about 400 meters. They are about 6 meters tall. The estimated volume of stone is over 6,000 cubic meters. Estimates for the weight of the largest blocks vary from 128 tonnes to almost 200 tonnes.

The Inca used similar construction techniques in building Sacsayhuamán as they used on all their stonework, albeit on a far more massive scale. The stones were rough-cut to the approximate shape in the quarries using river cobbles. They were dragged by rope to the construction site, a feat that at times required hundreds of men. The stones were shaped into their final form at the building site and then laid in place. The work, while supervised by Inca architects, was largely carried out by groups of individuals fulfilling their labor obligations to the state. In this system of mita or "turn" labor, each village or ethnic group provided a certain number of individuals to participate in such public works projects. Although multiple regions might provide labor for a single, large-scale state project, the ethnic composition of the work-gangs remained intact, as different groups were assigned different tasks.

Following the siege of Cusco, the Spaniards began to use Sacsayhuamán as a source of stones for building Spanish Cuzco; within a few years, they had taken apart and demolished much of the complex. The site was destroyed block by block to build the new Spanish governmental and religious buildings of the colonial city, as well as the houses of the wealthiest Spaniards. There is not a house in the city that has not been made of this stone, or at least the houses built by the Spaniards. Today, only the stones that were too large to be easily moved remain at the site.

Among all the fascinating ruins, we came upon rock slides in the area called the Rodadero Hill, a series of smooth rock channels that run down one section of the rock hill. The well-polished slides are a strange, incongruous sight among the straight lines of monumental Inca architecture. Even more inconsistent with Sacsayhuamán’s general vibe of military power and somber ceremony are the kids—and adults—happily sliding their way down the rock chutes. that were supposedly off limits to adventurists.

After our very informative walk around the site with our guide Amelia, we made our way back down, and on the way, we came upon a funeral being conducted outside a house. We did not feel we should take any pictures, so we just waited until they carried the coffin off to the sounds of music. We stopped and rested and had our bars for a snack at a curve in the road. We were all fairly tired after our climbing and walking around at the 3700 meter elevation.

We finally returned to our hotel and had a little lie down before heading out for dinner. We tried one restaurant called the Uchu Steakhouse, but it was already booked up, so we went along to another called Inkazuela and it turned out to be great. Their main courses were all meals in a pot like casseroles. We each ordered something different and we all raved about how good our meal was. We walked back up the winding narrow streets back to the hotel and right to sleep.Read more