In the Sacred Valley - Ollantaytambo

Very smoothly we got out of Cusco this morning around 8:30. A niceprivate driver actually got helped us to find the collectivo stand and so we took one to Ollantaytambo. Price: 2.50 Euros for ~1.5h ride in the mountainous terrain.

We met a very friendly and interesting artist on the bus (who transported his paintings ;-)) and told us a lot about the Inca culture, their architectural skills, connections to Egypt and what not. Really an experience and good Spanish practice :-)

Arriving in Ollantaytambo, we stopped for juice, coffee, and a brownie in the lookout café adequately called “Inka Tower” where we escaped the midday heat and admired the Inca ruins all around the town on the steep mountain slopes. The town itself also appears really nice and relaxed - one can vividly picture how previous civilizations lived here embedded in tall mountains alongside a big river and smaller streams.

Side note: the Peruvians are very catholic (like most of Latin America) and so in the center of the main square there is a nativity scene like in most European cities. Only here, the sheep are replaced by llamas to make it fit in better :-)

After depositing our luggage at a hostel we then walked to the main ruins and were awed by so many things:
- the vast terraces and the steep incline on which the former temple/fortress/recreation spot was built
- the intricate water works that run within the temple to bring fresh water to many places
- the corn and grain storage houses constructed on the steep mountain phases to secure them from floods and heat

Bear in mind that the Inca are still thought of as not having had access to neither wheels nor horses to carry all those stones!

Interestingly, even without much expertise we could make out 4-5 different styles of construction techniques - and learned later that this is probably due to the Incas’ incorporating and integrating other cultures’ temples and constructions in a peaceful attempt to expand their empire. Really good BBC documentary on the Incas’ (mostly peaceful and collaborative) 100 year reign until the Spanish conquistadors came:
https://youtu.be/mB8rhD7XdY0

We then invested some money in the overpriced train tickets but buying us more time for actual hiking in the valley (instead of walking alongside the train tracks for 4 hours ;-)) and had really good, authentic, inexpensive dinner: stuffed avocado, alpaca steak, quinua soup - yum!

Impressed by Ollantaytambo, we look forward to the supposedly even greater work of Machu Picchu :-)Read more