Blimey time moves fast. it’s only been 4 days since we moved up to Intro Hostel, but we’ve done so much in that time that I’m having to get cracking on this blog post now so that 1) this blog entry doesn’t get too long and 2) so that I don’t forget what we’ve done.

During our time at Pisco and Soul we pretty much covered all the bases as far as the tourist sites in Cusco go, so we decided to venture out of the city. Armed with our Tourist tickets, we ventured off to see the Inca ruins of Tambomachay and Puca Pucara about 5 miles North of Cusco. Our plan was to take the bus to Tambomachay, the furthest of the sites we planned to visit, and then walk back via Puca Pucara, Q’enqo and Sacsayhuaman (more-or-less pronounced ‘Sexy Woman’, but with a thick, inebriated, highland accent).

Our first task in this endeavour was to navigate the shambolic local bus system. We’d read numerous online blogs, asked Gonzalo at Pisco and Soul and asked the lady in the Tourist information centre where we got our tourist tickets from, but could not get a consensus on which bus to get or where to get it from. The crux of the issue is the bus ‘system’ (I’m using the word ‘system’ here as there isn’t a succinct word in English for a group of busses that drive around a city with no discernible route plan). Extensive online searches as well as perusing the pamphlets in the tourist information centre confirmed our suspicion; there is no map of the local bus routes! Furthermore, none of the bus stops say which buses stop there, there is no timetable – at all – and none the buses use numbers, instead each ‘route’ has a name which is displayed only on the front of the bus (most of the time) and a list of some of the destinations it serves written on the side (again, most of the time).  The bus lines have names such as ‘Servico Rapido’ (You’d think the name translates in to English as ‘rapid service’ but there’s no evidence to support this) ‘Batman’ (no, really) ‘Satellite’ (Again, you’d think this would translate in to English as Satellite; implying an orbital service. Wrong!) ‘Tupac Amura’, ‘San Sebastian’ (which the name of is one of the districts of Cusco, so I guess that one at least makes sense) and ‘Servico El Zorro’ (En-garde!).

Perhaps the Incas should have thought to implement this public transport system before the Spanish invaded, they probably would have got so fed up trying to work out how to get around that they would have given up and gone home.

Anyway, somewhat exasperated at the unnecessary complexity of the whole thing, we asked the receptionist at our current hostel who told us that we needed a bus called ‘Senior Del Heurto’ from down by the University to take us to Tambomachay. This advice was different to anything told to us by anybody else, but whatever, we decided to throw caution to the wind and just do as he said. Worst case scenario, we end up in an unknown part of Cusco and have to get an Uber back.

We walked our way down to the university and after waiting about 10 minutes at the side of the road, there it was! Senior Del Heurto, and it even had ‘Tambomachay’ written on the side! We crammed ourselves into the over-subscribed bus, paying 25p each for the privilege (we were undercharged in fact, but we weren’t going to argue), and followed its meandering course through the suburbs of Cusco and up on to the road towards Tombamachay. The local buses are, it seems, a family affair; Husband driving, Wife collecting the fares and shouting out the names of the stops and jumping out to fill buckets with water from a road side stream (honestly, your guess is as good as ours) and two daughters squabbling on the front seat ensuring that the driver’s attention was suitably divided.

Just as we left Cusco, heading up the hill past Cristo Blanco from our previous excursion we found out why we had been undercharged; the road had been blocked by several fallen trees. The road in front of the blockage had been turned in to a make-shift Senior Del Heurto coach park and we were told that this is far as we could go and that we needed to get off (at least, that was our interpretation; the engine turned off, the wife yelled something in Spanish and all of our fellow passengers promptly disembarked).

Aside from an enterprising local who was offering horse rides up the hill, nobody was really doing anything about the blocked road, and it was apparent from the way the trees fell that this had been done deliberately (maybe by the aforementioned enterprising local? It’s unfair to point fingers I suppose, but he was doing very well out of the circumstances at hand). We stood around for a few minutes scratching our heads before deciding to carry on on foot to Tambomachay, which we reckoned to be about an hour’s walk up the road. We were out to get some decent walking in before our trek to Machu Picchu anyway, so why not make the most of the situation. Keep calm and carry on and all that!

Numerous others, both locals and tourists, had come to the same conclusion so there were quite a few of us spread out along the road. With no traffic coming past (it became apparent that there must have been a blockage further up the road as well as there was absolutely no traffic in either direction) the walk was a very serene and peaceful one, including walking through a small village called Huayllarcocha which gave us our first insight into life in Rural Peru, with deep-red mud clay brick single story houses, farm animals and small family run textile factories.

A short descent down the road on the far side of Huayllarocha and we arrived at Tambomachay. Tambomachay features a series of Inca buildings set into the side of the hill with a series of waterfalls and streams cascading through them. The function of the site is not known, but the best guesses are that it was a spa resort for the Incan elites. Being Bathonians, the appeal of such a site was perhaps somewhat lost on us, and we found Tombomachay to be slightly underwhelming, especially as the description in the handy little map that accompanied out tourist tickets really bigged it up; accompanied as it was with photographs taken using the estate agent technique of making things appear larger than they actually are. No matter though, the secluded location in the valley provided a good opportunity to see some wildlife and take in the scenery, and the road closures had all but halted the steady flow of tourists. We therefore pretty much had the site to ourselves.

Heading back up the hill, our next stop was Puca Pucara (literally; Red Fortress), a hill fort constructed of deep red clay and stone across about 4 or 5 levels. It was built to guard the entrance to Cusco from the Sacred Valley pass. Puca Pucara is a more sizeable site than Tambomachay and offers great views across the valley and luckily the weather held back enough to allow us some good shots of the mountains to the north.

We began making our way back along the road to Q’enqo (yes, pronounced like the coffee) which was still seemingly closed at both ends, although a couple of locals with cars had evidently cottoned on to what had happened and appointed themselves local taxis for the day, driving backwards and forwards with cars full of tourists and offering us lifts with every pass, irrespective of how many times we declined their offer.

About 3 hours later, we again came across the spot where the fallen trees had blocked the road only to find that they had still not been cleared (The highways agency would never have stood for this!), although evidently someone had been along with a chainsaw to remove just enough of the fallen trees to allow the horses an easy pass from the adjoining side road, but had seemingly saw fit (hah! Saw! Get it?) to disappear again without clearing the main road. My suspicions of the enterprising local with the horse-riding business continued to grow.

Q’enqo itself is about a further 20 minutes’ walk down the road and overlooks Cusco from the northwest. The site is a ‘Huacas’ (Incan holy place) and is, like most Huacas in the Incan empire, built in to a natural rock formation that, in this case, looks like a miniature Uluru/Ayres Rock. It has a narrow but passable split down the middle and a short tunnel underneath out of which the Incas carved blocks used for the construction of ritual sites on the eastern side facing Cusco. Sadly, as with much of the historical legacy of the Incas, the exact purpose and meaning of the site is lost to history.

Our final stop, a further 20 minutes down the road, was Sacsayhuaman (strangely enough, whilst spellcheck is having a very hard time with all these Incan place names, it has no objection to Sacsayhuaman. It’s not in the dictionary, I think spellcheck has just given up). By far the largest of the Incan sites on our itinerary for the day, Sacsayhuaman (or, according to Wikipedia; Sacsahuaman, Saxahuaman, Saksaywaman, Saqsaywaman, Sasawaman, Saksawaman, Sacsahuayman, Sasaywaman or Saksaq Waman) features a 3 tier, zig-zagging wall of huge (no really, HUUUUGE) interlocking stones held together with gravity alone, along with occasional doorways and stairwells leading between the tiers. Across a large open space still used to this day for ritual festivals on the opposite hillside is a set of EAT’s (Experimental Agricultural Terraces. I won’t say much about these here, but they are going to feature very heavily for the foreseeable future of this blog).

By this time, we’d been walking for the best part of 5 hours and it was starting to rain and the wind was blowing pretty fiercely (it felt remarkably like Scotland for a time) so we decided to head back down into Cusco to get a well deserved milkshake and a sandwich from JC’s café, fast becoming our favourite haunt. Exhausted and barely able to communicate with each-other, let alone in Spanish to the waiting staff, we decided to go to the closest pizzeria to our Hostel. The more things change…

On to the following day then, and after our sizeable hike we decided to have a much more laid-back day and visit a couple of the art galleries in Cusco to which our Tourist Ticket gave us free entry. We started with the Museo de Arte Popular which is situated in the town hall. Upon arrival, we were greeted by a drove of riot police, various different stripes of municipal police, a handful of dignitaries and important looking people, journalists and camera crews. And one lone malcontent across the road who yelled at the assorted dignitaries and security forces for a good 20 minutes before the police finally had enough and escorted him elsewhere. Sufficed to say, we decided to skip this gallery and move on to the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo. Following our handy tourist map, we found ourselves in the middle of a municipal building that appeared to be a time warp to 1975, complete with pencil pushing desk clerks, massive rooms of folders, wooden panel railing along the stained creamy yellow walls and not a computer in sight. On the left as you entered was a floorplan of the building, on which nowhere could be found the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo. ‘Well whatever’ we thought, deciding instead to go and sit in the square outside the townhall to watch the world go by whilst being offered the usual assortment of massages, tours to Machu Picchu, cigarettes, shoe shine, Llama keyrings, bracelets, mass-printed paintings, sunglasses, weird wooden pot things that make a clip clop sound, mystery juice and, of course, drugs. Later research online would tell us that we were in the right building, it’s in the basement and full of nativity scenes and pictures of Jesus, so we were understandably devastated that we missed out.

The rest of the day was spent relaxing by the pool (table) back at the hostel, making the most of our quiet day before retiring early to bed. We’d booked ourselves on to a full day tour of the Inca Sacred Valley which meant catching the bus from outside the hostel at the crack of the dawn for a 2-hour drive through the mountains to Pisac. The drive through the mountains was stunning; the weather was perfect, clear and sunny with a smattering of clouds clinging to the valley edges and mountain tops giving a fantastic sense of the scale of the vista in front of us. Pisac is a small town at the eastern edge of the Sacred Valley on the banks of the Urubamba river, the main water source for the flat valley base which was the breadbasket (specifically, the corn and potato basket) of the Cusco region.

The town itself is home to a small population with a burgeoning tourist industry and craft factories specialising in silverware and other jewellery. On the mountainside to the northeast of Pisac are the largely intact ruins of a massive network of EAT’s and a small village which housed the Incan agricultural workers, most of whom lived their whole lives on these slopes. The terraces are spread over nearly a kilometre of elevation, with a considerable variance of temperature and humidity between the lower and upper levels. The Incans used these terraces to experiment with growing corn and potatoes at different altitudes, developing thousands of varieties of each and massively increasing crop yield and resilience to adverse weather. This commitment to food stability was arguably the most important contributing factor to the immense size, wealth and power of their empire at its height.

The tour group was a real international bunch; Brazilians, Chinese, Spaniards (one wonders what it’s like being on holiday and every 5 minutes seeing something that your ancestors destroyed…oh wait, we’re British, we know exactly what that’s like), US Americans, Mexicans, Chileans and us plucky Brits. Our tour guide Freddie did a fantastic job juggling the bilingual needs of our group, ensuring we were all well informed as to what we were seeing, where we were going and how the day was to pan out. This actually worked out rather well; Freddie generally did the Spanish portion of the tour first, then repeated himself in English. As the group consisted of Spanish speakers from a lot of different countries, he spoke very slowly and very clearly in Spanish, and this allowed us to test our Spanish comprehension before he repeated himself in English, giving us and opportunity to ‘check our work’ so to speak. He also reassured us when we first set off that our driver had had only 10 crashes during his career, so we were in safe hands. Judging by the standards of Peruvian driving we have witnessed to date, there’s every chance this wasn’t hyperbole.

After a 20 minute or so talk about the site and its history, Freddie gave us a good 40-50 minutes to explore the ruins and take pictures before returning to the bus and heading down into Pisac town. Here we stopped for a brief demonstration of the silverware manufacturing process and the importance of certain jewels and gems and their supposed supernatural properties. A brief wander around the markets and we continued our way through the valley, following the meandering course of the river through the valley to the town of Urubamba at the heart of the Sacred Valley. Here we stopped for lunch at a secluded and remarkably up-market restaurant for a buffet lunch of freshly cooked Peruvian delicacies, all included as part of tour ticket. We were expecting a short stop at the side of the road for a quick bowl of soup and some rice at a rough-and-ready café -which would have been fine- so this lunch was a very pleasant and unexpected bonus.

After a pleasant 45-minute break for lunch and a walk around the grounds of the restaurant with llamas, Alpacas and Vicuna (the n should have a wiggle above it, but I can’t be bothered to work out how to do that) we continued on our way to our second major stop of the day at Ollantaytambo towards the western edge of the Sacred Valley. Like Pisac, Ollantaytambo features a set of EAT’s, about a third of the size of those at Pisac and facing east along the valley. At the top of the terraces are the remains of the Temple of the Sun and a passageway working its way through the cliffside connecting the two sets of terraces. The Temple of the Sun features impressive stonework made from huge stones that were quarried from the hillside opposite and transported via the Urubamba river. The Incas were able to redirect the river either side of a central island, allowing for the passage of the stones, before working them up the other side. Freddie took this moment to scoff at those who say that moving these big stones across the valley is evidence that Aliens must have built the Inca temples, adding that you should never underestimate Human ingenuity. Here here! Across the valley from the EAT’s are a series of open-fronted terraced caverns built into the side of the mountain. The Incas would use these caverns to dry corn and potatoes, storing them for up to a decade at a time, enabling them to keep their population fed through drought and crop failure.

We were again given a good amount of time to explore the ruins at our leisure before returning to the bottom of the terraces for a group photo, a brief visit to the water temple (like a mini Tambomachay) and an opportunity for Katy to befriend one of the local street dogs who joined us for the group photo and then followed us back to our bus, making Katy the happiest she had yet been during our whole trip.

As the sun lowered in the sky and our bus climbed its way out of the Sacred Valley back towards Cusco, the clouds mostly cleared and we were treated to fantastic views of the snow-capped peaks of the Andes in the distance, the acute angle of the sunlight highlighting the peaks and troughs with accented colours and contrast of the green vegetation, red soil and brilliant white glaciers above.

Our final stop for the day was the village of Chinchero where we were treated to a demonstration of traditional textile production by the Quechua, the native people of Peru. This was the only part of our tour that didn’t have an English translation, but again, the Spanish spoken was slow, clear and simple enough that we (ok, Katy) could follow the gist of what was being said. A shopping opportunity later we boarded the bus again for a short trip to another church (yawn) built on top of Inca ruins (boo) and then made the final hours drive back to Cusco, the setting sun providing a final few breath-taking views across the plateau Chinchero sits on.

We arrived back in Cusco just over an hour later, tired, but both of the opinion that this was the best day we had yet had during our time in Peru. The sites and sights were amazing, the guide was excellent, the history was fascinating and the whole day was paced perfectly; we were never bored, we were never on the bus for too long at a time and we also never felt rushed to keep with a schedule. All in all, this was £50 very well spent and, having already booked ourselves onto another tour the following day with the same company, we went to bed greatly looking forward to what the next day would hold.

But that’s a story for next time…