Trails and Treasures

After a van pickup at 5 a.m., a 2-hour ride to Ollantaytambo where we ate breakfast, and another hour to the end of the road at Piscacucho, we finally starting hiking at 9:48 a.m at an elevation of 8,923 ft.

We're Ready!

After just a few meters, we waited for a returning donkey train before crossing the river.  Until we reached a guard station for the sanctuary, there were a surprising number of people living along the trail.  They use the pack animals to bring in drinks and snacks, which they then sell to trekkers.

A Traffic Jam at the Start of the Inca Trail

It was an easy walk along the Urubamba River

Nice and easy

with a great view up the river.  (The path is along the river on the left side of the following photo; the tracks are on the right.)

Urubamba River near Km 82

As we walked along the river, a train on its way to Aguas Calientes entered the gorge. 

A Load of Lazy Tourists on Their Way to Machu Picchu

The first ruins we sited were the remains of an Inca tambo or way station, a place where travelers could rest.

Ruins of a Tambo

At about km 86 the trail turned from following the Urubamba and headed towards the Cusichaca Valley, beginning to gain elevation.

Looking Back Towards the Urubamba Valley

Snow-covered Peaks

Our Initial Easy Climb

There were a number of small ruins along this short section of trail between the two valleys, and a shelter for trekkers to take a rest from the sun.

Trekkers Taking a Rest

The hillside terraces stood testament to the fact this area had once been well populated. (Note the trail in the foreground below, and the vegetation line.)

Inca Terraces near Willkaraqay

Nearby were the ruins of the hilltop fort of Willcaraqay and some sort of Inca observatory.

An Inca Observatory? or modern-day helipad?

It’s amazing to think about how the Inca managed to level this knoll.  But, the large stone slabs indicate it’s Inca origins.

A close-up of an Inca Engineering Marvel

When we reached the Cusichaca, we had a great view of the Llaqtapata or Patallacta ruins below on the other side of the valley.   Llaqtapata was first recorded by Hiram Bingham in 1911, and he returned here to do some excavating in 1915.  But most of what is seen today is the result of work begun in the late 1970s by Dr. Ann Kendall and the Cusichaca Trust.

Llaqtapata

Llaqtapata  was an agricultural station where the terraces were used for growing maize to supply Machu Picchu and Ollantaytambo.  The 116 buildings and 5 baths were used by both the agricultural workers and the soldiers manning the fort which stood where I was standing.

Buildings at Llaqtapata

In typical Inca fashion, while the observatory knoll had been totally flattened, the Inca left some select boulders in place when building the terraces.  I can’t believe these were the only huge rocks on this site, and they aren’t all huge.  So why were these particular ones left in place?

Why were these rocks left in place?

At this point the trail began to climb up the Cusichaca Valley towards Wayllabamba where the Rio Llullucha joins the Rio Cusichaca.  After walking about 30 minutes we passed through a mini-ecosystem where bromeliads clung to a hillside along the trail.

Bromeliads Along the Inca Trail

Tablachaka is a small village along the Cusichaca. 

Tablachaka

It was 1:15 p.m. and we had been walking for 3 1/2 hours, but we had another 45 minutes to go before reaching our lunch spot near Wayllabamba (9,842′).  As we continued to climb, Mt. Veronica pulled us upward.

Mount Veronica

When we arrived at our lunch spot, the porters had basins of hot water and large cakes of soap waiting for us to wash our hands.  In fact, whenever we arrived at camp the hot water and soap were waiting.  The same was true in the morning when they woke us up.

Meals were served in a kitchen/dining tent with a cloth partition between the cooking and eating areas.  The porters used large propane tanks for cooking, so the dining tent was a warm place to go when the sun set.

Our first meal on the trail consisted of an avocado salad, creamy vegetable soup, fish, rice, potatoes, and lots of cooked fresh vegetables.  The porters had laid out some tarps and our sleeping pads, and we had about 40 minutes after lunch to lie down and rest.

Ready to start again

We arrived at our camp at Ayapata (10,829′) after a steady uphill climb of about 1,000 feet in about 1 1/2 hours.  We were just in time for tea at 5.  Every afternoon we had a snack and a chance to rehydrate with tea or hot chocolate.  Our favorite snack was popcorn.  The four of us consumed great quantities of the stuff, while the dull biscuits (plain, unexciting cookies) and whatever else was laid out tended to just sit there.

Most of the other groups had stopped at Wayllabamba for the night.  There were just two other groups at our campsite.

Toilets on the left; Another group's camp on the right

Home Sweet Home

Deep in the shadows of the mountains, it got dark early, and, if there were any spectacular sunsets, I missed them.

The View from Camp Ayapata

At 6:30 we dined on soup, spaghetti with a choice of a tomato or a creamy mushroom sauce, and a flambeed banana.  By 8 p.m. we had retired to our tents.  At almost 11,000′ in the equivalent of late December, it was chilly, and the warmest place was in one’s sleeping bag.

The Museo de Arte Pre Colombino (Museum of Pre Columbian Art) is a wonderful surprise.  The 450 objects on display are all superb examples of artistic design and craftsmanship during the period 1250 B.C. to 1532 A.D.  I have no pictures of any of the gold and silver objects because they reflected the light too much, so please visit the museum’s website gallery to see some beautiful pieces of jewelry, cups, and other items.

On June 24 each year, Saqsaywaman is now used as the backdrop for a drama spectacle that culminates several days of partying in conjunction with the Inti Raymi or Festival of the Sun.  I arrived in Cusco too late to witness the spectacle, but I chanced upon a school courtyard filled with floats created by the students for one of the parades.  Some are clearly message-laden; others may be, but out-of-context in another culture, their message is a mystery.  I’m sure the students spent hours designing and building these huge floats, and some are quite good.  Take the time to examine them in detail and enjoy!

The ruins of Saqsaywaman (or Sacsayhuamán or in tourist parlance SexyWoman), the Inca’s formidable fortress on the mountain to the north of Cusco, are one of this cities most visited sites.  Yet most people arrive with no real understanding of its role in the fight to gain and maintain control of the Inca empire.

So, I’m going to take this opportunity to review a bit of Cusco’s history after the conquest using Kim MacQuarrie’s The Last Days of the Incas, which I highly recommend as being both informative and readable.  This chronology reads like a soap-opera, but it was deadly, serious business.

1533  Pizarro captures Cuzco and installs Manco Inca as new Inca emperor.

1536  Manco Inca rebels and surrounds Cuzco; Juan Pizarro is killed.

1537  Almagro seizes Cuzco from Hernando and Gonzalo Pizarro. Manco escapes to Vilcabamba, the new Inca capital.

1538 Hernando Pizarro defeats Almagro in battle; Almagro is executed.

1541 Francisco Pizarro is murdered by Almagro supporters.

1544 Manco Inca is murdered.  Gonzalo Pizarro, the last brother living in Peru, rebels against the king of Spain.

1548 Gonzalo’s army is defeated; he is executed.

1559 King Charles dies; Philip II becomes king.

1560 Titu Cusi becomes emperor and resumes guerrilla war against the Spaniards.

1572  Tupac Amaru, the final Inca emperor, is captured and executed in Cuzco.

Synopsis (short): The Pizarros lived by the sword and died by the sword.

Synopsis (long): Francisco Pizarro and Almagro started out as partners, but Almagro ended up with the short straw when it came to riches and titles.  For five years after the conquest, Cuzco lay at the center of a three-way tug-of-war between the Pizarros, Almagro, and the Inca.  It was besieged and burned. Ten years later, the last Pizarro brother was eliminated from the scene, but the strife, even among the Spanish, continued.  Meanwhile, succeeding Inca emperors were sometimes puppets of the Spanish and sometimes organizers of rebellion.

The Siege of Cusco: On May 6, 1536, after months of building up his forces surrounding Cusco, Manco Inca began his attempt to retake Cusco by deluging the city with a hail of stones, arrows, and fire.  Somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 Inca warriors surrounded the city in which 196 Spaniards (86 cavalry and 110 infantry) and about 500 native allies prayed for their lives.  Well, at least the Spaniards prayed.  After almost being burned alive in their thatched-roofed hide-outs, the Spaniards fought back in the narrow streets where their horses had limited maneuverability and Manco’s troops could be waiting to ambush from rooftops.

This street is wide compared to many in the heart of the city. Some are impassable to vehicles; others require pedestrians to hop up on a narrow curb and stand with their back to the wall.

After several days of intense fighting (just days, not nights), the Spaniards knew they had to make a bold move and try to take Saqsaywaman or they would eventually die, from hunger or thirst if not battle wounds.  Sometime around May 13, the youngest Pizarro–Juan–led about fifty horsemen (almost 2/3 of their force) in an audacious attempt to take the citadel.  With the aide of their native foot soldiers, who cleared road obstructions and filled in pits designed to lame the horses, the horsemen fought their way up and out of the city.  They then circled back to face the “three, thousand-foot-long, staggered walls of gray, gargantuan-sized stones, the largest of which weighed more than 360 tons and rose more than twenty-eight feet in height.”

From the bottom of the first wall to the top of the third is a vertical distance of at least 60'. (MacQuarrie, p. 220)

Many of the stones have been carted away and re-used in new building projects, so Juan and his fellow soldiers faced an even greater obstacle.

Inside the walls were about 30,000 of Manco’s warriors plus additional fortifications, including three towers labelled 1, 2, and 3 in the following diagram.

I’m sorry, but I have nothing really good to say about Juliaca.  It’s a dump.  Except for the main roads in and out of town and the road to the airport, most of the streets aren’t paved.  Wide boulevard-like avenues remain unpaved with dusty median strips. 

Unpaved boulevard in Juliaca

Piles of garbage grow in the middle of side streets.  All of this despite the fact Juliaca is not a small town.  It is the largest city in the Puno district with around 250,000 inhabitants and is the primary commercial center of the Altiplano.

Having missed the only flight to Cusco for the day, my guide and the office staff worked on finding a way to get me to Cusco.  The direct flight was booked solid for the next day, so the best they could do was a flight to Lima and then a flight to Cusco, both the following day.  That meant spending the night in Juliaca.

Getting back to town turned out to be a difficult task.  By the time, we were ready to leave the airport, all the taxis had disappeared.  Eventually, my guide talked someone into driving us into town.  Then, there was the problem of finding a (decent) hotel.  The first two he tried were full, but he eventually found me a room at the three-star Royal Inn in the heart of the city. 

Now this hotel is listed in at least one guide book, and its restaurant is recommended as a good value.  But the listing includes the words “heaters in rooms.”  Take it as a red flag, and don’t move in without it in the winter.  There is no central heating.  My room in Puno had a space heater too, but I never needed to use it, although it got quite cold at night outside.  So, maybe there it was just a back-up, or maybe my room got enough sun during the day that I never felt the need to use it.  But in Juliaca, my room had only a tiny window that opened into a shaft-like space that only hotels seem to have.  There was no way the sun could warm the room.  The room also lacked artificial light.  The lightbulbs reminded me of those in the electric candles I put in my windows at Christmas time.  My guide had discussed the heater issue with the desk clerk, who promised to bring one to the room.  Needless to say, I had to call several times, and only when my guide came back in the late afternoon to bring my boarding passes and discuss the logistics for the next day did I finally get a heater.  Interestingly, from my window I could look down a floor into a conference room where people were having a meeting with the windows ajar!  Maybe they had long underwear on under their suits, or maybe that was where all the space heaters were.

On the other hand, the food in the hotel’s restaurant was good.  At lunch time it was packed with businesspeople and families.  I was the only North American and obvious tourist in the place.  It was quieter in the evening.  My only complaint was that when I asked for bread with my evening meal, I was given two hamburger rolls for which they charged me some outrageous sum.  I wanted one of the delicious rolls served with most Peruvian meals.

Since there are no real tourist sights in Juliaca, my guide took me on a pedicab tour that ended at the central market.

On a Pedicab in Juliaca

Perhaps you remember my mentioning the prevalence of rebar sprouting from rooftops in an earlier post.  If you look at the background, there’s a regular forest of the stuff.  There were lots of oddly incomplete buildings in Juliaca.

Will they ever finish it?

The market in Juliaca had much more than the usual food and clothing items.  One could buy all kinds of electronics including name-brand large screen HDTV’s, cell phones, and high-end digital cameras.  On the other hand, Apple products were in short supply.  There were numerous stalls selling cut-rate CD’s and DVD’s.  My guess is that one would have to be very careful when buying any of these imported goods.

Now for the travel experience most people dread, the one that keeps many people from even contemplating a trip to a third-world country, especially when they’re beyond a certain age.  I’ve been through various forms before, but this was the most serious.  It was also the easiest to live through since I was being taken care of by Nina’s very competent and thoughtful staff.

As to background material, if you care, you can try to figure it out.  I heard that the peasants were on strike because of a water rights issue in the Amazon region.  I never understood why that caused people to block roads on the altiplano.  And the Peruvian use of the word “strike” really confused me.  Who actually was on “strike”?  the transportation workers?  peasants?  I’d call creating road blockades “protesting”.

On a more personal level, the situation was this.  I was in Puno and scheduled to catch a 7:50 a.m. flight from the nearest airport in Juliaca to Cusco.  When my guide let me off at my hotel after the Lake Titicaca excursion, he said he would pick me up at 6 a.m.  Later in the evening, he called to say there was a strike scheduled for the next day and that we should leave by 5:30.

I dutifully got up at 4:30 and was waiting when the driver arrived, but no guide.  He lived some miles outside of town and despite leaving home early, he had been unable to find transportation to get him to the hotel.  I gather he had walked a significant part of the way when we picked him up on the road out of town, heading for the airport. 

About half-way to Juliaca the protestors blocked the road.  A policeman had stopped us a few miles before that to say that one van had arrived at his check point with a smashed windshield.  I, of course, had no idea what conversation transpired between my guide and the driver, but we had soldiered on until we encountered the protestors.  By the time we reached them we were following two other tourist vans.  The protestors pointed to a rough dirt track and we followed the other vans.  It was slow going with huge holes and ruts.  At one point, the driver in front of us who had a longer vehicle got out and put some rocks in one of the ditches before driving over it.  Eventually we got to a paved road which I think was the one towards Sillustani rather than Juliaca.  We hadn’t gone very far when the road reached the base of a cliff.  As we rounded a corner we found huge boulders and rocks being hurled off the cliff, and a group of protestors using them to build a wall.  There was no way we were going any further.  So we turned around and followed another dirt track which eventually got back to the main road, but we were closer to Juliaca than when we got off.  We were now at a section under reconstruction.

 All the time there were tense conversations between the driver, another guide who was on the way to the airport to pick up a group, and my guide.  My guide later said that the driver was more concerned about his vehicle than his passengers. 

Anyway, we were now forced to abandon our vehicle.  My guide took my suitcase, I wore my pack, and we walked towards Juliaca.  This section of the road had a new layer of tarmac, so it was easy to roll the suitcase.  All one had to do was dodge the numerous rocks and pieces of broken glass strewn around and avoid the seams and drop-offs associated with variations in layers of paving.  There were hundreds of people walking both ways on the road; everyone from peasants to students to business men in suits.  The other guide ran on ahead, so that when we reached the protestors barrier on the Juliaca end, he had arranged a ride for us to the airport.  I’m not sure how far we went, but it was probably between one and two miles.

 I was too busy walking to take a picture, so I found this one on the internet. 

Rocks on the road between Puno and Juliaca (Reuters)

 I’m not sure what happened to the tourists in the van in front of us; they were a larger group, so there was no way their guide could have managed their luggage.  

My flight to Cusco left on time at 7:50 a.m., but we didn’t arrive at the airport until about 8:15 a.m.  At various times I was told that 17 or 21 people missed the flight.

Here’s another clip from the Internet.  My understanding is that the police came through mid-day to clear up the mess, and then the protesters returned again the next day to repeat the process.