There were two Germans, a Pole, two Americans, two Australians, a Peruvian, a Dutchman, an Englishman, and a one year old baby on this bus in Peru......
I know it sounds like the beginning of a joke, but there really were.....And just for a change the tour is leaving at a respectable time, like 8.10am from my hotel. Except that it is 8.10am Peruvian time which experience showed was actually always 10 minutes late.
Our tour guide for the day speaks Qechua as a first language and is, fiercely proud of his Inka heritage, coming as he does from the Sacred Valley. Much like many Cretans are proud of theirs.
As we battle our way out of Cusco he gives a little more information about Peru....It has a population of just under 30 million, unemployment is 20% (which is good because it used to be 37%), but there is a trade off because this means that they have an inflation rate of less than 1%, governments have consistently tried to achieve the Holy Grail of low unemployment and low inflation but unfortunately economic theory says this is never going to happen.
Peru’s main industry is mining, gold, silver, copper, and oil. Less than 4% of foreign income is from tourism, they were hoping for more this year and next but they are wise enough to understand that world recession has reduced these expectations. Peru is one of the few countries in the world with an expanding economy with a growth rate of around 7% per annum. And Lima is the fourth biggest city in South America, by economy.
Our guide makes a ‘big thing’ out of the fact that the Peruvian government has invested heavily in infrastructure, something that became more evident later.
Meanwhile on the bus we are all getting to know each other. The Americans are from Chicago, one of the Germans is a woman travelling on her own and she is from Munich, the other German is married to the Polish woman and they have their one year old son with them. I manage to impress her with a few words of Polish dragged up from the back of beyond. The Australians are from Brisbane, the Peruvian girl is from Lima but she now lives in Sofia with the Dutchman.......
We arrive at the beginning of the Sacred Valley where a couple of Peruvian women are waiting to have their photos taken, you have to pay them of course. I manage to get some free shots from a distance.
Back on the bus we make a group decision that we are not too fussed about the market at Pisac. As our guide points out this used to be the one of the biggest traditional markets in Peru, but now many of the traders come from Cusco and Lima just to be there and fleece the tourists. We do stop there for a while though as our guide wants to take us to the bakery where he says they make the best empanadas in Peru, I take this to mean that the baker is probably his cousin or some other relation. In the gold/silver shop in the baker’s yard, the girl from Munich buys a very nice necklace price marked at US$420, she finally get it for US$210, which is about what it is worth. There is an archaeological site at Pisac too but we are not going to that one.
Ever onwards and upwards we continue to Ollantaytambo which is where our guide comes from. He goes into orgasm mode as he points out the ‘Inka channels’ which still exist in the town, carrying water down from the mountains since Inka times. To get to the Inka site you have to fight your way through a market selling an array of souvenirs and over-priced bottles of water. Well there’s a surprise.
Inside the site there are 247 steps to get to the top, I am taking it very slowly with lots of rests on the way, the Australians over take me but later I pass them as they have collpased in the a heap at about the 200 mark. So what if I do arrive 20 minutes behind everyone else?
At the top, in the Temple of the Sun, the guide is explaining that the Inka empire was actually quite short lived from about 1100 to 1550AD and that they would have scarcely had time to develop the technology to build their famous earthquake-proof walls and no doubt they borrowed the technology from another race. Like everything there is a lot of conjecture because the Inkas didn’t have a written language but it seems fairly certain that Machu Picchu was the place where all there technology and history was based in verbal form and the desertion of Machu Picchu resulted in the loss of all their knowledge.
I am now suffering from Inka overload!
To give you some idea of how this tour system works in Peru, not all of us paid the same tour operator for the day, so we split into four different parties at lunchtime as we are all eating in different places depending on where our individual operator paid for us to go!
The drive through the Sacred Valley is fascinating in itself, a rich farming area using terracing and methods hundreds of years old. In several places ploughing was taking place using an oxen drawn plough and in the course of the day we only saw one tractor! Indeed in several places the women were ploughing by hand, which I thought was quite a good idea as it gives them something to do, and it became clear that the traditional dress worn by many is not just for festivals, celebrations, and for having your picture taken by tourists, but even in this modern age is worn as ordinary daily wear.
We finished our one day tour at a ‘co-op’ run by some local women where they give demonstrations of the processes for preparing sheep and alpaca wool for spinning, dyeing, and weaving. This was actually opposite one of the Inka sites we were supposed to be visiting so we got some good pictures of the site without actually visiting it! To be brutally honest I cannot even remember the name of the place, but the demonstration of weaving and so on was interesting enough especially when you consider that they still use vegetable dyes. Of course you are expected to buy something or at least make a donation, which is fair enough.
And tomorrow is an early start as I have the train ride to Machu Picchu, one of the highlights of my trip!
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