Our first concern was to reunite with Adam and Sienna. I had sent them with a notarized letter giving permission for Sienna to leave the country without her parents. We had also given them instructions on what to do in Mexico City, since the airline wasn't very helpful with their gate announcements on the way down. And we had gone through the backup plan, which was to make your way to Cusco and on to Machu Picchu if necessary until we caught up to each other. We were glad to get texts from them saying that their flights were on time and that they had made each of them.
Here I am pretending to be one of those guys with the signs waiting for people.
We were relieved when we saw Adam and Sienna and were able to give them a hug (and some yogurt drinks and pan for breakfast).
Erika's first missionary companion in Peru (her "trainer" or "mom") was Hermana Leslye Huanaco (not to be confused with Huánuco or Huancayo), from Bolivia. She was planning to come up to their investigator's sealing as well, and originally planned to visit Huancayo with us. Rather than leave her by herself for the week while we went off to Machu Picchu, we decided to invite her to come along with us, paying her way like she was a member of the family so that she could afford to go. She was very grateful to accept our offer. She wasn't ultimately able to make it to Huancayo in time to visit with us there, but she did make it to Lima (via a 26-hour bus ride) from Bolivia the night before.
So our last challenge was to connect with her in the airport. Finally we were able to find her there, and I was so relieved to have us all together so that we could proceed on our trip without freaking out.
Leslye is a beautiful gal, and she was so fun to have along with us on our trip. She spoke almost no English, so we had fun practicing our Spanish on her. She would patiently listen and provide corrections to our verb conjugations as we talked.
As we waited for our flight, I saw that Erika was asleep on Leslye's lap, so I asked, "¿Tu hija está dormiendo?" ("Your daughter is sleeping?" They would call their greenies their daughters.)
Getting from Lima to Cusco requires a flight that's a little over an hour, unless you want to take a 22 hour bus ride around the mountain. No, thank you.
On the flight I sat next to a really nice guy from Uruguay named Bruno. We was 20 years old and studying to become a doctor, and was meeting some friends in Cusco to go to Machu Picchu. He didn't really speak any English, so I had a great conversation with him in Spanish. Sienna was sitting next to me and sometimes I would turn to her for a vocabulary word, since she's in Spanish 2 right now and thus a bit more fresh on some of it.
I told him about how Linette, Kelsi, Erika and I went to Guatemala, Mexico, Peru and Korea, respectively, as missionaries, and that we had a son in Guatemala. He thought that sounded like a great thing to do. As we talked, he asked how he could serve a mission, at which point I had Erika explain that to him. She said, "Well, you would need to be a member of our church, and then..."
I got his e-mail address so we could exchange our favorite picture we got in Machu Picchu. When he added me as a contact in his phone, under "category" he put "happiness," which I thought was cool.
In Cusco we took a couple taxis to our AirBnB apartment that was big enough for all 7 of us, and then went literally next door to a restaurant that had authentic Peruvian food for people to try.
Sienna thought her dish was amazing! And every dish cost 10 soles (S/10=$3.20).
After eating, we went out to explore the town. Cusco is at 11,000 feet altitude, so they say to take it easy the first day or so in order to avoid altitude sickness. Fortunately, that didn't seem to affect anyone. Coming from 4,000 feet in Utah probably helped some. And the four of us who had been there for a week already spent a few days at 6,000 feet (in Huánuco) and a few at 10,000 feet (in Huancayo).
The main square is called the Plaza Mayor de Cusco, and features Spanish colonial architecture all around it, and occasionally an Erika jumping from the fountain steps.
One of the great things about Cusco is all the cool narrow streets lined with ancient Inca stonework. Here you can see Inca stonework on the left, and likely Spanish colonial stonework on the right.
The Inca were able to carve stones such that they fit perfectly together without the use of mortar. The stones are so close together that you can't slide a knife between them. How they did this remains a mystery to this day, especially since they didn't have hard metals like steel to carve with.
The Spanish destroyed a lot of buildings, but often kept the bottoms of Inca buildings around to serve as the base for a more modern buildings. When earthquakes happen (as they often do in this region), the Spanish construction tends to crumble, and the Inca construction tends to be unaffected.
By way of background, Cusco has been continuously inhabited since at least 1000 B.C. (over 3,000 years). The Inca people were a pastoral tribe in the Cusco area in the 1100s A.D. They eventually formed a small city-state Kingdom of Cusco in the 1200s.
In 1438 A.D., under the Inca (meaning "king" or "lord") Pachacuti (meaning "world-shaker"), the Incas began conquering surrounding areas. They would give an area a chance to join peacefully, or else attack them until they surrendered. Then they would take some of the children of the local leaders back to the capital of Cusco as "representatives" (and hostages), and then send teachers to teach everyone in the new area the Quechua language.
The people were assigned a certain amount of land to farm, according to their family size, and were required to donate some of their produce and some of their labor to the empire to support the leaders and the building projects. This made it so everyone had enough land and food to live on, and so was a kind of utopia, as long as you didn't care about having any freedom or personal ambitions whatsoever.
As shown in the map, over the next 100 years, under a few different leaders, they eventually built an empire reaching from Ecuador in the north to northern Chile in the south.
They had an amazing networks of foot roads and staircases across their empire, and even had what I call the "people express", where they could deliver news or fresh fish from the coast to Cusco within a day, by having people run 5 miles with the message or supplies and pass it off to another person, and so on for the 160 miles to the capital.
The "labor tax" also provided workers to create the roads and amazing structures that we saw throughout the area. It was amazingly well run, especially considering that they didn't have a money system, and didn't use writing (apart from quipu, which were strings with a series of knots in them).
(I'll get to the Spanish conquest later).
As we wandered the streets to the south of the main plaza, we stumbled across a free little area called Kusicancha.
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| Linette at Kusicancha |
Cusco originally had a bunch of little city blocks, with four properties to a block, with typically one single-room building per property. The Spanish tended to knock these down and reuse the stone to make larger buildings. This area had a mansion on it that fell into disrepair, and eventually it was torn down and the original Inca stonework below it was just recently revealed to show what the area used to look like before the town was plowed over.
You can see here that the walls do have dirt and rock between the two faces of the wall, so the stones don't usually go all the way through. Rather, the front edges are made to fit perfectly together, and then the fill dirt lays in between.
That afternoon we came upon the temple of Qorikancha, which was the most important temple of the Inca, dedicated to the sun god Inti. It comes from the words "Qori", meaning gold and "kancha" meaning "enclosure", because back in the day, the walls were actually covered with sheets of gold.
Here you find the absolute best quality stonework in the empire, where the stones fit together especially well and have a smooth finish on each stone.
The walls lean slightly inward to give the buildings more strength.
By standing on a little block, you can look through several windows that are all perfectly lined up.
This shows the tiniest stone in any of the temple walls.
As shown in these pictures, some of the stones had notches inside of them on which metal rings could be placed in order to hold the stones together.
And this picture shows how some stones had interlocking sections that would further hold the stones together against any shifting, kind of like Legos.
The walls aren't completely impervious to ground shifting caused by earthquakes, of course. Here you can see a section that shifted when the ground moved out from under it.
We hired a guide for $15 to show us through the temple, and he did a pretty good job. He showed us how some of the stones on the edges of the entryway like this one wrapped around so that there were some 15 different angles cut into it so it would fit in all the directions that it needed to.
There was a little model to show what the temple looked like back in the day.
Earlier that day, Adam had for some reason used the word "palanquin" to describe a litter that is used by people to carry a leader around, so it was cute that the model included one of those.
And then Sienna reenacted one in one of the stone entrances.
The Spanish were eager to show their domination over the Inca, so they tended to knock down buildings that were important to the Inca and/or build cathedrals on top of them. This was the case with Qorikancha, upon which was built the Convent of Santo Domingo, using the foundation of Qorikancha as the foundation of the new church. The colonial architecture is beautiful.
I loved that there were 7 connected chairs in the covered hallway here. Perfect.
The back of the cathedral overlooks the "solar garden", which in Inca times was the place where people brought offerings to the sun god, including full-sized golden or silver sculptures of animals and plants.
This diagram is supposed to be some sort of map that shows how a whole bunch of sacred sites in the area are aligned with lines emanating from the central temple.
And this diagram shows the constellations that the Inca identified, including a llama you can see in the middle, with one of its eyes being Alpha Centauri.
The temple was originally covered in golden plates like this one.
Adam took a couple of years of Spanish, but the main sentence he ever says is "¿Donde está la biblioteca?" ("Where is the library?"). So he was pretty excited to finally find a sign for one!
This is the lobby just outside the library, where people were actually engaged in reading historical books and such, since this is an operating monastery.
And here is everybody, each in their own arch.
Erika tried out the monster mask.
So, how did the Spanish get their hands on everything in the area?
After several painful initial attempts, Francisco Pizarro finally got a charter from the king and queen of Spain and in 1532 took a couple hundred men into the Andes mountains and met Atahualpa, the Inca (king), who was kind of hiding out because of a civil war he was having with his brother.
Atahualpa underestimated the Spanish force of less than 200 (since he had an army of 50,000) and visited Pizarro with a group of 1000 unarmed attendants. On a signal, Pizarro's men killed everyone except the Inca (king) himself, and took him captive. Eventually Atahualpa saw that they loved gold and told them he could fill the room up to "here", so Pizarro said that if he did, he would let him go. Atahualpa surprisingly did fill the room up to there with gold (including the plates from Qorikancha). And then, unsurprisingly, Pizarro found him guilty of planning an uprising and had him executed anyway. (This actually disappointed the king of Spain and is still a sore point among many Peruvians today, especially among the indigenous people).
Pizarro went on to conquer the rest of the empire, and kept the gold (minus the king's 1/5 and the men's shares). He ruled the area for almost a decade before being assassinated by another Spaniard in a power grab. Ah, well. So much for being gloriously wealthy. There's a famous story of one of the soldiers who, after miraculously gaining a percentage of the ridiculous Inca gold that would set him up for life, lost it all in one night by gambling. Duh.
The Spanish felt ok about stealing all this wealth, though, because they brought Christianity to the local people. And not all of the people were especially happy to be ruled by the Incas, so some of them helped the Spanish in their conquest. Peru eventually gained its independence from Spain in 1821.
Outside the convent, we took a picture with these gals and their little alpacas. The white one was "so fluffy I will die!!"
We grabbed some fried bread potato things from a street vendor, and they were good.
In this section of town the stone blocks are huge and a bit more rounded than elsewhere. They are still used as the foundation for existing buildings.
I call this the "Utah stone".
The stone below is famous for having 12 sides to it, in order to fit in with all the surrounding stones.
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| Sienna in front of The Twelve-Angled Stone |
There was a guy dressed up there whose job was also to keep people from messing with the famous stones.
After a busy day of travel and exploration, it was fun to sit on the cathedral steps in the cool of the evening. (This is also when Leslye realized that her phone was missing. There's a picture of it in the library at Qorikancha, so it somehow disappeared after that. It never turned up, so that was sad.)
I love how the lights climb up the mountain, showing how people utilize the steep landscape.
Tuesday morning Linette went for a jog and I went for a walk up the hill to explore while the kids went for some extra sleep.
The view of the city from above was nice.
And there was this random arch that might possibly include a foot bridge at the top.
Adam and I went on a little outing to hit the ATM near the main plaza.
Later I went inside the Cusco Cathedral with some of the kids who were interested.
Adam picked up a colorful Cusco hat to give him some shade.
Here are some more gals dressed in traditional (tipico) outfits with an alpaca.
One of the things Kelsi was especially interested in seeing was the Pre-Columbian Art Museum, which I had heard was the best museum in town, featuring works of art from around Peru from both the Inca era and earlier civilizations.
At the museum, there were some silver earrings and a nose ring. I had Erika pose so that I could photoshop them onto her.
Attractive.
There was also an assortment of gold items as well, including these bracelets from 1-800 A.D.
We had fun posing like all the little statues.
Adam is known for his "Mr. Grumpy" frown.
These dishes looked just like modern salsa dishes, but they were from between 1 and 800 A.D.
And this odd-shaped pitcher is called the "Mythical Potato". (Potatoes were first cultivated in Peru, and they have 500-2000 varieties of potatoes there, so they are a big deal to them).
These heads may have been crafted to look like the people they were buried with. They were also created between 1 and 800 A.D. on the north coast of Peru.
Llamas were especially important to the people of Peru over the ages, as they didn't have access to cattle and other large animals.
I call this painting, "The parable of the lost llama."
The museum was very nice, and once we had done that, the pressure was off because we had seen the main things anyone really cared about. So then we could just do Spider-man imitations and stuff.
I thought this was a cool scene of some local ladies having their lunch with their llama.
I had noted a highly-rated restaurant called "Chakruna Native Burgers". Sure enough, the food was great, the prices reasonable, and they included some Peruvian culture in with the meal. In addition to hamburgers and chicken sandwiches, we also got one alpaca meat sandwich to share so people could try it. The burgers came with french fries made from 5 different native varieties of potatoes.
While we were eating in there, thunder clapped and it started raining really hard. So we decided "No use going out in that! Let's get ice cream!"
This reminded me of the Fellowship of the Ring for some reason.
There had been rain forecast every day in every town we were planning to go to, back when we left for our trip. This wasn't surprising, since it was the rainy season. But we had been very fortunate, with only one bout with rain in Huancayo so far. Unfortunately, this caused us to let our guard down, and we only brought one poncho with us on this outing. The girls experimented with putting one head in each arm, but that proved too hard to walk around in, so Kelsi and Sienna settled for sharing one poncho between the two of them.
Fortunately, there were so interesting art galleries to duck into in the San Blas district of Cusco, so we got out of the rain that way for a little while.
The wet streets had their own charm, however.
Back at our apartment, Erika finished up some quizzes for her collage classes that she was skipping.
With that, it was time to pack up and head to Ollantaytambo (oh-yahn-tahy-TAM-bo). The train from that town to Machu Picchu only allowed 11 pounds of luggage, so we each packed one backpack with everything we would need for the next 3 nights and left the rest of our luggage at the apartment. The owner said they weren't renting it out while we were gone, so they said we could just leave our stuff in our rooms. (A couple days later they texted to say that they had rented it out after all, but not to worry, because they gathered up our stuff and would return it to the apartment before we returned. It worked out fine.)
So we all donned our backpacks and walked a kilometer or so to the place where collectivos compete for your business, taking you two hours away to Ollantaytambo (or "Ollanta" as they call it) for like $3.50 each, which was sweet.
As we drove out of Cusco, Linette and Sienna were counting dogs, which I guess they had been doing for a day or so. They counted more than 250 before they gave up. There are a lot of dogs in Peru.
The van took us through The Sacred Valley, where a lot of food was grown since it is one of the few flat places in the area.
Cusco was an amazing place, and there was more to see than we had time for.
In our next episode, we explore the ruins of Ollantaytambo.
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