The city is a mason´s dream with a smorgasbord of all types of stonework on show. Road, sidewalk, walls and up to the tiled roofs it is all some sort of stone. It can be pebbled, cobbled, blocked, granite slabbed to just plain found stone with plenty of the wonder of warm adobe. The great Inca stones are keyed into each other mortarless with a precision that is probably unmatched anywhere on the planet,any millennia.
Even today´s construction techniques would be hard pressed to match the quality.It is also unknown precisely how they did it creating a lot of the mysterious air that attracts a lot of new agers and other true believers. After the conquest the Spanish used some Inca sites as quarries for the construction of their colonial buildings. Qoricancha the sun temple is located in downtown Cuzco and is believed to have been the heart of Inca religion and astronomy. The Spanish destroyed it as pagan and surprise, surprise they built a Catholic cathedral on top of it using the Inca stone as foundation. In the 1950s an eathquake destroyed the colonial church structure exposing the orginal foundations. Amazingly the Inca work stood.The Inca empire consisted of four states with all roads leading here to city square. After a briefing at our trek company (QENTE) we then spent the rest of the week wandering the streets and sites of Cuzco including an off the wall tour with a young guide Jonathan who gave us the bohemian tour including a stop at a house that had some fresh fermented corn Chica marked by a bag hanging above the top of the door. Chica is the locals favourite party drink. He also took us to the large San Pedro Market where we had a look at an herbalists who offered a cactus extract that gives off hallucinogenic vibes something like mescaline and totally legal here. I made a few smart comments about having already done the Carlos Castaneda thing thankful I am a little too old and wiser for all that argy bargy. We also took a trip out to the Sacred valley just north of the city visiting the Salinas salt pans, a series of drying ponds fed by an underground stream leaching from the surrounding hills. Looking out over the ponds was a view of the mountains and a valley running down to the town of Urabamba.
We admired the view, little knowing that we were looking at where our hike would end. Not far from the ponds we visited the site of Moray an Inca built amphitheatre where Dylan would have been happy performing. Turned out to be an agricultural centre or laboratory where the Inca experimented with crops at different altitude levels.
Temperature range from top to bottom was 27 degrees Fahrenheit mirroring the climate range of the empire. Archaeologists have found different soil types from all over the empire here and of course many people wanted to get down to the center, leave an offering and feel the vibe. Finally it was time to organise and get ready for our hike and then Machu Picchu.to be continued
note the pumas head in the picture above
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