Exploring the Sacred Valley, Peru

To start our week in the Sacred Valley of Peru, we flew into the Cusco airport, then immediately left for the town of Ollantaytambo in the Sacred Valley. Cusco is smack dab in the middle of the Andes mountains, at an elevation of about 3,400m (around 11,200 feet). This height lends itself to altitude sickness, so it is generally recommended to start a visit to the area in the Sacred Valley, which is located just outside of Cusco, but at an elevation of around 2,700m, which is much less likely to cause altitude sickness. So, off to Ollantaytambo for a week we went.

Ollantaytambo

Ollantaytambo was a great base for the week. Not only was the town itself built by the Incas and overlooked by the ruins of an Incan temple, but it was an easy drive to many other Incan sites, not least of which was Machu Picchu (you will have to wait for the next blog post to hear about our trip to Machu Picchu!).

There were two ruins in the town itself. One was a pretty scary hike up the side of a mountain, but completely free. It is described as ‘high risk’, and they don’t mess around in South America. It was high risk. At various points we were walking along a cliff edge with no barriers. Not in a million years would you see this in North America.

The other ruin – that of a famous Incan Palace – is safer and easier to climb up, in a better state and therefore a lot more touristy…so we had to pay to get in (a lot! In old guide books they listed prices for a 2-day pass at $10 – we paid more like $70!).

As there didn’t seem to be much to it we thought it might be nice to get a guide to explain a bit more about the Incans and their settlements. So we negotiated with a guide and set off. There are many guides and it’s just your luck which one you get. Apparently on this day our luck was out! Our guide seemed very uninterested in it all, was difficult to understand, didn’t really tell us anything we hadn’t already learned and wouldn’t go to all the ruins with us because of some made up garbage that we had, ‘only paid for the short tour’. We very diplomatically explained that we would prefer to see more of the ruins than spend the time with him and so we went our separate ways at the top.

We spoke to some other people from our accommodation later that night who had a much better experience than us with their guide…just your luck.

Maras Salt Pans

One day, we took a trip from Ollantaytambo to visit a few of the other notable Incan ruins within the Sacred Valley. Our first stop was the Maras Salt Pans.

Salt has been collected here since before the Incas from an underground river. The salty water is directed into these ponds, which are owned by local families. Some are still unclaimed but only available to locals, who pay a fee and are then responsible for farming the salt themselves…looks very labor intensive!

It was neat to see the salt pans in various states of saltiness, along with a few that were actively being harvested. The salt pans as a whole create a stunning picture, as they are terraced into the hillside.

Moray

The Incans were expert farmers and Moray stands as a testament to that. Nobody knows for sure, but it is most likely that Moray was an Incan agricultural laboratory. Soil samples from all over the region were discovered here as the Incans experimented with growing different crops on different layers with different soils. Furthermore, the location and orientation of Moray means that there is a 27 degree difference in temperature between the top layer and bottom layer, allowing for even more experimentation that reflects weather throughout their empire.

Chinchero

On the way to see the Incan ruins in Chinchero we made a stop at a local alpaca wool mill. Our guide strongly encouraged us to buy souvenirs from here as it would be cheaper than other places. We happily did, but more because we’re suckers for authenticity. The ladies working there talked us through the whole process of gathering the wool, spinning it and coloring it and even gave us some tea.

We’re not willing to say how much we spent, but we realized we might have gone overboard when they insisting on taking our photo before we left. We think we saw them packing up after that as well. Probably retiring for the month on the back of our Christmas shopping.

Chinchero is a small town in the Sacred Valley, which is home to a huge Incan ruin that we were able to explore at will. These were some of our favorite ruins, and the beautiful mountain in the background sure didn’t hurt!

Hanging out in Ollantaytambo

At some point in Ollantaytamo, between Incan ruins, we noticed the boys’ hair was getting very long. We stopped at a local hairdressers, but nobody was there. We set off to try again later when a woman who was talking in the street ran up and ushered us back in. She seemed to know what she was doing, but to this day we’re not sure if she was the hairdresser or simply an opportunist. Either way, for $2.50 a head we’re not complaining!

Our hotel was smack dab in the middle of the town, and had great views from every side. We enjoyed the views from our window straight onto the ruins of the town.

As much as we enjoyed our time in Ollantaytambo, once the week was up, we were ready to head to see the world-famous Machu Picchu!