What If You Don't Have a Bucket List?

Cusco was the capital of the Inca Empire which was the last chapter in thousands of years of Andean civilizations.

The Incas arose from the Peruvian highlands in the early 13th century. They opened up a can of whup ass and replaced two large scale empires that were already ruling the Andes.

The Inca Empire was a an amalgamation of peoples, languages and cultures. No, the Incas were not nice people.They sacrificed children at special places by bashing their heads in and were hated by the people that they conquered. Such as it was, many components of the empire were not loyal, so when the Spanish arrived invaded in 1532, many of these diverse ethnic tribes welcomed the Spaniards as liberators and willingly settled down with them to share rule of Andean farmers and miners.

By 1572 the Incan State was fully conquered and the Spanish began to systematically dismantle many aspects of Incan culture including their sophisticated and innovative farming system that flourished in a difficult terrain, a road system that went all the way to Chile and much of their monumental architecture. 

Although the Inca were able to construct one of the greatest imperial states in human history without the use of the wheel, draft animals, iron or steel, or even a written language, one thing these motherfuckers really had down was stonework and masonry.

The Incans had a special relationship with rock.The line between natural stone formations and stone that had been worked by human hands was blurred.The Incan stonemasons would work the stones so perfectly that they would fit so tightly with the adjacent blocks that you can't push a piece of paper into the joints to this day. No cement or mortar was used.

Some of these stones above have five or six other perfectly fitted stones around them. Still tight as a tick ~500 years later.

This method of stone construction also prevented the destruction of the Incan architecture in the event of the all too regular earthquakes. The walls, temples and forts would just wobble. The Spanish Conquistadores at first did not take heed of the Inca methods and used stones, mortar and adobe.They wised up when their buildings kept getting obliterated and so they dismantled the Incan buildings and repurposed the worked stones for their own forts, cathedrals and government buildings. Above, an adobe wall mixed with broken pottery on top of a stone foundation using cement. No self respecting Incan mason would have half assed a wall like that.

Everywhere you walk in Cusco you see the masonry of the various ages. The Spanish repurposed many of the good Incan worked stones for their own works and earthquakes finished off what was not carried away. Later, somebody put together new edifices using the leftover debris.

There are ruins everywhere in Peru. If you do not care if the sites are not as grand as Machu Picchu, are not Incan but of previous tribes and don't mind a little hike, you too can have these ruins to yourself. Machu Picchu, on the other hand, is necessarily a well regulated spectacle that receives at least 2000 visitors per day, every day. Lots of ice cream cone lickers.

We booked a horse excursion with another couple to go find some of these ruins.

Probably at about 13,000 feet, glad we had plenty of layers.

Stopped at what the guide said was probably a shepard's shrine. Whoever it was cut these steps out of the bedrock that led to a primitive altar.

Our guide explained things and offered Coca leaves to the spirits.

Inkilltambo was some sort of sanctuary, carved out of granite ~1420. The name means inn and garden place in Quechua.

I decided not to make the hike down to Inkilltambo and stayed with the horses while the others went into a ceremonial niche to do New Age Om things. Lilly took this shot from Inkilltambo. See where I am?

They were gone about two hours and disappeared for a while into a dark inner sanctum where an oracle used to give advice in the old days. Got kinda weird being up there all alone in the middle of Peru, especially when the sun started to go down.

Speaking of Coca leaves.....

The leaves are used to fight altitude sickness and are available everywhere.

Especially in the hotel lobbies.

Things were going fine.......

..... until they weren't. Things kinda got outta hand.

The only way to get to Machu Picchu from Cuzco is to take the tourist trains or hike the Inca Trail.

The breathtaking ride through the Sacred Valley takes ~4hours to go ~65 miles.

The town of Aguas Calientes is quite scenic but is 100% reliant on the tourist trade. People shoving menus and fake baby alpaca sweaters in your face and such.

A bus leaves about every five minutes from town and there was often a line of a hundred people or more.The maximum capacity at the ruins is ~ 4000 tourists per day. There are many rules, such as: you can only stay up to 3 hours, only walk one way on a designated path and no videos. It takes about 20 minutes to reach the ruins and costs $24 in a country where you can travel hundreds of miles for like $6.The entrance fee to the site itself is $62 in a country where many sites are free. The train was $162 return. Add in expensive hotel rooms and inflated meal prices and voilà you have yourself a tourist trap.

As we don't have a bucket list, yes we decided to forgo the opportunity to visit Machu Picchu.

We went for three days mainly because of the *hot* springs, a short walk from Aguas Calientes. Well gentle reader, them aguas ain't calientes. Sometimes they were as many as 50 people in the warmest tepid pool, almost touching elbows. There were foreign bros spitting beer on each other, local pre-teens seriously making out and the water appeared dirty and smelled slightly of piss.

 Whew! Time to exit stage right from this place.

Lilly was so traumatized that she needed some llama and alpaca therapy. Seriously, that was the name of the adventure. It was led by a husband and wife team from a village 50 miles from Cusco. It was about a six mile walk through the~13,000 feet mountains with 14 interactive llamas and alpacas.

Like herding cats.....

We felt a little guilty sitting and having empanadas and Coca tea at a table that somehow had been miraculously set up for us at the top of one of the mountains. Guilty because our guide told us that this woman who passed us by herding sheep was in her early 90's.

Here I was breaking down the nature of the universe, how things really are, for our guide.

Later we stopped at the guides' compound where they gave an exhibition on how they make all of these clothes.

Here lime juice is mixed with some type of mold or bacteria that grows on cactus to make a purple dye. There were other leaves and roots that they used to make the other colors.

The ladies taking five while overlooking the Sacred Valley.

In our last stop on the llama therapy tour, our guides took us down a lane and knocked on the door of a neighbor's house (we were surprised  that someone was actually living in it). He said the adobe brick compound was over 200 years old; he pointed to the roof where someone had tied the rafters together in yesteryear with plant stems instead of using nails.

There in the sunny courtyard was this woman, apparently 101 years young, doing laundry by hand.

View from her kitchen into the courtyard. She said her husband had died 35 years ago.

As is quite common in Peru, she raised cuy, guinea pigs, in her kitchen as a meat source.

She kept sheep and alpacas in a manager out back. She said the cuy and the animals were her family now.

The Peru Hop bus dropped us off in this parking lot in Puno, our last stop in Peru until our visa expires. Peru Hop had done such a good job since we left Lima almost three months ago, I wondered what was this hotel-bus was about. Turns out it is, well, a world wide hotel-bus service based in Czechoslovakia. You might google them if it seems like your cup of tea.

Puno is at an even higher altitude than Cusco. Most tourists come here to visit Lake Titicaca, the world's highest navigable body of water. Our hotel offered oxygen therapy as room service. Once the sun went down, it was in the low 30's at night...burrrr. 

The lookout above Lake Lagunillas (14,580) on the way to Lake Titicaca, Puno.

I am not convinced that the pure oxygen makes much of a difference as far as elevation problems go. My experience was that as soon as you took off the mask you were huffing and puffing again. Remember when you would see all the running backs in the NFL huffing oxygen on the sidelines and now you don't? Probably better to let your lungs adjust naturally.

One of the main tourist attractions in the Puno area is to visit the floating island homes of the Uru people on Lake Titicaca.They are Indigenous and moved out to the middle of the lake many moons ago to avoid being taxed and enslaved by the Incas and later the Spanish. They build their floating mats, homes, boats and some food and medicine out of the Totora reeds above.

Today's Urus do not reject modern technology. Most boats have motors and most of the houses have solar panels to run appliances and charge iPhones.

Once sort of bird hunters, egg gatherers, quinoa growing fishermen, now days tourism is their main source of income and they will use every chance they get to hit you up for every last sol you have, bordering on the slightly sketchy.  But several hundred do live out here. The rest have thrown in the towel and moved to the mainland ~10 km away.

 

To maintain these floating island is a never ending task. They constantly pile the dried reeds on the island floor as they don't last long until they turn to dust. It was kind of spongy and smelly walking around and as they use outhouses, I am pretty sure I know where the waste goes.

The original purpose of the islands was defensive so they could move if they saw a potential threat that they couldn't handle (and, our guide told us they could cut the anchors of trouble makers and alcoholics and just let those problems float away. BYE!). 

The Peru Hop fulfilled their last contractual obligation with us by driving us from Puno almost all the way around Lake Titicaca and then dropping us off at the Bolivian border. We had to hump our worldly possessions about a half mile across the border, but I am not complaining because they really helped ease the process at Bolivian Immigration.

I don't know what the USA did to Bolivia but they make Americans jump through a lot of hoops to visit for a month. Everyone of those Hoppers in line are non-USA foreigners and they spent a New York minute each getting their visa. We 4 Yanks had to go to a separate window and provide: both of our bank statements, proof of hotel reservation, proof of a onward bound ticket out of Bolivia, two passport photos, two copies of our passports, our itinerary in Bolivia and pay $160 each for a one month visa (which is an outrageous amount of money in a country like this; for example Mexico gives most tourists 6 months for free and no questions asked). 

Peru Hop was upfront about this process for Americans and checked and double checked our documents to be sure we had everything in order; even then, our guide had to run across the street to make a copy of something.

There was then a Bolivia Hop bus waiting for us on the Bolivia side to take us to La Paz. There was some sort of strike or protest blocking the only highway through the mountains and Bolivia Hop had to use some, ahem, shall we say, creative methods, to sneak us by.

But that will have to be another story for another time.

In the meantime gentle reader, reflect back, if you will, on the 1969 movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In real life as well as in the movie, the duo escaped a Sheriff's Posse in the American West and caught a steamer to Bolivia. They had hoped to hide out and maybe retire as gentlemen ranchers in Bolivia but things went awry and they took to robbing banks again, in a country where they stuck out like a sore thumb. After a mining company payroll robbery, the banditos were surrounded in an isolated cabin by the Bolivian Army. The movie ends ambiguously, the official record says that badly wounded, they committed murder-suicide and are buried in San Vincente, Bolivia. Relatives, friends and conspiracy people have later said that they escaped the shoot-out, retired as ranchers in Washington State USA and died of natural causes at a ripe old age.

Alas, I digress.

When I saw that movie in 1969 at the Byrd Theatre in Richmond, Virginia, a 12 year old me wondered where in the heck Bolivia was. I am about to find out.

Thanks for stopping by