Pungent tuna sandwiches

1/3 cup sundried tomatoes (packed in oil type, drained)
1/4 cup fresh basil
3 cloves garlic (you can put more garlic. or less garlic.)
1/3 cup capers (olives would also work. or both.)
1 yellow bell pepper, chopped into 1/4 inch pieces
1 can tuna
Some bread or buns or something

Put everything except the pepper and tuna into a food processor, grind into a paste.
Flake up the tuna and mix everything together. There should be enough of the paste to hold the rest of it together, if not, make up some more (and let me know so I can adjust my numbers!)

Alternatively, you can skip the basil and use pesto sauce. If you do this you can just chop the tomatoes and leave the capers whole since the pesto should hold things together pretty well.

Once your filling is ready, put a thick layer onto your bread/sliced bun/etc. I imagine you could also mix it with some small noodles for a tasty pasta salad. Enjoy!

First, a bag for my netbook. It is a funny size and I was never able to find a bag for it that I liked (or even one that fit!) so I made my own using the fabric I bought in Peru (it has llamas on it).
It turned out pretty well, I used foam from some old packaging to make a padded pocket for the netbook, and there’s a front pocket for the accessories that closes using a drawstring with a bead that also has a llama on it. A magnetic clasp closes the whole thing, and there’s an adjustable strap for easy carrying.

There’s room for more than the power cable and mouse in the front pouch, I’m considering loading it up with my camera and DS and using it as my PAX bag this year.

The other project I finished today was a summer bed for my dog. I’d had the PVC and fabric around for ages so it was good to get that done.

The skeleton is made of PVC with some special furniture PVC joints I had to order online since hardware stores only sell the kind that are useful for water to flow through. The bed is made of black linen (which breathes well) so it should be nice and cool for Lily to rest on in the heat of summer.

After breakfast we went to check out the artisan’s market which was a bit further of a walk than normal but nothing too bad. It was inside a huge building with a few people around the outside as well. The building reminded me of one of those places where you rent a space to store your stuff, everyone had their little unit and each one was packed full of goods. They coat the walls, hang from the ceiling, cover the tables and shelves, and often run over onto the floor. The openings to the stalls are dangerous, they put as many things around the opening as possible, since they know most people won’t go in. Often there is stuff hanging from the top of the opening so if you did want to go in you’d have to duck. Well, I’d have to. Most of the people here are shorter.

I know I’ve mentioned these alcove shops before, but one thing I forgot to mention previously was the hallway shops. Some of the openings in walls (not in the market, it was all little ones) extended into hallways, and if you were brave enough to venture inside you would often find it goes on into a long hallway, a courtyard or sometimes even a mini shopping mall with all sorts of other shops inside! The hallway ones are quite the thing, each seller will have their section with walls and tables covered in goods and in most cases it is impossible to tell where one shop ends and the next begins.

Back to the market. This was the market that at the start of the trip was recommended to us as a ‘if you don’t find what you’re looking for, it will be here’ market. It was mostly the same stuff in every alcove as we’ve seen everywhere else. We’ve seen so many of these now that it’s mostly a blur of ‘no thank you’ as the sellers try to point things out while we walk by glancing over their shops. We picked up a couple things to bring home for people. I still didn’t find my tapestry, so my dining room wall will remain bare.

We did find a t-shirt place that had different t-shirts than we had seen anywhere else (it is seriously the same stuff over and over and over) and I got one with llamas all over it for 15 soles, which is an awesome price.

After the market we went for lunch at a local chain burger place. I had a boring old plain burger (which was tasty) and Jonathan had some fancy burger that had potato chips on it, among other things. He said he couldn’t taste them but they made it crunchy.

Next, we went to the Inca Museum which had been recommended to us. It was interesting to see some of the artifacts from these people whose buildings we had walked through on our tours. Most of the displays were untagged, and of the ones that were only about a third had english tags, so we didn’t learn much. We realised we probably weren’t missing much either, since most of the tags we could read just said when and where the things were found, and no one really knows what anything is. It was still good to see, and at 10 soles each it was worthwhile.

In between all of these things and after the museum we spent time walking around, looking at shops and structures and people. It really is an interesting city, and very walkable. We would probably be able to get a lot more out of it if we spoke Spanish.

One thing we’d been seeing around is this strange rock, on the tables with stone llamas and other knick-knacks, there would be this funny shaped rock in a case with other little rocks around it like a puzzle. It was on postcards, t-shirts, and its outline was spraypainted on street vendor carts. We finally had a shopkeeper tell us what it was, it is a twelve angled rock that is in one of the Inca ruins, apparently very famous. We wondered where it could be, that no one pointed it out to us during our tours. Jonathan looked it up when we were back at the hotel and found out it was on a road that we walked every day we’ve been here. We went out to look, and sure enough, there it was. So we got a picture. Yay rock.

I actually did find one tapestry that would have worked, the colours were not great but it had llamas on it and it was square. It could be mine for the low low price of 3,300 soles! It was really quite nice and looked like quality work but after all the other prices we’ve seen here that was a bit of a shocker. I didn’t splurge on that one.

We went back to the Inca Grill for dinner and had some local dishes, I had the trout with potatoes and other things while Jonathan had some shredded poached chicken with rice. They were both tasty.

Tomorrow we’re flying out to Lima and then we’ll have the afternoon and evening in Lima before catching our flight to Toronto at 1am. I’m sure we’ll be sleeping on that plane!

Finally the tour guide started talking, and it was in Spanish. Then, luckily, he switched to English, and told us that this was a bilingual tour. However, it seemed as if we were the only two who didn’t know Spanish, and he didn’t speak English very well, so he’d spend about four times as long talking in Spanish as he did in English. At least this was our last tour, so we already knew most of the generic details about ruins and churches.

Our first stop was a church in Andahuaylillas, which the description I’m reading here (you didn’t think I remembered that name offhand, did you?) says is known as the ‘Andean Sistine Chapel’. Again they wouldn’t let us take pictures, even without flash, so I didn’t get any of the inside. They are currently restoring it, so both of the sides had scaffolds with people working on the paintings on the walls. 

The church was pretty spectacular, and much different in construction from what I’d expected. The ceiling was shaped like /-\ instead of /\, and the whole ceiling was ribbed with the beams they used to hold it up. It was then plastered over and there were flower-like things painted in a pattern all over it.

The walls of the church have huge paintings and gold leaf carvings as well as patterns all over anywhere that wasn’t covered with the other stuff. The front was entirely covered in one of those giant gold-leaf covered carved things (I totally have awesome terminology here) with the little openings with statues in them that I have seen in pictures of other fancy churches and in the one we visited at the start of this trip.

One interesting thing that I forgot to mention in the writeup of the other church visit is their use of mirrors in churches. Normally mirrors represent vanity so they’re avoided in churches, but for the people who lived here when the Spanish came along to convert them, mirrors were treated as a way of looking at your soul. The church builders took advantage of this and put mirrors in the churches both to attract the people (since mirrors were hard to find and apparently people like looking at their souls) and to tie in the idea of the church being important for their souls. So, there are a lot of mirrors in the churches here.

Another interesting thing about this church was that there were two sets of people who used it, and this is a bit that I mostly missed due to the language issues so I’m not quite sure who or why. Anyways, while restoring it they’re finding whole other paintings and things underneath the existing ones, so a part of the difficulty of restoration is ‘which one to restore’? They even found a little cavity with doors that had a painting inside a couple years ago, that had just been plastered right over.

Our next stop was Piquillata, a city built by the Wari people even before the Incas showed up. It was built all out of stone, not as fancy as the nice cut stones the Incas used but impressive nonetheless. This city had been destroyed in an earthquake and abandoned, and then it got all covered up with dirt, so most of what we could see was the second floors of buildings. Our guide told us that if they excavated the whole thing this would be a city bigger than machu picchu.

It had a very interesting design, with streets and blocks much like we do now, though the streets were these tiny skinny things (much like most of the roads in Cuzco now, which was mostly built on Inca ruins, and the Incas learned it from these guys.). The really interesting thing about it was that each block was a huge walled off square with just one opening, and then inside that square were houses. there was a long corridor you had to go through to get into the square proper from that opening, too. They think that each family clan had one of those squares and then the individual families lived in the houses.

They’re not really working on restoring this area yet, but they had a few rooms excavated and it was quite the thing to see. They plastered over the rough rock walls with mud (I’ll get to the mud thing in a bit), which is also what they used as mortar to glue the rocks together, and then they went over that with white lime plaster. So, at some point this whole place was covered in white plaster with thatched roofs. It’s pretty amazing for something so old.

Now, that mud thing I mentioned. Nearly all the buildings here are made of mud bricks. Driving through the little towns and even the outskirts of Cuzco you see people building their houses with mud bricks, stacks of mud bricks waiting to be used, mud bricks being laid out in the sun to dry. They’re everywhere! Then you see houses where they’ve plastered over the mud bricks and painted them, so they look like what I consider ‘normal’ buildings. It’s kind of funny since a lot of them only plaster over the front and leave the sides bare.

Then you’re standing in downtown Cuzco and you see places where the plaster walls are chipped and in behind… more mud bricks! I’ve seen a few brick structures and a few concrete ones, but most of the time if these materials are used (or when the old Inca rocks, or other stones are used), it is as a foundation extending a few feet up and then the mud bricks are used on top of this.

As weird as it seems to me to have people with electricity, running water and cellphones (there are a lot of cellphones) living in mud brick houses it makes  lot of sense here. It gets very hot in the days and very cold at night, at least in the dry season. They’re cheap, they’re great insulation, what’s not to love? OK, maybe the bit where they get washed away in floods. They had a huge amount of flooding earlier this year (I have mentioned it previously) and we drove through a few towns where they had lost most of their houses and were living in tents up on the hills. It was very sad to see all the collapsed houses along the road.

OK, back on track. The next place we visited was Tipon, which was some more Inca ruins. These ones had been built with a similiar purpose to the ones in Moray, except instead of concentric circles it was three sides of a square, and not nearly as deep. They also had water still running through visible aqueducts, which was neat to see it being channeled all around. This place was fancier than Moray, they had a big multi-level  fountain that split the water into four little waterfalls at one point.

After the tour they dropped us back off at the main square in Cuzco, and we picked up some strawberry drink powder before heading back to the hotel to rest a bit. Ah, it was nice to have something to drink that didn’t taste like bottled water! I’ve been drinking strawberry juice at breakfast and it’s actually pretty awesome. We have a buffet included with the hotel stay that has strawberry, orange (the orange is really bitter) and what we think is mango juice. They also have grapes that are so huge they could be small plums.

We went out again and headed to one of the markets Emily had marked on our map. It was out of the tourist area, and we walked through streets that must have been their version of a shopping mall, with little shops all along selling clothes and shoes and the occasional random stuff shop. The shops aren’t like the ones at home, they’re basically little alcoves in the walls and they put all the stuff for sale up on boards around the front so you can see it all while walking by. The best part about this was no one tried to make us buy anything as we were walking by. The places closest to the ones at home were pharmacies and camera stores, which you actually had to go into and everything was on glass shelves behind glass.

We found the market, which was enclosed by huge (plastered mud brick) walls. Inside were a few aisles of the normal tourist stuff, but still no one trying to force it on us. The rest of the market was food, there was a food court with places selling food and tables to eat it at, and then there were people selling fresh produce, and people selling dried beans and the like, and people selling meats. We walked through the meat aisle by accident, and it was not what I would call pleasant. They had raw meat sitting out on tables, creepy things that I couldn’t tell what they were hanging from hooks, and some skinned things with teeth. Good times.

So we went through that pretty quickly, walked through the touristy stuff, and then went through the produce on the way out. The produce smelled delicious, they had all the normal stuff we have at home, plus some things I didn’t recognise like these round whiteish fruits (I think they are fruits) with purple stripes.

Speaking of produce, one thing I have noticed here is they peel the tomatoes. Every time I have seen sliced fresh tomatoes here (which is often) they are always peeled. I’m not sure why.

After the market we went back to the hotel and now I’m typing this up. How exciting. Next, we’re going out for dinner. We’re planning on trying that most exotic of restaurants… McDonald’s. Yeah, I know it’s horrible, but I have always heard of these McDonald’s in other places so once I saw it in the main square I knew we had to try it just once.

Edit: McDonald’s was almost the same as at home, with just a few differences. First, they don’t list individual sandwiches on their menu, and it is almost as much to get one as it is to get a whole meal, unless it is one of their ‘special price’ ones. It was just as expensive as at home, but not nearly as greasy and they seemed to put some spices on the burgers. Crazy! The only bit of grease we found from the burgers was from Jonathan’s which had bacon and cheese on it. We tried the Inca Kola, which is more popular than coke here, so that was something new from here. Also it had ice in it, which meant that despite it tasting like a mix between cream soda and bubblegum it was the BEST DRINK EVER.

The wikipedia article on Inca Kola (I looked it up because we were not sure if it had coca in it) is full of interesting facts about how pepsi killed itself in Peru and how Inca Kola was the first time coke allowed McDonalds to sell a non-coke pop. Also Inca Kola is bright yellow and has caffeine in it.

Moray is another site constructed by the Incas, but different in that it had a purpose other than religion or living. That’s not exactly true, since we’re told they treated science as a religion, and the experts in any given field were treated as priests.

Anyways, Moray’s purpose was to be an experimental site for farming. Using circular terraces and funky irrigation techniques they managed to simulate all the way down to 2000 metres above sea level at a site that was more than 3000 metres above sea level. They used these sections to figure out which varieties of plants would grow in different places, planting a whole bunch of different ones until one finally sprouted. In addition to changing air pressure and temperature (up to 2 degrees celcius either way) they also flooded some to see what would grow in wet conditions, and left some all dried up to see what would grow in dry. They then took those seeds and gave them to the people living in those conditions to use for farming.

At this location they had three of these ‘pits’, and then another over on the other side of a mountain.

They also used the surrounding hills to create plants that would grow at different levels, managing to take a potato that previously only grew very high up and have it grow much lower, just by slowly moving the plants down the hill and keeping the ones that lived to continue the process.

Our next stop was Maras, which was created even before the Incas came along and is still in use today.

Maras is a salt mine of sorts, except unlike a normal mine where you’re digging it out of the ground, they have a spring that comes through salt formations underground before coming out of the mountain full of salt. They then use a series of tiny aqueducts to carry the water all around to over 5000 small pools, filling them with water and then allowing the water to evaporate, leaving the salt behind. They get about three harvests from every pool before they need to scrape it out and fix it up with new clay.

Once they have the salt they put it in 60-70kg bags and carry it out to the storehouse. They get about 15 soles per bag. This seems like a tiny amount of money for such a huge amount of work out in the hot sun, but it must be worth it for them otherwise I imagine they would not bother to do it. The salt can only be worked in the dry season, and farming only happens in the wet season, so the people who work the salt mines have an advantage over the other farmers in that they can collect an income all year round.

I bought a llama made of salt. It cost 10 soles, but after all that I really didn’t feel like haggling him down.

After that we went back to the hotel and rested a bit. We still had a free afternoon so we had lunch and then went out and sat in various squares and people watched. Mostly llama watched. In addition to the people everywhere trying to sell you stuff, there are all these ladies dressed up in traditional garb ready to take payment for you to have your picture taken with them. A lot of them are carrying a lamb and have a baby strapped to their back. Some only have one of the two, and then some of them are walking around with full grown llamas or alpacas (mostly llamas) on leads.

We went to squares that were not heavily frequented by tourists, so a lot of the merchants and picture people who were there were just resting. The llamas looked very bored and a lamb led a small child past us on a piece of wool tied to a shoelace. Cuzco seems to have little squares everywhere, which is a good complement to their teeny tiny one way streets with their teeny tiny sidewalks. Some of the sidewalks you basically have to walk sideways on, most of them you have to hop onto the street if you want to pass someone. Luckily these one way streets actually have a direction, so at least you know which way to watch for cars. The sidewalk to our hotel actually tapers off to almost nothing right before we turn.

It’s been cloudy in the mornings in Cuzco, which our guide said was unusual for the dry season. They burn off pretty quickly though so it was very sunny and warm out. Much of the advantage to sitting in the squares is that most of them have fountains that give off a refreshing mist.

We had dinner in a place that was reccomended to us, it was all very fancy looking but the prices were cheap. Basically it was the same numbers as for food at home but in soles instead of dollars. It was tasty enough, but we are getting tired of eating in restaurants. I think if we were to do this over we would have gotten a hotel room that had a kitchen. Another advantage to a kitchen would be ice. I can drink warm bottled water when I need to, but it is getting to be a little much! It is a small price to pay for everything we have gotten from this trip.

So, we got up at 4am to be ready in time catch our ride to the Cuzco train station. Breakfast at the hotel doesn’t start until 5, which is when we had to leave, but we asked if there was anything we could eat and they rushed and put most of it out for us early. That was pretty awesome of them so we gave them a good tip. Then we went out to meet our ride to the train station.

I called it a train station, and it has all the accessories a train station ought to have, but the recent floods knocked out a lot of the tracks so the train doesn’t make it all the way to Cuzco. At the train station we get on a Peru Rail bus that takes us on a two hour bus ride to the station the trains can actually get to. Most of the ride was through areas we had already been through on previous tours, and it was still pretty dark, so there wasn’t much scenery to take in. The only real difference was we passed some police checkpoints that had never been there in previous trips. The first one just waved us by but the second stopped us and talked to the driver a bunch before filling out some papers and letting us go. I’m assuming it is something that happens when it is dark out, I could’t really ask anyone since the whole bus seemed to be speaking spanish.

After we got past the parts we had been through before we went on this long, twisty, one lane dirt road for a very long time. It was one lane but not one way, and we would often come across vehicles coming the other way and one of us would have to back up until we found a section of road that was wide enough to pass on. Most of the time we could see them coming (or they would see us coming) so we’d just stop and wait.

We got to the train station and waited for our train, which was a little confusing but we managed to get on it so it was all good. The train ride was great, we were heading towards the jungle (but not into it) and watching out the window it was amazing to see all these new plants popping up that had not been there before. They served us food on the train, just a small (cheese) sandwich, a drink (the 7up was much less sweet than i remember 7up being!) and a dessert. We got off the train in the town below machu picchu and met our tour agent lady who was basically just there to make sure we got off the train and then onto the next bus, letting the guy up in machu picchu know when to meet us. They really don’t want to let anyone get lost.

We opted to stay in the town for a little while since our tour wasn’t for a few hours and we wanted to have lunch first. There is a restaurant in machu picchu but we were told it is very expensive. We walked around looking at the little shops, mostly more of the same but I did manage to pick up a couple more llamas. We had lunch at a place that had mexican food, I had a burrito and Jonathan had trout, which is something they actually commonly eat here. I’ve been trying to figure out what kind of special foods they have here that we don’t eat at home, but it seems to be mostly very similiar stuff. Yes, they eat guinea pig, but until the tourists came along it wasn’t commonly available, it was something you ate maybe once a year at a special occasion.

Eventually we met back up with the lady and caught the bus up to machu picchu. It is quite a bit higher than the town, so the ride was basically going back and forth over a whole ton of switchbacks on another one lane dirt road, passing busses going the other way. After all the traffic fun we have had so far this barely registered on the scale.

When we got up there, the guy who was supposed to meet us wasn’t there. This is the first time that has happened, and after sitting around confused for awhile we went to ask the other guides if any of them were him. They weren’t, but they got right on the phone trying to find him for us. They were all very friendly and seemed very concerned that we were missing our guide. It was just another example of how much they’re depending on tourism right now, everyone we’ve met in the tourist industry seems to go above and beyond to make sure we have a good experience.

They managed to get ahold of our guide, and he told us that our tour wasn’t scheduled to start for another half an hour (which is why he hadn’t been there waiting) but it was good that we touched base with him ahead of time. He directed us to a place to take pictures that wasn’t on his tour, so we went in and climbed up to it (more switchbacks!) and it really was a great photo op.

We went back to the start to meet up with our guide and the rest of our group, which turned out to be crotchety old guy and his suspiciously young wife, whom we had had on one if not both of our previous tours. They were pretty good sports, though, so it mostly just made for an interesting tour. Machu picchu is one of the new wonders of the world, and it certainly deserves that title, but honestly after all the other ruins there wasn’t much new in what he was telling us, so there won’t be much new in anything I can write about it. It was amazing to look at, but I’m afraid I don’t have much to say about it. You’ll have to wait for the pictures.

One thing that was different about it, though, was that the ruins were actually mostly complete. Most of the ruins we had seen so far had been mostly destroyed, so it was really neat to finally see some ‘complete’ ruins. They had even put thatched roofs on a couple of them, to show you what it would have looked like.

The location was amazing, you’re up on a mountain surrounded by mountains, so all you can see all around is these incredibly tall mountains and deep deep valleys. You can really tell why these people would worship mountains, when everything you can see all around you is more mountians. Even more amazing is to look at the next mountain pass over and see more buildings waaaaay over there. And another on the side of the mountain across the way. It was quite the thing.

After the tour was done we had a moment of free time (we would have had a bit more but we read the bus ticket wrong) so on the way back we walked on a terrace where they had some llamas. This area gets too hot for alpacas with their thick fur so all they had up there was llamas. Not that I minded! Most of them ignored me as I walked by and petted them a bit, so I headed towards a baby llama who was lying down. I scratched him on the top of the head and he didn’t seem to mind so I moved to the back of his neck (this is a very large area! it was the bit right behind his head) and scratched him there and he seemed to be enjoying it since he leaned right into it. yay! I petted all the way down his neck and over his back and the two distances were almost the same. Then he got up to go see his mommy. Baby llamas are crazy soft.

Then we went back down and caught the bus back to the town, then the train. It was dark for most of the train ride back, so not much to see. The train on the way back doesn’t go as far as the station we got on at in the beginning, so it was an even longer crazy bus ride back from the train station… especially since our bus got a flat right near the start so even the smooth roads were bumpy. (It was one of those with two back wheels on each side so one flat wasn’t going to stop us.)

Just a note, these buses are mostly not big buses like we are used to, they’re big vans with lots of seats inside.

The bus didn’t take us all the way to the Cuzco station either, it took us to some other station and then someone from our tour agency picked us up there in a smaller van and took us right back to our hotel. All in all it was about five hours to get back, most of it on crazy buses. We were exhausted.

Today we went on a tour of the sacred valley and then Ollantaytambo. The sacred valley is a very neat place, hidden within a collection of very tall mountains. The way it is sheltered and the amount of sunlight it gets means it stays at an average temperature of 15-20 degrees (celcius) all year round. I’m not sure what temperature it was while we were there, but it was just a perfect.

There are a lot of houses and fields in the sacred valley. They grow a lot of corn, and it comes out with giant kernels. It was just after the end of corn season (it is fall here, just after the rainy season) when we showed up, so there was great rectangles of peeled corn just sitting out to dry in the sun.

Our destination in the sacred valley was a huge market. On sundays they have a local market and our guide showed us where that was, too. In the local market they were selling all kinds of local produce and it really made me wish we had a fridge in our hotel room. The tomatoes looked delicious but just like the ones at home, while the carrots were awesome, short and fat like little wedges. There were people selling powdered dyes and I realised later on that I probably could have picked some of those up to bring home. Not sure what I would dye, but the stuff in all the other markets is all the same everywhere while the local market is where the local people go to buy and sell actual stuff.

After our quick look through the local market we went through some aisles of the main market. It is all touristy stuff and almost everything you can find at one booth you’ll see at another booth very soon. It’s likely almost all mass produced, but I’m afraid if it involves a llama I am a big softie so I made many purchases. One nice thing about shopping here is that the local money is worth just over a third of what I’m used to. They ask for 30, and you freak out because 30 seems like a lot of money! Except that if you saw something like that at home it would probably be 25 or so because of the import fees and whatnot. So, since you got shocked at the big number (at least, my brain doesn’t do currency conversion well), you talk them down to 20. That’s easy, you could get more if you wanted to bother, but at the prices most of these things cost it doesn’t really seem worth it to haggle too far.

So, yeah, I now have more llamas than I have ever seen at home. I am looking for some sort of pleasing-coloured tapestry that has llamas on it to put on the wall in my dining room, but most of the tapestries seem to be portrait shaped and the space needs landscape. I’ll keep looking (no one can stop me! even if I wanted to stop no one can stop them from running up to me and showing off their wares!).

Llamas. Everywhere. I will buy them all.

So after we were done with the market we went to have lunch. The bus stopped and he listed off a whole list of names of people who had vouchers and led them all off. There was only two couples he didn’t name so we got confused and followed him, thinking we could still eat there but we would have to pay. This was not the case! The bus driver came out and got us but the other couple had gone too far and wouldn’t come when he tried to call them back. Eventually our guide came back and took us to a buffet where they had a bunch of different foods for us to try, some of them local.

I tried a bunch of different things, they had this one dish that was a thin layer of mashed potatoes, then a layer of tuna, then another layer of potatoes. Not that remarkable, but the potatoes were bright yellow! Apparently they have 5000 of the world’s 10000 types of potatoes right here, and that was one of them. Another dish I tried was dehydrated potatoes in a kind of stew (except that it was just potatoes and flavour and water or something). They tasted just like potatoes but had a very different texture. There was also a quiche-like dish that was delicious, and when they restaurant guy was telling us what it was he mentioned milk but not eggs, so I’m not sure what it really was. I tried a bunch of other stuff that I’m not remembering now but I took a picture of it for later.

Speaking of pictures, I forgot to charge my camera last night so it died on me after Ollantaytambo

After lunch, we drove to Ollantaytambo. This was a crazy place with a whole bunch of terraces. The guide showed us a picture of the terraces as seen from the mountain across the way, and you can see that they were built in the shape of a llama, so that’s pretty awesome. They didn’t look like a llama in any of my pictures though. We climbed up a ton of stairs to the head of the llama and I got some pictures from there. This place was meant to be a very important place for the Incas, so at the very top there they were building a building with these huge slabs of rock. They still had the ramps in place where they pulled the rocks up the mountain. However, our guide told us that the Spanish attacked while they were still building it, so it was never finished.

After climbing down the stairs we got back on the bus and dropped some people off who were staying in the sacred valley. Then we headed to our next stop, which was Chinchero. Chinchero was what he called a normal village, and it certainly seemed like it. With the exception that most of the ones we drove by were pretty flat, and this one had a whole pile of stairs! I’m normally ok at stairs but this at this altitude I am finding my legs get tired a lot faster than normal. Luckily, all we have to do is rest for a couple minutes and then I can go again.

At the top of the stairs was a big square with local people selling woven stuff all around. Most of the stuff they were selling was probably made on a machine (in fact, one lady pointed out to us a pair of socks she was selling that was machine woven and one that was hand woven), but a lot of it had llamas on it so I had to check it out. We got a panorama pictue with my old camera (yes, mine died, but we brought a spare!) of the mountains across the way which looked like they had been covered in terraces at some point.

After that, we drove back to the main square in Cuzco and we went back to our hotel to rest a moment and drop off our llamas before heading back out for dinner. Dinner was boring again, we went to another touristy restaurant and had pizza. it was a ‘four seasons’ pizza which we ordered with ham, salami, asparagus and olives. We thought this meant they would be all mixed up on the pizza but it was actually divided into quarters with one topping on each. The asparagus was white and it was surprisingly delicious.

Tomorrow we have to get up at 4am to get our 5am ride to Macchu Pichu, (it is a long trip up there by train and bus) so we’re heading off to bed now.

Yes, I’m charging the camera.

So first a brief rundown of Day 0: we flew from Vancouver to Toronto (approx 4 hours) and then from Toronto to Lima. We got into Lima at some crazy hour, so our tour company had booked us a hotel to sleep in for the four hours or so until we had to go catch our flight to Cuzco. It was expensive but we ended up being very glad we had had that, after all that sitting in an airplane, having a nice bath and a real bed was wonderful.

Now for Day 1: We got up at around 6 to get ready and have breakfast and get out in time to catch our flight. The hotel was right next to the airport (btw, all airports are crazy maze-like things) so we just walked right into the lobby. The flight to Cuzco was uneventful, except that it was only an hour and a bit long and they still served us food! We didn’t even get little snack bites on our four hour flight to Toronto, so that was nice.

When we got to Cuzco we picked up our bags and went to find the way out. There were a bunch of tourism companies in Lima trying to get our business, but they were nothing compared to the ones in Cuzco. We were glad we had set one up already, and once we got outside there was someone waiting for us holding a sign with Jonathan’s last name on it. That was pretty spiffy.

Our english speaking (they mostly speak Spanish here) guide is Emily, and she took us to a waiting van with a driver who was to drive us to our hotel. It was a crazy drive, the roads here are super skinny and sometimes there are three lanes of cars on a street that would not even qualify as a two lane road at home. When we wanted to turn left off of one of these roads we actually got over to the left a few car lengths ahead of the turn (and this road was full of vehicles) and everyone just weaves around each other. I was amazed that no one so much as brushed another vehicle, we were that close *all the time*.

This is getting long and I have not even got to the part where we did stuff yet. But it’s mostly for me so you’ll have to bear with me a little more here.

The hotel is in downtown, and this seems to be the area where most of the tourists go, everything is fixed up and pretty. The area we drove through to get here, however, was very interesting, half of the buildings were mostly rubble being rebuilt and there was huge piles of rocks and sand everywhere. I think this was damage from a big earthquake they had awhile back that destroyed most of the city, and it is taking them a very long time to rebuild.

There are stray dogs everywhere, running and sleeping and walking. Dogs of all types, I even saw what looked like a husky (blue eyes and all). Apparently strays are a very big problem here. We were told they aren’t violent or anything but you still shouldn’t pet them since they could be carrying something. As a tourist, it is mostly just cute to see these little dogs everywhere, especially at night when they are curled up to sleep. Everyone just ignores them and they ignore everyone back.

The other thing that is everywhere is people trying to sell stuff. You can really tell that their main income here comes from tourism, nearly every shop is a tourist shop, every nook in the wall or spare bit of road has someone selling something, all the open areas have people coming up to you trying to sell their wares. A lot of their wares have llamas on them, too, so they’re hard for me to ignore due to my love of llamas. (I have broken twice already.)

Everyone seems to take USD as well as the local currency, fancy places will put both prices on the bill, street vendors will tell you a price in USD if you ask. Every second store has a money changer. If you come here, bring as many small bills as you can, most of the stuff is pretty cheap.

OK, back on track. We got to our hotel and Emily went over our entire tour and which tickets we need to bring on which parts. (They had set up our visit, including getting ahold of all the needed tickets for us.) She actually started going over it on the way there, since there was a big party going on in the main square and we had to take a long detour with much traffic. After she was done we went up to our room and had a nap, since we had a city tour in the afternoon.

We got out of the hotel and waited for the pickup to the city tour, that was a crazy thing in itself, a lady comes running up to us and asks if we are the right people, tells us pickup is coming and then she runs off again. Next a van shows up and her and us get on. Not sure where she came from that time. Then the van drove around some more, dropped her off, picked up some other people with a different lady, dropped that lady off, picked up some other people with the first lady… it was quite the operation.

Once we got everyone we went back to the main square (which is just three short blocks from our hotel) and met up with some other groups, then got split into two and sent into a cathedral. (I don’t have my sheet with all the names on it right now, sorry.) We were not allowed to take any pictures in the cathedral, I really wish we could have though because it was amazing. There are probably some online, but you can’t look it up since I didn’t provide a name. One thing of note was this was set up for the catholic religion, but the local people had their own religion where they worshiped the earth and especially the mountains. Most of the virgins in the cathedral, therefore, are up in these crazy huge triangular dresses as wide as they are tall, so they are shaped like mountains.

Our guide for this tour was great, he is one of the local people and I totally failed to catch his name. He told us a lot of things about their history and seemed to be very proud of it. He spoke English well, which was good since he had a lot to say!

After the cathedral we went to somewhere that I totally forget what it was. It had a lot of examples of the Inka stone buildings, which were very impressive. (Our guide told us that the word Inka is just for the king, and the people had a different name that I couldn’t pronounce and so I have forgotten it. I shall look it up later. In the meantime I’ll just say Inka since that is what everyone calls them in the tourist info.) They built buildings out of these huge stones and put them together with no mortar, using a technique that no one has been able to figure out yet. These stone buildings have survived for ages, even through big earthquakes. In places where they have been partially destroyed and people have tried to repair them, they have had to use cement because they can’t get them to stay together the same way.

We were told that a lot of the destruction was done by the spanish. When they came in and took over, they could not understand how it was built, so it must have been the work of the devil and demons. No one wants devil work around so they blew a lot of it up with dynamite. Another thing they did was build things out of brick, so to fire all those bricks they cut down all the cedar trees that the locals had previously used to build things and make carvings. Nearly all of the buildings have the red tile roofs, and our guide told us they can’t change back now because they get paid money to keep the place how it is for tourism, and if they changed back they would no longer get that money. That is kind of sad. one thing I noticed while driving by all the construction was their rebar looked a lot skinnier than the stuff we use, and the red roof tiles were thinner.

Next we went up to this place that I can’t recall the actualy spelling of the name of, but it is pronounced ‘sexy woman’. (This was kind of funny when the guide kept saying it.) It has some more of those stone walls, but this time the stones weigh in hundreds of tons and there are three layers of walls build to resemble lightning bolts. I got lots of pictures of those.

We climbed up a nearby hill to get good pictures and though it was not a huge hill we had to stop to take a break, the thin air really does make a difference. I have been taking altitude sickness medicine so I have been forced to learn to breathe more before we even left, but Jonathan couldn’t take it due to an allergy so sometimes he forgets to breathe enough and has to stop and catch his breath. Other than that and feeling wimpy for running out of energy extra quickly, we both seem to be doing OK with the altitude thing so far.

We went to a couple other places that we stopped at for just a few minutes, we were high above the city so I was able to get some twilight shots of the city all lit up. One of the places had a big rock with passages carved all through it, and a sacraficial altar in one of the big ones all carved out of the same rock. It was a big cave-like passage so the guide had to use a flashlight and even then it was hard to see. We kept to the left because there was a big hole on the right. Someone hit me (lightly) in the face trying to touch the wall. It was all very pretty and impressive.

After the tour we were dropped off in the main square and had dinner in a restaurant that was reccomended to us, the Inka Grill. It is quite obviously geared towards tourists, but that is ok since we are taking it easy at first. No sense eating risky food on the first day and being sick the rest of the trip! We had food that we could get at home, but it was delicious. The one thing I had that was different was a hot chocolate, it came and he put down a thing of sugars like they do with coffee. I tasted it and it didn’t have any sugar in it at all! It was delicious and thick, I put in two sugars and it was perfect. I have a ton of different hot chocolate mixes at home, but if there a chance of doing so I would love to get some from here.

After that we got lost on the way back to the hotel, but that was due to us thinking we were on the wrong street, not due to anyone telling us wrong. We finally tried it again and just as Jonathan was telling me I could switch to the other side with the bigger sidewalk we came up on the alley with our hotel on it.

The hotel had delicious chocolates on the bed and hot water bottles under the covers to keep them warm for us. They also know how to do blankets  here (probably out of necessity, it gets cold at night), There are two very thick wool blankets and then a duvet. I was nice and warm!

It is time to go eat to be out in time for today’s tour (it is actually Day 2 now) so I’m off to do that now.

Edit: I realised later that I totally missed mentioning the fountain we visited. It was built by the Inca peoples so it was all made with their fancy rockwork. We walked a short ways and there was a hole in the rock that water came out, not a crack or a round hole but an orderly rectangle hole. The guide mentioned that that wasn’t the one he wanted to show us, and we were to continue along the path. One of the other tourists asked if it was better, and I cracked a joke ‘yeah, it has *two* holes’. Turned out I wasn’t far off, we get to the end and there’s one upper hole and then from there the water splits off into….two holes. good times. It was kind of neat, each of the three holes has some special meaning which I have forgotten, I think the top one was blessings and Jonathan is telling me the left one was fertility and the right one was youth. Also when the nearby stream is muddy due to rainfall, these streams are clear since they come from underground.

This is one of those sorts of posts where I show off awesome stuff that I have! Well, I think it’s awesome. It’s probably on the same lines as ‘My mom thinks I’m cool’, but I’m posting it anyways!

First up: I bought a cabinet on Craig’s list. I’d been looking for a bit for a corner cabinet with some decent storage to make homes for some of the stuff that doesn’t really fit in the kitchen, and I’d been having no luck with actual stores. This one was apparently custom made for the guy, and it is pretty much just what I was looking for. It even matches my table!

No, I don't like pink. It was there when I moved in and is too new to replace.

But best of all, it lets me display my awesome fish dishes (I love these. If I could find more shapes, I would purchase them. I found them in hospital blue once, but that wasn’t as awesome.)

The sticker on the back says "Torre & Tagus Collection". A bit of Google tells me it's apparently their 'Cape collection'. I should look into this further.

Next up: the garden! I’m on the second floor, so I guess it’s not really a garden. I do, however, have a large enclosed deck with one side facing south. Now, when I say ‘enclosed’ here, I mean they took a normal deck, and then put up walls of double-paned windows all around it, inside the railing. It’s kind of odd, but I realised at some point that it would do a good job of pretending to be a greenhouse.

So, what does one do with a greenhouse? Plant rows of seedlings, of course!

The picture on the right is the same plants as the ones in the back on the left. The more you know!

These will all grow up to be blue flowering annuals. The gem of my collection is (on right) the cornflowers! They’re sort of a desperate effort to have cornflowers for my wedding in april, since no one seems to want to sell them to me. It’s unlikely that they’ll bloom in time but I had to try! Also, I’ll still love them if they’re late.

There’s more to my garden than rows and rows of seedlings, though. In addition to the plant that dies and the plant that won’t die, there’s the lemon tree (that’s sadly probably dying) the pots of borage, the windowbox of lily of the valley and agapanthus, the mysterious pepper plant (right) and the herb garden (left).

The mystery plant showed up as a volunteer in my lemon tree pot, I moved it when it was just a baby because it had neat leaves. It’s grown, I still don’t know what it is, but it seems to have developed a pepper (see inset).

My herb garden last year had all sorts of herbs in it. Over the winter, All but one of them died. (This is probably because I didn’t water it for most of fall and winter. I can grow things from seed, but a green thumb I am not!) So, for 2010, I’ve raised it up on my awesome plant stand, and decided to plant nothing but basil, since that’s all I really use fresh, and I can never have enough of it! I’ve planted lemon basil and normal sweet basil, but I just planted them last night so they’re not sprouted yet. The other plant in the herb garden is my undead bay leaf plant, which somehow survived the months of neglect. I watered it a bit, and it sprouted new leaves! Madness.

So, there you go. A clean dining room, and a green garden. What more could you want?