Today was an interesting tour. We got ‘picked up’ by a lady running to see us as normal, but unlike normal there wasn’t a van waiting nearby to come get us, she led us all the way to the main square where we stood and waited for awhile, not really sure what was going on since she didn’t really speak english. A tour bus finally showed up and she instructed us to get on it, so we found a seat and then the bus went and picked up some other people. There were people already on the bus speaking Spanish, and most of the people getting on the bus were speaking Spanish, so we were somewhat concerned that there had been a mixup and we were on the wrong tour.
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.
