Scott & Kerry's Southeast Asia Adventure: Cusco Inca Ruins and the Sacred Valley

We arrived in Cusco, the main hub for getting to Machu Picchu and other Inca ruins, late in the afternoon, but needed to get a jump start on booking our trips for the next fews days. After a great lunch-dinner at this mexican place we randomly walked into a tourist place and began asking questions. We ended up booking a local city tour to see the ruins around Cusco and picking a private tour from the company owner for the Sacred Valley. The Sacred Valled for those of you as uneducated as I previously was, is the area in and around Cusco (suprisingly located in a Valley.. : ) that the Incas built many temples and cities. The entire area is shrouded in the mysticism about the Inca culture and how they were able to accomplish some of their architectural feats.

Recipe for a typical Inca town...find a really high and steep mountain in the area, haul huge rocks to the top (some well over 20,000 lbs), cut perfectly straight edges with a magical "laser" (historians are still baffled by how precise the Incas stone-work was and have only been able to duplicate the Incas efforts by using mondern technology), place these huge rocks perfectly on top of each other like a puzzle without mortar of any kind and build a huge complex on the top with symbolic meaning, oh and sprinkle magic fairy dust so it withstands the numerous earthquakes this area has endured since their time.

With all sarcasm aside the Incan ruins are spectacular and some of the most amazing things either one of us have ever seen.

Good example of an Incan wall with the perfectly cut stone...

This particular stone had 14 corners (the one stone raps around the other side as well) that the Incas cut perfectly...notice also that the stones alternate at the corner, thought to help prevent damage during earthquakes

Quick pose by the ruins...

A former Incan Temple of the Sun was converted by the Spanish into a church...you could tell the Incan walls inside as they had withstood the earthquakes and test of time much better than the Spanish parts...

A special worship fountain near Cusco...the water still runs and is irrigated from a mountain over 50km

This picture kind of shows just how big some of these stones are...and to to think the quarry was over 50km away...

The Incans are famous for their exact terraces...they were so precisely made on the sides of mountains it makes you wonder how they did it...by the way, these are about 15+ feet in height

We stopped in a small village during our tour to visit the kitchen of a local friend of our guides. The kitchen was pretty small with black rock from all the smoke over the years...and their were guinea pigs all over the place...¨cuy¨as it is known in Peru in a national delicacy and came out from every corner of the kitchen when the lady threw feed on the floor...

This area is called Moray...it was absolutely massive...you may be able to make out some people working down on the terraces...the different levels of terraces were said to be an experimental area for the Incas as they tried growing different plants at different temperature levels, we walked to the bottom and it was noticeably warmer at the bottom...crazy smart Incas...