Writings By Date| Cusco City Tour | 1 | 2 |
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| Saqsayhuaman |
The remainder of the tour focused on several archaeological sites just outside of town. The first, just minutes away, was Saqsaywaman, which wins for the funniest-sounding Incan name (sounding almost exactly like "Sexy woman"). It didn't rank too poorly for impressiveness, either: the entire site — which was never finished — was built using absolutely humongous stones, the largest of them weighing 300-400 tons. It's estimated it took more than 50 years to construct it, as the stones came from a quarry on a nearby mountain several kilometers away. The site was used to celebrate the Festival of the Sun, once a year. All that work, just for one party each year. And I thought the company Christmas party was a lot of planning and effort.
Next, we drove past Pukapukara — we forget what it was for, because we didn't get out or anything — and continued on up a steep hill overlooking the town to Tambomachay, an initiation site for new shamans. It featured a natural spring with three streams, which to this day is visited by natives for luck upon getting married. Men drink from either the left flow to have a boy, the right flow to have a girl, or the top/middle flow to have twins. Our guide swears it works, since he was two for two. I stayed the hell away.
We returned down the hill, with amazing views of Cusco, to Q'enqo, a series of small caves in the giant granite and limestone formations. The most memorable feature here was an ancient surgical table, where pre-columbian shamans performed surgical operations. They actually did things like reassemble the bones of shattered skulls. That's twice as impressive when you consider that anesthetic wasn't invented or several hundred more years.
(Ed.: It reminded me of when Mel Brooks' character in History of
the World, Part 1 is condemned to the guillotine, and is asked for his
last request.
"Novocaine!" he cries.
The French confer for a moment, then respond, "There's no known
thing to medical science."
"I'll wait!")
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| Llama Line-up |
Finally, we paused on our way back to town at a little village-post area to take pictures of the dozens of scraggly llamas, alpacas, and vicuñas, and — of course — to shop for alpaca sweaters, hats, rugs, and anything else that can be woven. These were supposed to be "special" prices because it was a collective, but these were clearly gringo prices, because they were about as bad as what you'd see in the states. For a country with a median income of $20 a month, it's hard to justify spending $90 on a sweater — especially when there are piles of about four hundred of them, making it a lot harder to believe the old woman selling them actually did it herself. They're probably all shipped in from Bolivia or something.
Back in town, I was suddenly hit with serious gastro-intestinal pain, and we rushed to the hotel just in time to avoid an ugly "blowout". I suspect it's from the salchiccha that was in my lunchtime empanada. Dammit, that does it: no more bacon, ham, or sausage for me until I get back to Western civilization! (Once again, thank God for Pepto Bismol.) We ended our night by going to dinner at Rosie O'Grady's, an Irish pub — yes, Irish — just around the corner. After all the local cuisine we'd been forced to eat, a nice club sandwich, greasy fries, and Guinness was just what we needed.
-- Keith
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