Writings By Date| To Puno by Bus, "First Class" | 1 | 2 | 3 |
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| Raqchi |
An hour and a half (and a little nap) later, we were at Raqchi, a village built by The Ninth Incan (he was the first to unite the kingdoms and introduce the idea of one "main" God). This was a most unique site, as it was erected around a very tall temple, and was the only time the Incans were known to use columns. It featured stone bases and adobe walls that climbed up three or four stories, and a thatched roof above the whole thing was supported by eleven columns on either side of the walls. It looked unlike any other Incan works we'd seen so far, making us feel that this was definitely worth the extra admission price.
We drove just a short way further before stopping in Sicuani for a buffet lunch that definitely beat yesterday's in Sacred Valley. For one thing, we ate together, rather than spread out across five different locations — though we didn't really socialize with anyone, so it's not like that was much more than convenience. This buffet also offered typical dishes, as did our prior one, but this food actually had some kind of flavor, and was in forms we could even recognize (mostly).
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| Adopted Andean Daughter |
After lunch, we drove for about an hour to the highest point of our journey, Riya Pass, at 4335 meters (over 14200 feet) above sea level. We got out of the bus to admire a pack of wild alpacas sitting around grazing (they don't ever do much else), then stopped at the actual peak to dance with the vendors again. We asked our guide to take a picture of us in the mountains, and as he stood back to frame the photo, a tiny Andean girl waddled up to us like a mechanized robot, and once she was directly in front of us, turned around to face the camera, without so much as saying a word, or even looking at us (though she did mutter some cute childish sounds). The knee-jerk reaction of this girl to a camera being pulled out was one of the funniest things we'd ever seen, and, to be honest, it actually made for a good photo, too. I decided we should train our children when they're about two years old to just walk up to strangers when they're taking a picture, get in it, then hold out their hand for money. The other parents would just love that.
As we returned to the bus, our assistant guide (bus attendant?) went around offering us cups of coca tea, to help with the altitude. Actually, nearly every time we stopped and got back on the bus, we were given a small "treat" of coca or soda. It made us long for Hugo and his snacks, on our Galapagos boat just a couple of weeks earlier!
