Britt and Valerie recently celebrated their 21st wedding anniversary. How about that? It seemed like an excellent excuse to head for the mountains, so they took off for a weekend (with Addison) and went to the Sacred Valley. Fortunately, this is relatively easy from Lima. The flight to Cusco is less than 1.5 hours.Cusco is beautiful and very charming. But it's also at about 3,500 meters, so a little hard on the system if you are arriving directly from sea level.
The Sacred Valley is considerably lower (2,500-3,000 meters) and a great place to visit, too. We'd been to Machu Picchu and Cusco before, so this was a chance to check out a few more of the incredible pre-Columbian sites and enjoy the incredibly scenery.
We stayed in a hotel in Urubamba, where we started out on Saturday by going to the hotel spa. Not everything was working properly there, but we did get a massage and chance to enjoy the steam room and sauna.
Then we headed for Moray, which features terraces cut out of the mountainside in concentric circles to take advantage of different micro-climates for growing various crops (maize, quinoa, potatoes, etc.)
From Moray, we hiked downhill past beautiful scenery and a patchwork of harvested fields. You can also see glaciers in the distance, though they are far smaller than in the past, due to global warming.
As we got further into the valley, the trail became very dusty. You can just see the silhouette of Britt and Addison in the dust cloud of the photo below.
After several hours, we arrived at the salineras of Maras. These were carved out of the valley by pre-Columbians and are still in use. The salt is carried by water that seeps from the mountain and is gathered in the carved pools. The pools are tended by families, who generally own 4-5 of these pools and can gather about 5-6 one-hundred pound bags of salt per pool every 45 days or so. A 100-lb bag gets them about US$3-6.
Once we reached the valley, we crossed the Urubamba River and flagged down a "collectivo" taxi on the main road to get to the village of Ollantaytambo. The taxi seats were taken, but the driver offered us room in the trunk (it was a station wagon), which were only too happy to enjoy.
In Ollantaytambo we enjoyed a good drink (coca sour for the adults and moka for the teenager). We caught up on the FIFA scores, including the US match, and had dinner in a wonderful restaurant that Valerie had discovered on an earlier trip. The village of Ollantaytambo was seriously damaged by the terrible floods last January and is still recovering.
On Sunday, we headed for another lovely Sacred Valley village/site. Pisac is famous for its Sunday market, and rightly so. It's completely charming and not as pushy/touristy as some others you may enounter.
Above the village of Pisac are some very impressive ruins, including terraces and a big fortress.
The only downside of a weekend in the Sacred Valley is the reminder that there's so much more to see and do.
