Peru X: The Sacred Valley

Pets or dinner?  Visiting a Peruvian home where the guinea pigs scurried across the living room floor was just one of our adventures on October 12, 2022.  We fell in love with Cusco, but left it to visit the Sacred Valley, nearer to Machu Picchu.

Our bus wound higher and higher, above Cusco, until we could look down on the crowded, red-roofed city, with its cathedral and central square clearly visible in the middle.

We then drove down into the Sacred Valley, a green, fertile space surrounded by high mountains.

I was continually fascinated by the strong, entrepreneurial Peruvian women, selling homemade crafts in little stalls and by the roadside all over Peru.  So many of their items were beautiful--alpaca hats and sweaters and shawls, dolls and stuffed llamas.

It was hard to know what to buy.  Mike bought one of two of these fluffy animal hats for Audrey and Calder Burke, but Heidi wished I had carried more home for the Christmas table!

There were crosses all over Peru, including on top of this cafe.  Are those guinea pigs beside the cross?

There was a Catholic church in every town.

We visited Chincero, another impressive Incan fortress.  I had no idea how many huge forts, temples, and cities the Incas built in just a few hundred years.  Those monuments have lasted for many centuries.

Our guide asked tour members to pick up these brown and white pebbles and guess what they were.  When one tour member suggested, "Llama poo," everyone dropped them.  Actually, the guide told us, they were dry potatoes which had been frozen.  That is a way of preserving potatoes in this cold land.

We then stopped at another cultural center, like Kenko on October 11.  We watched and listened as weavers showed us rough wads of wool from different Peruvian animals (llama, alpaca, vicuna). 

They demonstrated washing the wool, dyeing it with natural dyes, making yarn, and then weaving on a traditional Incan loom.

Earlier in the day, I had watched a young girl selling silver inlaid pendants on the street.  At the cultural center, a silversmith explained that those inexpensive pendants would turn yellow within weeks. 

 At the cultural center, I bought a sterling silver pendant, with a reversible Andean cross design, as a momento of the trip.

We ate lunch cooked by the native women at the center, with a variety of traditional Peruvian foods.  We sipped chicken soup filled with quinoa, and we were then served a plate of roasted guinea pig, chicken, mashed squash with the seeds included, and quinoa salad.  Addition platters of baked sweet potato, corn, fava beans, and boiled potatoes were passed around, along with aji sauce.

In addition to receiving a slice of guinea pig on our plates, it was also served decoratively on a platter!

Dessert was a stewed tree tomato!

We next visited the Gonzalez family's pottery factory.  The owner showed us how he took clay from the stream near his factory, wet it and mixed it, and turned it into beautiful pots, platters, and vases.

If my bags had not been full of other treasures, I would have brought home some Peruvian platters.

We walked down an alley into a home which mixed Christian and pagan traditions to an alarming degree.  The family also lived closer to their animals than I could imagine.

Guinea pigs ran about on the floor of the living room.

A collection of pagan totems decorated the walls--a llama fetus, skulls.

Yet, in a niche in the wall, there was also a picture of Christ, next to a family photo.

As I thought of the pros and cons of taking tours, I admitted that the many unique cultural events included in our tour was something I never could have planned on my own.

Tour members were fascinated, but also horrified.  When the owner of the house suggested we buy some crafts from him, there were few takers!

Our last event of the day was visiting the ruins at Ollantytambo.  

The ruins were massive, with a dozen or more rock tiers leading high up a mountainside.