After an early breakfast, we got picked up at 7AM and embarked upon the more adventurous part of our journey. It was several hours til we got around to the hiking part of things; in the meantime we had a drive of several hours that was broken up with a couple of stops, the first of which was a tiny village. Kind of a 'show and tell' to give us a sense of how things operate outside (yet in some cases quite close to) the touristy areas. This is inside the colorful market.
Our next stop was at a small Inca ruin site called Tarawasi. Our lead guide, Antonio, referred to it as the "mummy hotel", as the mummies in question were trotted out of storage for temporary stays in these niches during religious ceremonies.
Rhonda trying on one of those niches for size.
Check out the construction of the wall. The Inca used no mortar and, instead of carving stone 'blocks' of uniform size, cut each stone to match up with the one previously laid.
Another example at the same site.
And back in Cusco, here's another example. When the Spanish set up shop here, they destroyed most of the Inca buildings, but were wise enough to leave the ingeniously constructed foundations behind. All over the Cusco historic district, we saw original Inca foundations below Spanish buildings.
Time to start heading up into the high country now. Before too long, we got a firsthand look at one of the area's main problems, landslides. This wouldn't be the last time we had an 'interesting' road situation to deal with.
After another mountain village visit for some Alpaca wool shopping and another couple of hours of dirt road driving, things "got real" in a hurry. Time to get those spiffy hiking clothes dirty! (Like, seriously dirty. And crappy, too. Lots and lots of horse and mule crap up in the high country...) Here's my REI model before we got started.
Our warmup hike to the Salkantay Lodge was only about 3 hours, but it's important to ease into things to get used to hiking at altitude. "Easing" in this case was a short time, but going up from 11,000 to almost 12,700 feet. There was definitely a little huffing and puffing going on, but the scenery more than made up for it. Kinda reminded me of when we took the helicopter flight in Hawaii, only actually standing that far up in the air instead of flying!
The warmup hike was a good opportunity to start to get to know the folks we'd be spending the next week with. Pretty good mix of personalities. We especially hit it off with the four folks from Alabama.
Here I am at the Salkantay Lodge. We'd spend 2 nights here, with a nice excursion/sidetrip to take place the next day. That pouch around my middle is where I carried the "big" camera, a choice that I'm sure led to a few extra calories being burned; our guides kept stressing the importance of travelling as lightly as possible.
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