Family Blogging Part II

Madre:  Hey, this blogging is kind of fun!  Mind if write the next installment myself?

Hijo: go for it!  If my viewership declines, you’re gonna get the flak for it…

Madre:  OK, then here goes - I suppose it should have occurred to us that coca tea is a stimulant, and so it was probably not a good idea to drink several cups of it upon arrival in Cusco in the afternoon to ward off altitude sickness.  Good news: no altitude sickness.  Bad news: only got a few hours of sleep the first night in Cusco.

That didn’t stop us, however, from having fun the next day on our tour outside of Cusco to the archeological site near Moray and the salt pools at Maras.  The Incan site near Moray is hard to describe, especially since archeologists had a hard a time themselves determining the Incan purpose for this huge arena-looking series of concentric stone-ringed circles.

View from the top

Kinda eerie isn't it?

Us on the steps

The family in the Inca ruins!

Eventually they figured out that since the circles contained deliberately constructed layers of gravel, sand and soil, the Inca must have used this primarily for agricultural experimentation and production of crops to feed their empire of 12 million people.  They even came up with a way to dehydrate potatoes so that their couriers had “travel food” to take with them.  Bet you didn’t know that the Inca were the first to develop Potato Buds, huh?

Pedro: how about potato skins?  I heard there’s a TGIF in Lima….

Dona Donna: The nearby salt pools were equally interesting since they are something that has been in use since Inca times but are still used in much the same manner by the local people today.  The basic idea here is that due to a fortunate proximity of spring water, underground salt and iodine the people have created several thousand shallow pools of water that are fed by the springs during the rainy season, and which then produce salt when the water evaporates during the dry season.  The local people then just have to clean and process it, add a bit of the iodine that grows nearby, and voila! – you have the Peruvian low-tech version of the Morton salt company.

Huge area of salt mines

Over a thousand of 'em

Salty!

For dinner that night we treated ourselves to French food.  It was not only odd to be ordering French food from people who speak Spanish, but it turned out that we were the only ones in the restaurant that night.  We weren’t sure why we had the whole restaurant to ourselves (we washed up and changed clothes before going there, honest!) but it suffices to say that we had very attentive service from our waiter.  We’ll spare you the food photos this time if you believe us when we say that it was another very good meal.

Any closing thoughts to add for this post, Pedro?

Pedro: Nope I think that about covers it!  Tomorrow we’ll let you dear readers knows if we survived the Andean wilderness!