Moray to Urubamba

It seems that in most of my free time, I end up leaving the city (Cusco) and its honking vehicles, crowds of tourists, and pollution. It’s a fun place, but weekends and days off are a nice chance to go see other places. Small towns, ruins, mountains. This weekend was particularly long, so I had lots of opportunities to see new things. I drank chicha for the first time. It was alright. It’s alcohol made from corn that has a yellowy white, opaque color, a thick layer of foam on the top, and tons of chunks of stuff floating around in it which end up settling and forming a thick layer at the bottom of the cup. The taste isn’t bad. It tastes a bit like beer, it’s carbonated, but it’s a little bit bitter/sour and earthy/dirty tasting. It’s popular in the little towns here so I had to try it, but I don’t think I’ll be drinking it too often.

Next I went to a baptism party for a little boy whose godfather/mother are friends who are studying/volunteering (like me) here in Cusco. I got to see a real Cusco house. I mean a more average Cusco house. My host family is pretty well off and their house isn’t all that much different than what I’m used to at home. In much of the city though, I can tell that people live differently. There are lots of houses made of adobe bricks with corrugated metal roofs, not accessible by paved roads, and where it’s hard to tell if there is running water and electricity and such. This is the kind of house we went to. The taxi dropped us off at the end of a dirt road and we walked up some steep stairs to the house where the party was. Inside the yard, there were three different buildings. One was the kitchen, with a dirt floor, no windows and only two light bulbs for the whole large room, and an open fire for cooking (with no chimney so all the smoke went into room). Also, scurrying around the floor were a number of cuy (guinea pigs) and a few chickens. The bathroom is a small shed type structure with no running water, a light bulb with an impossible to find light switch, and no door. Although I didn’t try to shower, I’m pretty sure it is done in a similar shed with a couple of different buckets used to pour water over the body. The room where we had the party is tucked away behind the kitchen and has a dirt floor, white walls, and some chairs for people to sit in. I’m not sure what it is usually used for, but it worked quite well for the party. For dinner, we ate cuy…maybe the ones I had seen roaming around the kitchen earlier. It’s a hard thing to eat, mostly because it’s so much work to pick through and find any meat. The taste really isn’t bad though.

The rest of the weekend I spent mostly wandering around beautiful places in the mountains around the Sacred Valley. Between ruins, along a beautiful plateau, looking out above the valley at the tall mountains that seem to go on forever. Each time the clouds moved, another jagged, snowcapped peak became visible. Walking in this area, I didn't meet any other tourists. Most people I encountered were out herding sheep, feeding cows, or doing some such task like this. Everyone was very friendly, happy to stop what they were doing to give directions or just chat for a moment. After descending down into the valley and resting for the night in the town of Urubamba, I got up early in the morning to hike up to a glacier, high up on the mountain above the town. Unfortunately, it was a wet morning. It rained the whole time, making it cold and soggy, as well as impossible to see the glacier and the route we needed to take to get there. We hiked up a beautiful valley, filled with trees (most places here don’t have many trees and when they do, they’re usually eucalyptus), wildflowers, and great views up to misty mountain tops. It turned out that this valley didn’t lead to the glacier, but up along a beautiful, roaring stream into a huge grassy meadow with towering walls of rock and waterfalls in all the cracks in the tall walls. There was no one else here, except for two cows. Somehow this valley escaped the Incas and their construction. It was raining more here, and there was not really any way to climb out of this steeply enclosed valley, so we headed back down the way we came, into the Sacred Valley and back to Cusco.