Tour of the Sacred valley.

Another early start for a 12 hour bus ride ride round Pisac, Ollantaytambo, Chinchero. Arrived at the pick up point outside SAS travel at 8.30 but no sign of Sam or Rory.

At 8.40, just as the bus was loading they appeared with Rory distinctly bleary eyed. He went on to explain that he and Sam had gone out for few beers the night before. Sam had gone back to his hostel but Rory had stayed out with some American girls. At 2 am he walked one home to her hostel as she was nervous about going alone. At the hostel she gave him her pepper spray to return to her friend in the same hostel as Rory. Rory, for some strange reason, possibly connected with the beers, tried to blow the spray as a whistle, triggering the mechanism which discharged in his face leaving him blind and in pain from the spray on his eczema. Attempts by other travellers to rinse his eyes with milk did not really help and he stayed in the hostel entrance for several hours until he could see sufficiently to get home. Meanwhile Sam had woken to find no Rory, leaving him with a bit of a quandary. Just as he was thinking he needed to report Rory as a missing person, he appeared. Despite this Rory and Sam managed to turn up just in time for the day.

Following this inauspicious start we proceeded to enjoy a fascinating, if somewhat rushed day trip. First stop was a small craft market where we bought a wall hanging, follwed shortly after by Pisac market where we bought more local items including a painting. The mystery of these markets is that they all sell the same stuff in huge quantities - ethnic knitwear, Inca vs Spanish chess sets, bags, stone icons like pumas, llamas etc.

After Pisac market, clearly a major tourist staple, we proceeded up to view the Pisac Inca remains which entailed a long walk along precipitously steep mountain trials and steps before getting to some impressive ruins.

After a rather unenticing buffet lunch we proceeded on to Ollantaytambo, a continuously inhabited Inca village (unlike most settlements which were destroyed). The remains have some particularly impressive terracing as well as some typical Inca moutain top observatory features. Especially striking was the fact that the quarry for all the stones was 5km away at the top of the next mountain - the Incas had a particular penchant for making things difficult for themselves!

From the ruins we were also able to watch a festival down in modern Pisac, including the rather grizzly spectacle of a bullfight.

Final stop of a rather whistlestop day was Chninchero, again perched high up. This time the feature was a Spanish colonial church built atop an older Inca temple. The inside was a mass of frescos, paintings and typical Catholic iconography but with a few Inca features thrown in for good measure, all in a massive building out of all proportion to the settlement it now served. Outside the church was the now very familiar array of craftwork for purchase. The visit was rounded off with some grilled alpaca and potato on a stick from a street vendor.