cusco, sun 8th & mon 9thSunday - big chill. Only left the hostal in the afternoon for food. Our local hot sandwich place from last night provided takeaway lunch. Siena read Watership Down ALL day, and the other two played really nicely all day with sticks used for walking up the trails, or with horses (plastic ones J). We read or chatted and it was the quietest day we've had so far. Really restful!.Monday was more eventful, we met at 9 at the travel agency, then were transported up the hills - and these are real hills! - to about 3,800m in glorious sunshine where we picked up our horses and took a gentle trail around 3-4 Inca settlements. Huge stones, and one key site - Saysaywaman (sounds like sexy woman !) which had a stone 4.5 metres high, and took 70 years to construct (the question 'why bother?' comes to mind!) amazing constructions, and to think that this isn't some ancient civilisation but just 500 years ago, not long before our house at home was built, and when we were building black and white Tudor houses, these guys were still doing stuff like the Egyptians, rolling massive stones up hills, building stone terraces and carving each stone so they would sit neatlyon each other without cement or mortar.The landscape here is awesome - really hard to capture on camera, but the whole scale is something to behold - the enormous differences in height between the valleys and peaks (3,000m at times - and the valleys are 2k high!) and the way these towns appear in the valleys, with agriculture and some houses way up in the mountains is just mind boggling. Definitely one for the 'you have to be here to believe it' category.Some of the other things we saw were interesting too - houses where guinea pigs ran loose in the kitchen just before becoming food (they are a fairly standard meal) - kept there because they kept the floors clean and tidy from all the food. Outside the houses a red plastic bag indicates you can buy Chicha - basically moonshine but we had heard that the way they make it is for all the local villagers to spit in it while it ferments! The house was a genuine non tourist house, so we saw first hand the tiny house, smoke filled kitchen and basic accommodation.The whole trek took 5 hours, much longer than we had expected, so we were all hungry and tired. Except Derry of course who would have gone back onto her horse without any hesitation. So we had a quick visit to the pudding restaurant then wandered back up the hills to our hostal.We're all expecting sore bums in the morning after our long horse trek but the views and quietness it afforded us was well worth it.