After yesterday’s epic visit to Machu Picchu, anything we were going to do today was going to pale in comparison. It’s just hard to top that. But the Cusco region and Sacred Valley are filled with so many interesting sights and attractions that it would be possible to spend months here and not see them all. Obviously, we don’t have months. We had one more day. So we decided to hop on a half-day tour to Moray and Maras. ‘Cause, why not, eh?
After breakfast, we were picked up by the tour company and we loaded onto a big bus. Yep, after two days of a luxury private guide, we were back on a group tour. It was okay, though. Much more economical, for one thing, plus it wasn’t the sort of day when we really needed a private tour.
We were the only three English speakers. The guide gave her spiel in both English and Spanish, though the Spanish was clearly more detailed. Maybe because she spoke slowly and clearly, but I was pretty impressed with my ability to pick up a fair bit of the Spanish. A week in South America is doing wonders for my language abilities; I’m speaking franglais with Vanessa and Marie and broken Spanish with the locals. (The number of Israelis everywhere speaking Hebrew isn’t helping the confusion factor either.)
Chinchero tourist stop
We drove back into the Sacred Valley and stopped an hour in at the small town of Chinchero. There, the local women gave a small wool dying and weaving demonstration, of the made-for-tourists variety that is designed to get everyone to buy stuff. Since the handicrafts they were selling were clearly not real Alpaca, but instead the same “100% genuine fake” **** that is sold everywhere else, we didn’t have much trouble passing on the opportunity.
Crop circles, anyone?
The next stop was at the Incan ruins of Moray. The site contains three areas with circular agricultural terraces from Incan times. The cool thing about the terraces is that they each had their own micro-climates. The Incans used Moray as a sort of experimental farm to grow a wide variety of crops, greenhouse-style, many of which wouldn’t normally grow in this climate.
Of course, after the thousands upon thousands of terraces at Machu Picchu, plus those we’d seen at Pisac, Moray wasn’t anything all that special. But the circular formations made for some neat photo ops.
Back to the salt mines
From there, we made our way to Maras, the main destination of the day. The village is famous for the salt mines in the area.
Cusco and the Sacred Valley are, of course, well inland. The salt deposits were formed thousands of years ago as underground rivers, and now the ground has tons of high quality salt. The mines have been exploited for hundreds of years, by the Incans, the Spanish colonials, and today, by the local people who own the pools and benefit from the salt extracted from them.
We first stopped in the village itself, where we shopped a bit for salt and for food made with salt. (Fleur de sel chocolate, yum.) We also finally got a chance to try chicha, the local corn-based Peruvian fermented drink. To tell the truth, it was sickly sweet and not very good. But I’d been meaning to try some, so I was glad I did.
Then, we headed into the Salineras salt mines themselves. There are over three thousand tiny wells, in a series of pools that reminded me a bit of the leather tanneries in Morocco, except without the smell. We were able to walk around the first series of pools and take some photos. It was incredibly hot down at the salt pools, however, especially with the sun beating down. So we didn’t last long before hiking back up to the bus.
We drove back to Cusco to the increasingly grating sound of pan flute music. Hey, at least it wasn’t Simon and Garfunkel this time. Seriously, what is the Peruvian obsession with them all about, anyway?
Friday night in Cusco
We arrived around 2:30 to the main square, and made our way back to the hotel, stopping along the way to browse in a few more Alpaca wool shops and to pick up some water and grocery items.
Back at the hotel, we took a short siesta, and did some necessary paperwork and other organizational stuff. It’s easy to be in go-go-go mode all the time on vacation, but sometimes, you gotta plan stuff, pay bills, and all the boring stuff that rarely makes the blog but that has to happen in the background.
Then, we had one more night out on the town as a trio. For dinner, we decided to go to a Chifa restaurant. Chifa is Peru’s answer to Chinese food, introduced by waves of Chinese immigrants in the 19th and early 20th century. It’s incredibly popular in Peru. We made our way to a nearby Chicha restaurant and ordered some food that tasted similar to, but not quite identical to, Chinese food at home. The restaurant was really nice. The only problem was, there was three times more food than we could possibly eat. We felt bad leaving so much over, but the portion sizes were really ridiculous.
Then, of course, we couldn’t wind down this portion of the trip without one last night out. Marie opted out, since she was tired, and decided to head back to the hotel. But Vanessa and I decided we needed to internationalize our karaoke careers a bit more. The last time I went to sing karaoke in South America was in 2009 in Santiago. Well, now Cusco has had the honour of hearing me belt out Bohemian Rhapsody over a couple of rounds of pisco sour.
We found a nearby karaoke bar, which was mostly empty — there were maybe a couple dozen people in the place, tops — and we rocked the place. I mean, we owned it. After hearing Vanessa take on Gloria Gaynor, some Cusco local guys invited us to sit with them, and we got to practice our Spanish in between songs. It was a really fun night overall, and a great coda to this portion of the trip.