After breakfast with our families in Lucre and Cusco we headed through the Andean mountains for three stops on our way winding towards Machu Picchu:
Chinchero: Although the remains of an ancient Incan temple and terraces are here, the main draw for us was a textile workshop where the local Quechua women demonstrate centuries-old natural techniques for cleaning, dyeing and weaving alpaca wool and other fibers.
Moray: A series of depressions with concentric circular terraces dot the landscape here. What’s this all about?
Salineras: The Incas had many small ponds for harvesting salt here, and they are still in use.
At the end of the day we settled into our hostel in Ollantaytambo, the second most important city of the Incan empire, after Cusco.
The blog postings will take a short break again as Maria and Doug begin service visits outside of Lima. The posts will resume later with the rest of the trip to Machu Picchu before starting blog entries from the service visits.
Landon, Caleb and Austin had breakfast at the home of Francisca before setting out for a day of textiles and ruins.At the women’s textile cooperative in Chinchero the guide explained how they use this plant root to clean alpaca wool.Note the difference after cleaning the alpaca wool in the front bowl containing the root extract.Next, a demonstration of how the wool is converted to threads.On the ground are different materials — from beetles to purple corn — used for dyeing white alpaca wool.She promised a prize to the guys who could correctly guess the dye color after adding table salt to the pot, …… and this was the moment when Austin and Landon learned they had each won 1,000 kisses.The women in front weave on a loom, rolling the ball of alpaca yarn back and forth between them.The students laugh after learning that the bones used for this type of loom come from tourists who didn’t buy anything after the demonstration.Eager to keep all their bones, students shop with passion after the demonstration.Olivia and other students also shopped in the main plaza. In the background is a church built in the 1600s on top of an Incan temple, seen below the church.Willy explains the rock carving in the foreground designed to channel water through various chambers.The terraces and other ruins at Chinchero are believed to have belonged to an Incan palace.So many shopping opportunities, so little time.At Moray students were asked to explore and ask questions to guess the Incas’ purpose for building these curious circular terraces in bowl-shaped depressions.Clue 1: The locations of water channels could bring water to the bottom of each depression, but could not have irrigated each terrace.Clue 2: The ridge behind the students had a building and viewing platform for observing 4 terraced depressions.Clue 3: Surrounded by thousands of acres of flat farmland, terraces weren’t needed to provide more arrable land.Clue 4: Many small holes and tiny caves were visible along the paths and hillside, indicating the presence of limestone.Clue 5: These boulders had all been carved/shaped, indicating a religious purpose.For the group picture everyone makes a triangle, the Incan symbol for an “apu,” or mountain spirit.Answers: The depressions were formed by sinkholes from collapsing limestone caves. The best guess for why the Incas terraced them and designed water to flow into them: not to grow crops, but to create an elaborate ritual returning water to “pacha mama,” or mother earth.Sheep crossing.High salinity water from a spring, flowing through the canal, has been used since before Incan times to harvest salt here.Each salt pond produces about 4,000 pounds of salt per year, …… and there are about 5,740 salt ponds.
