Cusco

Our flight from Puerto Maldonado to Cusco arrived early and we got to our hotel here shortly after lunch. Time to settle in and get our bearings but the advice is not to do too much as we are now at 3,300 metres altitude. Diana seems to have been unaffected but I have had a bit of dizziness and a slight headache, so not doing too much too quickly is sound advice.

The historic centre of Cusco is beautiful - the Spaniards did build some lovely colonial cities across Central and South America, although it was unforgivable how much they destroyed in the process. It reminds us of some of the cities we went to in Mexico and to San Cristobal de la Laguna in Tenerife. We have spent the last couple of days wandering the city by foot. This is the Jesuit church….

…and this is the slightly smaller but none the less impressive Cathedral. The interiors are the usual hideous over-the-top baroque confection of gold, statues and schmaltzy images, but the exteriors are really very fine.

Lots of pretty streets to wander too, with a surprisingly good selection of shops (many selling Alpaca knitwear, but also a lot of outdoor specialists at which you can kit yourself out with anything you might need for the various hiking options around here, including the Inca Trail).

Underneath the Spanish surface, significant Inca remains still exist. Their fantastic stone work is easily recognisable, examples below.

The main Inca sites here are the Qoricancha and Sacsayhuaman. The first, a temple to the sun, and the pre-eminent temple in the Incan world, was brutalised by the Spanish who built a Dominican church on top of it, but you can still see the Inca foundations (the curved black wall directly beneath the church) and some of the buildings within the temple complex were preserved and re-utilised by the Dominicans.

Thursday morning was cloudy for our walk up to Sacsayhuaman. Originally thought to be a fortress (a big battle was fought there between the Inca armies and Spanish conquistadors) it is now thought to have been another temple. Pachacutec Inca developed Cusco as the capital of the Incan world and designed the town in the shape of a puma, with the town being the body and the rivers leading out of it its tail. It lacked a head and this site was chosen and developed to provide the missing piece. The stone work is monumental, with many blocks weighing several tons, all brought from quarries about 35 km away. Mind-blowing! The zigzag sections are in 3 layers each about 6m high and whilst they resemble later fortification techniques in Europe they are allegedly there just to represent the puma’s teeth.

The grass-cutting is done by some friendly llamas (or are they alpacas or are they vicuñas? - we might get this sussed by the end of our trip).

We leave Cusco tomorrow, with a driver and guide to visit the other main Incan sites in the sacred valley - Pisac, Moray and Ollantaytambo. We stay in Ollantaytambo for 2 nights and then on Sunday we are trekking the last day of the Inca Trail into Machu Pichhu. Can’t wait!