Lama and Albacca at the 'Oasis'
corn juice - popular in peru and actually really nice - josh was not brave enough to try!
They eat Guinea Pigs in Peru, he following 2 pictures are the before picture - the live guinea pig in their house prior to being spit roasted! - No I am no joking!
corn and spices in the market that we stopped at
The community we visited and the weaving
Up at 5am as the bus was picking us up at 7.30am. We where given a duffel bad and had a personal allowance of 3kgs to pack our belongings into for 4 days worth of hiking! Each person is allowed a personal allowance of 6 kg but 3 of that was the sleeping bad and air mattress! The allowance was because our belongings where given to the porter who carried your gear for you. Porters have to be weighed at each check-point – daily – to make sure they are only carrying 20kg. They carry all the tens, food, coking equipment – including the gas bottle! The weight limit is a good thing as it ensures a standard of working conditions for them. It also means we had a lot of porters travelling with us! We headed out today on the bus to see some Inca ruins. We started off by seeing Pisaq – an Inca archaeological site – a farming village with the largest cemetery in South America. The Inca’s mummified the dead but put them in the foetal position! Then we went to visit a community that Gap support – they employ the men as porters and take tourist to buy the products the women weave. I brought a nice scarf from Alpaca wool and saw how they weave and dye the products! I brought a green scarf as that is dyed with leaves, however, anything on the red spectrum – red/orange etc is died with beetle juice/blood! We stopped for lunch a little place we nicknames ‘the oasis’! We had all fallen asleep on the bus and all we had seen was mud huts but when we awoke, we pulled into this lovely place an had a great buffet lunch and looked at the pet Lama’s and Alpaca’s! We then carried on to Ollantaytambo. We walked up the Inca ruins to the temple of the sun. All really interesting and amazing to see what the Inca people made. They moved rocks from a mountain about 5-6kim away to the temple, the rocks weighing up to 70 tonnes! We had our last shower that night in the hotel as tomorrow we head off on the trail!
