Day 70 - the Sacred Valley.

It’s cold and sunny when I exit the ceremonial hut with my fellow ayahuasca participants. The Australian girl tells me that she also found that the images she saw were directly affected by the music. Kush drives us down in a Landrover even more ancient than the Volkswagen Beatle. It stalls constantly and sounds like it’s in danger of blowing up or experiencing serious mechanical failure.

I’m weak from lack of food, so I sign up for a day tour of the Sacred Valley with Expediciones Vilca, which involves minimal effort and lots of time on the bus. Besides several stops with plenty of opportunity for shopping/having your picture taken with dressed up women and haughty-looking llamas, we actually visit several important archaeological sites. At Pisaq we go up to an ancient fortress atop a mountain, from where there are superb views of the valley and the Inca terracing below. The mountainside opposite the fortress is riddled with holes – that’s where the tombs were before they got robbed by opportunistic grave robbers who also happen to be very good climbers.

At the fortress, our guide, a cheerful Quechua chap, points out a guinea pig enclosure and a slab of rock where they used to lay out dead bodies for the condors to come and peck out the liver, the kidneys, etc., after which the body was mummified and entombed in the mountainside. Condors – two of which are circling high above us – were seen as intermediaries between this world and the spirit world, so once they were done eating your insides, they carried off your spirit to the next world.

I discover my new favourite snack – choclo con queso (corn with cheese): boiled corn on the cob with large, pale grains, that comes with a slice of delicious local cheese. “Honey, I’m not sure I should eat the cheese,” a middle-aged American tells his wife. “Do you think it’s pasteurised?” I’m willing to bet that it’s not.

After feeding time at the gringo zoo (a buffet lunch in Urubamba), I skip the tour of the Ollanta ruins, since I’ve been there already, and use the time to decide what I’ve got left to see in Cusco.

Our last stop is in Chinchero, where we get a demonstration of how the local women make textiles using traditional methods. A teenage girl, Mariela, lets us handle different types of wool – sheep and llama – and she refers to the sheep wool as ‘donkey wool’ confusing the non-cheese eating American until he gets that she’s pulling his leg. The llama wool’s a lot softer. Mariela demonstrates how they use a local plant as shampoo to wash the wool, and sure enough, her tub is soon full of suds. Then she brings round different plants which are used to dye the wool, including cochineal, and dips the washed wool into the ready dyes to demonstrate how the process works. We then observe weaving at a traditional loom before we’re let loose to ‘shop till we drop’, encouraged by Mariela. The textiles are of excellent quality compared to a lot of tat sold on the streets of Cusco, and I wish I had more money/room in luggage.

Am wrecked by the end of the of the visit and fidget through the tour of the village’s ancient church. To me, its only distunguishing feature is the painting of angels with parrot wings - a jungle adaptation of the Bible. Tired of being approached by sellers, and getting ready to move on, both from the Sacred Valley and from Cusco. A month is a long time.