Up the Sacred Valley

By Mom and Dad



After breakfast at Paz y Luz, we headed out of Pisac and up the Sacred Valley to Ollantaytambo. Ollantaytambo is another famous Inca village where a major battle with Spanish was fought hundreds of years ago. Unlike our drive to Pisac from Cusco, the drive up the Valley was peaceful as we snaked along the river’s edge through corn field after corn field. It was like the corn fields of Iowa crammed into a valley in the Rocky Mountains.
Along the way, we crossed the river Urubamba and climbed up to a high plateau where we turned off onto a dirt road that led to Salinas.


Salinas is a huge salt mine that is fed by a hot spring that flows from the side of a mountain and feeds a steady stream of salt water that the Incas diverted into large pans built into the side of the mountain. The water in the rectangular pans is left to evaporate, leaving salt for people to harvest. It was amazing to see a massive patch of white salt appear in the middle of nowhere, almost like a glacier.



We also visited Moray, another Inca ruin that is believed to have been used as a test bed for different varieties of seeds. The ruins look like a giant amphitheater, with huge terraces forming smaller and smaller circles that form an enormous earthen bowl. It is believe that each levels had its own micro-climate, which allowed the Incas to test which climate produced the most abundant harvest for a given seed. Oddly, it is also believed that as one falls lower into the bowl, the micro-climate is representative of what is found at a higher altitude.

After exploring the ruins, we dropped back down into the valley, passed through the town of Urabamba, before turning the corner to the quaint village of Ollantaytambo. Here the roads are cobbled, and standing just above town is an enormous complex of more Inca ruins. We are now staying at a hotel beside the train tracks that is filled with fruit trees and flowering gardens. It is like our own little oasis where we are resting up before exploring more ruins.