After an early morning, as you recall the wake-up call came at 3:00 am, we headed to the Lima airport only to discover our plane was delayed by 1 hour. We fly into Cusco and immediately were given a cup of cocoa tea, which apparently helps with the altitude sickness, not a great taste; Cusco city is our highest yet at just over 11,000 ft ASL. Fortunately we just pass through and drive to Yucay, a small village in the Sacred Inca Valley. After a quick lunch we went on to Ollantaytambo and visited the ruins there. Much was destroyed after a 2 year war with the Spaniards but what we did see was a great prelude to Machu Picchu. I am going to show you several pictures the first is where the got the big boulders from, the second is the boulders they used to build their temple, the third is the unbelievable craftsmanship . They had to quarry the rocks, get them down a steep mountain, cross a valley, and up a 500 ft to the temple site, my guess 15 KLM. Seems almost impossible to me. Yes, they have moved similar sized stones with 1000 people in the village for approximately one block but still??

I forgot to mention that we went to a interesting private museum in Lima. The Larco family Museum is primarly  Nazca Indian archeological artifacts dating some 3000 years ago and a collection of most erotic ancient pottery in South America from around the same time. The erotic pottery and sculptures I will leave to your imagination but I will point out that when it comes to sex acts there is nothing new today;  it has been around for a very long time.

But we did see some interesting stuff ; the Nazca Indians has several artifacts that might explain the Nazca line…I will leave to the readers to decided.

Lima is a very big city, approximately 10 million people, and the traffic and pollution confirms it. But we still had an interesting day visiting the “old city” ; usual stuff, churches cathedrals, and monuments. We still happened to be on site when the major, a women, was holding some kind of rally. At the same time there was an official visit from a foreign country that shut down the area around the presidential palace.

After the city tour we went out to a Ranc that raises Peruvian Horses, the ones that dance to 4/4 time. Beautiful horses and we had a chance to ride them…I didn’t but Berniece did. The ranch serves a dinner with the visit which was very pleasant.

Tomorrow it is up at 3:00 am to fly to Cuzco.

Pictures to follow, I have a very bad connection so I will catch up when we get back from Machu Pichu.

Rather then give you a long commentary let me just tell you a few facts:

1.They really are not sure when these were done but it is at least 2 thousand years ago and they believe it was the Nascas, again they are uncertain.

2. It was discovered in the early 1900 when they were looking for more aqueducts built by the Inca and the Nazca Natives, an airplane was being used.

3. It can only be seen from the air, yes there are mountains near by but you still wouldn’t see all of them, actually not most of them.

4. A German mathematician studied the lines most of her life until she died at the age of 95, still no real conclusion of what or why.

5. Parts of it look exactly like an airport and runways, in fact from a reasonable altitude you could not be faulted for believing that.

What do I think? Not an airport but a copy of one. They were trying to attract their gods so they built what they believed the gods wanted so they copied it from somewhere, someone or something. It is as good a theory as any of them in my opinion; now if you want to know where I this great insight  I must simply direct you to watch “Ancient Aliens” so that so too can be as informed as I am!!! Kidding aside this site is a must see in a life time.

Well.. we have started the Peru portion of our trip today landing in Lima at 9:00 am. Took forever to get through the immigration and customs but we made it. Lima is a very modern city so when we went for lunch there was all the usual suspects including several KFC’s…no I didn’t…yet! After lunch Berniece and I went for a walk up to a park about 6 blocks away and it was fun. Sunday afternoon a lot of the locals were just hanging out; there was a little out door stadium with a dance area where the locals, mostly the older ones, where dancing. On top of that I something awesome, I will show you the picture and you can figure it out. Later, after dinner, we went to a water show in a local park. The city converted this park to a water fountain show in hopes of having something families could enjoy safely. It turned into a bit of a tourist attraction; we certainly enjoyed it and because we were seniors we got in free, how cool is that?

I know I have mentioned this before but just to reiterate; the picture look pretty small on our screen and maybe on yours as well so double click,  or tap on a iPad, to get the enlarged view because otherwise some of my comments may be lost. Also the enlarged picture does the subject more justice.

hope you enjoy them as much as we do!

The last few days has been a lot of traveling. For starters we flew from Cuenca back to Quito, (it is beginning to feel like home!), on Friday and had the rest of the day off…no tours. Actually there was a lot to do but we just hung around the hotel, rested and went for a few short walks. That evening Diego took us out to the local hot spot for supper and it was a very nice evening, a fitting end to a relaxing day.

The next morning, however,  it was back at it; up at 6:00 am for a 8:00 departure to the “cloud forest” , Mindo.  Here we go for a nice walk and have the opportunity to see approximately 53 different varieties of hummingbirds. Of course we didn’t see them all but the ones we did were quite beautiful and some much bigger than what we see at home.

The terrain was quite different than Quito as we are on the west side of the Andes and of course it was much more “rain forest” like. The vegetation was lush and felt like the jungle or, quite frankly, like a walk in our own back yard but much different species of vegetation. We were in the Northern Hemisphere on this excursion, just for the record. Quito straddles the equator so we were going back and forth quite often as I mentioned before but in this case it was well into the Northern Hemisphere by about two full hours. No big deal.

And then it was time to say good-bye to a great guide, Diego and 10 other who were on their way back home. The remaining 8 of us were off to Peru the next morning, at 4:00 am.

On the way the the historical site we stopped to try a little bit of pork rind. This is how they do it here. First you kill a pig , then you put it on a rack, using a propane blow torch you cook just the skin. After the skin starts to crackle you cut it off and serve it with salt. Then, after all the skin is “cooked off” in this manner the remainder of the pig is cooked. Now if you have ever tasted “pork rinds” in a package in Canada way back when…this tastes exactly the same!!

This is a beautiful city, (our guide lives here) and has a lot to offer. Some tend to thing of this Ecuador as a 3rd world country but let me assure you that when you are in the major cities like Cuenca it is hard to believe. We spent the last two days touring the city and the country side. The Panama Hat; it doesn’t come from Panama it comes from Ecuador. You probably ask why then is it called the Panama Hat? Well there are many stories but the most common one is that when the Panama Canal was being built the workers used these hats to protect themselves from the scorching sun during the day. People who visited the work site began to associate the hats with Panama but the truth is the hats are made in Ecuador. We visited a hat factory and Berniece is now a proud owner of a Panama Hat, made of course in Ecuador!

Along the way to visit a Historical site we stopped to see a women, 87 years old, who still weaves the Panama Hats for a living. It takes her two days for a hat that sells for about $30.00,(she gets a very small part of that), hard to make a living doing that but she stills enjoys doing it. So to explain the process; the hats are weaved by the locals ands then sent to the factory to be bleached and shaped. The process is longer than what I am explaining here but the real hard work is still done by people in the country-side who spend hours weaving these hats. The tighter the weave the more expensive the hat. The tighter the weave the longer it takes.

This is just a short interruption in the journey record to show you that some things never change no matter what country you are in!