Today our tour started. I think the thing we were most excited about is being off the Plaza de Armas and maybe sleeping tonight. The concert last night went until 1am and then the band did their march around the plaza from 4:45am until about 6am. And check out time was 9am, so no late sleeping for us. We were pretty draggy!
We ate breakfast fast, showered and packed and checked out by 9am. The hotel we are staying at for the first night of the tour is Novotel and only about 3 blocks away. So we walked. We have one big bag and two small bags. The big one is a roller and the small ones are small enough to carry. But rolling that big bag along streets and sidewalks that are all stones, bricks, and steps was hard work! We traded off and made not too worn out.
We had to wait to check in, but we decided just to sit in the lobby and play with our ipads to relax some. They were able to get our room ready early. This hotel is built around a couple of courtyards, the main lobby is a courtyard that has a plexiglass roof. But other than that, it is also a very modern hotel. Our room faces onto a little garden courtyard. It seems almost eerily quiet after our last hotel! We were very happy about that.
We met up with our tour after lunch at 12:30. Our tour guide is Diego who is from Lima, but has worked in this area for a few years. There are about 14 people on this tour ranging from a high school student to a guy who I think is older than us. We all introduced ourselves and then started our tour of Cusco. We were surprised that the first two places we visited where places we had already been (because they weren't mentioned in the tour documents). But we learned some interesting and different things from Diego.
First we went to the catedral. Diego pointed out all the many ways the catedral and its two sister churches merge Inkan iconography and ideas with Catholic ones. For example, he pointed out how the main altars of the three churches don't have crucifixes. They all have Mary in the front. Diego said that this was because when the Spaniards showed the Inkans a crucifix and said this was God, the Inkans couldn't believe it because their gods were the sun and the moon and the Mother Earth and this seemed to be only a dying man. But they could relate to Mary, so she has the prominent place on the altars. Also, he pointed out how all the images of Mary are shaped like a mountain with a head and hands and they never show her having feet. Here's a Virgen from the parade of saints earlier that illustrates this.
This shows that she is being portrayed as Mother Earth, which in Inkan iconography is a mountain. It wouldn't make sense to have Mother Earth standing on the earth. Mary is also often shown as pregnant in the paintings in the church which would connect to the important value placed on fertility by the Inkans. Diego showed us a stone that was basically egg shaped and about two feet high that represents the main God of the Inkans. For a long time it was inside the main altar of the catedral until a bishop discovered it there and had it removed. But they could not throw it out of the catedral or the current Inkans would not come to church. So they put it in the back of the church and had been using it as a door stop. Now it's enclosed in plexiglas and has a sign on it, but it doesn't say it used to be in the altar.
The second place we went was Qorikancha. Diego showed us places on the outside wall where little protuberances in the stone are believed to be a sun dial that keeps track of the time of year. They just looked like mistakes on the face of the stones.
While we were there a group of men dressed in traditional costume came into the building and marched around the courtyard of the building in two colums, stopping at every corner to blow on their conch shells three times (that's very loud!). Then they went into the courtyard and stood in a circle and blew their horns again. I'm not sure what this was, whether it was for solstice or just a general ritual.
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| Men in traditional dress with conch shell horns |
After Korikancha we went to Sacsaywaman. But we went on a bus. All our worrying about our being able to make it up the hill and then they bussed us up! But we werer really glad we walked up yesterday so that we had the experience of being able to do that.
Diego said that although the Inkans had defended Sacsaywaman against the Spaniards, it was not a military installation, but was a religious center. It was built with three sets of walls, each 33 feet high, the second and third starting at the top of the previous wall. In the center of the top was a tower 33 feet tall (everything in 3s). The stones of Sacsaywaman are very huge, which is probably good, because 80% of the stones of Sacsaywaman were used by the Spaniards and other people to build buildings in Cusco. What is left may be mostly too big to move. Here's a photo of us standing in front of a corner stone on the bottom level of Sacsaywaman.
The stones of Sacsaywaman are limestone rather than the andecite of Qorikancha and so the stone faces are a lot more weathered (also, I guess, the walls of Qorikancha were enclosed in walls the Spanish built until the 1950 earthquake).
The next photo shows more of the bottom level of the walls of Sacsaywaman and some from the next level above.
The next photo of Sandra is taken on the second level. The stones to the right are the top of the first level and she is standing against stones in the second level.
We didn't go up further than the second level. After visiting Sacsaywaman, we rode in the bus to another area of the Sacsaywaman preserve to view the temple of the moon. We walked across some farmland to get to it. This photo shows the snow-capped sacred mountain (I don't recall the name) across a quinoa field. Quinoa used to be what peasants ate here, but of course now it is very trendy.
They don't really know whether the temple of the moon really was a temple of the moon, but there is an outcropping with Inkan carved steps and a small cave with an opening to the top of the outcropping. When the moon is full at certain times, the light comes into the cave, so they call it the temple of the moon.
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| Passageway into the temple of the moon |
The wind was getting pretty nippy up so high and it was getting close to dark at that point, so we were glad when we headed back. We rode the bus back to about 3 blocks from the hotel (the hotel is on a pretty narrow street, only space for one car to pass) and hiked back. We had about 20 minutes to prepare for dinner and then we were all going to a restaurant on the Plaza de Armas. After figuring we wouldn't eat until 7:30 at the earliest and likely wouldn't get back to the hotel at 9, we bailed on dinner with the group and had room service. We hope to be asleep by 9pm. We have to be up by 6:30 tomorrow. We're counting on a full night's sleep tonight!
I'll leave you with a couple of fun signs I've collected in bathrooms on this trip.
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| In the Cusco Airport |
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| At Sacsaywaman |
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