Cuzco Cosco

Re-reading Clare's post "Sacred Valley / Cuzco / Machu Picchu", I only need to fill in a few parts of the picture.

In the original Quechua ("Ketch-wa") language, the town's name was Cosco, which the Spanish invaders couldn't pronounce, and changed it to Cuzco.

The tour we chose was designed to allow people to hike the Inca Trail (spelled Inka everywhere here). Hence it already included a couple of rest days in Cuzco. We added another couple of days due to not going to the Amazon. Hence we had quite a few days to drift around the town, and lunched on a few balconies overlooking the main square, once whilst watching a huge rainstorm with torrential gushing spouts on the historic church.

Cuzco is interesting and pleasant rather than fabulous and amazing. However we've been happy here, except for the peddlers in the main square, who seem to be the only people who hassle you. That might be because February is the rainy season in the Andes, and there are even fewer tourists here than usual.

In fact, we've been pretty pleased to have most places almost to ourselves and hope the trend continues.

One place that I had to myself were the Inca terraces above Ollantaytambo (partly because Clare was unwell). In some places the Incas made stone-walled stepped terraces up slopes to allow cultivation (as in Machu Picchu) and in others to maintain the landscape (as here).

The result yields some spectacular views. It also reminded me of a perplexing lesson in photography: no matter how many photos one takes, one can never capture the feeling of being there. One compares the photo poorly with the reality and takes several more in frustrated powerlessness.

We weren't completely idle during our rest days. During one, we visited the ancient Inca Sun and Moon temples of Qorikancha, only partly destroyed when the Spanish built the Convent of Santo Domingo over them as part of their attempt to "build" their religion over that of the locals. This failed in various ways, including the merging of the virgin Mary with Pacha Mama (mother earth), and the addition of previously-sacred Falcon, Puma and Snake images to church pictures of a woman supposedly newly-sacred Mary.

On another rest day (our last in Cuzco) we visited four Inca sites just North of Cuzco, with a taxi waiting for us between. The third was most interesting, Q'enqo (pronounced with a glottal stop at the apostrophe, rather than as "Kenco"). This just looks like a jumble of rocks, but hides a small temple area in the space under and between some of the largest rocks.

The taxi left us at the fourth site, Saqsayhuamán (pronounced very similar to "sexy woman", which aids recollection). The story has it that the fork and merging of a river originally resembled the outline of a sacred puma, and led to the selection of the Cuzco site as the Inca capital. Saqsayhuamán represents the head, eye and jagged teeth of the puma.

We found a great guide, named Guido, who is writing a PhD on the site. He encouraged me to walk alone through a winding underground tunnel that was pitch black in the middle, and to slide down the smooth curve of some ancient glacier-carved rocks, more recently polished by ten thousand other backsides. Quite a fun fair!

As I said in my last mini-post, the coach on to Puno wasn't at all the ordeal I anticipated, mainly because clever guide Lucho bagged us the front seats on the top deck. Hence we had hours of fabulous views. Not so anyone on the lower deck, since they look forward into a bulkhead between them and the toilet and driver. Not good.