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| This kid has probably heard “¡Qué linda!” so often that she’s sick of it. |
Tuesday, April 21, eighth day in Perú
Pisaq and Ollantaytambo
Breakfast in the hotel. My journal reminds me that I had four cold little pancakes, two sausages, and papaya juice. But at eight, the day began, when we got picked up by Romulo and Rubén for a drive to Pisaq. There’s two parts to this area: Old Pisaq with loads of ruins, and a town below, with a famous market.
On the drive to Pisaq, I took inordinately many pictures out the window of the van, few of these of much interest. Some of them are on either side here.
I must have been getting tired of writing in my journal, because all it says about Old Pisaq is «yet more ruins.» But over to the right, you see Rubén and Mark getting ready to walk into the area for tourists, having paid for our tickets in the round building to the right. And to the right of that, a view from Old Pisaq down to the valley.
A 12-second stop-frame video made
just before we entered Old Pisaq
There were ruins galore, but there were other things to look at. Plants and flowers living a squeezed life between the rocks; vistas down and over to the terraced landscape. Not terraced for the expected reasons, Rubén told us, but just to prevent landslides.
As for the flowers and plants to the left, something about the color and arrangement of the leaves in the first of those pictures really appealed to me, and I do wonder whether that was a strange kind of fern. The second picture (top right in the block) is clearly an Oxalis, hardly my favorite genus—in fact most of them are obnoxious weeds, for my money—but this one is kinda nice. And I thought that the blue-gray leaves of the plant in the fourth picture in the block definitely set off the blue and yellow flowers unusually harmoniously. (Mark identifies it as a Lupine, and that seems right.)
Now back to the ruins—from below, because we never climbed much above the level of entry into Old Pisaq, you could see the cliff pierced by caves. Excavated funerary niches, all empty thanks to the industry of grave robbers. The only other ruinish structure that I took a shot of is seen at the right, to the right of the funerary caves, with Rubén showing Mark something of the local botany. But now it was time to go down to Pisaq Town and the market there.
We went down to the town proper, where there’s a famous market. In a stall where two women were selling miscellaneous produce, there was a beautiful little girl, and I asked permission to photograph her. Before I could take the third picture, she was mugging shamelessly—that’s the picture at the top of this page. All I have in a more natural mood are the two below.
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| Big image, small. | Big image, small. |
We did buy at the market—each of us got a fine alpaca-wool sweater, and Mark got a couple of other things, but my only market pictures not of an adorable child are the two to the left. Mark has a number of shots that he took in the shop where we bought the sweaters, and all I can do is refer you over there.
For lunch, we went to an interesting place called Muña, named for an herb (Minthostachys setosa) from the region. Lots of Peruvian dishes in an open-air setting, very pleasant.There was also a local musician, a flutist who worked in an amped-up style that I felt was less satisfying than the relatively home-grown artistry of the crew members on the Delfin II.
From there, we went on to Ollantaytambo, a town with another market, but most importantly, a very large set of ruins. It’s definitely an important tourist destination: there were crowds of people there.
There was a steep climb up to the part of the ruins that everybody else wanted to get to; the stairway was fairly narrow, fairly tricky, and very crowded, with two-way traffic much of the way. But there was lots to see, and we both took lots of pictures, many of mine showing the same elderly (German?) couple sensibly armed with walking sticks.
The beautiful flower to the right is Cantu, Cantua buxifolia, the national flower of Peru. It’s embedded in a nature-explaining legend that goes back to the Incas. You can read about it in the Wikipedia article that I’ve linked to above. The photo is unusually sharp, for me, and you will probably enjoy it most in the larger version.
Our next destination was our hotel, where we would spend the night. My journal says, «From there [the archeological site], we made a side trip for Rubén to check on the details of his own ticket to Machu Picchu the next day, and then back—surprisingly far—to our hotel for the night, Sol y Luna.
«This is a fantastic place. Each unit is separate (with its own wifi account, no less), incredibly elegant. And the complex, in its totality, compares favorably with the Villa Caletas in Costa Rica [where we spent a couple of nights in lodgings so large that there seemed to be a separate couple of rooms for your mother-in-law]. Horses to ride, free jacuzzi, sauna, gym, who knows what else. Two restaurants, one more casual than the other, and we never found out what besides.»
When we arrived it turned out that Melissa and Steve from the river cruise were staying there too, because they had left a note for us to stop by their casita when we got in. At our first try, we didn’t meet up, but before long, we visited each others’ casitas to admire. I thought theirs was a bit nicer, with a fireplace, but then we did have that separate bedroom for the mother-in-law (or the kids) up a flight of stairs. They liked the cylindrical shape of our place.
As is our practice, before dinner, we went to the bar first to work on our journals, and then went downstairs to the more elegant restaurant of the two. Quoting again from my journal, «The dinner was disappointing, except for the appetizer, which was “quinoa falafel”, split between us. Very pleasing, and accompanied by a nice hot chutney.
«For the main, M chose a lamb dish, and I chose a pork. His looked like lamb stew, with clay-wrapped Andean potatoes alongside. I sampled part of one of these, and it was mealy and insipid. My main course turned out to be a pork pot pie, and it was just boring. Accompanied by plain white rice formed in a frustrated [sic: I should have written frustated] conical vessel and turned out onto another dish. Totally unimaginative.
«The dessert was a panna cotta, and also very bland and boring. This is a fancy fancy establishment, this Sol y Luna, and since it’s out in the middle of nowhere, we had to eat in its restaurant, and they should have been doing better.» (End of rant.)
From there, to bed, where once again we slept very poorly. But the next day would be the Great Attraction of Machu Picchu!