First, on Saturday after the shopping, Ngairi, Elly, and I went on the city tour. We took a large bus with some other people and visited a Cathedral in the city center. It consisted of two small churches on the sides with a large cathedral area in the middle, all connected. The outside looked nice, but I found the inside to be horribly excessive. Ornate carvings, everything covered in gold or jewels, creepy bleeding Jesuses. What was interesting was the mix of Spaniard and Incan culture. The Spaniards hired local people to help build the temple and artists to decorate it. In some of the paintings, there are dark people, not Spaniards, that look like the Inca placed themselves into the art. There is also a "Last Supper" of which in the middle of the table sits Cuy, or guinea pig, to eat. It wasn't allowed to take photos on the inside, so I was only able to take some photos of the outside. Another interesting fact, the Cathedral took about 100 years to build.
Our next stop was Coricancha, a Spanish place of worship built on top of Incan temples. The outside was beautiful, but the inside seemed a bit lacking. The Spaniards destroyed much of the Incan work, leaving only a base and a few walls. Sometime after building it, there was an earthquake which destroyed much of the Spanish brickwork. However, the Incan stone remained intact.
In the first two photos, you can see the Incan stonework on the right hand side. I believe it was the temple of the sun. You can see it's rounded edges and how it's angled inward slightly.
This is the interior courtyard. Nothing too special.
This is traditional work of the Incas. You can see how well the blocks fit together and that the precision was amazing. There is no mortar or any other sort of glue. Windows and doors are all angled in like that and the walls themselves are angled just slightly to help provide support during an earthquake. One thing I did not take a photo of was a very small rock, about 1 inch square and who knows how deep, that was placed into the wall. It looks like there was a mistake and a large block was cut incorrectly, so they placed this tiny piece in to fill the space perfectly.
Here is that small rock, courtesy of the internet.
The beautiful garden outside. I believe that rocks represented energy, which is why there are boulders throughout. There are also a few walkways and some flowers towards the bottom of the picture.
And this was a gold piece hanging inside. I'm not sure of it's significance, but it was about 4 feet tall.
I believe our next stop was Saqsaywaman, basically pronounced "sexy woman." It was a large, rather fortress like area that people would have to pass through to get to Cusco. It's in the shape of a jaguar (supposedly) and the zig zag in the following pictures is the teeth. There had been 3 towers on top of the hill back in Incan time for communication and to monitor the surrounding areas. The Spaniards took stones from here to build their Cathedral and other buildings, but they were unable to take the large stones, which were several tons. Because Saqsaywaman is so big, even though stones are missing, much of it still remains. There is a flat grassy area, which I guess is the mouth, in the middle and then raised areas on two sides.
Many of the stones are gigantic. The "small" stones you can see two groups of on the right and 1 group on the left would be heavy to carry.
"teeth" of the Jaguar
looking across the "mouth"
City views from on top.
Cameloids grazing.
Viva el Peru! Written into the mountainside. Various mountain artwork can be found around the city.
Our next stop was a bit of a hike uphill to the Temple of Water. There is a natural spring above the temple and the water goes through the temple, down the mountain, and all the way to the city. Our guide kept emphasizing how clean and pure the water was, which was confusing because you're not supposed to drink the water here. We saw some donkeys on the way up, which of course I found amusing.
Here is the temple itself. You can see the water flowing down in two "fangs." The structure is fairly wide and they believe the temple, when intact, was quite large.
Our final site seeing stop was some sort of place where the Inca mummified their dead. I'm not really sure. I was a bit tired of rocks at this point and it wasn't the most attractive site. It had a natural cave which we walked into and inside there was an alter. I believe our guide said that was where they would wrap the bodies. The cave was very cool and the alter itself was cold. I guess it was basically a body refrigerator.
I enjoyed the city tour quite a bit, but felt rushed. We went all over town and halfway up a mountain to see multiple sites in about 5 hours. Our guide was a bit curt and was very strict about the schedule (even though we ended early). Also, they invited someone onto the tour bus to sell us videos of ruins and other important sites. We were also taken to an official alpaca factory where they discussed how much better their 50USD pure baby alpaca sweatshirts were to my 10USD semi alpaca one. Thank you, but I like my cheapies.
So, it has taken me over an hour to update on just Saturday! I need to go to lunch and then return to the office for class. Hopefully I will be able to fully update on Sunday and Monday (Machu Picchu!) later today.
