Picking up from Crossing the Andes to the Sacred Valley: Altitude, Drone Drama and a Lodge Above the Clouds. The series starts here: Peru and Bolivia: The Andes, the Altiplano and the World’s Most Dangerous Road.

We thought Fernando was meeting us at the lodge. He thought we were meeting at Ollantaytambo. After a few phone calls, we met at Ollantaytambo.

He would be our guide for the next four days — young, knowledgeable, with a guide’s particular skill for making you feel history rather than just receive it. Climbing into el Burrito, he asked if we were friends of Pablo. We weren’t — but the truck confirmed we were his kind of travellers.

First stop was the temple complex at Ollantaytambo: buildings of unknown function, aligned to the solstices, terraces rising up the cliff face above. Ollantaytambo is one of the few places in Peru where the town itself, laid out on its original Inca street grid, is still lived in — not a ruin people visit but a ruin people occupy, with washing hung between colonial doorways and llamas grazing behind stone walls that predate the Spanish by centuries. The stonework at the temple was precise in the way Inca stonework always is — large blocks fitted without mortar, without visible seams, some of them hauled up from a quarry on the far side of the valley by means nobody has satisfactorily explained. A fountain carved from a single stone still flows through the site.

The Incas had a spiritual relationship with water.

Even after several days at altitude, any incline made itself known. 

Moray

An experiment. Circular terraces cut into the hillside, each level with a different stone base and therefore a different ground temperature — a controlled environment for testing which crops would grow where. The difference between the top ring and the bottom can run to more than 10°C, enough to simulate several distinct microclimates within a single amphitheatre. The Incas were doing agricultural science before the concept had a name, breeding crop varieties for altitudes they hadn’t reached yet. 

Salineras de Maras

Over five thousand small pools fed by a single salty stream, owned collectively by the local community, producing salt by evaporation as they have since long before the Incas arrived — the spring itself does the work, running saline out of the mountain at a concentration nature apparently intended for exactly this. From above it looks like a shattered mirror. I stood in front of it with my arms wide for the photo, which felt entirely appropriate.

Fernando pointed out along the road where chicha — corn beer — was served on dirt-floored bars, identified from outside by a red plastic bag above the door, a signal understood by everyone except the tourists who need it pointed out to them. Farm workers drink it during the day to quench their thirst. We tried it at Salineras de Maras. It was refreshing and, charitably, an acquired taste.