The Sacred Valley of the Incas: The Urubamba River, Peru

The Urubamba River, which passes Cusco ten miles to the northeast, flows through a good number of the best archaeological sites in Peru. The first site we visited in the Urubamba valley was at Pisac (or Pisaq), close to Cusco. Much farther down river, at a lower altitude and in a very different climate, is the site of Machu Picchu, which we saw later in the week.

(If you have Google Earth and want a quick link to the sites we visited in this area, download and open this KMZ file. Pisac is an especially interesting place to look at from above.)

Pisac, once a military fortress and ceremonial site, is perched high above the valley floor on a series of very steep mountains, and the best way to get there is to walk up from the town below. The town of Pisac, down on the flood plain, was once an Inca village and is now a completely Peruvian village, but still retains some Inca walls and stonework. It was a quaint little town, very pretty, but with too many tour group buses on the narrow streets and a horrid tourist market that infested the otherwise attractive central square with a hive of tents and people. From above in Google Earth, you can see that the town was also built on top of some beautifully curved Incan farming terraces. The terraces, shaped like the meandering bends of the river itself, extended into the nearby farmland in our photograph below. I suspect that these graceful sinusoidal arcs were originally built on top of natural river terraces that followed the course of the unconstrained Urubamba as it moved around alluvial fans at the mouths of mountain gullies.Our hike from the town square took us up a pleasant path through a eucalyptus grove, then up steep Incan farming terraces like the ones behind me here.The Incas built some amazing farming terraces out of unshaped field stone, with some really cleaver features. Many of them are still in perfect shape and often still in use. It was on the walk up to Pisac that we first saw the stone stairways that the farmers built to climb from terrace to terrace, and the vertical water slots that they used to channel water down the rock faces. This photo, which I think is actually from Ollantaytambo, is a great example of the stairways that we also found in Pisac and Machu Picchu, made from protruding structural stones.Here is a photo taken from the very top of Pisac down to the east, where some dual-use farming and ceremonial terraces are still in place. I was very impressed by the artistry and pure beauty of the curved lines set into the natural landscape.Here is a picture from the ridge atop Pisac, down to the main ceremonial complex where we saw some working fountains and astrological temples. I loved the setting of these ruins.Here I am during our climb up the ridge, poised above a shear cliff with the valley below.Here is Naomi on the edge of a turret-like building. The "door" behind her dropped off all the way to the river plain. When we hiked back down to the town, we encountered in our path this Drunken Dog:Compare to that famous Hellenistic sculpture, the Barberini Fawn, otherwise known as the Drunken Satyr:Uncanny. We laughed at that dog until an old woman came out of her house and stared at us.


Our trip to Pisac lasted only one day, and we had to return to Cusco. The next time we set out from Cusco, we aimed to get all the way to Machu Picchu by the cheapest way that didn't involve walking forty kilometers along old railroad tracks. On our way, we took a series of very cramped local micros, or passenger vans, and stopped in Ollantaytambo, where we spent most of a day exploring.

Ollantatytambo was my favorite town in our rather circumscribed tour of Peru. Like Cusco, it was built almost entirely on the single-story walls of an Inca village. Most of the modern settlement still sits on top of the ancient one in a tight grid of narrow pedestrian streets, which were all paved with cobblestones and surrounded by nice Incan stonework.The neatest thing about this little stone town was that every parallel street had one or two water channels that ran along the edges of the buildings and added a melodious gurgle to the sunny, flowery streets. Every house and shop had a stepping stone to get across.Ollantaytambo is also the site of another large archaeological park--a series of temples, water channels, fountains, baths, and massive terraces, which are easily seen to the west of the town:Naomi in one of the temples up above those big terraces:We also saw some really neat water channels and fountains, and a solar calendar, that all lined up with the sun. Since we were there just after the winter solstice (southern hemisphere), all kinds of things were lining up: the shadows from stone knobs were hitting various notches, the sunlight from tiny windows was bisecting rooms and directly illuminating sacred fountains, etcetera. It was all neat to see but the pictures aren't that good.

Here is a view downriver from up above the ruins. Apparently, some archaeologists had recently identified a two-dimensional pyramid shape in the layout of the fields and ancient walls that was supposed to have some connection with an Incan myth, but we couldn't make it out. It was pretty anyway.When we passed through Ollantaytambo later in the week, after visiting Machu Picchu, we stopped in the town's small market. The shoes that I had bought back in the US had developed a hole, so I was happy to see this cobbler who had set up his bicycle cart in a corner. He was teaching two apprentices how to glue on the sole of a dress shoe, but he stopped to talk to us and sew up my hole with strong nylon thread--much better than the flimsy stuff the shoes came with. The three of them were very friendly and talkative, and the cobbler was going to do it for free (it only took four seconds), but we gave him some coins anyway. It was very satisfying to repair something so simply and easily, when back in the US, I would probably have let the shoes fall apart and then toss them (even though my shoes probably cost ten times as much as the shoes he was working with). It is too bad that small-time cobblers and other handy craftsmen like this guy simply can not exist in our country any more. In South America, we could find one on any street corner in any city or town.That's my shoe he's sewing!

--Ryan