On Thursday morning, OAT got us a local guide for a tour of the city of Lima. We started the tour at the National Museum of Archaeology. This is a very nice museum that contains an impressive collection of ceramics, gold, silver and textile items from ancient cultures up through the Incas. What caught my eyes was this textile used to wrap a body from about 900AD
And this display of scullers. The first one shows a gold plate covering a man made hole in the a hull. This plate was inserted while the person was living and he or she lived many more years. There are many examples of this type of surgery where the experts cannot agree on the reason for it. Some spectate that it was for religious purposes (even though the holes were in different places in the skulls) while others believe it was for medical reason (but there were seemingly too many for this). Whatever, it is interesting phenomenon.
The other skills show how some people manipulated their children's' skulls to elongate them or flatten them to denote their higher class.
After the museum, we toured the San Francisco Church. This seventeenth century church has catacombs that weren't discovered in recent history until 1951. These crypts contain roughly seventy thousand skeleton as the wealthy basically paid their way to be buried under the church. We had a nice guided tour through the monastery and catacombs but no photos were allowed. I did get pics of the outside and the inside of the church.
Next was the Plaza Mayor, the center of the old town. This fountain in the middle of the plaza is from which all distances in Peru are measured.
The plaza also borders on the Presidential Palace where we saw a bit of the changing of the guard. This ceremony was oddly done behind an iron fence and away from any decent angle for photos.
On Friday morning, we got our bus and when to the airport for the flight to Cusco. The Lima airport was one of the most congested airports I have ever seen. I really don't relish the fact that I will need to go back there twice more before I return home. Anyway, our flight to Cusco was just a little late due to trying to get some Japanese tourists out of the emergency exit row. It seems they saw this row empty and decided to move to it. They didn't want to move and they couldn't speak any Spanish and very little English. Oh well, finally they moved...
On arrival to Cusco, we got into our bus and drove to the Sacred Valley.
These are Inca Ruins showing the stone terraces they built and the buildings where their engineers lived. It is amazing how well built these structures are.
This morning (Saturday), we headed for the Urubamba River where we took a rubber raft float down the river. This hour trip was much nicer than I expect as we needed to do little paddling and the scenery, between the mountains and Inca ruins, was spectacular! After this hour voyage, we went to the town of Ollantaytambo. This town still has ancient baths and Inca structures everywhere.
We got to climb up the town's huge terraces and explored its hilltop temples.
We also got to see inside an ancient house still be used. Note all the cuys (guinea pigs) all around. These are not pets!
After this adventure, we went to a local person's house for a huge lunch of veggies and a cuy. We got to 'experience' the whole process of preparing the cuy - killing, skinning, gutting and cooking.
I got to say the lunch was good but not the cuy. My piece was extremely tough and hard to chew - it didn't taste so great either! I don' see cuy having a prominent place in my menu.
Oh well, it was nice to meet this family. It seems that OAT sponsors this family and pays them well for their participation under their foundation program. This will be a 5 year program for the family. After that, OAT will sponsor another local family to replace them.
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