Wednesday, September 9, 2015

We awake and begin to appreciate the beauty of our hotel. The JW Marriott Cusco is a remodeled convent built on an Inca temple and we can see the evidence of both architectures. After a delicious buffet breakfast at our hotel, Wilson and Omar meet us and we head out to another ruin, Saqsaywaman. This was the main Inca site of their capital of Cusco when the Incan empire stretched from Columbia to the north to present-day Santiago Chile in the south. It has a distinctive jagged edged perimeter resembling lightening but useful as any invader would expose their flank to defenders. The entire Incan citizenry of Cusco could hide in its defenses. We then visit Gengo, home of an interesting subterranean alter where llamas were sacrificed. On one wall is carved out area with an opening above. It was formerly covered in gold such that the incoming sun from above would reflect and illuminate the entire room. Then to a tourist trap where we did buy a nice scarf. Then we went back into the city for a tour of the Cathedral and a discussion of Catholic iconography and its interplay with traditional Inca beliefs. Finally, we visited a Catholic church and convent built on the Incan Temple of the Sun. The Incan temple was so well built that the Spanish merely covered the stones with plaster and built around it incorporating it into their larger structure. We ate lunch at Limo, another great meal and then shopped our way back to the hotel buying another scarf (the same one Kathy saw at the Inkaterra but didn’t buy) and a painting from a street vendor named Dimitri. After an afternoon at leisure, we went to dinner at Ciccolina. We had a great table overlooking a little square and the busy street below but had our first hit (Kathy’s mushroom cream soup) and miss (mostly everything else) meal. To our good fortune, the travel agency paid for that meal as compensation for the mix-ups with a number of our other dinner reservations including our first night in Lima.

The Incan capital city of Saqsaywaman

Overlooking Cusco

The builders used both concave corners ...

and convex corners carved out of ...

huge rocks intricately placed to make the site easily defensible

The subterranean altar illuminated from above by the far opening that once was covered in gold

Inca actually referred to the king of the people; collectively the people are more properly referred to as Quechua

We ran into Santiago in the Plaza de Armas of Cusco;we met him the day before on the train

The Spanish built this church and convent on the site of an Inca temple

Looking down through three windows towards where the sun rises on the winter solstice

Lunch overlooking the Cusco Plaza de Armas or main square;
the food in Peru was uniformly great!

Dinner in Cusco overlooking a little square