Day 177 - The Inca Trail, Peru

DAY 3 OF THE INCA TRAIL (27/06/09)

We awoke before dawn and were already climbing yet another steep mountain side when the first rays of morning light began to creep over the snowy peaks.

Eventually the Sun itself began to show.



It is quite amazing how quickly after sunrise you go from jumper, hat and gloves to only a t-shirt.

Halfway through our climb we came across this Inca checkpoint and lookout called Runkuraqay.

There are usually little or no restrictions as to where you can walk amongst the ruins other than not to climb on the walls. They were so well built to start with that it would be difficult to do them much damage anyway.

More steep steps. The guide had an unfortunate habit of telling us that there were no more steep climbs, but there always were.

This mountain lake was about halfway up.

At the top more beautiful, panoramic views of the mountains and valleys awaited us.

Finally at another peak Adam dismissed Liz´s shouts of "Bear!" as a rather unconvincing joke.

However it wasn´t a joke at all. On the opposite mountainside was this spectacled bear (so called for the rings of white fur around both eyes) apparently quite suprised to see us too.

The bear soon disappeared. They are very shy creatures and are no danger to humans unless cornered. We were certainly very priveleged to see one in the wild, our guide has been doing the trek for five years and has never seen one before.

Where there´s an up there´s inevitably a down.

Late in the morning we reached anothe Inca ruin, Sayaqmarka.

The rounded building in the background was a grain store. There are many of these and they were very important. Everybody in the Empire paid 75% of their produce in taxes, 50% to the Inca Lords and Priests and 25% to these stores. What this meant for the population was that if one year the crops failed the government had huge food reserves to feed them. For this reason the Inca people are one of the few ancient civilisations who never had a problem wih famine.

Many quite delicate structures such as these turrets have survived remarkably well.

Since we had left so early in the morning there was nobody else at the ruins, a rare occurance on the Inca Trail.

The moutainous backdrop made the site all the more impressive.

Much of the modern Inca Trail is still the original Inca stone path, so well built that even with several hundred people walking over it every day it requires very little maintenance.

Bright yellow Andean orchids.

Adam and Avey, our guide. We were just about to descend through a small cave. Unfortunately by this point Liz had started to feel quite unwell, little did we know it was the first symptoms of Typhoid.

Approaching the terraced ruins of Phuyupatamarka.

Inside Phuyupatamarka are a series of water fountains. Amazingly since they were built into a natural stream which was already flowing down the mountainside they still work perfectly. Someone has added a leaf here to give a more impressive flow but other than that it is functioning as well as it was when it was built well over 500 years ago.

The path we were taking ran directly through the ruins.

The beginning of the steepest and longest flight of steps we had come across yet, luckily we were heading downwards.

Three hours of steep downhill was extremely difficult, paticularly for Liz with increasingly worse symptoms from the still undiagnosed Typhoid Fever.

The spectacular agricultural steps of Yunkapata, shame they couldn´t have erected the electricity pylon somewhere a little more discreet.

These bright yellow flowers really stood out against the dark green mountains behind.

The Wiñaywayna Orchid, only found in this one small area of the World.

Finally at our campsite after nearly nine hours solid walking Liz retired to our tent for a well earned lie down while Adam went off to visit the Inca site of Wiñaywayna right next door.

Some of the structures are amazingly similar to what you would expect to find in Europe around the same period, although at the time this was built, of course, there had been no contact.

The agricultural terraces at this particular site are thought to have been a kind of laboratory, an experimental garden for growing new plants and improving existing crops.

Once again it was possible to explore the site freely, although the high, well preserved walls made for quite a maze.

One last picture of the late afternoon sun on the mountains through the turrets of Wiñaywayna.