Inca Knees-Up in San Salvador

We were invited by one of the ladies that runs the hostel that we were staying in in Cusco, to go along to a traditional Inca Festival in a village called San Salvadore. We really didn´t know what to expect and boy, were we in for a treat !

The village was about 1 hours minibus ride away, and was perched on the side of deep valley. I reckon it´s normally population would have been about 100 people, but there must have been about 2000 folk hanging from every vantage point. The festival lasts for 4 days and is basically an Inca food and dancing competion. Here´s the view from the hillside down to the main arena.



The dancers were fantastic. I think each local village supplied a troup and they attempted to out-do each other with crazy costumes and a variety of music and moves. Some would mount raids into the crowd for small children which they would deposit in a heap, others would twirl around, others would try to whip each others feet, but our 2nd favourites were the Gringos who´d run around swaggering and drinking beer, spraying the crowd etc. Out ultimate favourites were the dudes who dressed up as llamas ( with balaclavas ) who basially took to beating the hell out of each other for the crowd`s entertainment. Have a look at the video clip below !


At lunch time we were invited by a local Mayor ( ! ) to sit down and have some food and booze. We were very generously given a huge plate of food and a glass of chicha. Chicha is the local firewater, made by folk sitting around chewing corn and spitting the result into a bucket - we only found out about this bit later on ... . The food was even more bizzare. On each plate was some corn, chicken, river weed, fish-eggs, guinea pig, tortilla, dubious sausage, a chunk of llama and a chilly pepper hotter than the surface of the sun ! The photo shows me munching on a guinea pig leg. Mmmmmm.



Here´s a short video of folk dressed as llamas, knocking several shades of sh*te out of each other.....

Cusco

Cusco is the ancient capital of the Inca empire. Modern day Cusco is in Peru and is a massive tourist town. People are drawn to see the Inca ruins and also to walk the famous Inca Trail up to Machu Pichu ( more of that in a week or so ). The town is at 3400m above see level, so it takes a few days to get your breath back after climbing any hills.....

We´ve had great few days here. We visited most of the town centre sights and a fantastic set of ruins called Sacsayhuaman ( that the Inca language - Quechua, but most people simply remember it as Sexy Woman ). Sacsayhuaman used to be the huge Inca fort looking down on Cusco. The most impressive feature has to be the size and fit of the masonary ! The stones they used are absolutely massive ( see picture of Athena for scale ). They´re all a little bit irregular so have been fitted together on an indvidual basis. They didn´t use mortar to hide any gaps between the stone, because they were such skilled masons that they didn´t need to to. You can´t get a fag paper between adjacent stones.

There are lots of other old Inca walls that have been incorporated into the fabric of modern Cusco. This photo shows off the typical style where they´d built the walls with a significant top to bottom taper. Again the fit between adjacent stones is near perfect.

There are loads of other nice things to see ( loads of colonial churches and a fantastic market with chicken´s feet and live frogs etc etc ), but to be honest, it´s the Inca stuff that makes the places special.

We also bumped into a selection of mates. Zoe Checkley ( collegue of Alan`s from Honda ) was here with her friend Lynn. By bizarre coincidence they`re going to be crawling up the Inca Trail over the same 4 days that we will be. We also met up with Steve ( AKA The Dog ) and Becky who we`ll be travelling around with for the remainder of our time in South America. Becky speaks excellent Spanish, so is to be treasured !

Want to buy a Ferret ?

Unfortunately, a reference to our Spanish dictionary revealed the sad truth that this shop was in fact an ironmongers. Bah ! Damn you pesky Spanish speakers.

Mendoza

We´ve been in Mendoza for the last 5 days or so. Mendoza is a couple of hours flying time west of Buenos Aires, just before the foothills of the Andes begin to rise. It turned out to be a cracking town. Apparantly it was levelled by an earthquake in something like 1840, and was rebuilt with nice wide, tree lined, avenues and large squares, so it has nice spacious feel to it, especially after the hustle and bustle of Buenos Aires. It also has lots of things to do...

We went on a wine tour. We visited an old family run winery and by way of contrast, a very large, modern factory style winery. Both were very interesting, but we´d have to admit that we prefered the samples from the factory !

We took a minibus right up into the High Andes. We got about 30km away from the Chilean border and saw some absolutely spectacular scenery. We hiked up a small valley to get a view of Aconcagua. At just under 7000m, it´s the highest peak outside of the Himalayas. We had a perfect day for it. Have a look of the photo of Athena for proof, and if you want to know a bit more about it, the video below features me waffling on......

We spent the next day river rafting, hiking and abseiling. The rivers are relatively quite at the moment. They´re fuelled pretty much only by melt water, rather than rain and that doesn´t arrive until late spring. Either way, the trip down the river was great fun with loads of rapids to prat about in. Only one person fell out, despite our best efforts. Next up was a 1 1/2 hour hike around the local peaks ( see second bit of video ). The scenery reminded me alot of Nevada - very dry and scrubby with bizarre rock formations sprinkled liberally around, but it has the added bonus of the peaks of the High Andes for a backdrop. To finish off the day we abseilled back down to the road level. Great fun, once you´ve got the first 5m or so under your belt.

Anoncagua video ( turn sound on to enjoy hearing me waffle ) ...

Hiking video...