Monarca Hostal Cusco

... unchallengeable central government, a willing spiritual and economic submission to the State. The common religion was worship of the Sun whose representative on Earth was the Inca King. The mass of people were subjected to rigorous planning for production of agriculture and textiles and other goods and storage barns were erected to house excess, to guard against years of lesser yields. They also built extensive pathways to connect the various ...

... Earth and the elements e.g. - the sun, and three key animals, the Condor (which represents the sky), Puma (which represents the earth) and the snake (which represents below earth) The Hispanics in contrast were much more interested in the gold, silver and copper and of course paid homage to god and his son We must have seen over a hundred pictures, statues of Jesus always on the cross to remind you ...

... for it....tuna is cantaluope NOT the fish i was thinking of. So I ratted myself out and told her what I was thinking. We giggled about that for 5 or 10 minutes. I love cantaluope - it's my favorite melon. So today, guess what I got...yep... naranja/tuna jugos. And it was yummy.

***Somehow while typing this dippy keyboard decided to move things around. What should be an exclamation point is ...

... We went horseback riding again, but this time, it was only us and the guide, Gabrielle. He took us way up into the mountains. It was absolutely gorgeous. We stopped and I sat in between the trees and the sun was warmly hitting my face. I must have dozed off for 20 minutes. These Andes Mountains generate powerful energies. I dreamt that I was flying. And I didn’t even have any coca leaves! I can see why the Incas respected ...

... predictably in the wrong direction, which only became apparent after we had walked through the plant itself and hit the dead end. Oops. Pretty uneventfully we arrived in AQ, 2h after the mishap.

We arrived at about 7.30am, and, upon realising we were too late to climb Huaya Picchu, we sat down for a bit to eat and sorted out tickets. The f*cking extortionate 124 sole ($42) entry was unavoidable and we all decided to splurge $7 on a 1-way bus ticket to the to save ...

... retires to rest, G and I hit up a few museums. The Museo Inka has quite a few artifacts, but they are poorly displayed and almost all explanations are in Spanish. Much better is Qorinkancha, once the site of the richest temple in the Inca empire and later, a Spanish church. Inside is an odd mixture of Inca walls and Spanish church with religious paintings. We latch onto various tour groups (they're everywhere!) to learn that the amazingly well-fit walls are held together as jig-saw ...

... as well as the efforts that went into them have to be admired, however there are a few lesser known facts about the Inca’s that made me question their logic that you might be more interested in. Firstly they existed for 100 years in the 1500’s and never invented the wheel, for a culture that prided itself on moving gigantic rocks for hundreds of miles the occasional wheel may have come in handy, secondly they never invented a written language or ...

... that was the path to Huayna Picchu. I was getting concerned 10 mins into it. There were not many people and no 400 limit in this trail. We asked someone to verify if we were heading in the right direction. Apparently not. By the time we got to the entrance of Huayna Picchu, it was already full.

We were a little disappointed. If not for this, there was no reason to get up at 4AM.

When we turned away from the crowd and started ...