Potato farming and Inka houses
Trip Start
Dec 29, 2008
1
15
77
Trip End
Mar 22, 2009
Ollantaytambo,
Sacred Valley,
Peru
Sunday, January 11, 2009
The village we were visiting happened to be the one our tour leader had been born in, but as he had left when he was only 2 months old, he was not really part of the village. The locals soon got us to work on their potato crops. Due to the fantastic irrigation system they had in place, they were harvesting their potatoes a lot earlier than the usual potato harvest of May. They used very simple tools to dig under the potatoes and then forraged through the soil by hand to find the potatoes. Once the men had been through doing this, the women would walk behind and check for any potatoes they had missed.
Apparently a lot of couples meet during the potato harvest, and the men get the attention of the women by throwing potatoes (sometimes rotten) at them. I had this demonstrated on me and had rotten potato smeared all down my shorts and legs. As we'd already packed and left for the Inka trail, I had very few other clean clothes to change into for the next 5 days.
Next we moved onto some more potato crops and had to thank the 'god mountains' and give an offering of coca leaves to mother earth.
Potato digging
One of the men from the village grabbed Honor and danced around the whole potato field with her. Then I was grabbed and we danced all the way back to the centre of the village. Dancing/running at an altitude of about 3700m is not the easiest thing to do, but it was great practice for the Inka trail. We found out about how they dye their wool to make different colours, including using male human urine to make blue. We were also able to try spinning some wool using their spinning top contraption. The village made us lunch and I was able to try one of the local specal dishes - guinea pig.
After visiting a hole in the ground (surrounded by 4 walls) the local children all held hands with me and we skipped down to the waiting taxis. I tried out my spanish on one of the girls who had spent the whole time with us and found out she was 12. She looks tiny, as does everyone local to here.
Soon we were jam packed into a taxi, careening down the hill in neutral to Ollantaytambo. We walked through the tiny streets (they were only made for walking, as Inka didn't even have horses until the spanish arrived), admiring the beautiful stone work of the walls.
We visited an original Inka house that is still lived in. There were guinea pigs running around everywhere because they need to have plenty available for special occasions.
We stayed in the Ollantaytambo Lodge from wheree we could admire the stunning surrounding mountain range. It was an early night, in anticipation of the start of the Inka trail the next morning.
