Puno to Cuzco (June 10, 2006)
Monday, June 12, 2006 at 7:02PM The bus we took to Cuzco was really fancy, and Lincoln rated it the second-best bus we had been on, with the first bus we took in Argentina being the first. We had a hostess who served us drinks the whole way (water and tea, not booze) and a great tour guide who gave us lots of information about the places we were passing, as well as at the stops we made along the way.
The first stop was Pukara, which had ruins of the Pukara people who were the first organized civilization in the region and came before the Tiwanaku people. The ruins were dated 1600 B.C., and our guide explained all the symbolism of the Southern Cross constellation here (called the Andean Cross in South America), and there was evidence of it in all the ruins of the time, even the Incan ruins. The ruins were built beside a huge rock, which from far away looks like the head and paws of a puma, and the small mountain range behind it looks like the puma’s reclining body. The puma was a very sacred animal.
The next stop was La Raya, which is the point where the Eastern and Western mountain ranges of the Andes meet. They don’t meet again until way down in Argentina at Cape Horn. This was also the highest point on the road between Puno and Cuzco, at 4335m. Shortly after this pass is the beginning of the sacred river that runs down through the sacred valley (it becomes the Urubamba river after Cuzco) until it reaches the Amazon.
We stopped in a town called Sicuani for a delicious buffet lunch before continuing on to our next stop, Incan ruins called Raqchi. These ruins contain the largest temple of the Incan empire, a temple dedicated to Viracocha, the god of the universe (whose face we saw at the Rock of the Puma on the Isla del Sol). Some sections of the temple had been restored, but most of it was still original building. The temple had been burned by the Spaniards, so not much of it remained. The ruins covered a very large area and had remains of the houses the nobility lived in, as well as round storage huts numbering around 200. They had restored one of them so we could see what they originally looked like. Eighty percent of the site was un-restored. The larger buildings had Incan stonework as the base of the walls, and then the rest of the walls were built from Adobe. This is the only Incan site where they used adobe to build their structures. Raqchi means ceramics in Quechua, and the local people were getting ready for a festival of ceramics that was going to take place that night. Near to Raqchi we could see remnants of the main Inca highway that runs 15,000km from Tucuman in Argentina all the way up Columbia (I think), the whole way being paved by stones.
Driving in the bus, we also passed a town that was getting ready for a huge festival for the snow god, where thousands of people in the area all go to a snow-capped peak to worship the god and bring back glacial ice to melt and use as holy water. So many festivals!
Next stop after Raqchi was a 17th-century church at Andahuaylillas which is known as the Sistene Chapel of South America because it is so ornate and covered in frescoes. It certainly was impressive, but unfortunately we were not allowed to take pictures of the inside of the church, which is dedicated to St. Peter and St. Paul.
About an hour outside Cuzco, we passed a huge gate that was the southern access to the Cuzco valley, and was used as a sort of customs checkpoint by the Incas. Very cool.
We arrived in Cuzco around 5:00 after a nine hour bus ride. The ride didn’t seem so long though, since we had so many interesting stops along the way. We took a cab to Kuntur Wasi Hostel, a friendly family-run place in the San Blas neighbourhood (thanks for the recommendation Hedgehogs!). After getting checked in we wandered down to the beautiful Plaza de Armas and began checking travel agencies for Salkantay treks as well as jungle trips for when Phil, Kathleen, and Jessica meet up with us.
Reader Comments (2)