Ollantaytambo and Pisac - The Sacred Valley

Ollantaytambo is an Incan city built in the 15th century, it is a royal estate built for the emperor Pachacuti. It is 9000ft above sea level in the Andes mountains.  Pachacuti was a warrior, conqueror and an exceptional leader, he helped make the Incan empire.  He killed two of his brothers and also two of his sons so that they wouldn't take over  the throne.

  The Incas had a quarry 5 km away that they used to get huge stones from to build the walls of the city.  Some stones weighed over 60 tonnes and took 350 men 1 to 2 years to get each of the large stones from the quarry to the city.  The Incas were very clever because they carved stone blocks coming out of some of the walls so that on the winter soltice (the shortest day of the year) when the sun shone the shadows from the blocks all lined up perfectly so they then knew that spring was coming.  They knew that they would soon have to plant their summer crops like their four different types of corn - white, yellow, red and purple.

So the city wouldn't tumble during earthquakes the Incas put small stones inbetween large stones so that the big stones had room to move without falling over.  They also had a water supply from the Patakancha River nearby that they used for irrigation of their crops that were growing on many, many terraces that they built.  The Patakancha River is called the chocolate river as it is chocolate brown during the wet season because it carries the mud from the Andes.  The Inca believed that the river was male and it flowed into the ocean which is female and fertilised it.  

We visited some smaller Inca ruins at Pisac.  What I found interesting was that there were lots of little holes in the mountain behind the ruins.  The tour guide told us that they were actually graves of the Incan ancestors.  The mummies were so important to the Incas that if the family moved to another place they would take their dead ancestors with them.  They were more important to them than all of their other possessions.  The mountains were so steep that to bury the dead the family and the mummy had to be lowered down from the top of the mountain on a platform to the grave.  They would then make an opening in the mountain and would put the mummy inside with some personal posessions for the afterlife.  They would build a wall surrounding the mummy with the body sitting up looking through a window so it could watch over its family and so the family could visit and see the mummy.

  The mummies are now all gone because grave robbers for many centuries have been taking them and their possessions.  Some have also been taken by archaeologists and put in museums around the world.  On our way back to Cusco we went to Chinchero where we saw women weaving traditional blankets and cloths out of llama wool.  They dyed the wool with natural products like cacti, leaves, bark, corn and flowers.  First they would wash the wool to clean it with water and a grated root which made soapy bubbles.  Then they would put hot water in a pot and add some colour and dip the wool in to dye it.  They would dry the wool and then spin it by hand ready to be woven.  Some cloths took 2 to 3 months to finish, each familiy had their own pattern which they wove by memory.  I thought the cloths were creative and beautiful.  Hannah