A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving. ~Lao Tzu

The next day we departed in the dolphin for Ollyantaytambo, one of the loveliest towns in the Sacred Valley. We passed the edges of Cuzco and entered a long plain. As the afternoon sun scattered itself across the valley, we stopped the car and gazed in wonder at the massive snow capped peaks in the distance. The cotton ball clouds caught their hems on the peaks as they passed, their fabric shredding into cumulus explosions atop the mountains. Yoshi, Jonas and I climbed atop the dolphin, our arms linked and held high, to stare down the Andes and celebrate this moment of accomplishment.

The Sacred Valley of the Incas is not to be taken as a tricky tourist name. This valley, the valley leading to Macchu Picchu, is a place to worship and reflect with awe and humility. Huge crushed velvet mountains lay like a crumpled blanket around the long valley, covered now in the patchwork quilt of the colors of the harvest. The Incans cultivate all possible land, which to them includes steep cliffs 2000 feet above the valley floor. The land is impossible to cultivate with machinery on these cliffs; the work is done by ox or by hand. During this time of the year, the harvest time, one can gaze around at mountains painted in squares of yellow, green and brown, the glaciers on the peaks behind them, the rough river tumbling through the valley and the small clay villages set throughout. It is a place of dreams. To imagine such an incredible vista of power and beauty, one must move past the daily life of humans to the realm of the heavens. This is the place where God goes to think.

We arrived in Ollyantaytambo, which Jonas remembered with great fondness and wonder from his previous visit here in 2000. Yoshi was becoming happier by the moment - the vast peaks were calling to his mountaineering spirit - and Graham was excited to show us his home. Ollayntaytambo houses one main cobblestone street, which passes through a small square and through the main thoroughfare of about a dozen tourist hostels and restaurants. Adobe mud houses are scattered throughout. At the end of the main street, set upon the hill above the town, is a lovely set of Incan structures and walls. Thick rock wall terraces cascade down the edge of the mountain into the town like a slow waterfall of stone and grass. Within the set of buildings on the hillside lies a famous wall, constructed of gigantic blocks of pink granite – each block is probably ten feet high and seven feet thick. The Incans had not finished this wall when the Spanish arrived; there is still a trail of huge raw blocks of granite leading to the ruin from an adjacent mountain. High up on the mountain’s uppermost cliff, maybe a thousand plus feet above the valley, is the granite quarry. The ancient Incans mined the granite blocks from the mountainside and tumbled them down via a rockslide to the bottom. They somehow hauled the massive boulders to the middle of the hill above Ollyantaytambo and carved them into rounded wall pieces, fit in perfect symmetry together. The edges are smooth and soft as silk – the boulders feel to the touch like immense, quiet living things. This wall, as with so many Incan structures, is a work of artistry and love. The methods and exact science of the Incan rockwork is still a mystery today.

Apart from the massive gas trucks and dozens of high class tourist buses roaring through the tiny square, Ollyantaytambo has the feel of the old west. Horses, donkeys and cows are as common a site on the street as a belching truck carrying natural gas or a load full of workers. The indigenous people wander about their business, staring at the ground with intense concentration and carrying huge loads of straw, held on their backs by the colorful woven blankets of the region. The weavings might bear one of multiple loads: a round faced, sun burnt baby, a load of potatoes, straw or corn; wild flowers, items for the market, ponchos, bottles of beer. Older Incan women all wear traditional dress - multiple layered skirts (sometimes up to six at a time), open toed sandals made of tire rubber, button-down sweaters and top hats. In some regions of the Andes the bowler hat is the most popular – in Cuzco and the Sacred Valley women seem to prefer white or black top hats. It is a striking combination; I found myself spending hours sitting in front of a café in Ollyantaytambo, watching the women hurry through town in the half run, almost a skip, that is common to the mountain people here. Sometimes the locals would dress in more festive outfits – bright red embroidered skirts, ponchos and an odd felt hat, covered in sequins and embroidery, which sits side saddle on their heads. The men might wear ponchos and alpaca pointed caps covering their head and ears. Everyone, however, wears tire sandals. Apparently, these are quite comfortable after they have been worn in (9-12 months of wear).

The run-down hostel in which Graham rents a full time room is managed most of the time by a 12 year old local boy, who cleans and oversees the place during the day and goes to school at night. His face was the face of so many children here – worn with age and worry by the age of nine or ten. Although Jose Luis was hardly dependable, he was the only staff member of the American-owned hostel who seemed to consistently know what was going on. In Bolivia, you will find along the highway every ten miles or so a large, dilapidated public service sign portraying the faces of children and a schoolyard. “We deserve and need time to study too,” it reads. The cover page of a Bolivian local newspaper was a photo of homeless children sleeping in crypts to keep safe. In Central America, the public service signs featuring children were in English: “Sex with children is a crime. It is punishable by _ years in prison.” A 17 year old boy who stayed in a tiny one room shack in the dirty parking lot where we left the Dolphin in Cuzco laughed when Jonas told him to come to Brazil. “No, no! Life is too good here!” His father, on the other hand did not have the same sentiment. “The poor stay poor here. I have tried many jobs before this one. The rich are rich and the poor stay poor.” I told him he was lucky to be born in such a beautiful place. He looked at the ground and said nothing.

After we left our things in the dark little hostel room, we met with Graham in the Chilean-run restaurant below. Graham was hosting his uncle James, an architect from Portland, OR, in Peru for a couple weeks. James was a friendly enthusiastic American, who personified the urban Pacific Northwest. He was concerned about the environment, highly educated, interested in sustainability, green building and urban planning and loved getting sweaty and full of adrenaline in natural settings, even at age 50. Graham had packed James’ stay with activities, as is so frequently the case with Americans visiting the developing world. I believe Americans used to be a culture of explorers. Now, it seems, at heart we have become an MTV society; we love and need to be entertained. “White water rafting in Peru! Rock Climbing in Kenya! Shark fishing in Thailand! Sky diving in Brazil! Trekking in Nepal! Horseback riding in the Copper Canyon! 4×4 in Malawi! Ride a Zip line in Costa Rica!” The pure experience of a magnificent place is no longer enough – we can get that from the Discovery Channel. The young people of America and the West in general, have lost the ability to sit quietly and absorb a vista of natural and cultural phenomena that we do not understand. The world has become a giant multiethnic, action-packed theme park.

Graham had planned for his uncle a day of mountain bike riding in the mountains. His uncle was happy to have our group tag along on the adventure; we knew little of the area and Graham’s knowledge of the environs was an asset. Early the next morning we set off in a small minivan with a local guide and multiple bikes stacked atop. I had only been mountain biking once or twice on quiet trails in Oregon – I assumed this would be a similar lazy ride through wheat fields and lovely mountain vistas. I should have known an all male group headed up by two American outdoors enthusiasts would never accept a leisurely ride through the high prairie.

We arrived at the top of a circular Incan ruin, set at the bottom of a great pit. We hiked down to examine it. Graham lied to the workers, telling them he was an archeologist from with the National Cultural Institute so he could see into the hole they were digging in the ruin. They gave him a small bag of artifacts to examine, which were pre-Incan pot shards and figures. He returned triumphant, more so because of his successful ruse than his examination of the uncovered remnants. We wandered a bit more and returned to the top to begin our ride.

The first hour of the descent was, in fact, a leisurely ride across the high plains. We passed Indians harvesting their crops and loading them onto donkeys for the long trek home. The day was sunny and bright and the peaks of the Andes monopolized every direction. I had not been on a bike in many many months and began lagging behind, taking photos and pacing myself. The guys were ahead, jumping potholes and skidding off small mud hills. They became smaller and smaller ahead of me. As I turned a corner at the end of the plain, I saw the guys on the hill across from me. The only way from me to them was a narrow donkey path straight down the hill. I began to wonder what was in store for us on this ride.

It was, in fact, not a trail for beginners. For the next four hours, I sweated and swore and slid my way down tiny steep trails, embankments rising on my left, barren cliffs on my right. Often the path was not wide enough to walk the bike and this option, with an unwieldy bicycle, would have been too dangerous anyway. One of the guides stayed behind with me while the rest went rocketing down the cliffs. This day I probably feared for my life more than any other point in the trip, or maybe at most other points in my life. By the time I caught up with the group at our first stopping point, I was wearing the face of piss and vinegar, silently cursing the male race under my breath. “Been a while since you’ve been on a bike, Kate?” Graham asked with a grin. We had reached the great natural salt mines, and for a moment, I was stunned enough to forget my stress. Beneath us lay natural salt mines, created by an unknown people sometime between three and four thousand years ago. The mines were made up of thousands of small pools, connected to one another, cascading down the canyon below us like a mineral glacier. The pools are flooded periodically with water, causing the salt to rise from the ground below to the surface of the pools. This is the only maintenance required for the process besides the extraction of the salt itself, which is done through a type of water siphoning. Each pool was in a different stage of calcification – depending on the salt content, the color of the pool ranged from brown to a light ice blue to white. Small figures moved across the massive formations, hacking at the salt with small picks. I climbed down onto the closest pool and pushed my finger through the upper layer of salt to the water below, as if pushing through a thin layer of ice on a swimming pool. We gazed in awe at this spectacle, created by humans thousands of years before Christ. Its ingenuity and efficiency were incredible – these salt mines still supply the entire Cuzco region with salt.

After a brief respite at the mines, the boys once again took off and I was left to face the most difficult descent yet. The South African guide, Clive, was kind and patient and encouraged me to go as slowly as I needed. In my case, this was incredibly slow. I navigated sharp turns in the mountains with my feet and stood up, my rear end hanging off the back of the bike, for the steep descents. My mind kept wandering to the cliffs below, imagining the fall. I am sure I wore out the brakes on the poor bike, but my mind was far from the state of the equipment. When we finally reached the bottom of the trek, I was exhausted and scraped, but whole. I took a bit of satisfaction in the sight of the bloodied and bruised boys, who had each taken tumbles during their acrobatics.

When we returned to Ollyantatambo, we ate dinner twice and retreated to our rooms to rest our taxed muscles. But the day was not yet through. Uncle James had mentioned to Graham over dinner that he would have liked to have seen the ruins on the hill above Ollyanta prior to his departure. Graham had immediately suggested we sneak in and trek up there that night. Uncle James, ever the outdoorsman, had agreed, despite his injuries (he had slid ten feet off his bike that day and was already sore from days of hiking at Machu Picchu. He was popping ibuprofen like crazy). Yoshi, Graham, Jonas, uncle James and I met back up around 9 to discuss the plan. When we realized that there was only one flashlight available among the group, I began backing out. The ruins were high above the town on top of the hill, all of us were exhausted and sore, and there was no light. This seemed like a recipe for unhappiness and more bloodied bodies. Graham insisted that the local people use only the moon to navigate the trails and that there would be no need for a light. Yoshi and I looked at each other – we were both a little wary of Graham’s assurances and of a long trek in the dark. But the group decided to go for it anyway and I consented. I did not realize at the time that had we been caught, there could easily have been jail time involved for breaking into a sacred sight.

We rounded the side of the hill and began a steep ascent. The trail we were following appeared to be yet another donkey or llama trail – tiny, rocky and difficult to see. With only one flashlight, Yoshi and Jonas were forced to attempt to follow in the dark. Every so often uncle James would shine it back toward them during a particularly difficult piece in the trail. James yelled out cheerily, “At least we have less problems with vertigo in the dark!” We could see from the lights of the town below us that we were already moving hundreds of feet above the road. We kept our eyes on the trail and tried not to lose footing. As I followed uncle James, I could see that his feet were becoming less and less sure and his legs were shaking. “Graham? Are we going to have to come back down this thing?” he yelled up towards Graham’s blurry figure. “Uh, no. I’m pretty sure we’ll use another trail,” Graham replied. “How much farther up?” I asked. “Mmmm, I really don’t know. I have never been on this trail before,” Graham yelled back down. Great. I prayed the trail would take us somewhere and we would not have to navigate the treacherous trail back down the hill in the dark.

Finally, after about an hour of uphill climbing, we reached a fork in the trail where we could see the beginnings of the Incan wall above us. It seemed we were penetrating an ancient fortress…I imagined dark faces looking down at us from the wall, armed with rocks and arrows. The wind began to whip around us as we reached the summit of the hill and the stars were bright above with nothing to distract them from reaching us. The moon was only a small cup in the sky; its light gave the ruins an eerie glow. The structure at the top of the hill was what most believe to be a type of prison. On the wall facing the setting sun were four holes, separated by the width of a man. It is believed that if a villager was caught committing one of the three Incan crimes – laziness, theft or lying – he was sent here and tied to the rock to think about his sins. Here he would face God – the sun – to atone for his misdoings. Multiple candidates for this punishment sprang to mind, many of them from my own government. We stood in the space of the ancient hand cuff device and stared up at the view of the stars and the silhouettes of the peaks. I closed my eyes and drank in the quiet dignity of the place.

We began our descent on the same trail we had used to ascend….Graham was looking for a fork where we could turn and follow a different route down. This route led through the terraces and ruins on the face of the hill. “Here it is!” Graham exclaimed triumphantly. “It’s all easy going from here on out.” The trail was not much better than the one we had used previously, but we were obviously moving toward the ruins, where there would be stairs and tourist trails. Behind me, I heard a yell. I looked back in time to see uncle James, the light from his headlamp waving madly across the hill, falling sideways toward the cliff. “Oh GOD!” I yelled and jumped toward him. He fell sideways, his arms gesturing for a handhold, and landed on the edge of the trail on a thick clump of grass growing on the cliff. His head hung down the hill. We were all silent as we helped him up, and once again, I cursed the male pack mentality, regardless of how much it has accomplished. Had we been anywhere else on the trail, James would not have been able to stop the fall. He would have tumbled down the long cliff to an ugly end on the road below.

We spent another hour in the ruins, running our hands over the great Incan walls, still warm from the sun, and marveling at the mastery of the masons who molded them. As we made our way down the immense terraces, we saw two red eyes moving toward us up the hill, under a blurry white shape. Uncle James yelped in surprise and we tried to adjust our eyes to the darkness, squinting to define the shape moving toward us. “Guia!” Yelled Graham, as he moved toward it. He stooped to pet the small white dog who came panting up to us. “This is Guia. She lives here in the ruins – hence the name, which means ‘guide.’ Every night they close the gates on her and she lives here. The townspeople support her with food. I’m surprised she didn’t find us earlier.” I loved the idea that this small happy white dog had chosen these ruins as her home. We made our way to the entrance of the ruin and climbed over a large metal door, dropping to the pavement below with a sigh of relief. The day, regardless of its unneeded heroics, was a moment in time I will never forget. We came close to death and art and the ancients in one small moment of a day.

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