I´ll try to sum up my gap in a couple of enties, with a little bit of well implemented summarization. On January 10, I headed off on a trip to the country, to the city of Ollantaytambo, which would later become my jumping off point for my Trek to Machu Picchu. I left in the morning, in the car of Julio, my personal guide to Peru, his daughter Katy, and Iris, a friend of hers travelling in South America from Austria. It was a beautiful day as we headed into the country with a few stops along the way.

In Cusco, a traveller can buy a ticket that costs something like $10, which grants access to a number of Inca sites in and around Cusco. On the way out, we visited a number of Inca ruins, and got a bit of background on each. We first stopped by a ginourmous white crusifix, high on a hill overlooking the valley of Cusco. Apparently, it was donated to the people of Cusco by a Palestinian community that lived in Cusco durring the second world war.

We visited several small ruins on the hills above Cusco, before heading into the Sacred Valley, an area containing a lot of fertile land in use since Inca times. Its pretty incredible to drive through and see stone agricultural terraces spreading from the fertile valley floor to great heights on the steep mountain grades. The Inca were masters at using every possible piece of arrable land, no matter how high or seemingly unusable. We passed through several small adobe villages, sustained economically by weekly markets, before arriving at the town of Pisac. Pisac is a small town on the banks of the Urubamba river, with a great set of ruins rising up behind it. Climbing the ancient stairs to get to the ruins gave me a small taste of what I was to expect on the Inca trail, and it tasted sour. The altitude made breathing a challenge. The ruins themselves were beautiful though, I had only wished I had more time to check them out.

We moved on to the small city of Urubamba, about an hour down the valley, where we ate lunch, and then on to Ollantaytambo. We would be staying here for a few days, in a small two room hostal owned by a woman named Ana Maria. This also acted as her home, and was right on the border of the agricultural plots. We were here to check out the farmers life in the lands of the sacred valley. This is the perfect example of ancient Inca terraces and even original irrigation canals being used on land that has remained plentiful and fertile for thousands of years. Ana Maria owns a few small plots in the adjacent fields, where she grows corn, potatoes, or anything else, to sell and for her family to consume.

The second day I was there, we went up to visit the substantial set of ruins overlooking the small town. These again were very nice, and well visited ruins, as the site is on the way to Machu Picchu. We spent a good deal of time looking around them and exploring. I was struck by the seeming lack of guards or wardens working for the Instituto Nacional de Cultura, who are in charge of mainting the ruins. It was sad to see that some of the stones had been defaced and people were wandering where they probably shouldn´t have been. I couldn´t help but think that tourists could pay slightly more to see these marvels, and qualified workers could be payed to watch over and assist tourists, and protect the parks.

That night, I lost a great deal of my innocence, as I was parlay to the slaughtering of two Guinea pigs, which we would eat the next day. Guinea Pig is a local specialty in the country. In the kitchens of the farm houses, it is not uncommon to see ten or fifteen little Guinea pigs just living on the floor, eating scrap greens, and burrowing in little niches in the corners. On this particular night, 2 plump fellas were selected. Ana Maria deftly snapped their necks, and proceeded to de-hair, and gut the cute little housepets. It was actually a lot more interesting than appaling, I will admit I was getting pretty hungry by the time they were set. They actually waste very little of the little corpses; the hair is used in adobe bricks for cooking ovens, and the intestines and stomach are cleaned out to late be used to make sausages. Everything but the bones finds a home. That night, I saw a chicken sleeping on top of a sheep.

The next day, it was time to help Ana Maria in the fields. I will admit I went into it dubious, as I figured it would be sort of a hokey tourist introduction to farm work in the country. It actually turned out to be pretty interesting. Ana Maria had hired a man, Don Eduardo, and his two sons, who used a cattle driven plow in order to work and plant the land. We would be planting potatoes that day. I had never seen how an actual cattle driven plowshare was used, and I actually got to do it some. If I do say so, I´m pretty handy with cattle and a plow. We managed to plant the whole field that day, and ate a picnic lunch that Ana Maria had prepared and brought out. The Guinea pig was delicious.

The next day I would be starting my trek, so I took a walk into town to pick up some last minute supplies. I picked up an assortment of tasty snacks to bring along, a bag of coca leaves to ward off exhaustion and altitude sickness, and a $1 walking stick which was a recomended accesory, and which were widely available in the market.