Sacred Valley - Explore Ollantaytambo Ruins - A Day in the Life of the Urubamba Community.

After having some breakfast in the dining room of the hotel and having time before embarking on the next day of our OAT tour in Peru, Peggy and I went for a walk down the main street of Urubamba. It was Monday and the streets were busy with street-side vendors and uniformed children on their way to school… and free-ranging dogs everywhere. The leash restrictions we are used to in the states did not apply here. No danger from them as the dogs simply milled about among the humans.

Not sure what the official names of them are, but I'll call them "Taxi Trikes"… 3-wheeled, motorized vehicles with a driver in front and a canopied seat for two or three paying customers in the back, practical for the narrow streets of Urubamba. They were also very individual in their designs and colorful adornments.

We caught the tour bus at 8:15 and headed to the marketplace… where Freddy gave us a job. It included a piece of paper with something written in Spanish on it. Mine said, "Quiero comparer un sol de maca entera." (I want to buy one sol of maca entera.) A sol is a dollar in Peru; maca entera is a fruit. We had 20 minutes to interact with the merchants in the marketplace and purchase different local produce. After speaking my line to a four or five different merchants, who would point me to a different area, I eventually purchased a small, plastic-tied bag of maca entera. Along with the other purchases made by the tour group, we then left the marketplace and caught taxi trikes to a church where the bus would be picking us up. I tipped my driver "un sol".

Then it was off to visit a farmer acquaintance of Freddy's. The farmer lived in a self-made house that by 'western' standards (Freddy's term) might appear to be a dirty hovel with dirt floors and crude implements laying about. But the farmer had bought the land 30 years ago and had a family, and was quite self sufficient on his two acres of land. Although he cooked his food over a fire, the house did have electricity and he owned a cell phone. As Freddy said, "He was poor in money, but he has all that he needs." Oh, and he had some Inca tombs on a steep embankment behind his house that he had sold some years back for needed money.

Next stop: Ollantaytambo, a small village of cobble-stoned streets and adobe buildings that had been built around some massive terraced Inca ruins on a hillside. The village itself was built on Inca foundations and is considered the best example of Inca town planning. Anyway, we took our time in the high elevation climbing the stone steps next to the terraces, stopping intermittently while Freddy regaled us with related Inca stories, like the Spanish conquistadors who marched into the valley and disrupted the Incas' way of life.

Among more rural Peruvians, guinea pigs are considered a prized delicacy, a sign of family wealth and worth. When we visited the farmer, there were guinea pigs off to the side on the floor, munching on provided grasses on one side of the one-roomed house. Our next stop was at a house in Urubamba where a mother, daughter, and two grand-daughters lived. The main theme of the visit was the preparation and frying of guinea pig and the making of corn tortillas… which we had for lunch, along with a squash soup and a tasty corn-based drink. I also talked with one of the grand-daughters who asked me if I had any children. I told her that I had four and that I also had grand children, all of whom I showed pictures of on my iPhone.

Dinner at Oscar's house, a private residence with two rooms with long tables for guests. After dinner, we got to tour the inside of his expensive house with artifacts of pre-Incan cultures, paintings of reputable artists, and a gallery featuring pottery works by his attending wife. I found it quite a contrast between other less-opulent homes we visited that day.