Cuzco and the miracle drug

  Cuzco, Plaza Armanas, panoramic – courtesy of Tyler Baker
After a night in Lima we flew off to Cuzco to meet up with our daughter Meghan and her boyfriend Tyler. Found a great little hotel (Corihuasi) about 2 blocks off the main plaza in Cuzco. That would be uphill from the plaza. Cuzco sits at around 11,000 feet. There is a distinct lack of oxygen in the air. We all felt it, but Tyler and I got hit the hardest. I was down for the count for a whole day feeling like I needed to sleep 14 hours a day, could not get warm, had zero appetite and my head hurt. Other than that it was OK. Our hotel had a large bottle of oxygen in the lobby, just in case the guests needed it. Then along came the miracle drug, Diamox (Acetazolamide). This stuff changes your blood chemistry just enough so the brain thinks there’s too much CO2 in your system. It then subtlety decides to breath a little deeper and a little more often. The next 3 or 4 days using it I could actually walk uphill again. Without it, the trip would have sucked for me. It took me 6 or 7 days to acclimate.

We did a number of trips to towns and ruins near Cuzco. Most are Quechua names. The locals up here in the Andes mostly speak the Quechua that is derived from the Inca language; some 8 to 10 million people speak it. Except for the youngest rural kids, they all seem to know Spanish too. When you are tired, the place names seem to become somewhat of a cruel tongue twister, Ollantaytambo. I know at least one Quechua word, wasi. It means casa in Spanish, i.e. house. Pretty impressive, ah. OK, enough verbiage, here’s some Andean pics (click to biggerate them), not necessarily in anywhere near the order we took them.

Cuzco Plaza at night from the hotel room

Headed home after a hard days work

Celebration of comadritas, or god-mothers

Dying raw alpaca wool

The dye choices, all from natural ingredients

Meghan and Tyler dressed up in traditional matrimonial garb. They both looked a little scared when they found out it was matrimonial.

You have to click on this panoramic to see much. Here’s Meghan at the street corner with Chris and I trying to catch up on the right in, where else, but downtown Ollantaytambo.

One of the more stylish alpacas. The Andes have llama, alpaca, vicuna and guanaco. The llama are the large pack animals with long necks. The alpaca are for meat and fine wool. The vicuna and guanaco are smaller and not domesticated, they are rounded up annually for wool. And yes, I did try alpaca, inadvertently. It was in a nice sauce at a local buffet and they call it ‘beef’. Seemed kinda tricky to me.

Rasta alpaca

Chris and I hiking into the cave at the Pisac ruins.

While a hawk hunts overhead

And a hummingbird hums

Meghan trying to fit on with the little locals as Tyler gives up.

Dressed for the day

Even Mom was sneaking a smile

Condor in mid-flight at the condor rehab center.

This is the cover shot for the new book Tyler and the Tortoise, or How I beat the system without breaking a sweat.

Andean river valley filled with maize, or corn

Paul, Chris and Meghan filling in the stone wall panorama

The Incas made scale models of their building projects to determine how to cut the stones and what hardware needed to be ordered from Home Depot. The stones are cut precisely and put together without mortar. If you can believe everything you read on the web, then this is how they cut the monster blocks:

“The Incas cut the stones, by cracking it and introducing slim pieces of wood. Then, they pour water in the wood, the wood absorb the water and expand. When the crack in the stone gets bigger, they repeat the steps with bigger pieces of wood. The method was enough to crack the stones in large rectangular shapes.”

Andean flowers

Here is scientific proof that 3 out of 4 tourists smile when dressed up in local garb.

Next up is Machu Picchu (Old peak) and the singing of Pacha Mama (Andean goddess, Mother Earth).

Paul