8

…Had a whole free day in Aguas Calientes. Spent it shopping and also met for lunch. Found out my tour guide Victoria just got divorced 5 months ago and is very upset by it. She has 3 kids and her ex used her car to pick up his new lady. I learned men are pretty much the same universally. She cried over a beer and we bonded. We spent two hours at lunch, they had a big pit there where they were roasting the chicken over a wooden stove. It smelled so good in there. I had the soup. The first bowl came out and it had a big long black hair in there. I was just going to get it out of there and eat the soup, but Victoria got the dude over and got me some new soup. Gotta love her aggressiveness. Poor thing. So my new soup came and I ate it and drank two huge beers and got a little buzz going, then Leif, the 21 year old on the trip started preaching to the group about the Celestine Prophecy. This is why he came to Peru and he was kind of funny. I had to go pee so bad, but he never took a pause, so I had to hold it for the longest time.
We pretty much talked religion for about 4 hours. Over beer.
I got back to my room late and watched Barber Shop. The remote didn’t work, so I had to get up and turn the TV off.
The next morning we had to get up early and get on the bus to Machu Picchu. I only had one clean pair of pants left, and had left all of my clothes in Cuzco in the laundry, so on they went again, and we set off for the city of ruins. The bus goes up, up, up the mountain on a curvy road. When we got there, we went the down way because most people were going the up way. And I was glad because when we came around the corner there were the ruins, with nobody on them. I got a bunch of good pictures (I think) and it was so awesome. If you look it up on the web, there is a huge mountain in the background that you can climb. Only me and Leif (the preacher) wanted to climb it so once we did the tour, we decided to go up there. The tour was really interesting. Basically, the Incas used this place like a summer home. They cleared the rocky hillside and had a quarry and built terraces into the side of the mountain so they could farm and grow corn, potatoes, etc. Then they suddenly left the place unfinished. Nobody knows why. And nobody knows why the Spanish never found the place either. It was rediscovered in 1911 by a guy named Hiram Bingham. He did many years of research on the place and found about 500 people lived there at a time. These days 1000 people go there daily. So they are worried that soon it will deteriorate to the point of no return, so they are talking about not allowing people to wander around it freely. Which is kind of a shame, because that was pretty nice to be able to explore it all over. Also, they planted grass there now to make it green, and that grass has roots that are going to grow into the stone walls and disturb them. There are stones that the sun directly shines upon on certain days of the year, and it is kind of an architectural wonder. Because it seems like it would have taken years and years to build it. And it’s WAY up in the mountains. There are llamas walking around too…