Peru 2015: Valle de Sur de Cusco (14 December 2016)

     I would have left Cusco if I was not still hopelessly waiting to meet my friend that I have missed dearly. The nice part about Cusco is, there is always something to do, whether it is sightseeing, culinary, cultural, and many others.

     I consulted a tour to see the areas south of Cusco (Valle Sur). That includes Tipón, Pikillacta, and the church in a town called Andahuaylillas.

Tipón, it was actually much more larger than this

    Tipón is old Incan ruin that is situated 3400 meter above the sea level (more details here). It was about 40 minute bus ride from Central Cusco. According to the tourist guide, Tipón is a terrace farm with a developed water irrigation. It showcased how advance the Incans were in terms of architecture and masonry.

      The next stop was Pikillacta, a city built by the Wari Culture in the 500 AD. It was literally translated into 'Flea People' in Quechua. Right before stopping the ruin, we had a bonus trip with an an opportunity to see the models of two set of the fossil remains of old animals that once lived around the Sacred Valley. That skeleton of the armadillo was the largest I have ever seen and I was so amazed by the the natural history of this Andean highland.

Some kind of a dinosaur

A giant Armadillo?

  Here is a Wikipedia introduction of Pikillacta. There was a lot of mysteries around the site and many archaeologists were still trying to solve the mystery. I can only give the very basic introduction of the site so I urge you to visit there if anyone has an interest in history and can afford to travel. The wall were miles long and we only had enough time to see a very small portion of it. We walked through a few rooms and we hopped back onto the bus to get to Andahuaylillas.

Pikillacta, a walled city built by the people from the Wari culture

     Andahuaylillas is located 45 km from Cusco, and its population is mainly made up of indigenous people known as a Quechua (if you do not already know it by this point) who are the descendants of the Incan people. There is an 'Iglesias de Andahuaylillas', one of the most lavish and detailed chapels in Latin America (A visit of it costs S/.10, which is almost like $3 in the US). While nothing looked too interesting on the exterior, the interior is simply astounding and unfortunately, no photography was allowed inside so I hyperlinked a picture of a sample of it below.

There is nothing fancy about the façade about the exterior of this chapel

The interior is golden color with a flavour of Incan culture

     We were also introduced a craft shop with amazing handcrafts (sorry no picture again and we were offered a fermented corn drink called chicha). I was later told that only the Incan royalty was allowed to drink chicha but it could a way to flatter the not-so-history-savvy tourists. We also stopped at a very well known bakery along the road and sampled some buns. I later bought some loaf of bread as a form of quick snack. After we had the quick drink, we saw some exhibits, including the storytelling of skull surgery and an more than twenty varieties of maize. It makes me mad that companies such as Monsanto wanted to reduce the varieties of these corn that human spent millenia to cross breed.

A shot of chicha drink for everyone

Different varieties of corns found in Peru

     I was also delighted I made some friends in this trip. There are all from Southern California and they were siblings and couple. They were Katya, Cristian, and Rudy. They were not the typical 'dumb American' tourists and we had some good conversations about various topics. After the long trip, we were dropped at Plaza de Armas.