Day 24: Peru - Sacred Valley sightseeing

Today, we had arranged to do a day tour with a local driver to see all of the sights of the Sacred Valley (well, many of them anyway). It was going to be a looong but sight-packed day. We started off towards Pisac, a Peruvian village known for its Sunday Market... well that and the Incan ruins.

The agricultural terraces are situated up on a hillside, overlooking the valley.

We hiked around for about an hour. After the Machu Picchu hike, this Pisac didn't seem like it would be much trouble at all. We still wore ourselves out pretty quickly.

Since I'm writing this post, I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that I'm the one carrying all our stuff (see pictoral proof below).
Turns out we both had gotten pretty chewed up the day before by the Machu Picchu mosquitoes. The bites started turning red and itching today.


After wrapping up Pisac, we met our driver in the lower parking lot, grabbed some fresh squeezed orange juice, and drove down towards the modern town to see the market. The Sunday market was enormous. Ming could have spent hours in this place.


I think I was a pretty good sport about the whole thing. I even tried on a few things so that she could "see how they'd look."

Eventaully, we started getting hungry though, so once we made a few purchases, we wound our way back to the car. Next stop: Chinchero.

Fortunately for our weary bodies, this stop was just a quick viewpoint, where we were able to snap a photo of us with the snow capped Andean peaks behind us.


Finally, we made it to a restaurant. Some ominous looking clouds were chasing us as we drove. When we stopped to eat, it actually began to hail!

We left the restaurant once the hail died out, and wound our way across dusty dirt roads to Moray, a set of circular terraces that sink 150 meters deep into the valley.

It's possible to hike down into Moray (as the tiny circle of people at the bottom attest), but we chose to stick with the view from the top. After a 5 minute pit-stop, we moved on to the last leg of our journey: Maras.

The salt mines in this area have been used since pre-Inca times. The salty water of a nearby stream is evaporated, leaving the salt behind in thousands of pools perched on the side of a hill.

After a full day of sightseeing, we were both pretty tired. We slept on the ride back as soon as the sun had set.