Today is day 1 of the hike, meeting at another hotel in Cusco, there will be 11 of us on this trip and our tour leader is Oscar. He has made it his mission in life to have the most positive reviews on the Backroads site and he has been the number 1 trip for the past 3 years. This should be very interesting.
First stop this morning was a woman’s co-operative and animal sanctuary, We toured the alpaca, llama and vicuña that they kept there and also saw 3 condor that are being rehabilitated ready to release back out into the wild. The purpose of the community is to provide work for single women and also to keep the weaving and natural dyeing traditions alive. They start the learning process as children and all of the patterns and designs are learnt without written instructions,
We then started part of a gentle hike for today, and surprise number two was that Oscar had arranged for the local shepherd to hike the first part of the trail with us with her alpaca, one of which was a beautiful 2 week old.
We arrived at our lunch spot and were greeted by local music. We were then treated to a 20 minute ceremony performed by an Andean Priest. Which included a lot of information about the reasons for the rituals.
Then we went to enjoy lunch, I am sure they will not all be as fancy as this but we did throughly enjoy it. Lots of local foods that we have not had before.
After lunch we continued our hike, past the temple of the moon and then onto the Inca temple of Sacsayhuamon where we were given a brief history of what was currently known as about the site and its uses. We then walked on back to the town and had a relax in our room before dinner
