Thor's Epic Journey pt. 4 - Cuzco and the Andes!

Alright! I am slowly blogging on!

From Lima I flew to Cuzco, which was the Inca capital back in the day, before the already much celebrated fellow Francisco Pizarro came to visit, bringing such generous gifts as plague and a general will to exterminate the brutes! Ah yes, Joseph Conrad references abound!

It's a really beautiful city, high, high up in the mountains (The city itself is on approximately 4000 meters or so). It was weird, you immediately get a mild headache when going there, and there are little oxygen tanks everywhere for fainters.

And the best cure for altitude sickness? Coca leaf tea! It's kind of a staple in the Peruvian mountains, and it tasted like pretty normal tea, although I can't say it helped much against the altitude sickness. However, I felt very invincible and energized! (Alright, to be fair, it really has none of the effects of cocaine. Cocaine is essentially made by the sap inside the leaves, but it takes quite enormous amounts of leaves to make just a tiny amount of cocaine, so the little coca they grow in Peru is mostly used to make tea, unlike its Colombian or Bolivian counterparts, mostly used to please rock stars and other losers.)

The city was full of narrow streets, with the foundation made by the Incas and the rest of the buildings more modern. It was kind of cool!

Like with this church, where the foundation is Inca, and the rest is built by the Spaniards.

The church courtyard.

On the inside of the church were Inca ruins. Again, this is a very seismic area, but the Inca constructions are made a built more solid than the Spanish stuff, so while the Spanish buildings would rise and fall on every earthquake, the Inca buildings still stand comfortably.

I had a guide in Cuzco (and the Valley of the Kings, which I'll come to later) who was just super, super intense! he showed some of the building methods of the Incas, in which the stones are carved to have corners that fit with each other, kind of like Legos. So if you want to build something earthquake proof, make it Lego-like!

Then we drove further up in the mountains (cue headaches) to this enormous religious structure, used originally as a place for worship but eventually as a fortress. It was kind of crazy, the boulders were ridiculously huge, and I can't even imagine the time and effort and headaches it must have caused to lug these big boys up the mountain sides. 

The Incas had three "holy" animals, or at least animals of special significance. One is the Condor, which was believed to carry the dead to the heavens (so, bad omen to see a Condor approach you, in other words); the Anaconda, regarded and respected for its ability to be in movies with Ice Cube, and finally, the Puma, regarded for its ability to make cool sports outfits. Hence the Puma paw on the top of the picture.