7-16

Trip to Pisaq to the Festival for the Virgin of Carmen…We get seats on the local bus, over the pass and into the sacred valley’s cool morning air. Crisp and clear. Note: I am pick pocketed as I get off the bus…zippered outer pants pocket….$30 and I did not feel a thing. These guys were good! We decided to take a taxi to the ruins…$15 soles or to the top $20…a very good idea, the climb would have been hours up.

Pisaq 1. Inca Ruins 2. Terraces 3. Stone Work

We hiked from the parking lot up the trail – single lane with breath taking sheer drop offs and a narrow tunnel leading to the secret temple of the Sun and Moon. Huge terraces climb the mountain side, row upon row lead to the sky. We follow the trail leading to the top where we find a citadel, temples, residences, water works and baths flowing...stone work done by very talented stone masons…curved walls, trapezoid doorways and wall niches…perfectly straight walls with large blocks of stone mitered together…some so closely you could not poke a knife blade between the stones. This airy vista looks down upon the valleys below from its saddle notch, so easily defended by the steep canyon walls. We took the narrow back trail down to Pisaq and the festival – 2 hours down…hundreds of steps and across terraces, to pop out just above town and walk down the gauntlet of souvenir vendors and into the town square.


The festival is a riot of color; natives dancing in costumes; floats to the Virgin de Carmen carried on costumed shoulders; noise, music, singing; crowd smells of perfume and body odor mix as the procession marches by in the hot sun. We get lots of pictures, then retire to a local restaurant balcony over looking the square for a cold beer and to rest our weary legs. The parade ends up flowing into the very crowded square and just below our ring-side seats! What pictures we missed earlier, now we were rewarded.

Pisaq Virgin de Carmen Festival

As the day came to an end, we worked our way through the throngs back to the bus pick up point where we waited for the next bus to arrive. When it pulled up, the huge crowd converged on the door in a Japanese train jamming session. To say we were pushing and shoving was an under statement. People crept under my arms as I held the door way to try and help Judee aboard. We got one and a half seats in the back row shared with an older Andean couple and an Andean mother with child strapped to her back and two other children. Standing room—gone. Yes, it was a fun ride back to Cusco!

7-20

A rest day in Cusco. Up at 7:30, Judee fixes us a whole wheat pancake and bacon coffee and o.j. breakfast. We clean up and then start cleaning the apartment since we are having our first dinner guest tonight. Make the beds; mop and sweep the floors; shake out the rungs; empty the trash; review and complete the shopping list; pack up Bici since we are going bike shop hunting and grocery shopping; carry Bici out to the street and off we go! A warm sunny day greets us, blue skies and no winds. Down the crowded, lumpy cobblestone streets we fly out of the old colonial part of town into the bustling, noisy, newer neighborhoods and further on into the commercial districts. We are following a map and directions given to us by a local guy, Tom, whose Peruvian wife runs a small restaurant up the street from us.

Slight digression to tell you about Tom, a transplanted young/old hippy sort of drop-out from California: Tom is very imposing in stature, about 5’8” with a weight lifter’s upper body: huge arms, chest, and neck He usually wears a ball cap backwards, shirts with cut off sleeves and jeans. He likes to mountain bike, drink, chew cocoa leaves and by trade is a carpenter. He told us about leading bike trips over the Andes and into the Amazon jungle below…of riding the tank trucks with his bike over the mountain roads in the snow (in the pics he is in shirt sleeves) and down into the jungle where he had built a bamboo shelter and is homesteading the property. To say Tom is a local character seems to say it all.

Now back to our day: We find the bike shop Tom has sent us to, not open at 9:30 am but the lady next door directs us down the street to another shop. We go. It is a hole in the wall with bikes spilling out all over the sidewalk, rusty, dirty beat up bikes in all stages of ill repair. The local mechanic joins us to see what we need. He is dressed in rags and missing most of the fingers on his left hand, speaks no English, so we struggle to share what we need. No luck here, so we go back to the original shop which is now open and a young guy tries to help us. This shop is cleaner and more organized than the previous one, but really just a one room operation with few tools, parts, or supplies.


We head off again in hunt for a shop we now understand supplies tools and parts to all these local one man shops. Whoa, we pull up in front of Bici Partes Imperial, a little larger shop with lots of stock and a young guy building/truing a wheel out front and thought we finally had found our shop. Well, communication was difficult and the shop owner and his wife soon lost interest in our needs, so we again moved on. Two shops later we hit pay dirt, after another visiting racer from Lima took us to the shop of his friend. He explained our needs to his friend, introduced us and went over in detail what we wanted, showed him Bici and when our new rim arrives from the US we will return to have him build us a new wheel! During all this explanation, I discovered that the clamp that holds my front computer pick-up has fallen off. Of course, none of the shops have a clamp, so I fabricated one out of sheet metal, a screw, nut, and duct tape. It works!


Onto our grocery shopping at the Mega Mart where we load up only to find out we are short of money and have to take items back. No problem, Bici is loaded and off we go through the traffic back to the apartment to finish getting ready for our guest, clean Bici, and spend an hour reading, basking in the late afternoon sun in San Blas park, two blocks from the apartment. A long day of lots of activity for our Rest Day!