8/11/09 - ...and Here We Go

We drove to Ollantaytambo early in the morning. This is the town at the beginning of the Inca trail at kilometer 82. Here I met Amir and Omri from the Galapagos islands again and from a quick chat with them found that they had done pretty much the same stuff as I had since the tour began leaving me wondering where exactly my money was going here...

Getting off the bus was akin to being ambushed. I've never seen so many local people trying to sell you stuff in the one place. You kind of have to wade through them to get anywhere. I'm glad that they are all shorter than I am, otherwise it'd be quite intimidating.

The picture below is the five of us that were doing the hike (Jurgen had booked late and so had to do a different trek and Margaret was feeling too ill to continue). Note that we all have those silly hats now to protect us from the sun. On the plus side, our shadows looked like Indie...

Day one is meant to be very sedate, a nice warmup for the next few days, and it was. We stopped points overlooking various Inca ruins and our guide Ruben told us enthusiastically about the Incas. They expanded very rapidly forming an empire greater in size than that of the Romans. They were not great warriors, rather they rather aggressively assimilated other tribes by building around their sacred sites and worshiping their gods, or by bumping all their artifacts and taking them back to Cusco where they also worshiped them. They were quite happy to add any new gods they discovered to their own. The rate of expansion was indeed impressive, but I can't help but feel that not running into any cultures with equivalent technology is why they got trounced by the Spanish. They hadn't needed to advance their weapons beyond spears and slingshots. Knights on horseback and simple firearms must have been terrifying.

I'll take a moment here to mention the porters. For our group of five plus a guide we had eight porters one of whom was also the cook. We had about 5kg on our backs. The porters each carried 20kg and moved faster than we did. Before the regulations on weight were introduced apparently porters could be expected to carry up to 45kg. That is more than half my weight. These guys are exceptionally hard working. In fact, I spent most of the trip feeling guilty about not carrying my own gear.

As seems to be a theme in South America the views were continuously awesome so I'll have plenty of photographs to share as we continue on.