Day 2

Our 5-day push from Abancay to Ollantaytambo was comfortably-spaced, meaning that we didn’t arrive too exhausted, and were able to immediately do an exploration the day after arrival. It would be an easy one though, a 4-mile walk back to the junction where we had entered the Sacred Valley yesterday, where Rett had found a brewery for us to visit. The route first took us back through town, where we had resolved to walk every block of the narrow stone-paved paths of the 4×8-block Inca city during our stay in Ollantaytambo.

On our way to a pedestrian route three or four terraces up from the road that had brought us in to city, we took a slight detour to see the arch/tunnel we had seen yesterday from the opposite side. There were a few dogs in that area, and a small black one somehow became attached to us and kept trying to trip us up as we returned to our route. I was annoyed at first, because walking these twisting cobbled pathways is treacherous enough even when there isn’t a black furball constantly underfoot. But as we continued on, we all came to an unspoken agreement that if he truly wanted to join us, he would need to walk in a more-orderly fashion. He accepted the deal!

We kept expecting him to get bored with us, or feel that he was too far from “home” and turn around, but that just never happened. Within 10 minutes of meeting him, he had somehow become “our” dog, and anyone seeing us would have assumed we had been together for years. Rett took a step more-treacherous than anything on the stones, and gave him a name: Sirius.

Some of the other dogs we met along the walk were more scared of Sirius, than he of them, and some were the opposite. When we passed by goats, they were both clearly terrified of each other. It was obvious that Sirius was super-smart, and a fast learner, and after initially positioning himself poorly when we passed goats, he quickly figured out that he could use us as a shield. Similarly, for dogs that he was less-interested in saying hello to, he learned that if he made that feeling obvious to us, we would help to shoo them back to their houses.

And he just kept happily trotting along with us! I asked Rett if she had secretly bribed him with a hidden pocketful of bacon when we met, but no, food wasn’t even his motivation; he just really, really liked us! Or, food was his motivation, but he was just smart enough to play the long game. I didn’t really know what was going to happen when we got to the brewery, but I was trying my best to follow Rett’s approach of living-in-the-moment, and not pre-planning for future consequences.

But luckily the brewery was largely in a (beautiful!) outdoor space, reminding us a bit of the farm-breweries in New York’s Finger Lakes, and no one seemed to take any issue with Sirius coming in with us. He did a thorough inspection of the grounds, and said hello to most of the other patrons, but continually would return to us (at some point, Rett did share some of her food with him, which did certainly solidify our bond).

Cerveceria de Valle Sagrado was a wonderful place to drink some beers; the wind picking up did make it a bit cool, but we found a relatively-sheltered table (other guests took advantage of the big black blankets the brewery provided, making one table look like a meeting of cloaked Death Eaters from Harry Potter).

As we were getting ready to leave, Sirius finally harvested the fruits of the long game that he was playing, grabbing some seriously-good remains off the plates of a group of other patrons who had departed. Given how happily he had walked four miles to this “unknown” place with us, I had considered that maybe the brewery and its surroundings was actually his “home”, and that he was using us as companions for his return from an excursion that had somehow brought him to Ollantaytambo. But it took very little coaxing to get him to leave the brewery with us, so apparently not! Rett’s original plan had been to do the walk one way, and then catch a collectivo (shared van) to take us back to Ollantaytambo. We had no idea if they would take a dog (or if Sirius would even be willing to get in a vehicle!), so my “worrying about the future” nature that I had been working hard to suppress this whole time had now become our present. There was no way that Rett was going to leave him here, so another four miles of walking might have been in all of our futures.

But Sirius waited with us at the “bus stop” as if he had done it 1000 times, and after five or ten minutes a mototaxi arrived and dropped some new customers at the brewery. When we asked how much a ride to Ollantaytambo would cost, the driver spent an odd amount of time thinking about it, so it really felt like the gears in his head were calculating how ridiculous of a number he could quote to these maybe-drunk gringos that they would still be willing to pay. But even when we objected to his S/20 (US$6) quote, he held firm, so maybe that really is the going rate here. It did seem like he was based in Urubamba, the town in the opposite direction, so it’s possible that this was a distant and unusual route for him, and he would have to drive us slowly up the bouncing stone road into Ollantaytambo. And, he was willing to take Sirius, which we still didn’t know if a collectivo driver would do, so we agreed and off we went, with Sirius hopping right in when directed.

Once back in town, we had some errands to do. Sirius continued to follow us for a little bit, but there were a lot more distractions amid the chaos of crowds and vehicles and other dogs, and after we briefly popped into a shop, we no longer found him waiting outside for us. Frequently the end of a good thing will make Rett so anguished that it feels like she wishes her past-self had never accepted the good thing to begin with. So I was proud of her ability in this case to simply be happy with time we had with Sirius, and then let him go with minimal sadness or searching. We’re here for at least a week, so maybe we’ll meet again!

The bag of fancy locally-roasted coffee Rett had bought yesterday turned out to be whole-bean, so one of our errands was finding a way to get it ground. The place where we bought it said they couldn’t do it, and sent us to its maker by the train station. We had no luck asking at a couple of random coffee shops, and even when we made it all the way to the train station, the shop there seemed unwilling too. But then another worker appeared, took the bag, and set off walking. We followed.

It was a surprisingly-long walk, but along the winding narrow paths of a gorgeous farm, infused with a near-Hobbiton level of pastoral peace. Run by El Albergue, a sort-of farm-resort that also operates the excellent restaurant on the plaza where we had lunch yesterday, this was an unexpected excursion that made us quite glad we had gotten the wrong coffee! We were led to the rustic barn where the actual coffee roasting happens, and the worker there graciously got us our ground coffee (not by grinding our opened bag as I’d expected, but by simply exchanging it for a new bag).

As usual, this felt like more service than we deserve, so I was glad that our next step in this serendipitous day allowed us to somewhat “pay” for it. It turned out that the similarly-rustic barn next to the roastery contained the distillery! A place Rett had already marked on our map, though one we hadn’t expected to visit anytime soon. But in the warm glow of the late-afternoon sun, we could not have planned a better time for a tasting, led in a friendly, relaxed, and informative manner (in English) by the host. We had a hard time choosing between their flavors of caña (distilled sugar cane, also used in the cocktails we had at yesterday’s lunch), so bought two bottles, Salqa Añejo (aged in American oak), and Salqa Botanizado (extremely herbal, infused with 40-some herbs, spices, and fruits). Cheers, to Sirius, and Ollantaytambo!