Days 15-16

Rett had come up with a whole line of sites she wanted to see in the Sacred Valley, and initially we’d assumed that we would slowly hop with our bikes from the west “end” at Ollantaytambo, to the east end at Pisac, 37 miles away. But the Incas seemed to revel in making their sites bike-inaccessible, so Rett arranged a private taxi (via Taxidatum) to take us on a tour of the salt pans at Maras, and the circular terraces at Moray. Plus, we really liked our AirBNB home in Ollantaytambo, so continuing to use it as our home base made more sense than hopping ahead.

With the taxi due to pick us up at on the plaza at 10am, we went out for a pancake(!) breakfast at the Sunshine Cafe. Despite everything being in English (including the name!), the server/cook spoke only Spanish with us, which actually makes us feel better about ourselves (at least if we can understand everything we need to!), since it means we must not come off as totally hopeless with our Spanish, and as visitors, we’re the ones who should be doing the extra “work” anyway.

Our taxi driver met us a bit early, and after the slow rumble out of Ollantaytambo’s stone streets, we moved frighteningly-quickly up the valley, especially when we began ascending the switchbacks up from Urubamba. And no, our driver was actually quite safe and professional, it’s just that compared to riding a loaded bicycle, the valley floor drops away with shocking speed. He communicated with us (just a few necessary sentences) mostly in English, and initially confirmed that he was taking us to Chinchero, Maras, and Moray. Well, no, actually Chinchero wasn’t on our list, but since it’s part of a “standard” tour that the taxi company runs (usually on a one-way transfer from Cusco to Ollantaytambo), why not?

Chinchero was mostly a nicely-maintained set of squared-off terraces, attached to a town of the same name. We were right to not have it on our list of places to go out of our way to see, but in this case as a (doubly) “free” add-on, it was totally worth the extra stop; it didn’t raise our initially-quoted taxi price (~US$62), and it further amortized the cost of our “Boleto Turistico” tickets, which are 10-day passes (~US$36 each) that allow entry to 16 different sites around Cusco and the Sacred Valley.

Next up was Maras, a bewildering conglomeration of bright-white Minecraft blocks tumbling down a mountainside. This salt-production facility existed long before the Incas, and is still actively producing salt today. Simultaneously a visual treat and a marvel of prehistoric technology/engineering, it was a very different flavor from anything else we’ve visited in the Sacred Valley.

It’s all birthed from a single, small, hypersaline spring emanating from the mountainside. Ocean water is 3.5% salt; this spring is 25%! Through a network of channels that must rival the human circulatory system (but here without even a pump, relying solely on gravity!), the salt water is distributed to every single one of the 4000+ shallow pools that have been built on the mountainside. A pool is filled with a couple inches of water, which evaporates over three days in the bright sun of the Andean dry season, and the process is repeated for a month, at which point the salt is dug out. Apparently this system has had sufficient economic viability to allow continuous salt production here for hundreds or thousands of years, but now an entry fee of S/20 (~US$5.60, not included in the Boleto Turistico), it seems like they must make as much money from tourists as they ever did on salt!

Our taxi driver was purely for transport, so our visits to each site were self-guided, but he was easy to find and ready to go whenever we finished up at each site. Our final drive took us back westward, but still atop the surprisingly-flat plateau on the south end of the Sacred Valley. We’d lucked into one of the clearest days we’d seen in the valley, which meant that we not only had great views of many snow-capped peaks as we were driven around, we also had ideal lighting in which to view these archeological structures that can almost turn into abstract art when photographed.

Our final stop was at the unique circular terraces of Moray, which are a sharp (rounded?) contrast to the squared-off terraces of Chinchero.

Unlike Maras, where the current practitioners could tell us exactly why the salt pans exist (if we couldn’t figure it out on our own), Moray is just like every other Inca site, where the reason for the structure’s creation is forever lost. But that doesn’t stop people from barfing forth theories, and other people from taking those theories as fact and running with them. Here, the dominant theory (so dominant that even the highway road signs forthrightly declare it as fact) is that it was an agricultural research center, where the Incas could use the differing “microclimates” of each terrace to experiment with different crops, and then they would spread their learnings throughout the Empire.

This theory makes absolutely no sense.

First, various websites (all simply copying from each other) claim that there is a 15°C (27°F) temperature difference between the top and bottom terraces, which is the whole basis for the “differing microclimates” idea.

No. Just….no.

Ok, I admit, I didn’t walk ~100 feet down to the center of the pit with a thermometer, but I can guarantee you that it is not 27°F warmer there. In the real world, temperature decreases by 3-5°F for every 1000 feet, an effect I have quite a lot of experience (especially here in Peru) verifying with a thermometer! So you’re trying to tell me there there is something magical about these circles that creates a temperature variation in one hundred feet that would normally require a seven thousand foot change?!

Next, has no one looked at any other Inca terraces? The inextricable nature of all terraces is that they cover a range of elevation! That’s the entire point of them, to flatten a slope! And many cover an elevation range greater than the ~100 foot maximum at Moray. So would that not make every set of terraces a potential location for “agricultural research”?

But if we accept with the stupid assumption that varying elevation is key, why would they have built an auxiliary set of rings at Moray that’s only two levels (about 12 feet) deep? Why build something at this supposed research center that has zero research value?

More broadly, you’re telling me that these Incas, who hadn’t even invented the wheel, and who had no written language, had nonetheless developed the scientific method and were adept at executing large-scale experimental research projects?! C’mon! It’s clear that the modern people promoting this inane theory don’t even understand the skepticism and hypothesis-testing required by the scientific method, but they’re telling me that the Incas did?!

“So what’s your theory then, smart guy?” Well, I just take it as further evidence of my broad all-encompassing theory of Inca architecture: “we built it because we thought it would be fuckin’ cool!” I mean, just look at these things! They’re incredibly artistic and aesthetically pleasing. That’s why tourists come here 500 years later, not because they want to learn the best corn variety to plant in their home garden. Archeologists seem to have failed to consider that the primary explanation for these mysteries could simply be that Incas shared our human drive to build “cool-ass shit”. Which at best strikes me as culturally-blinded, and at worst, racist!

Dropped back in Ollantaytambo, it was nice to feel much less-tired than we usually would after such a solid day of sight-seeing. But we’re sad that our time in this magical town is finally coming to its end! Our AirBNB hostess spontaneously offered to let us stay another day at no charge, which was certainly tempting, but we’re already booked to move on.