Calca, PE to Pisac, PE

14.4 mi / 10.7 mph / 249 ft. climbing
Home: Jochmann’s AirBNB

We were still alive on this earth when we woke up, and a glance out the window brought further relief, showing that the wildfire on the mountainside had not moved much nearer than where we had left it last night. In fact, it was difficult to discern clouds from smoke, but stepping outside, the eerily-massive crackling sounds proved that the overnight chill had failed to extinguish the inferno.

Our country AirBNB, with white smoke still rising from the mountains across the valley.

Our AirBNB was a “shared room in a house” situation, and our hostess departed for a couple hours in the morning, presumably for a yoga session in Pisac or something similar, leaving us alone with her cute dog Canela (“Cinnamon”, en Ingles). She, and her place in this near-rural setting, gave the impression of a one-time Pisac-hippie, but in contrast to the wealthy compound-dwellers we passed yesterday near Urubamba who decamped for privacy and space, it felt more like our young hostess moved out here past Calca for the lower cost-of-living. The risk of wildfire is probably not something she included in her calculations!

Upon departure, we made a quick backtrack along the off-highway gravel road to the little-visited Inca (and perhaps earlier) ruins of Urco. Ironically the site supposedly has a ceremonial focus on water, but it was powerless to do anything about the fire blazing just across the valley.

The “tower” at Urco, with fires burning in the background.
A view through a window in the Urco tower to another window to a village beyond.
In the center of the ceremonial section of Urco, this giant natural boulder sat surrounded by stone walls, and carved with a channel to send water through this zoomorphic “spout” (we would later see the “spout” replicated on a mural in Pisac, indicating the local importance placed on a relatively-minor feature).
Flames are still visible up on the mountain, though the relatively-low amount of smoke and its inability to hide them is perhaps a positive sign?
On our side of the river, the hills are filled with water, the opposite of fire.
Riding down the gravel backroad to Calca.
Check out the sheep in this mural absolutely going off on the dog. Our Lamby was glad to feel the solidarity; as a dog chew-toy, she is super-wary of even-friendly-looking canines as well.
It really feels like the towns in this southern part of Peru really try to outdo each other for the most-aggressive, frightening “Welcome to <X>, we’re glad to kill, er, I mean, have you!” monuments. They’ve clearly injected this giant puma with a boatload of steroids.
This giant animal is a bit more friendly-looking than the Puma, but the extremely-perky udders create their own scariness.

Yesterday’s challenges on the gravel roads led us to finish the day on the main highway, and that revealed that there is a lot less traffic through the Sacred Valley between Urubamba and Pisac than there is between Urubamba and Ollantaytambo, so today we just stuck with the more-direct, more-efficient asphalt highway, and it made our progress much quicker.

Riding up the Sacred Valley, now far enough from the fires that the smoke is lessening.
Some pretty wild rocks live in this Sacred Valley.
Schools or sports centers will frequently have student-painted murals, and this one of Michael Jordan (or, Ron Harper wearing Jordan’s uniform) certainly caught my eye. No idea what inspired them to use this image from a meaningless April 1996 game against the Milwaukee Bucks though! (that’s Vin Baker defending.)

The short day meant that we arrived into Pisac well before our 3pm AirBNB check-in, so we headed to the Plaza for a nice lunch at La Ruta, where I took immediate advantage of the expat influence in the town by ordering a Pasta Arrabbiata dish, something I haven’t seen anywhere in Peru, even in the most-Western-catering restaurants we’ve visited. It’s the best-smelling Peruvian town we’ve been in, with all sorts of hippie-scents (incense, etc.) wafting out of the shops and into the narrow mostly-pedestrian streets. After lunch we walked our bikes over to the mercado and gringo-focused supermarket, where we surprisingly had to hide a bit from the heaviest mid-day rain (including thunder) that we’ve encountered in months. It seems that the dry season in Peru may be coming to an end, which will present complications for us, but could not have been timed better for the wildfires.

Looking down on the Plaza in Pisac from our lunch restaurant (searching for a place to hide our bikes from the hot sun was a failure, so they sit there next to one of the poles, but soon the rain would make the heat irrelevant).
The streets of Pisac are a somewhat-more-artificial version of Ollantaytambo’s, charmingly-narrow, with gutters down the middle, but conveniently smoother.
The view from our very nice 3rd-floor AirBNB towards the Inca archeological site at Pisac, which we will explore tomorrow.

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