Posted in photography, tagged photography, Pumamarka, solstice hike on July 24, 2009| Leave a Comment »
The rest of Jarrard´s pictures of the three of us. Check out more festival photos at http://jarrardcole.wordpress.com/.
Looking cute.
Hiram Bingham pose.
The girls.
Jacob laughing, with Mount Veronica in the background.
UNC! We really like doing this.
Jacob on the solstice hike.
The three of us at the solstice hike.
Today was another myserious festival day where we had no school, so we spent the morning at Pumamarka, an Inca citadel about 7 kilometers north of Ollantaytambo.
Granted, we haven´t been to Macchu Picchu yet, but these were by far the most spectacular ruins I´ve seen so far. Pumamarka overlooks the Rio Patacancha in the middle of a valley surrounded by massive mountains.
We wanted to be back in Ollanta by a decent hour, aka lunch, so we decided to take pay a taxi driver to take us to Pumamarka and then hike the two-hour trip back to Ollanta afterwards. We´d been told the route was pretty flat, and it was, but there were definitely some steep parts on the way up that our driver was none too happy about and I felt guilty, but pleased, to be skipping.
The drive up through the valley was gorgeous, and we stopped several times to coax livestock out of our path. Our driver finally dropped us off about a 100 meters below the fortress. I´m pretty sure he´d had enough of potholes and cows and was ready to be done with us.
The view was breathtaking, the sun was shining, and the ruins were empty save a lonely-looking guard who let us in a wooden gate. We had the place entirely to ourselves for about two hours, during which we took innumerable silly pictures of each other, ate some avocados and cheese, and sang way too loudly than was actually necessary. We tipped the guard on our way out, mostly as an apology for our atrocious renditions of songs from the Sound of Music. But I swear, the hills were alive.
The walk back down through the valley was beautiful, and we saw every type of livestock in existance. We saw baby goats and sheep, and learned that cows have horns as well as the torros. Who knew.
We arrived back in Ollanta almost five hours after we´d left, with some catalog-worthy pictures of ourselves and a nice range of sunburns. Mission success.
(I´m trying out a new format for uploading pictures that´s way faster. You can click on any of the thumbnail images to expand them. Let me know what you think!)
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