Posts Tagged ‘ruins’

The next stop on our family tour of the UK was Durham, where my brother is working on his PhD. He recently bought a house, so we were excited to see him and to check out his new place. He gave us a wonderful tour of castle and abbey ruins and I had a blast taking tons of photos.

We started out with a bit of a walking tour of the town, cathedral, and the castle which is part of the university.

It was a beautiful walk along the river. The cathedral is in the background.

Walking along the river into town

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After seeing Edinburgh for a little bit, we decided to see my old college friend who now lives in Oban.  This is a small port town north of Glasgow on the west coast of Scotland, and not far from all the famed Scottish isles.  It’s a beautiful place!

Oban's Coastline

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Because Hazel wasn’t feeling well during our hiking around Machu Picchu, I went up the mountain nearby myself. This was a really amazing hike – not only do you get great aerial views of Machu Picchu, but you also see tons of flora just not found elsewhere on the site.  I’ll leave the talking up to the following pictures.  I have tons of others in the Best and Rest albums as well!

Orchids found low on Montaña Machu Picchu

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Perhaps appropriately, it is not as easy as you would think to get to Machu Picchu.  This is good for a couple of reasons – keeps crowds down (a little), brings in money to keep things nice there, and makes it feel like a real adventure when you finally make it.  We did plenty of research about getting to the site.  Turns out, it is not accessible by road alone.  You basically have three choices about how to get there and then within those choices are lots of variations.  The main methods are:  hike, take a long bus ride and a short train ride and a short bus ride, or take a shortish bus or taxi ride, medium length train ride and a short bus ride.  We went for the last option since it is generally considered the easiest and the safest.

We set off the day after we got back from the jungle and headed for a minivan taxi thing.  They leave as they fill up and take you to Ollyantaytambo, a town about half of the way to Machu Picchu where you can get the train the rest of the way.  We met a new friend in the van, a really nice guy from Helsinki, and had lunch together in Ollyantaytambo before catching the train.  As we were walking from lunch to the train I got a horrible churning in my stomach and just knew that I was getting sick.  Not convenient considering we had a 1.5 hour train ride ahead of us and were going somewhere fairly remote and not accessible by road!

Well, I survived the train ride.  The train itself was really nice, leather seats, windows in the roof so you could see the views, snack served.  And the ride was scenic.  Really beautiful in fact.

Peru Rail Train to Machu Picchu

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We had a little time before our tour to the jungle, so we decided to check out the Sacred Valley and some more Inca ruins.  This valley is about 45 minutes from Cusco and has a bunch of little towns near to some cool archeological sites.  We settled on going to the town of Pisac since it is on the closer end of the valley and is known for its market.

We thought we’d catch the bus over, but after a lot of confusion and uncertainty about where we were going decided to get a taxi instead.  Finding a cab was easy (and not as expensive as you might think!) and we had an uneventful journey over the mountains to get to the valley.  As soon as we got our first view of the valley I knew we had made the right decision.  I also could tell why it is called the Sacred Valley.  Very steep mountains rise up on both sides and the whole scene is lush, green, and spectacular!

We spent the our afternoon at Pisac’s famous market (another wedding quilt fabric post coming soon!) and had some tasty coffee and dinner.  The next morning we were up bright and early to take a look around the ruins.  We grabbed a cab and headed up the mountain.  Turns out that these ruins are HUGE.  We had no idea how big they were going to be.  After walking for 2 hours we still had not seen everything.  The terracing systems were especially impressive and were absolutely enormous.  There were also fortified areas, running fountains, a tunnel through the rock and spectacular views.  It was right at the top of the hill and some of the paths were winding along the very edge of the cliff.  I’ll let the photos speak for themselves.  You can see why we were glad we had the chance to see this!

Impressive Inca Walls

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The bus to Cusco was a pretty smooth ride. Well, except that the kph monitor was malfunctioning and beeped periodcally throughout the night. At least Hazel got to sleep!

Cusco Cathedral

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