Oh The Things We Do (When We Don't Have To Work)

It's nice not having to go into the office on a Monday morning.

Our toughest task today was trying to stay in front of the tourist buses. And take good pix. Thankfully, we succeeded.

After breakfast and a delicious cappuccino from across the street from our hotel, we headed for the ruins of Ollantaytambo. While there's a serene, spiritual feel today, it's actually the site of a horrible past. When the conquistadors were defeated in their first attempt to take the fortress, they returned with a force four times the size of the original. You can figure out the rest.

We then met up again with Jesus, our driver from yesterday, to take us for the rest of the day to a couple of remote sites -- with a lunch stop in Urubamba.

While it doesn't sound like much, locals urged us to visit the salt mines, or salinas, that have been used for centuries.

Glad we did. Stepping onto the mountainside covered with thousands of bright white salt pans was surreal. We walked the top edge of the pans, as workers -- young and old -- toiled at extracting the salt and packing into large white bags. The guide book says it's used for cattle salt licks, but Jesus said it's used as table salt, too.

He then drove us across a lunar-like landscape to Moray, an ancient and fascinating site where the Incas dug huge, quarry-like holes in the ground, and then terraced them to grow different crops on different levels. It was a sort of giant farm experiment to see what grew best at the many levels.

Jesus then took a rough dirt road as a shortcut back to Ollantaytambo, which was right next to the train tracks. Unexpectedly, a local farmer had rerouted irrigation flues using river rocks in a way that flooded the road and made it impassable. Instead of making the huge trek back the way we came, Jesus and Brad removed the rocks to drain the mini-lake that had formed. And then they replaced the rocks after Jesus made it safely through.

Here are some of those great pix we were fortunate to snap today.

At the top of the Ollantaytambo ruins.

 No, that's not a Greek Island village. It's thousand of salt pans that have been used for centuries.

It may look like crop circles, but it's a huge terraced pit that was used for farm experimentation.

 There are snow-capped mountaintops behind those clouds.

The Sacred Valley.