How does salt taste? Peruvian chronicles. Day 4.

This was the day I took my first tour outside of Cusco, so I perform my morning ritual of getting up with enough time to have breakfast and not having to rush to the street with my food almost still on my mouth. While I was having my coffee and watching the local news, I heard that there had been a small quake during the night. Luckily, I didn’t notice it.

As previously arranged, I went to the travel agency hyper-punctually and one of the girls from there took me to Kusipata Square, where the buses set off to different places. The organization there -or lack of it- far from being nerve-wrecking, is funny, because while you wait the tour guides and the drivers place every passenger in a bus and that’s it.

After a while, the bus took off and the guide started joking about making a stop in a bungee jumping place right outside of Cusco (at least I hoped he was joking, and so he was). Not even crazy. The first real stop was quite close, a small town call Chinchero. There we visited a establishment ran by a cooperative group of local women dedicated to textile work in a entirely handmade, natural and slow way. While they invited us with coca tea, they showed us all the process of the alpaca wool since it has been cut until it’s a finished product. The first step is washing it. To this purpose they use a root they pick up in the mountain and then they scrape it and in contact with water it makes so much foam. They also use it as shampoo and they say it prevents grey hair -though in my opinion I’d say ethnic and genetics play their role too). Anyway, the wool gets sooooo clean that I wanted to go into the mountain and pick some of those roots myself. .

After being washed, the wool is spinned, and then the magic of coloring begins. Every color they use is made out of natural pigments, different leaves, flowers and even bugs. Yes, the “cochinillo” (sorry but couldn’t find its English name) is used for all the red tones, depending on the amount of time the wool is immersed in the ink. And moreover, the cochinilla is also used as make-up. Applauses.

One of the women from Chinchero dying the wool. In this case she is showing the different tones of red obtained from the “cochinilla”.

Amazed with what I had seen, I went back to the road. Next stop: Moray archeological site. My jaw dropped one more time. This place wasn’t a city nor a fortress, it was an agricultural experimentation centre. Exactly like I was taught at primary school, this place is a group of farming terraces, approximately 5,9 feet high each. The deeper down you go, the higher the temperature is, it is estimated that the temperature difference between each terrace is 1 Celsius grade and that’s how they tested the growth of the different vegetables. The visitors don’t have access to walk between all the terraces but there’s an specific area to walk through where you can experiment the temperature variation yourself. 

I ended the walk around the site a little bit before the last ones of the group so I sat on a stone just to contemplate the place and keep loking at the snowed peeks I’ve been seeing since we got out of Cusco. I don’t know why, but I could stay staring at them my whole life.

Though they don’t seem so big in the photo, each terrace is taller than myself.

Once more, we went back to the van and the road, now heading to Maras salt mines. From the road on the top of the mountain you can spot the salt pools. This place is exploited by a group of families and each one of them has a certain number of pools. The super salty water (guess how I know this) goes down from the mountain to the pools. There, the salt is filtered and the rest of the water evaporates. There is also a market area with food and crafts. In that moment I remembered the time my father had brought me a small Alpaca made of salt from the North of Argentina and how it melted in the humidity of my Uruguayan kitchen.

The salt pools seen from the road.

A local woman filtering the salt in a pool.

This day, the altitude hit me a little bit, but it was all thanks to my lack of food between breakfast and 3 or 4 pm. After all, my “eating like a baby” method works better. When I got back to Cusco I went straight to the travel agency where I had hired my tour to Machu Picchu to hire the bus service to go up the mountain. Not only for comfort reasons but a little bit of precaution too, because I don’t want to be already tired when I get into the site and not be able to enjoy it. When I told this to one of my closest friends, known for her brutal honesty, she replied “And how were you thinking to go up?”

After a nice, hot shower, I started preparing myself for the next day, when I’ll get to see the Sacred Valley of the Incas.