Peru: Ollantaytambo

Ollantaytambo is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in South America, but i had never heard of it. It was built in the around 1440 by the Incan Emperor Pachacuti, who had conquered and destroyed the previous civilization, dating to somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 years old. The city built by Pachacuti consisted of terraced farmland and housing for the royal classes. Amazingly, 100 years later the Incans successfully defended the city from attacking conquistadors in the Battle of Ollantaytambo. With the arrival of Spanish reinforcements in Cusco a year later the Pachacuti was forced to retreat to the hidden mountain city of Vilcabamba where the Incans survived as an independent state for another 30 years.

From down by the river where the train station is you can spy a glacier and sub-peak of of Mount Veronica

Outside of town a pretty trail winds through farmland. I don't know how far it goes but there were a number of locals passing by.

Where i come from the valleys are U-shaped. Here they are V-shaped.

The old gateway into the town

The road we came in on curves up a hill from the river and enters the town at the same point as the trail.

When we drove into the city in our cab i knew i was going to like it. It turned out to be the most enjoyable city I visited in Peru, even though we only stayed for one night. For us it was the end of our travels by car and our last stop before heading to Machu Piccu by train. As such i was under the impression that the town was the end of the road, so i was kind of confused about the procession of noisy trucks carrying explosives and toxic materials through the bumpy town square all day long. Later in Panama when i had a decent internet connection i looked it up and found out there are actually two other roads that leave the city and cross over the mountains into other valleys with spectacular scenery. I did zero research before this trip. I should have done more than zero, but it didn't matter because we didn't have any time to do more than we did.

The first thing you will come across after entering the town, besides dogs, is this shrine/temple of the type commonly seen all over Central and South America.

The main street through town. This is the same water aqueduct that goes along the trail above the farmland outside of town.

I'd kind of like the entrance to my house to be like this one.

From about the middle of town you can see intriguing ruins looming up above.

The bridge down there crosses the Patakancha River and on the other side in front of the ruins is another portion of town called 'Araqhama, with adobe buildings in a more Spanish style. The road over there is more cobbled and usually occupied with large noisy buses or explosive trucks. I couldn't understand why it was always so busy but apparently at this time that narrow bridge is the only thing connecting large parts of the country. I'm wondering if floods or landslides destroyed a better route somewhere else.

The Patakancha River divides the town into two areas.

In 'Araqhama, corners and cornering.

The really cool thing about Ollantaytambe, aside from the awesome ancient look of it, was a series a water channels flowing down the four north/south streets in the old portion of the city. The little canals connect after 8 blocks and then flow along the main street in town to the east right out of the city and into the valley farmland. They may have originally been used as a kind of open sewer (and maybe they still are) but i found their presence relaxing.

Hoodies are popular with the youth down there too. There were a few high peaks visible from town, usually in the clouds.

This building was a bit ususual because it was nearly a stantdalone structure instead of part of a large block.

A 17,000 foot ridgeline off the west side of 18,600 ft. Mt. Veronica. The mountain was not visible through most of the town, but it was down at the train station, where our hotel was, and some of the rooms had a great balcony view of it (not ours). Notice the nice place to live on the far right.

We were only in Ollantaytambo for one night, and we stayed at the train station hotel which is a bit of a walk down the hill by the Urumbamba. Although our room was spacious, we soon found out it was the worst room in the hotel because it was the only one that was over the train platform. We could literally hop out the balcony door onto a passing train, and since the train engines stopped right next to our room we had to keep the window closed because of the fumes. So don't get that room.

The Incans designed their doorways to be the perfect size for my passage.

In the ruins we came up this steep narrow passage between buildings.

Looking down the rest of the valley that we couldn't see until we got up on the ruins. The dirt road directly below is a major road through a large are of the country. We never visited the part of town down.

Some unfinished cut stones. People who believe in Mystic Lasers think some of the ruins are 12,000-15,000 years old. We should have looked at this area longer but at the time there were some high winds kicking a lot of dust up and we were trying to avoid a giant crowd of bus people.

A close up of the wall joints. It may be hard to see in this picture of the inside corner of a wall but the Incans insanely decided to carve the corner into the two stones on the right, instead of having the stones meet AT the corner. So those two stones have been carved to turn 90 degrees for one inch, then they meet the next stone.

This was a structure similar to one we saw in Pisac. This would have been a covered hallway and the original floor probably would have had tunnels for guinea pigs to live in. When you're hungry you just grab one.

The terraced fields at Ollantaytambo were still green and were maintained. There were some more ruins on the hillside across the valley. The terraces here were shorter than the ones at Pisac.

Ben is idiotically demonstrating how to ascend Incan stairs (like Mario, i guess). The terraces have diagonal sets of protrusions that were used as stairs to get from one terrace to another, like an old school arcade platformer. Stones were spaced farther apart for stairs going up, and closer together for stairs going down. These are stairs going up.

A fun cliffside trail led us to a greener, more relaxing area away from the main ruins.

When we came back a few days later we had to get off the train and switch to a cab to ride back to Cusco. On the way out of town we were momentarily stopped when a huge crowd of police emerged over the top of the hill and came running down the street, grabbing tables and chairs right out from in front of baffled tourists who were having coffee and eating. The police looked really excited and threw all the furniture into the back of a big truck where other police stacked it up. It was totally bizarre and when we asked our driver about he told us that there is a law that you can't have tables outside a restaurant without a special permit. I imagine the permit must be too costly, because all the restaurant owners ignore the law. So, occasionally the police come by in a massive raid and steal all the furniture as a penalty.

The old city is built on a grid with 4 streets running uphill (parallel to the river) crossed by 7 opposing avenues. The uphill streets each have a water canal on the side that runs down the main street. It adds a nice ambiance. You are never far from the sound of water.

You can see ruins up on the cliff right above Lares Calle. We went up behind the wall here to look at some pottery.

This was in the courtyard of an artists home. Behind the tarp he had a workshop where he made nice but expensive pottery.

These guys had slaughtered a pig and were washing it down in the street before they butchered it.

The dogs in Ollantaytambo each had their own territory. They would post themselves at the street intersections keeping an eye on the next dog down, making sure there were no intrusions. "Rogue" dogs would wander around the town, looking for food, sex, and entertainment, sometimes taunting the guards, sometimes propositioning them.

Buildings in the northern part of the town are built with common fieldstones while the ones in the southern portion of town are built with cut and fitted stone.

I roof on this place definitely didn't look like it would hold up in an earthquake. But it had Pinnochio and Tweety Bird? on the wall and i don't know who else.

This street, Patacalle, was along the river at the edge of the grid and went much farther than the rest.

Eventually we came upon the main road that leads out of town to the north and the road turned to concrete and got steeper. We turned around and made our way back into town. By that time it was late enough that locals were returning home from work.

An example of modern bricks used to build an additional floor on top of the original Incan stonework.

Awww, this dog was so sad

No wait, he's totally fine! It was just born looking naturally pitiful.

A weird Peruvian coin toss game that was at our hotel.

The beautiful view outside our hotel room window. These are a whole bunch of people who arrived at 11pm. I don't know where they came from, maybe from one of the big mines down valley. It was like sleeping in a subway station.