Peru, 2003

	I arrived in La Paz, Bolivia, the highest capital city in the world at 12,500', on July 22.  Zach arrived that night, and the very next day we began our journey to Cuzco.  In this picture we have already purchased bus tickets for Copacabana, Peru and Zach is getting some crackers for the bus ride.  This is a typical stand selling soft drinks, crackers, water, and lots of other stuff.  You see stands like this everywhere and they generally sell all the same stuff.
	Near the bus station are ice cream stands.  This picture shows the ice cream factories from where the ice cream stands get their ice cream.
	Behind Zach are the ice cream stands.  Notice how the hillsides in the background are covered by houses all the way to the rim of the mesa. Mostly poor people live in the houses higher up, the rich people live lower in the city.
	Our bus to Cuzco had to cross this part of Lake Titicaca.  Here is the ferry.  Showing uncommon good sense, they had the passengers exit the bus before the traverse, and take a people boat across, shown below.
	Here is the people ferry.  No life preservers. Heck, we were only a half mile from shore in the center and at 12,000' elevation, the water would be plenty warm for a swim.
	Other than the boat sinking I felt really safe crossing Lake Titicaca.  I finally realized why -- Here is the Lake Titicaca Naval station. No fear of being attacked by a foreign power in this lake!
	Three vehicles crossing on the ferry.  No, I didn't see a single one tip over.
	Sunset on Lake Titicaca.  The Inca's believed that the first Inca was born in Lake Titicaca.  BTW as I alluded to before, Lake Titicaca is at a very high elevation -- around 12,000' in the Andes mountains.
	The Peruvians drink Mate de Coca, or Cocoa Tea.  Since it has cocaine chemicals in it, it gives a nice wake up feeling in the morning (and any other time of day for that matter.)  I'll let you know in a few weeks if this is detected by pre employment drug tests.
	Here a lady is sweeping donkey dung off the field.  She said to me 'Take a picture, take a picture!', so I did.  Then she charged me 1 Boliviano.  Geez, I should have known she was a model.
	Guess what -- more models.  These were expensive ones, demanding 10 Bolivianos apiece perhaps to pay for llama food.
	Here we were crossing from Bolivia to Peru.  We already had our passports stamped with exit stamps from Bolivia and we hadn't entered Peru yet.  I wonder if any laws apply where we were right then?  Perhaps we could have been murdered, or better yet we could have murdered somebody else!
	Not shown in any pictures, while in Copacabana, we took a boat ride to the Island of the Sun, where the first Inca was born.  After that we boarded a bus for Puno where the floating islands of Uros existed.  Here in this picture we are boating out to the floating islands of Uros.  A native is rowing back to land.  He  seems to row backwards, or maybe we row backwards and he rows correctly.
	Those houses are on floating islands.  The islands are made of many layers of dried reeds and chunks of dried reed roots. The islands are anchored by ropes and some sort of anchor or stake under the water.  Sometimes during a storm an island will cut loose and blow far away.
	Here our boat is going to let us off on a floating island.  The reed surface is spongy and you sink a little with each step.  But you never go all the way in to the water thank goodness. One native poked a stick through the bottom of the island and it was about 10 feet down to the bottom of the water.  And no, with that hole in it, the island didn't sink.
	Here are some little girls playing in a rowboat.
	They row backwards too.  They row better than some adults I know.
	Here is their father on a reed boat.  The boats are unsinkable because they are solid reeds.
	Me on a reed boat ride.
	Me on the big bird.  These bird towers serve the traditional purpose of allowing goofy tourists to take pictures.
	After  leaving Puno and the floating islands, we took an all night bus ride to Cuzco.  Cuzco was a fantastic city.  Very clean and lots of fun stuff todo.  It used to be the administrative headquarters, or capital, of the Inca empire.  This is the staging city for the Inca trail treks and the departure for Machu Picchu, the sacred Inca city on the mountaintop. Machu Picchu is about 2-3 hours to the northwest from here.
	Another picture of the Plaza de Armenas in Cuzco. "Most of the streets in Cuzco are lined with Inca built stone walls which now form the foundations of modern or colonial buildings. Cuzco is the archeological capital of the Americas and the longest continually inhabited city on the continent" From South America on a Shoestring. Here's an link to an overview of the Inca empire Here is another link to Inca info at encyclopaedia.com
	On the way to Machu Picchu, our cab driver let us take a picture.  There are many large mountains such as this, many over 20,000 feet. Notice also the agricultural fields terraced up the mountainside to the left of me in the picture.
	The day we visited Machu Picchu, it rained hard all morning.  Here is a somewhat clear shot of the houses at Machu Picchu.  We had hoped to hike the Inca trail for 3 days, then visit Machu on the 4th, but there is a quota on the trail and it was full.  We needed to wait a week, which we didn't have, so we went straight to Machu Picchu. Since there are no pictures of the Inca trail on my website, you can hike the Virtual Inca trail
	While at Machu Picchu we hiked the Huayna Picchu trail, which goes to the top of the steep peek at the far end of the ruins.  Zach is in this picture, can you see him?  If you look in the previous picture, the nearest peak is the one zach is now on.  We climbed past this peak to the following peak which was the highest.
	On top of Huayna Picchu, is this building, I forget what it was for.  Then even more steps going to the very summit about 100 feet highet.  It was quite mystical with all the clouds, rain, and steep mountainsides.
	Here are the stairs immediately below the building. Pretty steep, wet, and shallow.
	Me descending Huayna Picchu.
	Steps carved out of granite.  They had no steel tools to do their carving.  They only used other stones.
	The round building is the temple of the sun.  On the solstices the sun would shine through one of the windows for 7 minutes each morning.  One window was for the winter solstice, one for the summer solstice. Also notice the stonework qualities.  The wall on the right was the common quality used for houses.  The wall on the left and the temple of the Sun were done with super fine quality, as were all the temples and religious constructions.  Upon closer examination, you will see the rocks are fit extremely close together, almost as if they were cut with laser or a modern cutting tool.
	Here is another example of the super fine quality.  Notice the rocks aren't just stacked, each one is individually cut to fit into it's place.
	A water channel cut in to the granite.
	A sacrificial altar.  80 percent of the bones found in Machu Picchu were women indicating many  sacrifices.  Or maybe they just complained too much.
	Here is Zach in front of some religious structure.  It also uses the super fine quality.  Historians believe the collapsing of the wall to the right was from gold miners digging the ground out and not putting it back correctly.
	Terraced hillside at Machu Picchu.  Our tour guide said the terraces were for erosion control and not agriculture, but other guides said it was used for agriculture. I think it was just for photographic purposes.
	Temple of the Condor below the tree to the left a little. Huayna Picchu would be to the photographer's right and the previous picture's terraced hillside is to the left. Here is a cool link to a site about the mysteries of Machu Picchu
	The market in Agua Calientes, the modern town closest to Machu Picchu.  This is where the buses pick you up to take you to Machu Picchu.
	A chess set.  Notice one side is Incan pieces and the other side is Spanish pieces.  Cute at first, but not so funny after a little thought.
	After returning from Machu Picchu, we hired some guides to take us trekking through the mountains around Cuzco.  We didn't have all the camping gear we would need to cook and camp, so we hired somebody to do the work for us.  They brought a horse and two mules to carry the stove, food, tents, and common gear. Pretty de-lux. We just walked with our cameras and water bottles. The guide said it would be 10 km and take 6 hours. We thought 6 hours for 6 miles no way! Well it was more like 20 km and it was between 13,000 and 14,000 feet elevation. It took us 8 hours of hiking, and we were in good shape. The guide was way off on his estimate.
	We encountered these farmers harvesting a grass used in making adobe bricks, pronounced eechew, but spelled like I have no idea.  That grass only grows above 11,000 feet.
	Here are the two guys picking the eechew.  We paid them a boliviano for the photo op.
	Mountains
	We stopped here for lunch.
	A four star stopover with lunch table and tablecloth even. Wilfredo in the red is our cook.
	The horse guys driving the horses and mules toward the saddle.
	Very near camp we leave the canyon we were in and can see way down to a town called La Maya or something like that. Our campsite will be at some Inca ruins around the left of the slope we see in the forground.
	Wilfredo the cook on the ground, Daniel our guide is next from the left, and Zach. We will camp down the slope to the left, but not all the way at the bottom where the river is.
	We camped at these Inca ruins.  The ninth Inca named Pachacutec lived here around 1438.  He was famous for the high quality of craftsmanship done by the workers under him and he extended the Inca empire by conquering the central Andes. His son Tupac Yupanqui, the tenth Inca, then extended the empire from what is now Quito, Ecuador to Santiago, Chile. The eleventh Inca, Huayna Capac was the last to rule a united empire. When he died he divided the empire in half, giving the northern half to one son, Atahualpa, and the southern half to his other son, Huascar. This began civil wars and at the same time European diseases such as smallpox arrived faster than the European conquerors themselves, and contributed to the Incas' demise. The final blow was when Francisco Pizarro marched down from Panama to finish the dirty deed in 1532.
	After finishing the trek, we did a downhill mountain ride for 2 hours.  We passed these salt processing pools.  A trickle of water coming out of the mountain is extremely salty.  When the water evaporates, it leaves behind salt crystals.  These pools are where the water sits to evaporate. One family 'farms' one to three pools.
	Zach and Carlos, our Mountain bike guide, scanning the salt fields. The End!