Miscellaneous Information

There is no order to the information I'm about to share; but here it is anyway. The flight was long but the girls did really well. It was an 8 hour direct flight and Anna napped well the flight there and they both slept pretty well on the flight back. Our flight back left at 1:30 am which had me a bit worried. We put them to bed at their normal time, took them to the airport through security and all the international nonsense and they stayed asleep. Security was very kind and let me keep them in their respective stroller and carrier. They have not done that for me in the past in America, I now have great love for the Peruvian airport staff.

While in Peru we did lots of cool things; we went to the Sacred Valley, Moray, hiked up to the Temple of the Sun in Ollantatambo, and took a tour of salt mines; as pictured below. There are over 3,000 family plots in these salt mines and here are the people working the salt.


The terraces fill with water from a salt water river that flows down the mountain and the families purify the salt by separating it from the dirty water and rinsing it with new water many many times. We saw a man carrying bags of salt that he had raked out of his terrace. They let us touch their section and it was really interesting. Think very dense ocean water.

We also went to a farm where they displayed different local animals. Lots of alpaca and llama and a relative of the deer called a vicuna as well as a relative of a chinchilla (I think it's called a huanaco) that I saw in the wild at Machu Picchu. We heard 15 alpacas live at Machu Picchu, we saw one. We had particular love for this Rastafarian alpaca.



Peruvians kept asking to take pictures with our children and here is one taken with one of the absolutely beautiful Peruvian children we met.

This little boys name is Miguel. His mother is a weaver and we saw her making a table runner.

This first picture was taken out the window of our hotel in Cusco (I love Cusco). The second was taken out the window of our hotel in Aguas Calientes (I wonder if anyone loves Aguas Calientes).




I don't know if you can tell but in the second picture there is a train track running right under our window. When we booked this hotel our touring company didn't even offer us another option, this was the best they had. It was a big surprise. We got off the train in Aguas Calientes and assumed there would be some way to get to our hotel that would involve either a car or a sidewalk. There were neither. We hiked our luggage, five children, and Spencer's parents up a live train track and into this hotel. It all worked out fine, but it was another adventurous surprise. On our way out we learned to leave the luggage with the hotel and a porter pushed our belongings out in an all-terrain wheel barrow.

Here we are at the Temple of the Sun in Ollantatambo. Tambo means storage and the Inca built amazing storage facilites in the mountains to keep their food fresh. The Inca loved the trapezoidal shape (I think I learned in college that it is an intrinsically strong shape). Their doorways were always trapezoidal. Here we are at the doorway entering the Temple of the Sun.

The nooks that the kids are sitting in are the areas that the Inca would put whatever they were about to sacrifice to the gods. No children were sacrificed that day. We didn't take them to Peru for that.

This last picture is of Anna in a spice and chocolate store. I like this picture because it is evidence of what great travelers children can be. They weren't always interested in what we were interested in, but they were excellent at observing and finding something to do and figure out. Spencer might suggest that Anna can be interested in food no matter where we are, but I'm choosing to see more :)