27th September: Cuzco

We were woken up early by the bright sunlight coming through the window in the ceiling.  In the morning, we did a quick update of the blog and enjoyed a really nice breakfast at the hotel (with homemade bread and marmalade).  We then met with the agency with which we will walk up the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. We agreed to come back for a briefing with the whole group a few days later.

Although this agency also organised a tour around the sacred valley of the Incas, we decided to book with a much less expensive one for the following day.

John in front of an Inca wall in Hatunrumiyoc street  (the wall is now part of the Archbishop's Palace)

After a late lunch, we visited the Inca museum, which held a great exhibition about various pre-Inca (Wari, Tiwanaku, Nazca) and Inca cultures.  The Incas had a surprisingly brief period of ascendancy before the arrival of the Spanish.  Still, they managed to built a great civilisation uniting a great part of what are now parts of Bolivia, Chile, Colombia and Peru.  We learnt about Inca agricultural practices (some still used nowadays in Peru), clothing, jewelry, and weapons.  Portraits of Incas dating from the 18th century were particularly interesting as some of them were still wearing their traditional clothes, while others only had some ornaments.  All of them showed the coat of arms of the Inca families. Few such portraits are left as the Spanish ordered their destruction to avoid fostering pro-Inca (and therefore anti-Spanish) sentiment.

The next room had an exhibition on Incaismo, a movement of the 19th and 20th centuries for the preservation of the Inca culture.  Such movement was present in paintings (for instance of all the Inca "kings"), photographs of traditional clothing for celebrations, and textiles.  In the courtyard of the museum, women were weaving following the traditional method.  Their products were offered for sale.  This initiative is aimed at keeping the tradition alive.

We then headed back to the hotel for a visit of the projects created by a Dutch woman about 15 years ago.  Moved by the poverty of some children in Cuzco during her first trip, she came back to the city a few later.  She started by hosting a few children (soon becoming 12 ) in her apartment.  She then managed to place another 24 of them with two host families, still providing for their food, clothing, medical bills and other needs.  With a generous donation she had received, she bought a house and transformed it into a hotel, the profits from which she used to finance her charity.  With the proceeds, she created centers for children from 6 to 12, where they are provided with food twice day and can have a shower twice a week.  They also have support for homework, medical care,  and a library.  Centers are complementary to school, they either come in the morning or in the afternoon, when they do not have class (in Peru, class is either in the morning or in the afternoon).  She is close to the families and tries to support them to the extent possible.

In 2008, this Dutch woman created another hotel (Ninos II) a few streets away, where we are staying.  Nowadays, her charity takes care of 600 children.  The proceeds from the hotel only cover a little part of the expenses, so the charity is still dependent on donations.  We met some of the children, who were really friendly, and had a tour around the facilities of two of the centers.  We enjoyed in particular the library (whose walls were decorated like a scene from a book) and the cinema (to which children can go to when they accumulate enough points for good behaviour).

View of Plaza de Armas, early evening

In the evening we had an enjoyable dinner with Adam and Donna (whom we met during our trip to Uyuni) and some of their friends from Australia, at the place we had been the day before.  The food we chose was this time much nicer, a stir-fry with lots of vegetables.