Sacred Valley
With a day between our arrival in the Cusco region and our trip to Machu Picchu, we took the opportunity to explore the Sacred Valley. We started the day in Ollantaytambo City, walking through this old town. 
We saw the ruins but didn’t enter as we had Machu Picchu up for tomorrow. We shopped in their markets and got a couple of nice handmade items. Our destination for the day was Cusco since our train to Machu Picchu leaves from there. It was a two-hour Drive so we arranged for a driver with our AirBNB host. Given the long drive and few stops, we also picked up lunch to take with us. Along the way saw capsule hotel rooms and climbers.
We had seen these on YouTube a few months ago and we were entertained that we came across these just driving along the way.
Our first stop was the Maras Salt Mines via Urubamba. Very interesting stop. It provided a look into one of the industries that support the Valley community. The cost to enter was 10 soles each, and we picked up a drink and enjoyed our lunch while there. 
Kami saw a near-disaster as another tourist passed out near the edge of a steep drop-off. She helped grab him to prevent his fall. It was our first experience seeing someone suffer the effects of altitude sickness. While we had a slight headache, it was nothing like this poor guy displayed. Thankfully he didn’t fall over the cliff and the medical responders evacuated him to a lower elevation.
Down the road, we stopped at an Incan textile demonstration at Ch’aska in Chinchero. Ashley got to pet alpacas and I got a free Incan dance. The goal, of course, was to get us to buy their goods, but we left them a tip instead and bid them farewell. While there, a sudden hailstorm emerged, which is apparently typical in the mountains.
As we approached Cusco, we had a challenging time with our driver. He didn’t want to take us to our AirBNB even though we had arranged for that as part of our day. We hired him for five hours to take us from Ollantaytambo to Cusco, and at about four hours in, he wanted to drop us in the central square in Cusco. Normally that wouldn’t have been an issue but we had all of our luggage with us and were still about 2 kilometers to our next stay. After a few tense moments of conversation, the driver proceeded to our final destination and we were welcomed by our new host. Tired but thankful to be there, we settled in for a nice coca tea with our host.
In hindsight, there is plenty to do and see in the Sacred Valley and we would have been better off just spending our entire time there rather than Cusco. We’ll summarize our Cusco and Machu Picchu experience in a separate post and reveal our reasons that we might have skipped Cusco altogether, except maybe spending our last day there before our flight left.
