Cuzco

Yesterday we spent the whole day in Cuzco to watch the festival of Inti Raymi, the celebration of the winter solstice. We started early, standing in the street to try and see the beginning of the dancing and music, but we couldn't really see. The party moves throughout the city, so we went to the main plaza and waited for the dancers and musicians to arrive. We waited for almost an hour in the blazing hot sun. One girl kind of passed out (a couple of times). Pretty much 2 minutes after the musicians and dancers came out, we had to leave to go to the next location, Sacsayhuaman, where the main event was occurring. We sat in our bleacher-like seats, and luckily it wasn't that hot there. We waited for almost 2 hours. The show then started and it was a reenactment of the ceremony that the Incas did for the Sun god. It was all in quechua, the language of the Incas. But there were so many people involved. The dancing and music were great. But then our guide wanted us to all leave early before it ended so we could beat the rush out of there. Well, instead of leaving through the exit immediately to our right, she decided to take us all the way to the other side to exit, which meant we had to walk in front of a few thousand people. It was soooooooooooo embarrassing...35 of us leaving like that. People were booing us saying “It's not done yet” “You're horrible”, and some people even threw stuff at us. I felt awful. Anyway, after that, our day was done. Some people were sunburned really badly, but I've been ok so far. My spf 15 has done its job.

Today we got up and left to head to Urubamba and we made several stops on the way in the Sacred Valley. One stop was at a salt mine. That place was pretty cool, but getting there was not. It was a narrow, curvy gravel road with literally 80 degree drops the whole way hundreds of feet down. Of course our driver drove fast. He took the curves pretty fast, and what do you know? We meet a couple of vehicles. We barely scraped past going 3 miles per hour. It was a terrifying experience.

Once in Urubamba, we saw the Templo del sol, an amazing Incan temple. We climbed a lot and my legs are pretty wobbly. Now, I'm in our hotel which is much nicer than the ones we've been in. Tomorrow is an extremely long day. We'll spend like 7 hours at Machu Picchu (which I don't know why we need that long), then return back to Cuzco. Machu Picchu is where the famous Incan ruins are that I'm sure everybody's seen pictures of. It's going to be my dream come true.

Please pray for me as I'm having some extremely bothersome problems in the stomach area. It's not fun being sick on a bus for 8 hours, so I don't want to have to deal with that.

Also, I decided that I'd really like a donkey, sheep, and a llama or alpaca as pets. They are sooooooo cute. I can hardly stand it!