Peru showed us many different faces. We entered Peru from the south, through the Atacama desert, the most arid place on the face of the earth. We took a plane from Tacna to Lima, a giant sprawling city, then up to Cuzco a city steeped in history as the ancient Inca capital. And Peru contains the central destination of this trip, Machu Picchu.
 

Lima

	The first impression of Lima was "why would anyone want to live here. Coming in from the airport we passed miles of dusty, partially complete houses, squatters tenements and small shop fronts. We were told that it never rains in Lima and the humidity varies between 70% and 100%.
	But once we reached the center of Lima, at the Plaza de Armas, we started to see the better side of Lima. This is the Cathedral.
	And right by the Cathedral is the presidential palace, the home of the executive branch of the government.
		The San Francisco church is nearby.
		It dates back to colonial times and has a very beautiful cloister whose walls are decorated with typical Spanish Azuelos (blue shaded tiles).
		It also houses an archive of thousands of books from the colonial period. Their bindings are deteriorating in the tropical climate, but they have no money for preservation.
	We also visited the Gold Museum. They didn't allow photography.

Cuzco

We flew from Lima to Cuzco early in the morning. I sat in the window seat, eager to get some great shots of the snow-capped Andes. Guess what! Even at 13,000 feet there was no snow in this area! We needed to be further south if we wanted to see the 25,000 foot crags with perpetual snow and ice on them. Cuzco is so close to the equator that it has a very mild climate. Seasons? Rainy and not-so-rainy. No snow.

We spent a day in Cuzco getting used to the altitude and visiting Inca sites. The following day we visited Machu Picchu, then back to Callao where we rejoined the Ryndam.

	Cuzco is a smaller city. We learned that much of the center of town is built on the bases of the walls built by the Incas.
	The master stonemasons of the Inca empire trimmed their building stones so exactly that they fit together perfectly with no need for mortar. The usual demonstration is that on the finer walls, you can't slip a knife blade between two stones.
	The archeologists can tell just how important a structure was by the quality of the block work. Smooth uniform courses, showing as straight, level, horizontal lines were used only for temples. The rock fitting became less painstaking for priests, Kings, nobles, etc. Finally storage buildings and stables had rock walls similar to the stone fences that one finds in New England.
	Cuzco has its own Plaza de Armas, dominated by a large cathedral.

Temple of the Sun

When the church of Santo Domingo was damaged in a recent earthquake, the repairs revealed the Inca Temple of the Sun (Qorikancha) underneath it. Excavations brought to light a very well preserved building

	The church has a very nice cloister built over the temple.
	The even rows and uniform blocks show this to be a very important building, a temple. At one point they must have damaged one of the blocks since we can see this small patch cut to fit:
	Some of the Inca decoration was preserved by being plastered over by a devout Spanish priest.

Saqsaywaman

Just outside of Cuzco are the ruins of an Inca site with some of the largest dressed stones in the world.

	The site might have been the location of the Inca's Cuzco palace. Cuzco was laid out in the shape of a Jaguar, and Saqsaywamen was located where the head would be. Nearby, a woman had tethered her llama flock for the benefit of the tourists.
	The size of the stones was awesome! It is still a mystery how the Incas managed to move and fit these blocks when they didn't have wheels or machines. One clue is a batch of spherical stones that could be placed in the path of the large stone for it to roll on.
	There are three tiers of walls representing the three levels of the Inca cosmology: Snake (underworld), Jaguar (our world) and Condor (the heavens). The lowest walls form a zigzag pattern like the path of a snake.
The view of Cuzco from the top was breath-taking!
	The spring-fed fountain nearby is still running.