First Blog From Peru

Hey everyone back in America! This is Chaps and it is our second day here in ollantaytambo.
First of all a very happy birthday to mrs. Flynn, and now down to business.
All of the flights were good, the Miami airport was incredibly boring but it was all leading towards getting here, and we got some good footage of what can legitimately be called "ultimate boredom." We got to Cuzco yesterday morning and met our two WONDERFUL guides, Robert and Paul. Paul is actually from ollantaytambo and is somewhat of a celebrity around here (we jokingly call him the mayor) which is very nice. Cuzco was a really big town, I think I heard 400,000 people, and they are currently preparing for the festival of the sun. So when we arrived there was a festive atmosphere with the town´s rainbow flag prominently displayed everywhere and school children marching outside the palace de justicia. The whole town was quite amazing really, like nothing I personally have ever seen before. All of the houses there looked like an amalgumation of the last 40 years of architectural style, resulting from the fact that buildings are built when the money comes in. One of the major differences that we all noticed immediately, aside from the mountains, was the amazing amount of animals running around the streets. In Cuzco it was mostly wild dogs but as we got farther out it became pigs, donkeys, oxen, cows, sheep, ducks, chickens, and all sorts of other animals. Robert jokingly said that if we were walking through one of the eucalyptus forests and we looked hard enough we might actually see a koala, and, in our sleep deprived state, we bought it for a while. So from cuzco we drove to ollantaytambo which is an hour and a half away and a few thousand feet lower. As Mrs. Flynn remarked there was an amazing change in climate in that half hour. We went from most of the mountains being covered in snow to most of the mountains being covered in grass and rocks. But these mountains are still beautiful, and looking down the valley from ollantaytambo we can see the beautiful snow covered peaks of the higher Andes. About fifteen minutes outside of ollantaytambo we stopped riding in our mercedes van and decided to enter the town on the ancient incan trail and through their gate. This trail, like seemingly everything the incans built, is still around and still quite amazing. It is just mind boggling the amount of terraces, and outposts, and bridges and walls that they built years before the spanish conquest that are still around and amazing. When we got into ollantaytambo we quickly found our hotel, the hostal de las portadas, and settled in before getting lunch. I´ll be the first to admit that the accomodations are not the ritz-carlton, but there is something homey about it, at least for me, and there IS hot water! So after settling in a little bit we went out to get our first taste of Peruvian food at a local restaurant, and were not dissapointed. We all had some local soup which was very good and other food which was quite excellent. Then we went back to the hotel and had a good two hour rest time, which was much needed since we had been awake for more than a day straight, negating the paultry few hours some of us were able to snatch on the five hours and one minute flight from Miami. Then yesterday afternoon we had our first activity, a scavenger hunt all around the town. We had to find the main square (easy), the market, some streets, the stadium, the school, the radio station, the cemetery, the bull-fighting ring, and other spots of local interest. This by design was supposed to help us learn to use the spanish, which few of us speak, and it really did help us to accomplish that. Two of the teams found small local children to help them along the way and our team made good use of the policemen which are more plentiful around here than in America. It was a tight race the whole way but I am happy to say that Jackson, James, and I won and also got to see a lot of the town. After that we returned to the hotel and drew maps from our memory before we went out to dinner, where a local band played and the food was excellent. After that we all returned to the hotel, took showers, and completely crashed, sleeping heavily even though the mattresses were basically rocks.
This morning we woke up, had breakfast, and were given a short history of the town of ollantaytambo. It was founded by an early incan emperor, whose name escapes me, but who was essentially the Alexander the great and established the Incan empire as the major power of South America spanning from Ecuador to Chile. For years this town was a place to stop and get food and rest, which gave it the name Tambo. Some years later a local soldier wanted to marry a princess but was refused her hand by her incan priest father. He then returned to this town and waged a succesful war and when he won both it and the bride even though he was expelled the town was renamed after him, ollantaytambo, ollantay´s resting place. Then in the 1530´s the spanish came and took over cuzco during their conquest period. A general of the Incan army returned here though and fought the only succesful battle ever waged during spain´s conquests in South America, winning but eventually the war was lost. Although as any naitve will point out the incans had just been embroiled in a civil war and were drastically weakened. So this town around with the rest of the countryside became spanish and was mostly settled by a mix of spanish and ketchuans because all of the pure ketchuan indians, the survivors of the incans, fled into the mountains to live a simple life style. So when peru became a free country in 1821 it was still basically the spanish hybrids and pure people who ran the country in a feudal system basically until the 1960s when land was given to coops and has since been broken up into individual ownership. Quite interesting and good to know.
After our history lesson we set out to go white water rafting, which was very cool, and very beautiful. Quite amazing to be on the river and to look around and see snow capped mountains and ruins that last to a long past empire. And the rafting was good too! We got to go through some class 2 and 3 rapids and developed a fierce inter-boat rivalry. The Condors versus the Bananas, Bananas forever! We got into splashing fights and by the time that the rafting was over we were all thoroughly soaked in freezing cold water and happy to get some tea, hot food, and a change of clothes. So we ate a picnic style lunch right by the river and under the mountains and all of that and then drove back into town where most people are now reading Three Cups of Tea, and jackson and I are sitting in the main square in an internet cafe.
Everyone here is incredibly friendly and I feel like I´ve included everything that is pertinent to this point. Everyone´s spanish in the group is advancing rapidly, and tomorrow we are going to hike the 3-4 hours to Chilca to begin our week there. Robert tells us that we will be the only gringos in the town, certainly not the case in ollantaytambo, a good jumping off place for Machu Picchu, but it should be challenging considering that none of our families speak a word of English. We´ll blog again soon I suppose but it will definitely have to wait till we are back in ollantaytambo. Until that point we all send our love to our families back in America and want you to know that everything is good and we are all healthy, and please forgive any spelling mistakes as there is no spell check and this is a spanish keyboard.

--Chaps--