We had one more day of altitude acclimation before going to visit Machu Picchu.
We left our hotel in the Sacred Valley and visited a salt “mine”. It’s not really mining. Marasal (choose English, or whatever, on the right-side of the menu bar) sits on a salt-water spring. Now, I don’t know if it’s trapped ocean water from millions of years ago or rain water that drains thru caverns full of salt crystals, but at 7% salinity, the spring is pretty darn salty.
From above it looks like they are strip-mining salt rock, but it’s thousands of evaporator ponds. During the dry season they channel the spring to fill the ponds and let each dry out over several weeks. You then gather up the salt and sell it. There are cool salt-is-ready pictures on their website. The ponds are owned by members of the near-by community – some own a few ponds, some own hundreds. Seems salt has been produced here for over a thousand years.
We then visited an agricultural testing site, run by the Inca hundreds of years ago. The Moray archaeological site is an oddity. Winds from the nearby mountain glaciers provide cold air. The cone-shape comes from an ancient meteor strike. The Inca provided excellent irrigation. As an example, Peru produces over 5000 variety of potato, each preferring different elevation of soil conditions. Here, the Inca tested and cross-bred potato. Makes you wonder how the Inca would have looked if they have another few centuries.
To finish this day, we visited a local weaving center. It had the big three: Llama, Alpaca and Vicuna. From stepping off the bus you can shove grass into the faces of all three. I’ll be honest, I’d never heard of “vicuna” before.
The one-day-old alpaca was cute. Note the umbilical cord still hanging around.
In the classroom we were introduced to traditional methods of processing wool. While in the background secondary (probably non-English speaking) teachers spun the wool, the primary teacher told us about cleaning the wool and coloring with natural dyes. Below are the plants and the colored wool they produce.
As a real-time example: a local cactus-eating bug is squashed for a red-gray dye (middle). However, if you mix in lemon juice you get orange (right). If instead you rub with the crystal alum you get a red-pink (left).
I’ve seen similar demonstrations at silk “factories” and such, and it always blows me away. Even more strange, use the same dye on different fibers and you get different colors.
Of course, after the demonstration there is the shopping area. These guys have a hard sell to me – I live in Arizona. Of the things I need, a wool jacket is not high on that list. However, vicuna wool is the softest stuff I have ever felt. Our guide explained that vicuna wool is not allowed to be exported.
A long day, which included lunch. We did not drive far looking at a map. But each location is the next mountain over. We bounced from 6000 feet (2000 m) to 12,000 feet (4000 m) all day.
Next: We finally visit Machu Picchu