The next morning we are up and ready for a 8am departure for the Sacred Valley. By 8.30am we are wondering if we have been sold a duff one and ask for the hostel to call the tour company. We are told that they will pick us up at 9am. At 9am a man comes with our tickets for Machu Picchu and the tickets for the train but no mini bus to start our tour. The tickets have my passport number and my name written incorrectly but the man assures us it would be fine. Just call me Elena Kinn! I torture the ticket man by practising my Spanish with him until the bus shows up at 9.30am. We are taken to a market stall at the side of the road before we see anything of the Sacred Valley and I'm having flashbacks to India where you were taken to stalls before, during and after a tour as the guide received commission. Not this again please! After 30 mins of a complementary thimble sized drink of coca tea, a demonstration of a magical tea pot for sale and some bartering for a nice bag on my part we head off. An hour later we arrive at our first ruins of the day called Pisaq. Typical to many Inca ruins they were high up on a hill. The road up had obviously suffered numerous land slides and had been re-layed in various routes many times. The ruins of the Pisaq city included buildings, temples, tombs and agricultural terraces. Our guide, Benjamin who seems to say Pachamama alot shows us around and explains how life must have been like when this city prospered. The ruins are ruins because of the Spanish (conquistadors) when they came to Peru.

Next stop was lunch and it was amazing. An all you can eat buffet with salads, meat dishes including alpaca stew, numerous desserts and the complementary pisco sours. We both took full opportunity to fill our faces. Talk about pigs in mud! After lunch back on the road we arrived in Ollantaytambo for more Inca ruins. The ruins were scattered on 2 hill sides with the major part of the city on 1 hill and the food stores built on the steep slopes of the 2nd hill. The impressive location of the store houses was to take advantage of the natural chill and breeze created from the joining of 3 valleys. At the highest point of the city ruins there was a part built temple. Benjamin talked about slaves doing the work. Must have been a lot of slaves to move some of those big rocks! The slaves with good stonemasonry skills would do the work that required much more precise carving such as the temple areas. Slaves that were just "ok" would do areas such as the terracing or the steps. If you made a mistake you were likely killed.

We then left the tour to go back to Cusco as we were scheduled for the train from Ollantaytambo to Aguas Calientes later. We slowly meandered the thin streets of the Ollantaytambo city of today, rich in Inca style giving us a feeling for what a lot of the Inca cities would have looked like. We stop to take it all in with a beer at an inviting bench looking out toward the Ollantaytambo ruins. We are advised to get chicken and chips for dinner. I was still a little full from lunch but Andrew tried the chicken and he was very impressed. A local dog amused us by performing circus type acts to try to get some chicken.