Simon's despatch:

As was rapidly becoming the norm for this trip we were out bright & early to begin our coach ride up the sacred valley, sleep is a luxury practically forbidden it seems!

Some only mildly perilous roads took us past sexy woman (admittedly the Peruvians spell it differently but the pronunciation is the exactly the same). Disappointingly this turned out to be an ancient Inca temple but was impressive non-the-less.

A stop off at g-adventures planeteria charity project got us up close & personal to some llamas & alpacas (which taste pretty good incidentally) and showed us how the local women weave, it also gave Beth the opportunity to buy more textiles to add to her burgeoning collection.

This was followed by a hike up to an ancient inca temple/village perched on top of some fairly impressive cliffs. Massive stone terraces cascaded down from the village demonstrating once again what an amazing civilisation the Inca's were.

Incredibly the Inca civilisation only really existed for about 300 years. In that time they managed to conquer pretty much the whole of the Andes (from Ecuador down far into Chile, a distance if turned on it's side that would stretch from the west coast of France to almost Moscow!). They favoured living on mountain tops to be closer to their gods and as a consequence had to perform massive stone engineering projects to flatten peaks for villages and construct huge stone terraces to feed themselves. It's believed that they achieved these engineering feats by having a large migrant workforce that travelled around constructing the villages and temples that were then lived in by relatively few villagers.

They quarried rock by using hematite stones to chip small holes into natural fissures, wooden pegs were then driven into the holes and soaked causing them to swell, cracking the rock, more pegs would then be driven deeper into the crack and soaked again until about 8 days later the rock would break off and could be chipped & ground into shape.

The Incas lived by 3 rules - Don't lie, don't steal and don't be lazy. Judging by what they achieved I think they managed to stick to at least one of them and as being thrown from a cliff was the punishment, I imagine they adhered quite strongly to all three!

We finished the day in an old inca town called Ollantaytambo, that still had a functioning Incan drainage system and impressive sun temple we hiked up to. Cor blimey altitude makes a difference... I felt like I belonged with the smokers at the back of an RUMC scramble wheezing up every step, still I reckon a marathon should be a breeze when I get back (no I'm not going to do one)!

Interesting factlet - Incas tended to sacrifice llamas to their gods because the blood took longer to coagulate. I guess most creatures at these altitudes have so many red blood cells that premature coagulation was a significant ceremonial issue!