Mountian Biking

This weekend we were able to take a bike trip out to the Sacred Valley, it was amazing! We started the day in Cuzco, met up with our guide and got all our equipment, and then rode to the bus station, we then took a hour ride into the valley and started trip to see the ruins of Moray and the Salt mines. We rode for about two hours through the country side, on single track, up and down... it was a bit difficult due to the elevation and again the thin air, but we made it, and for both Jeremia and myslef it was a good challenge, since we are pretty much both begginers at biking!

The ruins at Moray were very interesting, again, showing the geneous of the Inkas, as we rode up to the archeological site, we began to see circular terraces going down and down, into a huge valley of sorts, our guide explained to us that this site was actually a labratory for agriculture for the Inkas. Since the Inka empire was so large the climate for each region was very different. The labratory was a test site to see which crops would grow the best at each specific elevation, the crops being maiz (corn) and Potatos ( for those of you who dont know the potato originated from Peru, the Inkas had over 4000 varieties) The circular terraces that we saw were the test stations for the crops, each level varied in temperature of about 5 degrees! With this temperature change they were able to simulate the growing conditions of all the different elevations in Peru. When they found out which crop grew the best in each elevation they would tell the people what to grow in thier specific location! WOW... We both thought this was pretty amazing!


After the ruins and Lunch we started down to the town of Maras, a small villiage where most of the people make thier living by working in the salt mines.


The salt mines were also really cool to see, mostly because they still use the same method of cultivating the salt as the Inkas did so long ago. As we rode down into another valley we began to see the thousands of salt pools. Our guide explained that there was a natural salt water spring located here, and what the Inkas figured out to do to get the salt was to construct terraces, or small pools where they would funnle the water in every two weeks, once the water was sitting in the pool, they would cut off the water supply and then wait for the sun to do its magic... evaporating the water from the pools would take about two weeks, and once the water is gone, all you have left is the salt! The mines are only in use in the dry season, running from may to october, in the wet season, the rain messes up the system so they do not use the mines from novermber to may. We were told that about two hundred people work these mines, and it is run on a co op system. The salt mainly goes to the city of Cuzco, but is also shiped to all over the country. Being curious we decided to scrape off some of the salt left over, and low and behold, it tasted just like salt... although it was very strong.. or maybe thats because we just tried too much! Collecting the salt is all done by hand, as most of the agriculture is still done here in Peru. Once the water is all gone, men, women and children all set to work scraping up all the salt into bags, and then transport them by Mule back to the town of Maras, where they then go to Cuzco to sell it.

After the salt mines, we continued on our way down to the town of Urabumba. Where our guide left us, and where we stayed the night. It was a cute little villiage, we found a small palce on the river, had dinner and pretty much went to bed really early... the biking wiped us out!

It was a wonderful day, and a great way to see the valley, We would both recomend it over just taking the bus or a tour, we saw so much more on the bikes!