Sacred Valley Peru

I spent three weeks in Cusco Peru, living with a family and studying Spanish from two delightful university students, Rosio and Magaly. The name of the 400,000+-person city is a loose pronunciation of the ancient Quechua word for navel. Cusco was literally the navel for the world in South America during the Inca Empire. The photos I took display a truth, but not necessarily the truth. Many of the people in the city wear suits—looking similar to a stockbroker on his way to a Dallas office. This isn't captured by my camera because, quite frankly, it just wasn't interesting or exotic enough. Cusco is a delightful place. They say there is a parade every Sunday in this city in the Andes, but my experience is that there is a parade every few minutes. Later, I took a another trip to Peru with my daughter Kate. She and I spent time in Cusco then trekked twenty miles into the Andes to explore the ruins of Choqekirau. The advantage to these ruins is that they are hard to get to. The crowds of tourists like those at Machu Picchu did not exist. The exhaustion of the trek and the solitude of the ruins added to its mystic.  The people and places displayed on my website represent the different truths there that cannot be found in my hometown. They are of the old woman preparing to weave with alpaca or a man plowing with a wooden plow in the Sacred Valley. I watched families working in terraced salt ponds filled with salt water escaping from the base of a mountain. In surrealistic fashion they harvested salt to support themselves, (about 60 cents for a 5 liter bag). Interesting people allowed me to take their photo—their eyes were magic. I took photos of Machu Picchu, (the old mountain), which is probably the best known Inca ruins, and rumored to be a spiritual hotspot. I first took photos in the early morning as clouds drifted in and out of the ruins. Later, as the day cleared and I was able to climb Waynapicchu which towered over the old mountain to take photos of the ancient spectacle. In my trip with Kate, we explored Machu Picchu as well and I took photos high on the Inca trail leading into the ruins. It is inexplicable how this civilization, without the advantage of a written language or the wheel, was able to build such edifices. The people I met were good people in an area of the world laden with rich, ancient, history and the real possibility of adventure colored by the ghosts of a past spiritual, advanced, civilization. I hope you can feel some of that through my color and black and white photos.