(Apologies to my regular readers: a number of things have interfered with my regular posting, but I think with the start of September I am back on track.)
Time to return to South
America.
We’re on our way to Cusco,
Peru, where we’ll continue the adventure that started in the Galapagos and will
end in Machu Picchu.
A Note About Tours and
Tour Companies
The week before our trip
left, I called Natural Habitat Adventures and asked how many people from the
Galapagos tour had chosen the ‘add-on’ adventure of a visit to Machu Picchu.
“Just two of you,” was the
reply. We are about to embark on a
semiprivate tour.
Important information about tours
and tour companies: just because you sign up for a tour, doesn’t mean your tour
will be going. There are companies who, if not enough people sign up, cancel
the tour and refund your money. It
happened to me once. After that disappointment, I have been careful to choose
companies whose tours go as scheduled, regardless of the number of people
going.
Natural Habitat Adventures does
NOT cancel tours. If you choose a
tour with Natural Habitat Adventures, the tour will take place. You may want to
make sure that any tour company you consider has that same policy.
So we’re off for a
semiprivate guided tour of Cusco, the Sacred Valley, and Machu Picchu.
A Little About the Inca
I began writing about the
trip using my notes, photos, and extensive information that Natural Habitat
provided. It struck me the Inca Empire was far more significant than I had realized
while I was there. To do justice to the
Inca, the first posts offer a brief introductory history.
We begin our visit in Cusco,
a busy city that was once the center of the Inca Empire. The Plaza de Armas was
the Huacaypata, or Warrior Square.
 |
| The Cathedral in the Plaza de Armas, Cusco |
Pizarro and his
conquistadors arrived in 1533. That marked
the start of the decline of the Inca empire and the beginning of the area’s
written history.
Wait… there was no written
Inca history?
The Inca did not have a written
language*. Their spoken language was Quechua,
which you can still hear today. Their oral history was passed from generation
to generation with the help of art and artifacts, and with the help of quipu
(or kipu), a system of knotted strings. We haven’t fully
interpreted quipu, but they do tell a story.
Studies suggest the knots represent
numbers; the locations and number of knots have unique values; and the string color
also has meaning. There is evidence that Inca had officials who tracked the quipu
information for the king.
Here are a few examples of
quipu:
You can find more information
at these sites:
So we're going to be visiting the area of a once-giant empire that spanned the mountains of South America, had no written language, and yet left an amazing legacy.
* Some believe that the civilization was so
advanced, it must have had a system of writing, but we just haven’t discovered
it yet.
# # #
Next:
A Little Legend and a Little More Inca History
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