We awoke around 6am after a difficult night at 14,000 feet. GANNET2 was quite warm inside with our electric space heater doing its duty but the outside temperature was about 38 degrees which is colder than it’s ever got in Key West. Rusty was delighted.
The road led us to Pisac a town where Layne wanted to check out some textiles they are famous for making in a women’s cooperative. Layne is hot to trot to Brazil and luckily for Pisac it’s more or less on the road and luckily for Layne its at barely 10,000 feet altitude.
There is this area of Peru we were now entering which is probably the best known to outsiders called the Sacred Valley which was the headquarters of the Inca Empire. Cusco was the capital and the Sacred Valley encompasses the most famous ruins from the Inca period leading up to the infamous Machu Picchu site. Incidentally if you want a ticket the soonest one is available I am told is in December. We hope to be in Argentina by then. 
One of the best known features of the Sacred Valley to overlanders is that there is no trash. Peruvians are famous among vehicle travelers for lining their roads with garbage, but when you tell an air traveler visiting the famous bits of Peru about it they looked shocked. “I never saw that” they say indignantly. That’s because they only saw the Sacred Valley.
That cloud of diesel exhaust is the result of not having air pollution controls. Third World travel at its finest, and though I do enjoy the ease and freedom of travel in South America I do see drawbacks in the poorest countries and I do see why regulations are important. I don’t think growing children in Peru benefit from this.
They grow some delicious apricots too. Every time we stop to buy food at the roadside Layne brazenly asks for a photo. The Quechua women usually say no, the non indigenous smile happily not fearing for the loss of their souls to her Panasonic pocket camera. 
There are also a lot of police patrols here and checkpoints. We got waved through two after they carefully studied our front license plate. On the third the officer in charge, urbane and polite wanted to practice his English and asked us about the campervan life, never asking to see our documents. I was happy to satisfy his curiosity as RVs aren’t common in Peru and he was decidedly curious in a cheerful way with this break in his routine.
I don’t know if it’s because we’re old and thus respectable or if it’s because we speak Spanish or because we smile and treat them politely but we have had only kindness and helpfulness from all the police we’ve met through 13 countries. Those that prefer to imagine South America as a 1950s hellhole of corruption and authoritarian rule will mutter darkly “there’s still time,” but we have been well treated so far.
Check out the lead Inca below, hauling an alpaca home. You never know what you’ll see:
Pisac is a small village nestled in a valley of dramatic mountains jagged and severe. The Urubamba River has a strong flow and they take advantage to irrigate crops giving the desert sudden pops of bright green. It is a lovely spot. 
We just managed to squeeze into Senora Nellie’s campground (hot showers $12 a night) a mile down river from the town. Rusty took one look at all the grass and got rolling in it. 
We settled in and left Rusty, exhausted in his old age by the drive to nap on his bed. Pisac is a town of 10,000 people just 20 miles from Cusco and a world away from its intense tourist economy. It’s on the tourist trail so every guide will instruct visitors on how to get here by bus as not many show up in Promasters. It’s famous for its handicrafts market and an Inca fortress built reputedly as a retreat for Inca leaders when life in the capital got too intense and they wanted a break. We are on a mission and our sights are on Brazil but I must say on first acquaintance I like this town.
When we were planning our arrival we couldn’t find a phone number for the campground and we could find no information on whether they took dogs, not even in iOverlander (I’ve changed that). The alternative is to drive up one of these streets to a free public parking lot.
More precisely it’s this street, below that you have to drive to reach the parking lot. I will freely admit that when looking at the description ahead of time I about shit my mind imagining driving up this boulevard to camp. It’s not exactly a freeway is it?
But on closer inspection it’s clear that the road to the parking lot is kept relatively clear of obstacles and is much easier to negotiate than the other alleys like this one below, lined with flower pots. I’m glad we got in the campground and merely have to walk this town. Driving these alleys is a bit much even for me, Mr Intrepid at the wheel.
Note the Shamanic Institute below. At first the mountains put me in me in mind of Bisbee Arizona (thanks Bruce) but on closer inspection the posters advertising yoga and cleansing and all that stuff made me think of Taos New Mexico.
I’m not fussed about hippy ways to waste money and I’d rather be around a bunch of esoteric peaceniks than the thugs and cruelty lovers who think that’s the way to win. Mind you neither camp seems to care too much for vaccinations at home. I’ve traveled too much in my life to think the earth is flat or that diphtheria is a good way to die. I’m 67 fat and lazy but I’m fully vaccinated against everything listed below offered for free by the Peruvian government. I hope the Quechua peasants pay attention but I doubt it. Education has a hard time overcoming prejudice everywhere. A return to the 17th century seems to be the trend to one who grew up grateful for a sugar lump to avoid time in an iron lung.
It was oddly quiet on a Saturday afternoon around four but we snagged a loaf of Quinoa bread wondering what it might taste like and wandered the streets. It’s a paradox for me as I like cleaner more organized towns, less picturesque third world towns, and I feel out of place in the poorer villages of the altiplano but this is very tourist oriented and comfortable for a middle class alien. The folks are cheerful too apparently not having had time to get irritated by mass tourism.
This mural below looked slightly off to me. The group on the left looked like the Three Kings in Inca form but I have no idea what’s going on.
When I was a child I spent my summers and years of my adult life in a small village in Italy and I would occasionally meet lost tourists and I would shock them by putting them the right road addressing them in fluent English in the middle of this back of beyond Umbrian countryside, at an intersection of gravel roads where they thought bandits and trolls lived, not a well mannered English school boy. So when I see stuff like this below, I ask myself if it’s a sentiment expressed by young educated Quechua or Europeans making Pisac their home? You can’t escape the outside world.
The appeal to former glory in modern form:
In this extraordinarily clean picturesque little town even the convenience stores are clean and tidy and appealing in a way chaotic Peru cannot manage. Except here.
My young life in Umbria rather stripped away my ability to romanticize poverty. My family had the only flushing toilet and the only privately owned television in the village when I was a youngster. We all watched tv in the communal room because it was more fun. My mother the aristocrat complained bitterly when her children preferred to watch tv with the villagers. I suppose she wanted our company but we were selfish youngsters and wanted to be cool with the village. I find it hard in my old age after a life lived in comfort to romanticize this woman’s life. I’ve seen the other side and I was glad to get away.
The paradox is I like to walk amongst the beauty and enjoy the history but I am delighted to retreat to GANNET2 and live my suburban American life in my own camper home a world away.
And yes they do drive these impossibly narrow alleys. We house polloi walk and step obediently aside for the superior beings in their cars…me yesterday and today a peasant on foot I am. I remember riding in my father’s Rolls Royce but I am quite happy to walk and step aside in my old age. Money has never appealed to me as much as experiences.
I like Pisac and I want to stay longer than a few short days but they have self service laundries in Brazil and comfortable rest areas exotic food and an impenetrable language. New experiences! And it will be hot and sticky like Florida without category five hurricanes and I shall look back on these Andean moments and wonder if they were real. Like that lost little schoolboy playing at being a peasant all those decades ago.
