On Top of Ollantaytambo
After your earlier visits to Moray and Maras today, your next destination is Ollantaytambo, where you will stay overnight and catch the train to Machu Picchu tomorrow. There are a ruins at Ollantaytambo, but you don’t know much about them.
After a winding final stretch across the railroad tracks and the river and back, you reach the center of the small town. The buildings are mostly a sunny mustard shade with traditional tile roofs. It’s clearly a tourist town. You see the ruins ahead and notice the daylight moon at the top and think that’s pretty cool.
After you park and get out next to a vast area of souvenir shops, you get a closer look at the ruins, a great series of terraces reaching quite a long way up the mountain. It’s a little intimidating after the long day you’ve had, but you are feeling good and the altitude is much lower here. Let’s climb that mountain.
It’s not as bad as it looks, and you make your way up the steps pausing to look back at the ever increasingly amazing scene behind you. At the top you turn around for a classic wide view of the town, the mountains and the ruins around it. You can’t decide which is the best part. It looks like another planet. You walk through the Temple of Ten Niches and count them just to be sure. Up and through the Sun Temple you see the finer and pinker stone work reserved for the most important structures.
Around the corner the mountain continues further up into a craggy peak. There is a small structure, and a lot of spooky moss. You are sure this part of the ruins must have an interesting name, but nobody seems to know it, so you call it Haunted Ruins. Through a slanted window opening you look back on the ten niches and the Sun Temple across the terraces before beginning the walk back down.
After you walk back down the terraces you are in an area of fountains and small buildings at ground level where the Incans had their water supply. There are many fountains, the most beautiful of which is in a small hut with a window looking off toward the mountains.
Looking back toward the ruins, you think about the huge scope of what you have just seen, and realize that Machu Picchu is so much bigger, its going to blow your mind. Your mind is already blown for today and you head back toward your hotel at the Ollantaytambo train station where you will be staying tonight.
You pass a quaint yellow churchyard with the ruins on the other side of the town behind it. There are the famous storehouses called Pinkuylluna. You won’t have a chance to visit them, but you get a nice shot as the sun begins to set. They are even higher than the Temple Hill you just visited.
You wander around the town a bit, into its main square. It’s not very big, has a small park with a fountain in the center. There is a police station to one side, and some police lined up being spoken to by their commander. It looks dramatic. You would love to take some pictures but it’s probably not a good idea. You do feel safer walking around this small, darkening and sparsely populated town as it gets dark.
There are interesting dead ends and turns. You see a possibly defunct museum with its door ajar and a matching blue moped parked outside and wonder what might be going on in there. The street has square channels of rushing water only a few inches across embedded in it at various places. It’s a unique drainage system.
On the long road back to the hotel and train station, the sun is setting to your right in an opening between the mountains. There are power lines running through the valley and glowing orange lights in an otherwise unoccupied distance. The sky is purpling. It’s a magical sight.
Finally you reach the bustling tourist bazaar outside the station as you head toward the gate and your well deserved hotel bed. Right before security you pass a crowded bar and notice an orange cat weaving between the barstools. He looks like your cat back home. This is the first cat you have seen in Peru, and the only one you will see. As far as you know it’s the only cat in Peru. It’s not at all surprising given the number of stray dogs all over Peru.
You reach the gate of the train station / hotel and wave your wooden hotel key at the guard, then realize a catch with staying here. A train is unloading passengers, all headed toward you down the narrow platform. The only entrance to El Albergue Hotel is on that platform. You are so tired from your incredible day, you don’t even notice how purple the sky has become as you swim upstream through the crowd to a well earned night of rest.