Perú...we love you!: Las Salineras & Cusco (otra vez)

This weekend we enjoyed some time hiking up to some pre-Incan salt mines, or Salineras, close to Ollantaytambo and we went to Cusco to pick up a few key items in preparation for the rainy season that is soon upon us.

We were in awe at how amazing the salt mines were.

We tried to harvest salt by hand out of the pools and found it was a little tricky, especially with no tools, so we found a salt mine worker who had already harvested salt and was hauling it up to his storage facility on his back. We asked him if we could pay him for some. He said to just take it and that we didn't need to pay, but we left a small donation of S/3 in his rugged hands. Can't get more from the source that that!

Since the Salineras seem to come out of nowhere, I researched a bit more on Wikipedia about them and this is what I found:

"Since pre-Inca times, salt has been obtained in Maras by evaporating salty water from a local subterranean stream. The highly salty water emerges at a spring, a natural outlet of the underground stream. The flow is directed into an intricate system of tiny channels constructed so that the water runs gradually down onto the several hundred ancient terraced ponds. Almost all the ponds are less than four meters square in area, and none exceeds thirty centimeters in depth. All are necessarily shaped into polygons with the flow of water carefully controlled and monitored by the workers. The altitude of the ponds slowly decreases, so that the water may flow through the myriad branches of the water-supply channels and be introduced slowly through a notch in one sidewall of each pond. The proper maintenance of the adjacent feeder channel, the side walls and the water-entry notch, the pond's bottom surface, the quantity of water, and the removal of accumulated salt deposits requires close cooperation among the community of users. It is agreed among local residents and pond workers that the cooperative system was established during the time of the Incas, if not earlier. As water evaporates from the sun-warmed ponds, the water becomes supersaturated and salt precipitates as various size crystals onto the inner surfaces of a pond's earthen walls and on the pond's earthen floor. The pond's keeper then closes the water-feeder notch and allows the pond to go dry. Within a few days the keeper carefully scrapes the dry salt from the sides and bottom, puts it into a suitable vessel, reopens the water-supply notch, and carries away the salt. Color of the salt varies from white to a light reddish or brownish tan, depending on the skill of an individual worker.

The salt mines traditionally have been available to any person wishing to harvest salt. The owners of the salt ponds must be members of the community, and families that are new to the community wishing to propitiate a salt pond get the one farthest from the community. The size of the salt pond assigned to a family depends on the family's size. Usually there are many unused salt pools available to be farmed. Any prospective salt farmer need only locate an empty currently unmaintained pond, consult with the local informal cooperative, learn how to keep a pond properly within the accepted communal system, and start working"

Needless to say, it's pretty amazing and we got in for free. We couldn't believe that there weren't any rules that we saw about walking right in and around the salt flats. Truly intricate and amazing.

On an animal front, we found a baby scorpion, which was pretty cute. Picture below (proof!). It was about an inch long and it is so crazy to see them here since it's something we're really not used to.

On a cute animal front, Adam went for a spectacular hike up the valley to some Incan ruins, and made friends with a baby calf.

"I was making it back from these magnificent Incan stairs when I came across a herd of bulls, and a calf. The calf ran ahead of the crowd and came to say hello to me. He moo'd, and I moo'd back, and then he moo'd back even louder. So after we were mooing and walking together, his big bully friends came and I was nicely instructed to get the hell outta there. As the sun was setting on the way back, I was overcome with astonishment for the absolute beauty of this place. It's a treat to be living here!"

Until next adventure~~