Moray, Salt mines and an almighty flight problem!!

16th September 2011

So we got back from the Inka trail late Thursday night (15^th September 2011) after travelling on the Vistadome train back from Machu Picchu. We were all on cloud nine from the experience and the energy of Machu Picchu, made better by the fact that we were checking back into our plush hotel. We both relaxed in a hot shower, which was much needed after 4 days trekking!

On Friday morning we all (incl. Rowena and Michael) decided that a trip out to the Salt ponds and another Inka agricultural phenomenon in Moray would be great to see before we left Cusco. We hired a taxi to take us out for the day to the sacred valley again for one last time..

The salt mines are pre-inkan and is naturally occurring from the volcanic salt water that leeches out of the soil and is collected in ponds. The water is then evaporated to leave the salt, which is collected, cleaned by hand then used for cooking and beauty products.

The Moray attraction is an agricultural Inkan site which is 400m above the plateau and is 30m deep. Each level of terrace could grow a different vegetable or grain depending on its altitude and positioning to the sun. For example potatoes would grow at the high altitude exposed terraces and cocoa leaves in the sun trap at the very bottom with low altitude.

We arrived back to Cusco in time for a final bit of shopping before we left for Cusco on Saturday morning for out flight to Lima , then onwards down to Paracas on the coast of Peru with Rowena and Michael.

Flight issues!!

And so it begins….Rowena and Michael were flying with LAN airlines, but we had booked with Peruvian Airways, which unfortunately had been shut down for safety reasons at the end of August. We had been monitoring the situation for several weeks, including going to several Peruvian airlines offices and emailing them (all with no success or response, may we add) and everyone said that we could exchange our flight and hop on another flight with another airline on the day. We had also confirmed this fact with people that had actually gotten their flight exchanged so we thought this would work for us.

We decided we would get to the airport really early just in case we needed to wait a while, so we got there at 6.30am for our 11.10am flight. You can see where this is going…. 4 hours later still no ticket and no flights available for the rest of the day!! Rowena and Michael had arrived several hours after us and had boarded and taken off for Lima without us. We were gutted and felt terrible that they would have to fend for themselves in Lima, get a taxi to a bus terminal and a bus down to Paracas without us and very little Spanish. We were running out of time and options and so was everybody in the queue. Everyone was getting very agitated!

Unfortunately there was only 1 lady in the Peruvian airlines closed counter at the airport who could not give refunds or help in anyway, so we decided to take a bus rather than hang around in the vain hope that there would be 10 ‘no shows’ to fit us on already over booked LAN flights.

6 of us in the queue grabbed a taxi, squeezed in (with all our lugged) and rushed to the bus terminal. We managed to book the last remaining seats to Ica on the 2pm overnight 15hour bus! Great!!! It would get us into Ica at 5am where we would change to Paracas and meet Rowena and Michael at 7am….