Retired Nomads - Part 2 : Llamas & Alpacas, Pisac Ruins, Pisac Market & Chinchero, Peru

Pisac Ruins, Pisac Market & Chinchero Market and tour of town

This morning our guide Jimmy and driver took us back to the Sacred Valley to visit the Indian Markets of Pisac (largest in all South America) and to tour Pisac ruins. If we had known the train wasn't running and we had to take a long bus ride to Cusco we would have stayed one more night in Ollantaytambo. It did turn out to be one of my favorite days of the Peru trip. There was a rockslide that blocked the road and our guide was quite late as he had to wait for it to be cleared to continue. We could see the "cleanup" when we passed by it later with him on the way to Pisac.

We first stopped at a place where they had Llamas, Alpacas that we could pet and feed. They also had Vicuñas which have the softest and most expensive wool. That was a fun stop (even if it was a "touristy" thing to do). We even saw Chinchillas in the wild, closer than we saw them in Machu Picchu.

The Pisac market was amazing and had many selling locally made items, but one part was for locals to shop for food. That was quite interesting.

Then our last stop was at Chinchero where there is a local market and a lovely town. It’s primarily locals in their native dress meeting on Sunday. Their market is only open on Sunday. (I organized our trip to visit on a Sunday so we could see it) We spent quite a bit of time here and I did find some nice things to buy. (alpaca sweater for $12 and various trinkets) I hadn't bought much prior to this stop and I loved this place. They had a lot of unique items.

Then to our dismay, we were taken to the exact same restaurant that we had just been taken to a couple of days earlier. It wasn’t as good this time as a huge tour bus had just come through and very little was left. I was miffed that they didn’t take us to a different place to eat or at least have some food left on the buffet. I guess they only deal with one place for their tours. Jimmy had a bit better touring style than Luis. He talked about things, but pretty much let us go at our own pace.

After returning to Cusco, we wandered around the town squares and had a nice dinner at Pacha Papa. In fact, we went there for lunch the next day to try some different things.