Stephanie and Ryan: Sacred Valley and Machu Picchu

The next morning we woke up and got ready to be led on a "Meditation Walk" by Avashai's friend Avery. We were joined by Daniella who we think is Avery's girlfriend/wife/daughter/we'renotsure. We set out and right away he let us know "this might be weird."

We started walking backwards up the trail, then went through "excercises" to explore our senses. We closed our eyes and listened, we tasted alfalfa, smelled some herbs growing around us, touched the rocks and water.

Next we were told to walk with one arm over our heads, then do the next. I'm not totally sure what this was supposed to illustrate.

Finally after walking backwards a little more, we had a "ceremony" on a small bridge over the stream.

Now, Ryan is a no-nonsense kind of guy, so I could only imagine what he has been thinking this whole time. At one point after walking with one hand over his head the leader asked him "what did you feel during that?" And Ryan replied "nothing."

Anyway here we are standing on this bridge and we have to make a wooshing sound as we cast off negative things like fear, doubt, etc. Ryan actually did it 2 times while everyone else was. What choice did he have? Haha! Then we faced the oncoming water and opened ourselves to accept positive things like contentment, happiness, etc.

This concluded our walk and we went back to the retreat to enjoy a great breakfast. Avocado, eggs, bread, honey, butter, brown rice with mike and potatoes, apples. It was really good.

After breakfast Daniella joined us for the Moray Incan ruins and for the Salt Mines. I thought the salt mines were really neat. You'd think we'd have seen enough salt by now, but it was a lot different looking than the Salt Flats. The terraces at Moray were cool as well, such perfect circles dug into the mountain. We bought a small weaving from the tables outside the ruins.

We were dropped back off in Urubamba were we bought some pastries, had some papaya juice, and bought a few things at the market for snacks the next day.

We were back in time to enjoy another delicious dinner of leftover soup, 2 kinds of salad, olives, bread and crackers, and avocado. We are loving the food here.

We went to bed and woke up at 4:15 to have some breakfast at 5 and head to Machu Picchu. Avashai made us some quinoa porridge and gave us fresh yogurt and honey with it. He even let us use some of his peanut butter that Avery brought him from the states for our sandwiches for the day.

We were out waiting for our cab at 5:30. At 5:45 he picked us up, dropped us at the train station at Ollentaytambo and he were off. We grabbed 2 cafe americanos to go and got on the train. The train was pretty comfortable and they passed out drinks for us half way through. We each had the manzanilla tea with sugar. In about 90 minutes, we were dropped at Aguas Calientes where we would meet our guide. Or so we thought...

We were told that someone would be standing there with a sign with our names on it. There were several guides, but none of them were for us. We waited and waited, even walking down to the bus station to see if the guide was down there. Negative.

We asked a different guide if he could help us. I dug up Avahai's cell number from an old saved email. There was no answer, but he did call back a few minutes later, and said he would call the guy and send him.

After a grand total of about 40 minutes waiting a guy named Raul walks up. He takes us to buy our tickets and says "the tour starts at 11." It's 9am!

We explain to him that we came in on the 6:40 train so why on earth does the tour start at 11?He tells us we can go into the park ourselves, but some back out and meet Patrick, the guide with a white flag, at 11.

Fine, whatever. We go in, see the beautiful ruins while very irritated at the entire tour situation. We roamed around for about an hour or so before going back out front to find this Patrick character and his white flag (bandera blanca). From 10:50 to 11:25 we waited. No Patrick, no white flag.

It was comical at this point. We decided to just go with it and try to have a good day. We went back in and gave ourselves our own tour which consisted of us wandering around the ruins and taking a million pictures from every angle. We walked up a long trail to a lookout point and had some passion fruit that we bought at the market the day before.

After a lot of sitting and walking all over the ruins we headed out to get the bus back to Aguas Calientes. We had dinner at a good yet overpriced restaurant in the tourist down. Walked around the souvenir shops, and had coffee and hot chocolate at a cafe before getting our train back to Ollentaytambo.

We made it back in time to catch the tail end of a Shabbat celebration at our retreat. We had some tea, discussed an interesting Incan water jug, briefly told Avashai the tour was a bust, and went to bed.