It was a fitful night's sleep and a hurried farewell and then a walk through the early Sunday morning streets of Cusco, where the city was in late-Saturday-night mode. Raves breaking up before dawn are not a pretty sight.

But I found the bus in front of the trekking agency as arranged and joined the group for a beautiful drive through the Sacred Valley as darkness gave way to daylight and the first caress of sunlight touched a snow capped peak that rose through low clouds.

The Sacred Valley with the meandering Urubamba River and patchwork fields and terraced mountainsides and farms and villages is a wonderful place to experience, and I was glad to be there again.

There are some truly amazing aspects of Inca culture into which you will gain insight from visiting the Sacred Valley, and in particular the village of Ollantaytambo, which never stopped being an Inca village and still is.

We stopped there and the trekkers bought bamboo walking poles and coca leaves from the locals. There was a big open-bed truck filled with men who, it turned out, were the porters for our group.

We headed out of the village down a back road so narrow that only one vehicle could pass, so when we met another, one had to back up to the nearest wide spot.

We drove along the valley bottom, past some nice adobe farm houses.

Bulls are good luck symbols there, and you see statues on house roofs. I took it as a good omen that we passed lots of real bulls.

We turned down an even more narrow lane and passed green oat fields, corn bins bulging with all colors of corn, other bins filled with ears of corn with huge kernels. At 7:50, the sun touched us. The lane was following the river. We passed a boy holding a sickle standing in front of a tiny church.

We arrived at a field off to the left of the lane where the driver wanted to pull off, but the way was blocked by a stubborn burro.

Everyone introduced themselves. There were Irish and English and a Scot and Australians and the Peruvian staff, and me. As the breakfast wound down, I noticed that the field (which evidently was used as a footy field) lay adjacent to the rails, and the morning train was coming. I was hoping to catch a glimpse of my lover, which would reassure my worried mind, so I stood by the tracks waving and looking intently into each rail car as it passed. But I did not see her.

Part 4: The quiet of no cars

this travelogue is part of the subside travelzine
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