Are we on a march again?" Patrick asks as we are escorted away from the tour office by the lady we bought the tickets from, before being passed off to another person who shows us to the minivan for the tour. No matter that there are at least a dozen tour agencies on the Plaza, once you sign up you are grouped with other people in whatever van has room.
Today we want to visit Cumbe Mayo and the easiest way to do this is with a guided tour from the city center. So at 9:30am we crawl into a minivan with another dozen Spanish speaking tourists. We paid a little extra for an English speaking guide, but there are no muzungu's except for us. The guide is excellent though, he is very knowledgeable and takes his time explaining things to us.
We were surprised to hear that we had crossed the continental divide. Water from the rivers around Cajamarca flows into the Amazon River and towards the Atlantic Ocean. Cumbe Mayo is a high area of pretty rock formations and green valleys on the Pacific side of the divide. What makes Cumbe Mayo special is a 9 kilometer long aqueduct built over 3000 years ago by advanced pre-Inca peoples. It carried water from a small river across the continental divide to Cajamarca. Over its 9 kilometer length the aqueduct only drops 2 meters, which means it only drops 0.22mm per meter. Awesome accuracy on a grand scale. Once across the divide the water flowed all the way down to the city, almost a thousand meters lower where it was stored behind a dam.
The tour ends at about two, we have lunch and take another ride to the supermarket to buy bread and meats for the next couple of days. We learned today the region around Cajamarca produces most of Peru's milk and has excellent small-scacle artisan cheese factories. So we get a nice chunk of Peruvian Gouda cheese for the road.
Guy selling rain ponchos and sunglasses to passengers on the tour buses. Hedge your bets, Patrick guesses.
Petroglyphs at Cumbre Mayo. It is thought these were made by the same peoples that built the aqueducts over 3000 years ago, but what they mean is not always clear.
Aqueduct carved through solid rock. The people that made this did not have metal tools. It is thought they used obsidian tools traded with people near the coast to carve this channel.
Young girl weaving a belt. It takes about a week to weave one, it sells for 10 soles or 3 US$. According to our guide she walks an hour from her house to this location along the tourist trail to try to sell. Rachel buys a cloth.
