Llamas, Horses and Pups, Oh My!

The second day we spent in Cuzco, I was on a mission to ride horses.  "Donde esta monto un caballo?" I asked everyone.  The resounding answer was Saqsayhuaman (pronounced almost like "sexy woman").  We woke up too late to take the hostel tour, but we could take a cab for 10 soles and walk to the caballos from there.  So the boo and I found a cab told him "sexy woman" and off we went.  He dropped us off at Cristo Blanco and we didn't speak enough Spanish to have him fully explain where the horses were.  Obviously, we took the opportunity to have a llama photo shoot.

We made our way down the hill that Cristo Blanco stands on to see if we could find out where the horses were.  All of the sudden a Peruvian boy started to speak to us and we immediately asked, "Donde estan los caballos?".  This was what he was selling!  We were thrilled that we found our way...until we realized that we were about to go on an all Spanish tour guided by this 12 year old boy.  It didn't really matter to us, because we really just wanted to ride horses for a few hours.  Our tour followed the map below:

We rode around to different archaeological sites (we didn't buy the tourist ticket for 70 soles...instead we saw the free ones) until we got to the Temple de la Luna, not to be confused with the one that sits at Machu Picchu.  We met Sassy, the Temple de la Luna dog who just had a puppy and we toured the temple by following a Peruvian stranger who just happened to know everything about the Temple.  He pointed out all the carvings within the temple: snake, puma, llama, condor, that were apparently carved solely by rain water hitting it.  He also said that the temple was a strong point of magnetism because of its location.  We had to take our shoes off to go into the offering area.



Sassy the Temple de la Luna dog



Temple de la Luna

We rode the horses, whose names by the way were Poncho Rojo, Diamante, and Cara Blanca, back to our beginning and left Saqsayhuaman via cab to return to our hostel.  Of course, we said our goodbyes to our guide, our horses, and the little guys that came out to say goodbye as we left.