oooh, i need a sexy woman. oooh, i need a dirty girl.

get your mind out of the gutter, dear blog readers! i'm talking about serious inca history here!

before we went on our 4-day trek on the inca trail, we did a little practice hike to a nearby archeological site called sacsayhuaman.  pronounced properly, it sounds like saxy whoa-man. pronounced like a dumb tourist, it sounds like sexy woman. get it?  don't be that guy, dear blog readers.  don't be that guy.

anyway,  sacsayhuaman is located right outside of town, on a nearby mountaintop, and consists of several different sites a few km away from each other.  although we were walking through the city to get there, we were actually "hiking" up very steep streets for a mile or so until we reached a church at the half-way point.  from this point we had quite the view of the city.  then we had another mile or so uphill, and of course some serious stone steps (why are the incas so obsessed with steps?)

up at the site a man who i thought was an official ticket taker convinced me that we should rent horses.  si, caballos!  there was some grumbling from the bolshevik about this one, as he wanted to walk the whole thing ourselves.  but i insisted that we wouldn't make it to all the different sites without horses.

now, it turns out that if you are on foot you have to walk mostly on the sides of streets and highways to get to the various different sites.  however, when travelling por caballo you are not allowed on the streets and highways, and you actually have to go through mountain passes in order to reach the different sites.  it was kind of like stepping into one of those old school marlborough ads from the magazines.  it was breath-taking.  slighty terrifying at times, since i'd never actually been on a horse through steep rocky terrain and was suddenly envisioning all sorts of christopher reeve scenarios, but breath-taking none-the-less.

and of course dear blog readers, there were llamas!  cute little baby llamas!  roaming around on mountain-sides!