Salt Mines

Sorry it's been a crazy busy day, and I would have posted this yesterday but just didn't get around to finishing it. Yesterday we visited three places: the salt mines, Chinchero, and Moray. The most exciting one was the salt mines, but I will tell you a little about all of them. 

Chinchero was the fist place we visited, we took a cab from our hotel to Chinchero. This was basically the same as the others, ruins. But it was a great view from the top, and you didn't even have to hike that far. After a 5 minute hike to the ruins, you can walk up a few stairs to a church with a courtyard; which has shops and little markets spread around it. After looking around a bit, we headed back to the cab to head to the salt mines.

25 minutes in the car and we are there, well almost there. You can see the mines, but you have to take a step road down to the bottom, which in someplaces only has room for one car to pass. We headed down the road, praying that our taxi driver knew what he was doing. Farther and Farther down we went, until we reached a line of cars waiting to park in the small parking lot. Our taxi driver decided to take a risk and swirve around the cars to get to the front. When he reached the front the woman who was directing traffic told him that he needed to back up because a tour bus was coming through. He backed up a little until he reached a spot that he though would be fine, but the lady said to back up more. Soon the bus was heading our way and the taxi driver was going backward while tring to find a place to let the bus pass. Finally we did, we were almost falling off the cliff but the bus go passed and we parked the car. 

We entered the mines expecting it to look like a cave, but from what we could see it looked like terraces just covered in salt not grass. We walked along the terraces trying not to fall into the ones filled with water. Fortunately we did not fall into the water. Ri found a pile of salt and stared eating some, she even put some in her pocket for a little later. Once we finished walking around we stared to head up and look at the shops along the way. 

We ended up spending a lot more money then we planned on spending. Since we were leaving for Ecuador at 7:00 we needed to spend most of our soles (in Ecuador they use dollars). We had to pay the taxi driver 200 soles, or 65$, then we needed to pay the taxi to the airport 30 soles or 10$. So we either pay the first taxi in US dollars or in soles, depending on if we spent any in the salt mines. Which we ended up doing. We bought one salt shaker, bath salts, popcorn that was not fully popped but still tasted like popcorn, 2 bags of popped inka corn (which was very large popcorn kernels that you can actually eat without popping), and a salt nativity scene. 

After the salt mines we headed to our next destination. This was not very interesting at all, but the lunch we ate in this town was very interesting. He asked us if we wanted to stop the car and look around, we said no but he insisted so we got out and found an ice cream cart. We had not eaten lunch yet, but mom let us get it since we didn't really have much time to eat, plus we had already eaten on bag of popped inka corn. Riley and I both got ice cream and walked around for a little, it wasn't that interesting, but worth the stop. Dad then spotted a popcorn cart that was making freshly popped popcorn. So we got some of that too. Needless to say our lunch of ice cream and popcorn was really good. 

Once back at our hotel we had about an hour till we needed to leave for the airport. So we headed off to eat some dinner, at you know where, yes the doner. This was our 4th time at the doner, and unfortunately our last. Dad hopes that we can find a doner in Colorado that is as good. If you know of any let me know!

We boarded the plane and left to Lima, then to Ecuador. We arrived in Ecuador at 2:15am and reached our hotel at 4:30am. We all went right to bed hoping for at least 5 hours of sleep. 

Sincerely,

T