I'ts Easter Sunday, and since I left home on March 20, I t's the first time I haven't been rushing from one place to another.  Been having trouble with the blog, I've written several times, but they're lost somewhere?  Getting off the plane at Cusco something was funny, disorentating long story short, I was attacked by altitude sickness--and attacked is accurate.  Took two full day, am fine now.  Was in several sites in the Sacred Valley, saw several sites, one happened to be the home town of our guide.  He is about 50ish, but scampers about looking after one or another of his team (us).  I'm going to fracture the spelling of his town, but it's Ollytanatempano.  it is in a valley of three mountains, and was an Incan defense location.  The walls of the terraces were about ten +/- feet tall, and were maybe twenty feet wide and were progressively up the mountain maybe thirty of them.  Each were a battle ground to be defended or taken.  At one time the Inca pushed over huge rocks down the terraces from the top, each at about the size of a volkswagon...  to kill Spanish soldiers,  The ministery of culture, which runs the Inca ruins, left them on the lowest flat below the terraces, to demonstrate the power of holding the high ground...   I had to really work climbing up, and took more than my share my share of rest stops.  have some great pictures, and will transfer them from another location were the wifi is faster.   Yesterday, holy saturday, we took the train down, repeat down, to machupicchu. It is about two thousand meters below Cusco, and the top of the Sacred Valley.  My biggest surprise was that machupicchu is not dry, clean fresh mountain air, as we experience in the Rockies.  It's a mountanious jungle, warm, humid, misty, smelling of (rotting) plants, and yes it is on top of a mountain side, the valley below is perhaps a mile or more down.   The mountains here are steeper sided, with very few being gradually sloped.  When I have faster wifi, I'll send you pics, amazing.  The Inca then, and even to a lesser degree now, are smaller people, the last two guides were well under six feet, perhaps, just over five feet tall, especially the middle aged and older Peruvian folks, the younger generation are taller, but I don't remember any being six feet tall.   Their height is surprising when you struggle up the stairs, with an average about 12" risers, but Maria explained most Inca messengers, carring messages in relays of perhaps of ten miles--uphill or down, for hundreds of miles, ran the whole way, so in running took longer steps, and the 12" height was efficient to run up or down the taller steps, while we are struggling to slowly climb up step by step, a 12"stair height is not comfortable.  When you see the pictures you'll see there several types of stone work.  Carefully carved stones with no space between the interlocked blocks of stone, and oftener than not bigger blocks of stone (boulders) were used on temples, walls of the kings (Inca) home, or street retaining walls which had to hold back huge parts of the mountain, whereas smaller stones, the size of our concrete blocks +/-, were used for commoners homes, or perhaps for the the fourth or higher layers of stone on the street retaining walls. Wall types were not one type or another, purpose prestigue were deciding factors.   The buildings had wooden rafters and thatched roofs again of several varieties due to purpose or to honor the inhabitant. Loved machupicchu, both the ancient village as well as the modern tourist village at the bottom of the mountain.   Oh! The river is a tributary of the Amazon, even though it is closer to the Pacific.  Machupicchu was located where it is because of being inside of two different triangle systems--important in culture/teligion, and as a protection of the "road" between