It seems hard to believe that it took me 60 years to get to South America, but well, there it is. A quick trip to Peru this spring tells me that I probably need to do a few more, longer trips. Oh, darn.

These images are from the town of Ollantaytambo where the Incan Sun Temple once stood. The Spanish took the temple’s gold and dismantled the temple to obliterate Incan power and use the stone for their own buildings. Much later, archeologists discovered a pre-Incan village at the base of the Sun Temple that had been flooded and filled with river sediment. The Incans built their temple on the ruins of that town. So the cycles continue.

Excavation of the pre-Incan settlement is at the bottom center of the above photo. On the slope above town are two granaries built by the Incan to keep their harvested crops out of reach of the flooding Urubamba River. An obvious path stretches to one granery, the other is upper left.