The continental breakfast at the hotel is complete with fresh fruit, fruit juice and a variety of good breakfast items that are heaven to wake up to. Today, we traveled an hour and a half outside the city to visit a couple of places. Our first stop was Las Salineras de Maras. It was a group of around a thousand little pools of water on the side of a mountain. The pools are filled with salt water from the stream that flows out of the mountain. There is an extensive irrigation channel system so all the various owners of the pools can fill their pools and then stop the water, let the water evaporate and harvest the salt. All of this is done without machinery, only a small shovel. The salt is exported around the world, but is the cheapest in Peru, I got a small bag for 1 sole (30 cents). To get down to the Salineras, our bus driver drove down a set of switchbacks that were barely wide enough for one car and had a sheer drop off with no guard rail. He was pretty good, but the nerve-racking part was when we encountered a car going the other direction and one would have to back up until it was wide enough to pass. The view from the mountainside with the pools was incredible and like the oasis/desert in Ica, one of the most beautiful places I have ever been.

   Next was another ruin, Moray. Moray was a set of four different valleys filled with circular terraces. These were used to grow crops that otherwise couldn’t be grown on the steep side of a mountain, and are present in Machu Picchu, and many other places in the Andes. This particular set of terraces are thought to be used for agricultural research to see what could and couldn’t grow at that particular altitude. The guides also informed us that all of the names of these ruins are Quechua words, but most names were given by the Spanish because the Incas left behind no writing. We then returned to the city and hotel and had a presentation from Henry, a lawyer who was our local guy in Miraflores, about law in Peru, as well as the death penalty. Monica then gave a lecture on the past couple of presidents of Peru, as well as a brief background on PPK, the candidate who just won the election.