Peru Day 3 - Fourth stop - cooperative store

Previous post on this series is here ...

There was one photo of Urubamba river that I missed in previous posts.. so here it is! We did not go back through the same route we came. It was more like a loop from Cusco to Ollantaytambo to Chinchero and back to Cucso!

The last stop on day 3 was a workers co-operative of sorts where a group of ladies do wool products, arts and crafts that are ethnic and sell it to tourists. As an added service they provide free restrooms in an otherwise desolate place.. it is a win win.

They also tried to make it interesting for the adults and kids by having a few stalls.. the first one was a display of a jillion potato varieties. Did you know that my favorite vegetable came from Peru?! For that alone, I owe these people. If someone gave me an award just for living this long and I had to give a speech, it would start with Peru for potato and move on to the folks who came up with Noodles  and that would be it.. if they gave me a three minute time limit that is..

My mouth is suddenly watering for things like sambar and soan papdi because of my recent sickness, not that I can taste a thing.. where were we? Potato! 

 Then there was an Alpaca pen.. the kids got to feed the Alpaca's

San got to pet them..

then we got to see this lady carrying a baby on her back and keep weaving the wool..

That was one incredibly cute baby..

 Then we had a demonstration of how the wool was sheared, cleaned using a local root, colored using different natural colors.. (she pulled a parasite from a cactus leaf, crushed it and used its blood as the red coloring.. that was bizzare)! 

She made some jokes about how it is too late for me to use that root to get strong hair as I have lost it already. At least that is the one thing that the kids remember from that whole stop! Showed this picture to the little one and asked "rememeber her?" and she goes "she made that joke about your hair.. ha ha!"

After the demo and some shopping we came back to Cusco. It was our second night in Cusco. The first night dinner was a disaster. We asked our guide to just drop us off at the Plaza de Arma and he obliged. We found an "Italian restaurant" and asked for Vegetarian items. There was a Nepolitano (cheese) pizza and Spagheti with tomato sauce (not marinara.. just tomato). We got that and ate what we could and crashed. It was better than the previous night, but we felt something was missing. 

The little one was pale and she barely managed to eat anything. The altitude sickness somehow hit us hard from 7 to 9PM.. we went back to the hotel room and crashed.

The next day was going to be interesting.. the most interesting.. Machu Pichhu was beconing..