An Incan site along the path.
Can you find Dad in the picture below?
Jesse, striking a pose in front of the mountain scenery.
Dad and Sara
Another Incan site along the path.
There were lots of interesting flora along the way, so here's a picture of one of them.
This picture of Dad and I was taken about 1 hour into the incline.
Snow-capped mountain off in the distance.
LLlllaaaammmmaaaassss!!! Seen in their natural habitat.
A deer we saw about one hour from the top of the pass.
A view of where we came from... way down there!!
Waterfall along the way. There were a few others, but they didn't show up very well on the camera.
Dad and Sara at the top of Dead Woman's Pass; they are waving to Jesse and I as we come up.
Another view of where we came from. It is way down in the valley.
Our group at the pass. We made it!! Below, the post stating where we are and the altitude.
This is a shot of our campsite, right before the clouds moved it. The video below shows how quickly the weather changes in the Andes.
Our group wasn't very large, just 9 hikers, plus our two guides. We hiked with a couple on their honeymoon from London, and two other Americans who were studying abroad in Buenas Aires.
Day 1 is called the Easy day. However for me, it wasn't all that easy! There were quite a few uphills and we climbed about 400m to our camp. Along the way, we stopped to view a few Inca sites along the way.
The sites along the way were Inca villages, or stopping points for messengers when they traveled between towns, especially between Machu Picchu and Cusco.
As we hiked, we stopped for lunch. I don't have the words to express our shock and amazement over the quality of our meals. The trail uses porters who carry our tents, food, and their own personal objects. Porters run ahead and have everything set up for us, including a lunch tent, complete with table and chairs, which they disassemble and reassemble for dinner at the campsite.
Jesse, me, and Dad, at one of the fantastic views. We ended the day at the campsite Wayllabamba, where the porters played soccer and we relaxed in the tents.
Here is a little bit better picture of the main cathedral of Cusco. This was an original Incan temple that the Spanish turned into a Catholic church. We toured this church the next day. A few interesting things about the chuch: there is a rendition of the last supper where instead of a fish on the table, there a guinea pig; there is an altar with a black Jesus on the cross, it was stated that during an earthquake, some people grabbed the cruxifix and once they started taking it outside, the earthquake stopped, so then people started burning candles underneath it and it turned black, like the Andean people.
After lunch, we huffed and puffed our way to Koricancha, which was the Incan temple of the sun. The Spanish took over every Incan temple and turned them into Catholic churches, but this church still has original Incan walls and follows the original design.
Here's an up close shot of the walls. There is no mortar, no caulk, there is nothing between the stones. Its amazing how they were built; they are earthquake proof as well. Many of the Spanish built churches have suffered structural damage due to earthquakes, but the Incan built walls still stand.
The next day we took a tour up to Sasquaywaman, which was though to be a fortress of some kind, but now, archaeologists think it was another temple. We saw a woman in traditional Andean dress with a llama. I had to cry out- llllllaaaaaammmmmmaaaa! And then take the pictture. I really like llamas.
The cool thing about Sacsaywaman (besides the name which sounds like sexy woman) is how its built and its location. Its built like the picture above, but with huge rocks!
Here is Dad and me, standing underneath the largest Incan doorway still standing.
To show the size of some of the rocks, here is Jesse to help with dimensions. The rock is huge! Our guide told us that some of the rocks were moved to their current spot, but others were already there, and the Incans left the large rocks where they were as a sort of worship towards mother earth.
Here is the location I was referring to earlier. Sacsaywaman overlooks Cusco.
We also visited two other major Incan sites around Cusco that same day. One of them showed us how the Incans used aquaducts to supply water to their cities. It seems pretty awesome that those aquaducts are still working today, after 600 years. 
On our last day before we started the Inca Trail, we went on a rafting trip. Dad really wanted to go because he'd never done it before, and me personally, I love rafting! Our friends Amy and Sara met up with us in Cusco and they joined us for the trip. .JPG)
The main plaza was pretty cool, in that there were tons of locals around and there was one big church and some quaint shops.
One thing that we did that was pretty cool was take a tour of the Franciscan Monastery. The monastery has been open and running since the Spanish took over in the 1500's. The coolest part about the monastery was that they had catacombs underneath that were part of the tour. We weren't able to take pictures, but about 25,000 people had been buried underneath the church, with the skulls and femurs still there. We saw them. It was pretty cool. The other church we visited (above) has a large collection of artwork from the Spanish colonial times. It was interesting because Jesse could see similarities between the artwork here and the artwork he saw in Spain.
A final, interesting note on Lima. The picture below is of a statue that was built in Spain to come to Lima. If you look carefully at the woman in the front of the statue, (you might have to zoom in) you'll notice something interesting on her head. Its a llama. Lama means flames in Spanish, and when this statue was commissioned, the creator got a bit confused and instead of putting flames or a torch on her head, there's a llama. 
The view from our hostel.
We got one last look at the Rano Raraku crater (in case you don't remember that was where they made the moai on the left side of the crater) and headed back to turn in the jeep and return to the mainland after an incredible few days on the island.
As you can see from the pictures, the crater was stunningly beautiful and located right on the edge of the island. This crater held special meaning to the Rapa Nui people because of the ceremonies that took place here near the end of the island's independent existence. When resources on the island ran out, namely the trees that were all chopped down, and moai could no longer be moved and erected because of this the people of the island changed their entire religious system. The moai represented a form of ancestor worship and those ancestors clearly weren't protecting the islanders from environmental disaster anymore so the islanders changed to something new sometimes referred to as the "Birdman cult". This consisted of all the tribes of the island sending their chief and one strong representative to the Orongo crater at a designated time of year for a competition. Here is a petroglyph from the site showing the birdman.
The chief and representative would stay in the houses pictured below and on a designated day the representatives from each tribe would start the competition to decide which tribe would rule the island for the coming year.
The competition involved each representative climbing down the thousand foot cliffs, swimming the mile across shark-infested waters to the far island you see below, climbing up the cliffs of the island, grabbing an egg of the nesting migratory seabirds, swimming back across the mile of ocean, and climbing back up the cliffs to the waiting chiefs with their egg. Now that's a pretty crazy physical competition if you ask me!
After this we drove across the island to the place where they make those red hats for the moai called pukao. The different volcanoes that make up the island each had different types of lava and this one was valued for its red color.
To wrap up the day we went to the only real beach on the island, and purported landing place of the first island settlers, called Anakena.
The beach also features 2 ahu with some nice moai.
The smaller ahu with the single moai has a different design and this one was actually re-erected by Thor Heyerdahl who wrote the book Con Tiki, which some of you might be familiar with, and was experimenting with techniques for putting the moai up using only materials that were actually available to the Rapa Nui people themselves.
The last stop for the day was a couple of ahu near town with the only moai on the island that has eyes. A few years ago an archaeologist from the island discovered some pieces of white coral broken among the stones of an ahu. After some confusion as to how they got there, they were pieced together to form eyes for the moai. To date, this moai is the only one that has had eyes restored to it... kinda eerie looking isn't it!
