Heading out on the Inca Trail

One year ago today, we headed out on the Inca Trail.

Sounds simple, right? In a way it is. Until you consider that these photos were taken at about eight in the morning and we'd already been awake and traveling for four hours.

(Is anyone surprised I have a purple backpack?)

So, the Inca Trail starts at kilometer 82, also known as Piscacucho. That's great, but Cusco, where our hotel was, is at kilometer 1. When the Spanish invaded Peru, the Inca emperor took one look at the situation and decided it was a battle they couldn't win. They disappeared into the jungle and tore up the section of the Inca Trail that left Cusco so the Spanish couldn't follow them. The typical four-day Inca Trail hike now starts at Piscacucho. From there, we hiked up a local trail until we joined the original trail late that afternoon.

The first section of the trail took us through several Quechua villages and outposts like this one. The locals earn a portion of their income selling supplies to underprepared tourists, but the villages also contained examples of Inca engineering.  Those water canals date from the Inca empire.

We passed Llactapacta as we headed up into the mountains. I was greatly amused this past fall when one of the early episodes of Agents of SHIELD included a scene at Llactapacta. It didn't look anything like this on TV.

We stopped for lunch and OMG, the food! I've eaten in some pretty amazing restaurants in my travels, but I would put every single one of them up against the food our camp cook prepared for us on a propane stove in little campsites all along the trail. Five-course gourmet meals...

The thing that stayed with me the most, though, was the scenery, so I'll leave you with some pictures of the glory that is the Andes.

Want to know more about my trip to Peru? Check out The Path, coming on Sept. 1 from Dreamspinner Press.

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The Sacred Valley (Pisac, Ollantaytambo and more)

The Sacred Valley...

The name itself is evocative. The valley itself is incredible. The Urubamba river carved out the valley and its floodplain over thousands of years, and along its banks, the Inca Empire grew up.

Villages like this one above Pisac (where Benicio now lives) are typical of the way the Inca people lived. The thatch roofs are recreations, but the rest is original.

One of the things that struck me about this village and so many of the others was the engineering that went into them. The Inca people created terraces for agriculture and for erosion control. We haven't mastered erosion control in the 21st century, but the Inca had it figured out a thousand years ago. These terraces were agricultural in nature. You can tell because of the steps between them. Erosion control terraces were narrower and didn't have the same steps because people didn't need to access them as easily.

After we left Pisac, we headed to a center dedicated to preserving local arts. The knitter in me was thrilled.

All those colors of alpaca wool dyed naturally...

And the work the Quechua women create with the yarn is spectacular.

This is the market in another village, but all the handcrafts were made in the traditional way.

We also learned about the difference between llamas, alpacas, guanacos, and vicuñas. Guanacos and vicuñas aren't domesticated, so they're less interesting. Llamas are bigger and capable of carrying up to 25 kg, but they don't make good eating and the wool they produce isn't easy to work with.

Alpacas on the other hand won't carry anything no matter what you offer them, but they taste delicious and their wool is warm, plentiful, and soft.

Our last stop was Ollantaytambo, the oldest continuously occupied city in the Americas. The reason it was such a prime location?

The man in the mountain. Yes, that is a natural formation.

Next stop... the Inca Trail!

Want to know more about my trip to Peru? Check out The Path, coming on Sept. 1 from Dreamspinner Press.
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Cusco and Sacsayhuaman

A year ago, my husband and I left on an adventure.

Yes, those are the Andes, and no, I didn't use a telephoto lens when I took that picture from the plane window. They're that tall. We flew from Lima to Cusco, which would be our home base for the time we were in Peru.

After settling in at a lovely hotel right off the main square, we had the chance to take a tour of the city.

It was interesting but very rooted in the Spanish conquest of Peru, not in the Inca empire that is so fascinating to me. Fortunately the city tour included a visit to Sacsayhuaman. For those of you who don't speak Quechua, it sounded like our guide said sexy woman every time. That's not quite the proper pronunciation but close.

Sacsayhuaman is on a flattened mountain above Cusco. The stones are quarried from the next mountain over and then dragged (the Inca people didn't have the wheel) through the intervening valley and up to the other side to be stacked as you see them. Easy, right? Think again. Many of those stones are taller than the average person.

Okay, not taller than Noah, but Noah is over six feet tall. (I'm the one with the red and green sweater and the big camera, for anyone who's curious.) The online sites I've found talk about it as a fortress, used in the defense of Cusco, but our guide saw it far differently. For him this was a spiritual site, a place of worship for the Inca people. All three animals sacred to the Inca people are represented here--the condor in the name (huaman means condor), the snake in the zigzag shape of the stones, and the jaguar because Cusco was laid out in the shape of a jaguar in ancient times with Sascayhuaman as its head. Additionally the stones are fitted together so smoothly you can't get a blade of grass or sheet of metal between them, a typical feature of religious architecture, not military. Regardless of whether it was religious or military, it was stunning. Here are a few more pictures in case you weren't impressed enough already.

Want to know more about my trip to Peru? Check out The Path, coming on Sept. 1 from Dreamspinner Press.


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Coming Soon: The Path

I've talked quite a bit about my trip to Peru last August as well as about the book it inspired. All that work has finally come to fruition. The Path is on Dreamspinner Press's Coming Soon page.

The cover is a photo I took on the trail with a little magic by Paul Richmond, our Assistant Art Director. I love the light and the mist, and of course the steps. Let me tell you a thing or two about those steps. We joked about the scenery being proof of the existence of God and the steps being proof of the existence of the devil. They were a little bit uneven and were steeper than steps we're used to, so after a while, it was excruciating. At the same time, they are a marvel of engineering, created by a "primitive" people who didn't have the wheel and yet who excavated and maintained a path between the spiritual and political capitals of a huge empire, a path that is still in usable condition over 500 years after the Inca people abandoned it.

For anyone who's interested, here's me reading the prologue of The Path.

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Testament to Love, second edition

Almost nine years ago, I participated in a fic exchange. Authors sent in requests for a story they'd like to receive as well as genres they would be willing to write. I signed up and eagerly awaited my assignment. While I was waiting, my best friend asked me if I was participating and I said yes. Imagine my distress, then, when two days later, I was assigned her request. She'd be expecting to read something from me since she always beta-read my fiction before I posted it, but it was supposed to be a surprise. 

I did the only thing I could think of. I emailed a third author friend and asked for a second prompt. So while I was writing Nicki's story in secret, I was writing Connie's story to show to Nicki. I'd finished Connie's story and was frantically working on the last scene of Nicki's when we went to a weekend get-together of author friends. I spent the entire weekend with her on the other end of the couch as I was trying to finish the story without her finding out.

I managed, with a bit of luck and her ankle bracelet to let me know when she was coming down the hall, and sent it in for the fic exchange. It was posted and I sent her off to look at my story, as if she hadn't read what she thought was my story a dozen times already. Instead she found Testament to Love.

I've expanded on the story since then, adding 5k over the previously published version (which itself was longer than the fic exchange story), and it will be published as a novella in June or July. Needless to say, I'm ecstatic. I only hope she loves this edition as much as she loved the first.

Cover poll

I'm almost done with my next book, tentatively titled The Path (or possibly El camino since it's set in Peru) and I need some input on the cover. I took close to a thousand pictures while I was in Peru, many of them of the Inca Trail, one of the elements of the book that the title refers to. And this is where you come in. I've included some of the best pictures of the trail below. Leave a comment with your favorite to help me decide which one to submit for possible use on the cover of the book.

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Birthday wishes and more fangirl squees

I wrote pretty extensively last spring about meeting Janelle Taylor at RT and everything that meant to me.

She sent me a birthday wish on Facebook for her "KC  Book Fair buddy." Of the hundreds of birthday wishes I got yesterday, and I got many, that's the one that made me tingle in excitement. You see, Ariel the author wouldn't exist if it hadn't been for one of Janelle Taylor's books. I was bored with YA books because 30 years ago, YA books romances didn't even have a kiss half the time, and they certainly never went beyond a kiss, and that kiss had no description surrounding it. Just the simple statement that they kissed. Imagine my delight, then, when I opened Destiny's Temptress and found not just kissing but descriptions of kissing and sex! I knew the mechanics of sex all fifth graders learn in sex ed, but that was hardly the same.

I read that book until it fell apart. I studied it. I wanted to see how to build tension, how to develop a relationship, how to write sex. And then I turned around and practiced all the things I'd (hopefully) learned by studying a master. 

And now that master is my KC Book Fair buddy.

Yeah, I'm doing a happy dance all over the house once more.