Ingapirca

Last light we got in late to our hotel, the Santa Lucia, a boutique hotel. Basically it is a refurbished house of someones a long time ago. We had breakfast at the hotel and then met some friends and a tour guide. We started driving to Ingapirca which is an incan ruin outside of Cuenca. The Incans built this for the kings son and had most of the bricks brought in from Chile, this was very difficult because there were no roads and no wheels yet so they had to carry it on their backs.

There were some very interesting things that I learned about Ingapirca. For example, in the middle of one of the houses there is a grave for an important woman (we do not know who it is) that had died, in her grave people also found out that there were a few other people burried with her, ALIVE. They were buried alive to show the importance of the woman. I also found out that almost all of the incans things were squares and all of the Coharies used circles. Niether of the two groups used windows. Another thing I found out was that the Coharies hated the Incans so much that they helped the spaniards kill off most of the Incans.

When we started to head back to the hotel we stopped first for lunch, then we stopped at a home of a family that makes shawls by hand. She gave us a tour and told us about the croud that she makes shawls for. Appearently she makes shawls for famous people around the world by custom design. She also sells them to many other people but they are expensive. I got one that is blue for 45 dollars which in Ecuador, is worth a lot more than it is here. After that we went to an orchid shop that turned out to be closed, so we went back to our hotel.