Inti Raymi Festival

It seems like I haven’t written a blog in some time because we’ve been busy doing lots of fun things and have been away from t’internet. After visiting a cemetery in the Nazcan desert and seeing some anorexic looking people we travelled to Cuzco on a gruelling 15 hour endurance bus ride that I wouldn’t like to repeat again.

Cuzco was the centre of the Incan empire and the continents oldest continuously inhabited city, after the Spanish invasion it became a bit of a backwater but now it’s back and is known as the cultural capital of the Americas. One of the reasons we travelled to Cuzco was to see Peru’s biggest festival, Inti Raymi (festival of the sun). For Christy’s birthday we checked into a 400 year old hotel which was built by the conquistadors and enjoyed the festival in style. For 10 days before the festival the city is totally filled with parades and celebrations. It seems like everyone’s involved and the whole city parades about dressed in awesome costumes, dancing, playing music and having a great time – it was really nice to see everyone getting involved and the feeling of community spirit. It all comes to a head with the main celebration, the festival of the sun, which is attended by everyone and their dog. We got to see all the parades close up but the main festival was so busy we had to sit high up on a hill and watch from afar. Unfortunately some people in front of us on the hill stood up enraging everyone behind who, on encouragement from a stupid American, started throwing rocks to make the people sit down. Some of these started landing near us and some on our heads so we decided to run away before they got so hyped up the mob started to crucify people. I don’t think we missed that much as we couldn’t see very well from there and the parades in the city definitely had a better atmosphere to it anyway. The festival was a photographers dream and I got a bit carried away, here are some (lots) of the photos ....

Ok, no more I promise!!!