June 13 Continued

Hello again! Now I am in Aguascalientes at the base of Machu Picchu! Tomorrow we 
hike! I am really excited but i am also super exhausted. All we have been doing the past 
two and a half days is traveling. It's so tiring. I love it here though. The sacred 
valley really is a sacred place. It feels like a little piece of heaven. At the base is 
the river urubamba and it is flanked by enormous mountains on the two sides. Traveling 
down it today on the train felt like I was guarded from the outside. It feels like a 
completely different world. I wish I could just spend days here hiking around the entire 
valley. It is beautiful. It feels magical! I can definitely understand why it was and is 
considered sacred. So today, we left cusco in a comvi to ollantaytambo with a friend we 
met at the fireside. He is a tour guide here and offered to come with us for free. His 
name is Rolando and he is full Quechua! He learned Spanish when he was 14! He definitely 
looks it too. He is probably only 5' tall. I feel like I tower over him. But he is really 
nice and he is a member of the church! Dad, he served his mission in Trujillo! We are 
very lucky to have met him, so we can learn as much as possible while we are here. The 
one problem is that he doesn't speak English super well. But I have been able to 
understand and translate almost perfectly so far, which I am pretty proud of. He has also 
been teaching us a little Quechua too. 
In ollantaytambo we ate lunch, rice and pork and chicken soup, as per usual here, then 
hiked to some ruins. They were apparently the storehouses of the incas in that area. They 
would store their food and it would keep for years because there was limited farmland in 
the area to feed the people, because it's at the bottom if the valley. After that was the 
train then our hostal in Aguascalientes now it's bedtime because I am super exhausted. I 
love you all! Have a great day!!
Amber 

Kiley and Amber K. with Ronaldo

Ollantaytambo

The Ruins