Cusco, day 4

Wednesday
Today we hired the same guide as yesterday, Oscar. He took us to the Sacred Valley, a huge fertile farming land and we learned all about the different crops grown there. Peru is full of many natural resources like hundreds of varieties of potatoes, many different types of quinoa, corn and too many other vegetables to name here. Plus they were rich in gold (the Spanish pretty much took all of that though). Also they have cool animals like Alpacas, Llamas and Guinea Pigs. We visited more Incan ruins near the town of Pisaq. Oscar explained how the architecture of the city was laid out and how life was for the Incans. They made a lot of enemies during their conquering phase so they made clever structures around their cities to keep the other guys out. We did an hour and a half long hike with many steps (I think the Incans were the ones who invented stairs) and we were quite challenged by this, which made us very concerned, again, about our impending hike.
We went to two very cool places today - one was a sanctuary for injured animals, a place for them to heal from their injuries or illnesses until they are ready to be released into the wild, and the other was a llama and alpaca farm featuring all the different types of llamas and alpacas. Also there were a couple vicuñas, which are very rare and live at extremely high elevations. We were able to go into the areas where the animals were and feed them alfalfa. I loved visiting these places today!
Incidentally, Nick has started to have symptoms like he's getting sick during our outing today and by the time we got back to our hotel this afternoon he was definitely sick with the beginnings of a bad cold. Now what?? With long discussions on what we should do (cancel the trip completely, possibly postpone it 'til a few more days or have Nick stay at our hotel and be sick while I do the hike as planned), we decided on option #3. So I went with this group of strangers - 3 other couples plus our guide and all the cooks, porters, horsemen and their horses and mules. I was really nervous about doing this without Nick, but we've already paid a deposit and it's one of the main things I wanted to do while I'm in Peru. Plus Nick didn't want me to miss this opportunity and Fernando & Kristen encouraged me to go ahead while they stayed with Nick to take care of him. Sigh. We planned on Nick being well enough to join the group in 3 days to explore Ollantaytambo, Aguas Calientes and Machu Picchu. Poor Nick...