Day 10 / June 30, 2013 I was excited about this day as we started out with a visit to the Urubamba market with our local guide, Sheila, our tour leader, Kike, and the hotel’s head chef. At the market we bought foods for our cooking class, which was held prior to dinner. This was fun to merge with the local population at their marketplace and see how different people’s experience of grocery shopping is from our sterile experience in the United States. It’s not that the market is unsterile, but more that the atmosphere is such an organic experience, with local people selling their crops and meats, juices and baked goods. The closest thing we have is the trendy farmer’s markets now found in many towns and cities. One buy that makes a perfect gift is the gourmet salt, which is currently quite the rage. I bought three separate pound bags of salt from Maras at $1 per pound. There are some gourmet salts that cost $7 to $30 per pound! From here we followed the bottom of the mountains along the Urubamba River to Chinchero and the weaving demonstration workshop. Along the way we saw the rafting spot where we would go tomorrow, as well as a company, Via Ferrata, which offers rock face climbing and then zip lining down the mountain face you just climbed! At the top of the line they have vertical hanging modules, transparent hanging bedrooms where you can choose to spend the night! This is nothing our Road Scholar participants would do, but I found the idea of it exciting (but you won’t likely find me doing any of it). The weaving demonstration was informative and fun. The building was made with clay/mud adobe and had packed clay/mud floors. This was a co-op, where many of the ladies involved in the demonstration, had their personal weavings for sale.  So it was a great place to shop where we knew the quality was excellent! The demonstration included about 6 to 8 ladies and they started with the wool just sheared, still dirty from the natural conditions of the animal. They introduced a natural soap and washed the wool showing the resulting dirty water and the much cleaner wool. From there they had three bowls with three different natural sources for color, such as roots, berries, leaves and seeds. They then took the natural dye materials to the cast iron bowls full of hot water. After some time in the boiling water they placed the cleaned wool into the hot dye liquid. After the wool dried then the ladies spun it into yarn, which they demonstrated. Under the fire pit was part of the guinea pig pen and due to the coolness of this mountain town, many of the cute little creatures could be found huddled there for warmth. After the demonstration we had time to shop at the co-op, walk around the town and visit the market. I bought a Quechua version of our kettle corn, which was delicious and popped with much larger corn kernels. We ended the walking tour back at the co-op where we had a delicious traditional lunch of barbequed alpaca and guinea pig! Despite having seen the live little guinea pigs, I think we all enjoyed the meal. We then drove to Moray and on the way were rerouted due to a car race using the road as part of its route. Thankfully there was another option and we made it there in about the same time. We went around the site and then many in the group hiked to the bottom and back up as I watched. The mountain vistas at this time of the day happened to be clear and beautiful. Not too much time was needed there and soon we were headed back to Yucay where we had our cooking class. Once we got started it became apparent that they had decided to cook too many versions of the two starters. One dish had three versions and the second starter thankfully had only one version. But it was fun anyway and the appetizers were tasty! Next up was a music demonstration: Intro to the music of the Andes, but the musician was also booked to play in the lobby for the entire hotel.  After some great Andean pan flute music we all made our way to dinner. Next post >> Previous post >> Learn more about this program >>