Chocolate Class! And the Sacred Valley!

I'm a few days behind on posting but hoping to get caught up! Two days ago, Trevor and I signed up to take a chocolate making class in Cusco. We learned all about the process of growing cacao beans and got to make and sample a couple different types of chocolate.

Here, we are all watching while our teacher scoops raw cacao beans into a ceramic roaster:

We roasted the beans for 10 minutes; here Trevor takes his turn stirring the beans. Trevor was also the timekeeper to make sure we didn't over-roast the beans!

After the beans were roasted, we took the nibs out of the shells, and then used a mortar and pestle to grind the nibs into a paste. Here are our group's mortars and pestles:

From the ground chocolate, we first got to sample Mayan hot chocolate - with only a little bit of sugar and some chili powder added - very good! And warming!

After the Mayan hot chocolate, we made milk hot chocolate by adding hot milk, cinnamon sticks, cloves and sugar to the chocolate, and then mixed it with a special stirring stick. Trevor mixing milk chocolate:

Finally, we got to make our own molded chocolate! We chose our molds - Trevor decided to make two big bars and I made a lot of little chocolates. They had all sorts of flavors we could add, like mint, salt, sprinkles, marshmallows, nuts, chili powder, coca, etc. Trevor made his with salt and chili, and I made a couple different varieties.

Trevor fills his mold:

Here's the whole class having fun filling our chocolate molds. The class was composed of a French family with three kids, a Swedish couple, a Dutch couple, Trevor and I, an English girl, a Dutch lady living in Ireland, and two Spanish girls. You can see most of them here:

The next morning, it was time to set out on our Machu Picchu adventure. Machu Picchu is remarkably difficult to get to - probably why it stayed hidden for so long!! Day One of our tour took us through the Sacred Valley, and eventually left us at the train station in Ollantaytambo, where we caught a train to Aguas Calientes and ascended to Machu Picchu the next day.

The Sacred Valley was very beautiful and we stopped at a couple different ancient Incan ruins. Here, Trevor hangs out with some llamas at a rest stop. The llama he was with did not want to be in the picture but the white one behind the others REALLY wanted to be in the picture:

We were starting to get higher into the mountains, which resulted in some great views. The sky was such a beautiful color of blue:

Farming terraces at Pisac. According to our guides, these were farmed with crops until last year but are now being restored and preserved. Enlarge to see how tiny the people are and how large the terraces really are:

Group listens to the guide at Pisac:

Our second ruins of the day were at Ollantaytambo. We thought these were a lot of stairs but we had NO IDEA what would be in store for us at Machu Picchu... TO BE CONTINUED