Photo Montage. It's the best I can do tonight.

It all happened. And it all came together in the most perfect, unforgettable way possible. I've just arrived back in Cuzco, after a two day tour through the Sacred Valley, with Machu Picchu as the cherry on top. A few stats at the end of two days: over 22 miles of walking, over 150 flights of stairs climbed, over six thousand calories burned. So...I'm tired. Adding photos of the most mind-numbingly awesome weekend ever, then going to bed.

The bus, on the way to the Sacred Valley. And we're not talking no Greyhound. Like South Africa, the favored method of transport in most Peruvian cities is the combi bus, which operates somewhere in that gray area between private taxi and scheduled bus. Six soles (about $2) and the hour-long ride can be yours.

The salt pans at Maras. After arriving at Urubamba, a small town within driving distance of all the Sacred Valley sites, we secured our new best friend, Peter, as our cab driver. Our first stop were these outrageous salt licks, which have been in constant use for hundreds of years. Because there are no access roads besides the foot-wide precipices between each pan (many of these paths also contain an elaborate drainage system that sends just the right amount of water to each shallow pool), workers still carry the salt up the mountain in sacks on their shoulders. They do it a lot, too, since each lick produces over 100kg of salt per day. Incredible.

Maybe the best 15 minutes of the trip. On our way toward the highway, we stumbled across a Saturday street party, which included Peruvians from all the surrounding towns. The highlight of the event was the Tug of War Tournament, which pitted women from different towns against each other. Each team, occupying staked out spaces around a basketball court as if the Sharks and Jets were on their way, had its own colors. The largest, and most intimidating gang, was the Pink Ladies of Urubamba. They sent their six strongest ladies, average age about 65, into the ring. No one else approached, until the ragtag crew from Yucay ran in. I'll let you see the video someday, if you're good.

The terraces at Moray really don't photograph well unless there are people inside, to give you an idea...oh wait. There are people there. Well, that's how effing big it is. While the space looks like a big amphitheater, historians noted that each section within each bowl had its own microclimate -- it's really warm in one area, really cool in the next, windy in another, et cetera. They now think the site was used as a botanical laboratory, where they could experiment by growing different crops in different conditions.

The view from the fortresses at Ollantaytambo, where Manco Inca made his big stand against the invading Spanish. I don't have a good picture here, since Patricia brought the fancy camera, but will eventually be able to show you the steep walls on all sides of the plateau. Imagine Spanish conquistadors charging up the cliff faces, arrows and lances puncturing their fancy uni's, and saying "forget this, ese. I'm outta here. Paz afuera." I don't know why these conquistadors became Mexican in my mind, but it was a crazy colonial time.

Our train trip, which barely happened. As we arrived at Ollaytaytambo, we checked in with the ticket counter, which informed us that all the tickets had sold out. But with a little determination, perseverance, and ass-kissing, we managed to score two last-minute tickets on PeruRail, the finest monopoly the government could privately contract. Since there are no roads in or out of the closest city, Aguas Calientes, the train was a must. Here's us making the most of our time. Notice the Advil next the pencil, which are still being popped pretty regularly to cope with the altitude headaches.

Annnnd...we're here. This picture is my first good look at a Wonder of the World, taken at 6:41am. We'd been awake since 4:30. But with only a few dozen other people who made it up the hill that early, we were treated to some pretty baller scenery, and with some gentle mist and low-hanging clouds to add to the ambience.

Don't worry, I'm not going to show you all the ruins. But here's an example -- the Temple of the Sun. See that circular room? See the trapezoidal window? On June 21st (the winter solstice in South America), the sun peeks up over the mountain, through a huge stone structure on the horizon, through the window, and onto a ceremonial stone that still resides in the middle of the room. And crazy enough, this stuff still happens. Those Incas. What will they dream up next.

There I am. In one of the most magical places in the world, on one of the most magical weekends of my life.

Day 2 in Cuzco -- Sexy Women

Still playing catch up, since Patricia is alive and well and watching the Gonzaga game on her computer. But that won't be revealed until later. Read on.

Without knowing if or when my friend would make it Cuzco (she revealed to me after arriving that one more day of delays would have sent her packing back to the States, so thank goodness), I went for broke and decided to see the stuff you have to see: the ruins. To do it, I had to get there in a van. And just like the van, I needed fuel. That's where the local cafeteria comes in.

I decided to stick with a rule today: eat where it's crowded, preferably with locals. So upon finding an outcropping of taxis and buses, I checked near a ramshackle doorway: plastic buckets to sit on, surly men eating piles of food. Check.

Most Peruvians living on lower incomes eat out more than they cook at home -- since the average three course meal, called the menu, costs two to three dollars, it's often more economical to let a little old lady do the cooking. And I found one. Her name is Teresa, she's five foot nothing, and she loves to make fun of taxi drivers after they leave. I can only imagine what she said about me. In my presence, though, Teresa was everything you read about. She insisted I clear my plate, otherwise she's be insulted. She asked me how everything was the second it entered my mouth. She taught me about the different varieties of potatoes she cooked with (there are over 500 in Peru). And she kept piling on extras if I complimented anything.

Today's menu: coca tea, made with coca leaves that provide a mild narcotic boost and allegedly resistance to altitude sickness; potato soup made with yellow potatoes and potato cream, along with perfectly spiced salsa; alpaca meat served over rice, with -- you guessed it -- more potatoes. "The Peruvian breakfast is the best breakfast there is," she cooed in Spanish with a toothless smile, sliding another piece of alpaca on my plate.

After a quick totter over to the next bus terminal, I was on my way to the famous, and conveniently located, Inca ruins of Tambomachay, Pukapuchara, Q'enqo, and the world-famous Saqsayhuaman (it's literally pronounced "sexy woman"). Walter, the guide I found hanging around the entrance, tried to add me to his tour with some Argentians, who then got pissed and left him to give me a personal (and presumably less lucrative) tour of the ruins.

While Walter taught me lots of the Incas religious beliefs and building methods (interesting fact: Incas would cut these massive rocks by inserting heat-sensitive wood into minuscule fault lines, waiting for them to freeze, and force the rock apart), he was most excited to teach me pickup lines -- a phrase he adores, incidentally. While I particularly enjoyed calling women sirenas, or mermaids, or invoking the ever-popular "girl, you have so many curves, and I don't have any brakes," his favorite was the classic four-line exchange:

Woman: So, what do you do?

Man: I'm a student.

Woman: Oh, what do you study?

Man: As of right now? Your eyes.

He told me you could add "sirena" to the end, if you want to give it some maritime flair.

All that talk stopped, however, when we saw the Saqsaywaman herself. Speechless, I pulled out my camera and furiously started pushing buttons as Walter described what I was seeing.

If Qorikancha was the temple of the sun and moon, and if Tambomachay was the temple of water, Saqsaywaman was the most intimidating of all: the Temple of Thunder, Lightening, and Thunderbolts. To pay homage, Incas set up stones in their typical, polygonal fashion -- except these were all over 8 feet high. The largest stone we saw, perfectly sculpted by Incan masons out of composite iron they found in meteorites, stands over 15 feet high and weighs over 120 tons. One can only imagine hundreds of workers pulling the limestone uphill over a mile, using Egyptian-style rolling techniques, then being told by their boss that the stone wasn't smooth enough. "Set it down, get out your sandpaper, and get it right," he'd say. After that rock is done, head back to the quarry and repeat a few thousand times. No wonder the Sexy Woman took fifty years to build.

Upon my descent from the thunderbolt-dominated heavens, I checked the hotel. No sign of Patricia. Looking to drown my sorrows in juice, I told the receptionist I was headed over to the local market. He looked concerned.

"That's where the locals eat," he said, making sure this gringo wouldn't be scared off by Peruvian sanitation standards.

"Si," I said, staring him down, "lo sabe usted." You KNOW it.

After being served the juice of five oranges, squeezed right in front of my eyes, and after buying some trinkets (don't worry, family members, I gotcha covered), I got the word from an internet cafe: she's here. She made it. Patricia didn't die!

Since meeting up at five, we've been chilling in the Plaza de Armas, eating some fine trout and Peruvian pizza, and tasting some local pastry dishes. The tale continues anew tomorrow.

Brad gets excited about history.

I began my education in Qorikancha, just off the town square. Qorikancha, or "golden temple" in the native language of the Quechua, was one of a handful of the Inca's most celebrated religious sites -- and since gold was always used to signify the sun, it was certainly the best decorated.

To understand the whole gold thing, you have understand a few things about the Incas, and a few things about the Spanish conquistadors. Peruvians didn't have a monetary system in the 1500's. People grew surplus crops, and traded them. There was no gold standard. Spain, on the other hand, had a carefully codified system for gold -- a certain weight was worth one peso, more was two pesos, and so on. A certain amount of gold would take care of you for a month, or a year. So when the Spanish took the Inca king, Atahualpa, hostage, his promise was music to their ears:give me my freedom, he said, and I'll give you a room full of gold. Not decorated with gold. Filled to the brim. He even specified the measurements of the room. If he can offer us this much gold off the top of his head, the Spanish thought, how much do these people have?

When Pizarro, the head hauncho, sent three of his men to travel to Qorikancha to expedite the gold gathering, they figured it out. The temple was covered – from floor to ceiling – with gold. Solid gold fountains. Solid gold llama replicas. Even the walls were covered in over 700 squares of gold leafs, that measured two inches thick.

What you see of Qorikancha now is the result of that day. The Spaniards quickly set to work, stripping the gold off the walls, as confused worshippers entered and whispered to each other – some of their first thoughts were that, perhaps, these men who wore beards and rode horses actually ate gold, and needed it for survival. Imagine aliens entering the Vatican and getting really excited over fresco paint, ripping hunks out of walls by the barrel. The Incas saw these walls as a beautiful homage to the rays of the sun. The soldiers saw their retirement funds.

In addition to the colorful story, my tour guide, Caterina, had loads of interesting tidbits about the architecture of the temple. I’ll spare you all of them and hit you with my two favorites.

First: The city of Cuzco was purposefully designed in the shape of a puma, the most powerful animal the Incans knew. The head was the site of the military quarters. The heart was the town square. The tail was where the roads left Cuzco and ran off to other villages. “This temple,” she said delicately, with its tribute to the male and female deities of sun and moon, along with its power to spring the seed of the Incan culture throughout the empire, “is located where the genitals of the puma would be.”

Second: The Spanish were freaking amazed, as I am today, by the Incan’s grip on architecture. They routinely wrote home to their families, describing the stone masonry as unlike anything they had ever seen: every stone, no matter how massive, fit perfectly with those around it. No mortar was used. And miraculously, though the new Spanish churches and markets fell down with every passing earthquake, the Inca structures still stand today.

My dad, a structural engineer who gives lectures on seismically-sound design, would probably be able to point to the thing that the Incas got, and the Spanish didn’t – arches. The Incan architects understood that a trapezoid was stronger than a rectangle. Add that to the fact that trapezoids fit the religion well – they pointed to the heavens, they ran along the earth towards the edges of the empire – and the shape begins reappearing everywhere. Niches to hold bodies are in trapezoidal shape. Walls are built on a slight angle, bracing themselves against quakes. Coolest of all, they build trapezoidal windows in which you could see a hundred yards.

These people knew what the eff they were doing. So did Caterina. She kept calling me Brad Pitt.