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We took the "Inca" back to Cusco. It is an upscale train like the Autowagon but decked out in an elegant, lots-of-wood, Victorian fashion as if it were a misplaced Oriental Express. Our trip was uneventful, but the following day a local train had an accident on the same line; a carload of passengers rolled out of control down a long incline and sailed off into a tributary of the Urubamba River. Fortunately, no one was seriously hurt. Apparently, this calamity happened when the rock placed under its wheel failed to restrain the car. One should not condemn the railroad line for such practices too hastily; proper rock restraint protocol is a complex and perplexing problem. A busload of passengers on the Cochabamba - Oruro run went sailing off into space when an assistant failed to use a rock. In this case too, no one was seriously hurt; the bus landed on a conveniently placed house which stopped its fall. (Both the bus company and the train are reviewing their procedures.)

About the time the passengers of the local train were enjoying their exciting flight, we were on a local bus on our way to the Urubamba Valley. This time we were heading toward some "pozos" (salt pans) that were said to be easy to find - take the bus to the town of Urubamba, walk an hour down the road to Tarabamba (a village), take the bridge across the Urubamba River, turn to the right, walk along the river until you reach the cemetery, turn left until you come to a small salt creek, head up the valley...you can't miss'em!


To get to Urubamba, our bus crossed a high fertile plateau - it is what the Bolivian Altiplano would look like with a bit more rain. Snowcapped mountains east of the Urubamba River could be seen off on the horizon.		Urubamba (the town) is upstream from Machu Picchu 50 or 60 kilometers. Here, the river is meandering and slower moving - the valley is broad.


The critical factor in the journey turned out to be the bridge. A bridge across the river should be easy to spot. It wasn't, and the side road that led to it was a inauspicious dirt path. After extra miles of trial and error we finally found it.	Microclimates anyone? The east bank of the Urubamba is green and fertile, the west is arid like a desert.

Once in view, the salt pans were hard to miss. They painted the side of the valley a dazzling white. Pozos, the salt pans, are small pools created by terracing that are used to extract salt from a saline creek. There are over 5,000 pozos here. They have been in use since pre-Incan times. A woman we met has a grandfather with 5 pozos from which he earns $30 a month.


Spring had arrived - flowers were blooming, prickly pears were expanding toward maturity, people and bulls were preparing fields for planting...pigs were just waiting to be eaten.			Motocabs - a major means of transportation in the Urubamba Valley.

Bolivia, 2001