tina davis B.Sc

Jackfruit: A Bicycle Adventure Through Latin America

but someone decided to fill the hallway with soil. So, I decided to follow one
really deep tunnel as far as I could go, until I realized that for all the squeezing and
squirming, I was stuck.

Suddenly, my body told me something strange. It started with a rumble in my
stomach, and then a twitch in an unnamed area. “Crap”, I said, and I didn’t mean
that in the expletive. Beyond me was a hole in the ground, marked by multiple
altars indicating an important entrance to a vast underground network. At the time,
I didn’t see it as an entrance. I saw something quite different. I saw the john, and
I was seriously thinking about doing something sacrilegious, only because nature
was calling.

“Are you alright in there, David?” Called Ernesto

“I’m stuck.”

“Oh my. Can you reach for the stairway?”

“Yes, hold on.”

I sucked in my stomach, and slowly crawled out of the tunnel.

“Please be careful, some of these places are still dangerous.” Said Ernesto.

“I will.”

After figuring out that my body wasn’t ready for the outhouse we headed to the
Incan fortress temple ruins of Sacsayhuaman. It’s pronounced “sexy woman”, and
from an ogling point of view, it was definitely worth a look. The enormous curved
stones, the gorgeous geometry of the placements, and quite frankly, the hills and
the valleys of the “sexy woman”, were indeed a sight to behold. At night in the
crescent moonlight, she knocked my boots off.

Sacsayhuaman is best described as a gigantic terrace of stones. The bottom,
leading terrace had the monster rocks; the centerpiece was a 300 ton, Andesite
monolith. It wasn’t the only one, as next to it were stones that were on the order
of 250 tons. If we multiplied the average, of say, 200 tons per stone, conservatively
speaking, with about 100 stones for the first terrace, which is probably an
underestimate; that brought the total tonnage of the first level, just the first level,
of Sacsayhuaman to about 20,000 tons worth of stones. To present a relationship,
the US aircraft carrier Nimitz weighs about 97,000 tons, the battleship New Jersey
is 15,000 tons, a typical destroyer class ship is 5-7000 tons, and a 4 story nuclear
reactor can be 670 tons.

But 20,000 tons was too much to even consider first. So, we examined the
monster, the beast of the rock in the wall. At 300 tons, it was a stone that most
modern day equipment would have lots of problems moving. In fact, there was   

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