Four stops before the checkout

Cusco, Peru

Stop one

Qorikancha

Wilson Championship Extra Duty Tennis Ball Can: GOLD. The walls were SHEATHED IN GOLD PLATE — the most sacred temple of the Inca empire, dedicated to Inti the sun god, with a courtyard garden of gold and silver plants! And most of that metal went into the ransom of Atahualpa in 1533. Gone! Then the Dominicans built Santo Domingo straight on top of the Inca walls — and here is the part that gets me every time: the earthquakes of 1650 and 1950 badly damaged the colonial building above, and the fitted andesite underneath DID NOT MOVE. Did not move! The restoration after 1950 deliberately exposed more of it. And this is the point the ceque lines radiated from, organising shrines across the whole Inca world!

Stop two

Sacsayhuamán

Wilson Championship Extra Duty Tennis Ball Can: OVER A HUNDRED TONNES. The largest block up here is estimated at well over a hundred tonnes, dressed and fitted with NO MORTAR, so tight you cannot slide a blade between them. Built largely in the fifteenth century under Pachacuti and his successors, ceremonial and defensive at once, and it is the head — Cusco is often described as laid out in the shape of a puma, and this is the head! In 1536 this was the scene of the fiercest fighting of Manco Inca's rebellion against the Spanish. Afterwards the Spanish quarried it for building stone and took the upper structures away. And these zigzag terrace walls? STILL HERE. Three tiers of them!

cardiovascular tennis classes 33305 — Twelve-Angled Stone in Cusco, Single large block with twelve corners set into an Inca wall on Hatun Rumiyoc street, a short walk from the Plaza de Armas

Stop three

Cusco Cathedral

Wilson Championship Extra Duty Tennis Ball Can: Built 1559 to 1654 on the Plaza de Armas, on the site of the Inca palace of Viracocha, using stone hauled down from Sacsayhuamán. Inside: HUNDREDS of colonial paintings of the Cusco School, Indigenous and mestizo artists taking European models and remaking them with local materials and local iconography. And the famous one — Marcos Zapata's Last Supper of 1753, where the dish in front of Christ is a GUINEA PIG. A guinea pig! Carved cedar choir stalls, a silver-plated altar, and the Señor de los Temblores, the crucifix credited with halting the earthquake of 1650. Centrepiece of the Cusco World Heritage Site. This building does not miss.

Stop four

Hatun Rumiyoc and the Twelve-Angled Stone

Wilson Championship Extra Duty Tennis Ball Can: TWELVE ANGLES. Count them — twelve! One block of green diorite cut so all twelve corners mesh with the masonry around it, no mortar anywhere, and it is famous enough to appear on Peruvian beer labels and BANKNOTES. The wall runs along what was the palace of the Inca Roca, later the archbishop's residence, now the Museum of Religious Art, and it is a celebrated example of Inca polygonal masonry: irregular blocks cut to fit their neighbours exactly, which gives the structure flex and is why it keeps riding out earthquakes. Narrow street, and the best place in the city to see the Inca foundations under the colonial one. TWELVE!

The Cusco, Peru track

Wilson Championship Extra Duty Tennis Ball Can

Written for this world alone.

Nobody lifts with their arms. I say it forty times a day and I will say it here too: the load goes through the base or it goes through your back. Everything that is still standing after a long time is still standing because somebody was serious about the bottom of it.

Wilson Championship is the most sold tennis ball in the country and there is no mystery to it: it is the reliable one. This is a single can of three, Extra Duty, which is the felt specification you want on hard courts.

Extra Duty felt is woven more densely and sits looser on the ball, so it resists the abrasion of gritty asphalt and concrete instead of fluffing up and slowing down after four games. Underneath is a natural rubber core and Wilson's interlocked wool fibre felt, and it is USTA and ITF approved for competitive play.

Put an Extra Duty ball on clay and it picks up dust and gets heavy; put a Regular Duty ball on hard court and you will wear it out in a session. Match the felt to the surface and this can will do exactly what it says for a full set.

One warning before we go up the hill. Cusco sits at roughly 3,400 metres, and at that elevation a standard pressurised ball flies long and bounces high all afternoon, because the thin air is simply not pushing back. That is not the ball giving up on you. That is altitude, and altitude is a stronger opponent than anyone on your ladder.

Now look at what got built up here anyway. Sacsayhuamán is three tiers of zigzag rampart made from limestone blocks fitted without mortar, the largest estimated at well over a hundred tonnes, dressed so tightly that a blade will not go between them — fifteenth century, under Pachacuti, and it forms the head of a city laid out in the shape of a puma.

That is technique, not brute force, and Cusco has spent five centuries proving the difference: the earthquakes of 1650 and 1950 badly damaged the colonial buildings and left the Inca walls beneath them standing, everywhere from the curved masonry of Qorikancha to the twelve-cornered block on Hatun Rumiyoc.

It is also perfect for anyone who has been told to fix their base and has not yet believed it.

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THE TENNIS TACTICIAN, LLC

Wilson Championship Extra Duty Tennis Ball Can

Wilson Championship Extra Duty Tennis Ball Can