I am sitting in an internet cafe in Lima, the leaden sky pressing down on the busy streets of jostling cars. I have had a cold for the last five days after being infected by Seb and my stay in the mountainous town of Huaraz, famous for being framed by the Cordillera Blanca where "Touching the Void" is set, was therefore curtailed. Im my boredom, Ive worked out how far I´ve travelled in South America.
As you remember, I started my trip in Buenos Aires and headed south across the arid, flat pampas, unsure of what the future would hold. Puerto Madryn and fishing escapades later, I found myself in the "land of mist and snow", Patagonia, gawping at glaciers and climbing mountain crags. The cold, bleak immmensity of the landscape got to me in the end and I yearned to head back to civilisation. It came in the form of the street vendors and sooth-sayers of Santiago, in the "cafe con piernas" and deep seats of Starbucks. My love for Argentina meant that I would cross back into the country of the gauchos twice on my way up Chile, visiting Santiago and the beautiful Salta. Mystery lay in the "magnetic" valley of Cochiguaz, near the Elqui valley and exquisite beauty in the star strewn mantle thrown above me. San Pedro was the tourist nexus of the north, drawing me in and spitting me out again within two days, my jeans a little more ripped from sand boarding and the valle de la luna. Trains have been a continual disappointment in South America, and Calama was no exception. It wasn´t a lurching steam engine that awaited me, but prostitutes on street corners and an Italian with a beard who went by the name of Alberto.
"Dawn in russet mantle clad" walked not "oer dawn of yon high eastern hill", but over the rosy, rotund faces of the Bolivian women in their top hats, my most enduring memory of Bolivia. The mountains of salt led on to Tupiza and Tarija, nearly falling off a horse and sampling some foul Bolivian wine. Refreshed, I travelled on to Potosi and the bowels of hell, only to emerge suffocated and humbled. The white walls of Sucre provided the perfect setting for independence celebrations and prepared me for the din of La Paz`s streets, "the shanghai of the Americas". The cross into Peru was imperceptible, both of the Andean peoples of Lake Titicaca descending from the Tiahuanaco tribe. Enjoying David´s company, I gained an interesting insight of how people live on the islands of Uros, Amantani and Taquile, so different from Puno where people entice you into their hostels in the hope of foisting a sub-standard tour upon you.
Arequipa was a pleasure, Cusco a chore. The first was as elegant and relaxing as the second was vulgar and stressful. It was made up for though, by the first sight of Machu Picchu as the sun rose over the surrounding mountains that had lain inviolate for so many centuries before the arrival of Bingham. Much of the area did not even appear on the map of the famous Italian cartographer, Raimondi. I have travelled progressively more slowly as time has passed, and by the end I was content to just keep on keeping on.
Argentina was my favourite country, but does not compare to Bolivia in terms of difference and "culture shock". The people of Madagascar seemed more akin to Europeans than the Quechuan speaking locals of Uyuni or La Paz. In all, I have travelled 13,000KM across dry pampa, silken grass land, barren mountains and icy precipices. The sand dunes of the Chilean and Peruvian coast would seem to stretch on forever and then suddenly give way to snow-capped peaks and green foliage. The pampas north of La Paz was an even greater contrast, home to flitting kingfishers, parrots, dolphins and caimans.
I´ll certainly miss the four sol dinners (though Ive eaten too few and am surely running low on funds), the staggeringly high, six thousand metre mountains, meeting new people at every destination and the feeling of freedom you experience when you pack up you meagre belongings and get back on the road. In terms of culinary highlights, the steak of Argentina stands out, as does the ice-cream of Bariloche, the humitas of Bolivia, Israeli food in La Paz and above all, Cappricio cafe in Arequipa where oozing slabs of artery blocking chocolate cake would be served up with nonchalance.A place to be remembered and its not even in the Lonely Planet.
The smelly socks will not be missed, though, nor the swiss-cheese trainers and jeans that haven´t bear the scars of chimichurri sauce and ceviche juice. I believe some bugs may have found a willing home there. The bread here in South America is nothing short of crap; a sort of sweet, crumbly dough that doesn´t bear up well to the rigours of jam spreading. God knows why they have a word for homemeal bread, pan integral, because nobody eats any. To be added to this growing list are holes in the ground where you are expected to urinate, toilets without seats, carrying toilet paper around in your bag wherever you go, supermarkets that don´t cater to the individual, pharmacies that refuse to sell plasters, illegal driving, continual strikes, contempt for the Gringo, poor water pressure in the showers, hair in the plugholes, marauding Israelis, laundries that shrink your clothes and people who have no sense of civic pride. It made me yearn at times for some sort of benign dictatorship that would make the buses run on time. There are no trains left to run on time.
As Orwell said, everything feels heavier in England and people with knobbled faces apologise for being pushed or jostled (apart from London, of course, the least English part of England. Will people be protesting in the streets about Britain´s complicity in the torture of terrorist suspects. I doubt it...the Ashes are a far bigger concern. It may rain, but its still home. TAKE ME BACK TO DEAR OLD BLIGHTY....
Thursday, 9 July 2009
Wednesday, 1 July 2009
Machu Picchu or Picchu? Cusco or Qosco?
Peru would be alright if it weren’t for the people, the women on every street corner with leering smiles who entice you into their “massage parlour” with calls of “mister, mister, massache”, the taxi drivers and tour operators who brazenly lie to you, the bus drivers who let their country go to the shit in order to protect their own narrow interest. The people who jeer at you and call you “gringo” with a contempt that you would reserve for the lowliest of beings, while relying on your money to survive, the greasy haired libertines who grab at you as you walk down the street and whisper “You want weed man, coke?”. Of course, these people comprise only a small proportion of the population, but they do enough to take the shine off a city that should overwhelm a tourist with its culture, elegance and heritage.
“Cusco”, a perversion of the Quechuan word “Qosco” was literally the heart or navel of the Tihuantinsuyo (Popularly known as the Inca empire), the four districts of which stretched to the north into modern day Columbia, to the south into Chile and Argentina, to the East into the Amazon and to the West to the coast. The word “Inca” only refers to the head of the tribe, a descendant of the sun God Inti. Under the reign of the Inca, Pachacutec, Incan lands were transformed from a tiny collection of small villages and hamlets into a vast, sweeping empire containing tens of thousands of people who owed homage to the Inca and worshipped the sun God in the ceremony, Inti Raymi. The creative force of this empire was concentrated on Qosco. Pachacutec remodeled the city, building upon the stonework of earlier inhabitants and turning the modest Temple of the Sun into Koricancha, or temple of gold. Much of this spectacular work can still be seen today in walls and fortifications that have borne the winds and rain of half a millennium and today support a modern city. I stayed in the artsy district of San Blas and every day, when walking to the Plaza de Armas, I would pass an exquisite Inca wall built in the expansionist style; hulking, irregular shaped masses of rock fit together seamlessly without the help of mortar and polished to create a shiny finish. This contrasts with an earlier style of rough hewn rock glued together with mortar and a later style of shiny, regular blocks fitted together seamlessly in uniform lines. The expansionist style seems to me to be the most ingenious and intricate. Without the help of the wheel, the Incas fitted strange shaped stones together so perfectly that not a blade of grass can fit between the seams, built the walls to withstand earthquakes and would lay the foundations for a modern city that pays little attention to its own roots.
Koricancha is a fantastic example of Inca masonry. When the Spanish arrived, much of the Sun Temple was dismantled, but the foundations and fortifications were retained in order to built a Franciscan monastery above it. The smooth, curving outer wall looks like a breaking wave and contrasts favourably with the clumsy Spanish structure it supports. Inside, two perfect chambers that are mirror images of each other hold niches where the Inca would have sat during the winter solstice, the sun shining on him alone. All the walls lean inwards and the two hunks of rock that form the door run horizontally from a trapezoidal lintel in order to spread the weight in a world that had no conception of the arch. Because weight could not be distributed more efficiently, all the Inca buildings I have seen are squat and made of monoliths of rock, suggesting that the city itself was made of low-rise buildings. Despite all the Inca remains that litter the city, it is difficult to visualise exactly how the city would have been, like seeing a stumps of wood where once a forest stood. The old centre of the city is reputed to be shaped like a puma, the head being the ceremonial site of Sacsayhuaman where the Festival of the Sun, Inti Raymi, would be held. Outside the city walls, fields and terraces would have stretched off into the distance, feeding Qosco and the rest of the empire. Probably because they lived in temporary dwellings, the ordinary farmers and citizens of Qosco have left few visible signs of how they lived.
Yet within Qosco, it is easy to forget that you are living in one of the most historically important cities in the world. Locals prostitute their centuries-old culture by posing for photos with as many goats and llamas as they can muster, young children of nine and ten are forced to make a living by making up information about the Incas and feeding it to gullible tourists and one man dresses up as the founder of the Inca dynasty, Manco Capac, complete with all his regalia: colourful tunic, gold headdress, sandals and golden axe topped off with a husk of corn. There is a street branching off from the Plaza de Armas where you are sure to be offered drugs and at the end of the street lies homogeneously Israeli area, complete with Israeli signs and budget restaurants. Party hostels like The Point and Loki cater to the needs of the gap year English who want to get slashed and humiliate themselves without even leaving the comfort of their hostel and the staff refuse to speak to you in Spanish. In the centre of the city, you see nearly as many tourists as locals. There is little living in Qosco that is authentic, not even the name. Only some old walls supporting modern decadence. This is such a shame in a city as beautiful as Qosco, where two beautiful Mestizo churches grace the central square against an azure sky invariably spotted with billowing cumulous clouds.
Are modern Peruvians any more developed than the Incans? They may talk on mobile phones and use computers, drive cars and look into space, but their running water is polluted and many children don’t go to school or are forced to work at an early age in order to earn a living. Some are abandoned by their parents and stuck in orphanages where they are helped by willing tourists. On my Machu Picchu trek, I met a girl called Lydia who had volunteered in an orphanage in one of the riches cities in Peru, Arequipa. One day, someone proposed raising money to give the children new clothes to wear at school. The money was raised, the clothes were bought and given, but the next day they had disappeared. They had been sold for drinking money. The people are fired on by their own government and so demand their rights in transport strikes that paralyse and impoverish the country. Yet despite all their ostentatious catholic piety, many Peruvians have yet to learn to treat each other with respect. This became glaringly obvious when we went to watch Inti Raymi in the head of the puma, Sacsayhuaman. We arrived at 9 in the morning in order to secure seats for a ceremony that would begin at 2 in the afternoon and were soon heckled by a woman behind us who whined throughout the day about us being too tall and obscuring her view (Nobody can whine like a Peruvian). For the first hour of the ceremony, we were given an uninterrupted view of the parade ground where the Inca was being carried on a litter to a central platform where he would perform a libation with chicha (a fermented drink made from corn) and make a symbolic sacrifice of a llama. As the hill overlooking Sacsayhuaman became more crowded, you could feel the tension in the air and some people stood up to get a better view to a chorus of “Bajate, Bajanse”. When they refused, the people above threw bags of rubbish and stones at them, despite the fact that there were tens of young children in the crowd. Plastic bags rained down, one of them hitting me on the back. The people below retaliated and in the tumult, hundreds of innocent onlookers decided to leave, standing up and angering those above yet more. From then on, we saw nothing. An old man struggled up a slope and then collapsed onto his knees before fainting. He was quickly helped up by a woman who hauled at his limp body, pressing his face into the folds of her blouse and restricting her airway. He was laid on his back and people jumped down from the terraces above with their own home brewed remedy. One woman proposed putting alcohol in the man’s nostrils, while a young adolescent offered to perform CPR. Luckily, a young American medical student was on hand to save the day. Meanwhile, wave upon wave of Peruvians tried to push their way through the throng while an old man lay on the floor, perhaps about to die. Crazy.
My four day jungle tour to Machu Picchu was fantastic, despite a conceited, unfit guide who would lag behind the group and abandoned us the day before we went up to The Lost City of the Incas. Our tour included Rachel and Scott, sun brazed Californians who live in San Francisco and work as an artist and teacher respectively, the two Johns, funny, gay Canadians on a short tour to Peru and Lydia, a bubbly English girl who has been surviving on five soles a day since her credit card was stolen. The tour started with mountain biking on a road bordering the Urubamaba valley, the Sacred valley of the Incas. We sped round tight corners as we descended from a high mountain pass to humid jungle, at times leaving the road for a dirt track whose bumps unseated both of the two johns who tumbled over the handlebars. Yohan consoled us by boasting that he could jump 10 metres on a bike. The second day included a steep hike through jungle to an Inca trail, past a group of ailing Irish who often stopped to catch their breath and later collapsed into hammocks or vomited into toilets. The Inca trail was one of the most spectacular sections of the treck, with perilously narrow steps and nothing separating you from a two hundred metre precipice. Yohan performed an Andean ceremony to the surrounding Apus, or mountain Gods, which involved addressing each mountain in turn and stripping three coca leaves to the stalks. With this, we were granted safe passage all the way to Machu Picchu. Salcantay loomed ahead of us, laden with snow, but it didn’t compare to our first view of Machu Picchu the following day as we stood on a rickety metal bridge riddled with holes. A vertical cliff face rose up hundreds of metres to an Inca trail that somehow traversed the impossible gradient. On top of the mountain, the three windows of the sun temple were silhouetted against the sky. The boring slog along the railway tracks finished in Aguas Calientes, a bizarrely modern tourist town crouching below towering mountains covered with trees and tropical vegetation. That same day we braved the vertiginous climb up Putucusi mountain to the side of Machu Picchu. We clambered up a series of almost vertical ladders, struggled up the rocky slopes with quads burning and gained the summit for our first view of Machu Picchu. We saw it from ninety degrees, as if in cross-section, the mountain of Machu Picchu descending into a hollow where the ruins stand. A ridge takes up on the right where the ruins end and bumble along to the foot of Huayna Picchu where some ruins still cling. To climb this mountain, you have to be one of the first four hundred people to enter Machu Picchu, and so the following morning, we crawled out of bed at 3:30 and began to walk at 4.
The torch beams swung around crazily in the darkness as we walked towards the bridge in the pitch black. For the first ten minutes we met nobody, but soon picked up the trail at the start of the steps. Despite the hour, the air was hot and humid and we were all bathed in sweat after the first flight of steps. Unusually for Seb, he hung behind, nursing his blisters and a brewing cold. In the darkness, the steps seemed to go on forever and I had to grope around to find the next step. After an hour of hard climbing, we began to smell bacon wafting from the 900 dollar-a-night hotel next to the entrance to Machu Picchu. We were among the first people to sit down on the steps and easily gained admission to Huaynu Picchu. The city looked spectacular as the sun rose slowly over the surrounding mountains. Llamas munched lazily at the grass covering the terraces and we were surrounded on all sides by tumbling terraces, constructions that looked like rustic cottages and the smooth stonework of sacred buildings. Next to the steep steps, irrigation channels carry water down the hillside. The water is supposed to come from an underground lake and the flow is constant throughout the year. We were given a tour by a man called Percy that was less than illuminating. All we were left with was uncertainty; uncertainty about what Machu Picchu was, how it was constructed and who was truly the first person to discover it. Some archaeologists have claimed that the site served as a haven for the Virgins of the Sun because only female skeletons were found in the cemetery. Others claimed that it was a prison, but the consensus today is that it was a get-away for the Inca Pachacutec and was one of the last safe havens for Incas fleeing the Spanish invasion. The trails leading to Machu Picchu were blocked and the lost city was not officially found until 1911 (of the 1880s depending on whom you believe), although the local people had known of its existence for centuries. The problem lies with the Spanish who seeked to destroy rather than to understand. Contrary to popular belief, Machu Picchu does not mean Old Mountain, but is a meaningless name coined by the Spanish. Furthermore, no Spaniard ever deciphered the complex Incan cords where the key to understanding the Tihuantinsuyo may lie. They are multi-coloured strands of fibre with knots of various types and colours. The size of the knots, their colours, the space between them and the direction of twist may all carry meaning. That said, they may merely have acted like the rosary in the Catholic Church, reminding the Incas of important facts and dates in a primarily oral culture. Quien sabe?
The late afternoon was magical as the slanting rays of Inti picked out the strict contours of the terraces and the rising hulk of Huayna Picchu. Exhausted, we took the tourist bus back down to Aguas Calientes, a rip off of Starbucks and some extortionate Mexican food. Quite a day!
“Cusco”, a perversion of the Quechuan word “Qosco” was literally the heart or navel of the Tihuantinsuyo (Popularly known as the Inca empire), the four districts of which stretched to the north into modern day Columbia, to the south into Chile and Argentina, to the East into the Amazon and to the West to the coast. The word “Inca” only refers to the head of the tribe, a descendant of the sun God Inti. Under the reign of the Inca, Pachacutec, Incan lands were transformed from a tiny collection of small villages and hamlets into a vast, sweeping empire containing tens of thousands of people who owed homage to the Inca and worshipped the sun God in the ceremony, Inti Raymi. The creative force of this empire was concentrated on Qosco. Pachacutec remodeled the city, building upon the stonework of earlier inhabitants and turning the modest Temple of the Sun into Koricancha, or temple of gold. Much of this spectacular work can still be seen today in walls and fortifications that have borne the winds and rain of half a millennium and today support a modern city. I stayed in the artsy district of San Blas and every day, when walking to the Plaza de Armas, I would pass an exquisite Inca wall built in the expansionist style; hulking, irregular shaped masses of rock fit together seamlessly without the help of mortar and polished to create a shiny finish. This contrasts with an earlier style of rough hewn rock glued together with mortar and a later style of shiny, regular blocks fitted together seamlessly in uniform lines. The expansionist style seems to me to be the most ingenious and intricate. Without the help of the wheel, the Incas fitted strange shaped stones together so perfectly that not a blade of grass can fit between the seams, built the walls to withstand earthquakes and would lay the foundations for a modern city that pays little attention to its own roots.
Koricancha is a fantastic example of Inca masonry. When the Spanish arrived, much of the Sun Temple was dismantled, but the foundations and fortifications were retained in order to built a Franciscan monastery above it. The smooth, curving outer wall looks like a breaking wave and contrasts favourably with the clumsy Spanish structure it supports. Inside, two perfect chambers that are mirror images of each other hold niches where the Inca would have sat during the winter solstice, the sun shining on him alone. All the walls lean inwards and the two hunks of rock that form the door run horizontally from a trapezoidal lintel in order to spread the weight in a world that had no conception of the arch. Because weight could not be distributed more efficiently, all the Inca buildings I have seen are squat and made of monoliths of rock, suggesting that the city itself was made of low-rise buildings. Despite all the Inca remains that litter the city, it is difficult to visualise exactly how the city would have been, like seeing a stumps of wood where once a forest stood. The old centre of the city is reputed to be shaped like a puma, the head being the ceremonial site of Sacsayhuaman where the Festival of the Sun, Inti Raymi, would be held. Outside the city walls, fields and terraces would have stretched off into the distance, feeding Qosco and the rest of the empire. Probably because they lived in temporary dwellings, the ordinary farmers and citizens of Qosco have left few visible signs of how they lived.
Yet within Qosco, it is easy to forget that you are living in one of the most historically important cities in the world. Locals prostitute their centuries-old culture by posing for photos with as many goats and llamas as they can muster, young children of nine and ten are forced to make a living by making up information about the Incas and feeding it to gullible tourists and one man dresses up as the founder of the Inca dynasty, Manco Capac, complete with all his regalia: colourful tunic, gold headdress, sandals and golden axe topped off with a husk of corn. There is a street branching off from the Plaza de Armas where you are sure to be offered drugs and at the end of the street lies homogeneously Israeli area, complete with Israeli signs and budget restaurants. Party hostels like The Point and Loki cater to the needs of the gap year English who want to get slashed and humiliate themselves without even leaving the comfort of their hostel and the staff refuse to speak to you in Spanish. In the centre of the city, you see nearly as many tourists as locals. There is little living in Qosco that is authentic, not even the name. Only some old walls supporting modern decadence. This is such a shame in a city as beautiful as Qosco, where two beautiful Mestizo churches grace the central square against an azure sky invariably spotted with billowing cumulous clouds.
Are modern Peruvians any more developed than the Incans? They may talk on mobile phones and use computers, drive cars and look into space, but their running water is polluted and many children don’t go to school or are forced to work at an early age in order to earn a living. Some are abandoned by their parents and stuck in orphanages where they are helped by willing tourists. On my Machu Picchu trek, I met a girl called Lydia who had volunteered in an orphanage in one of the riches cities in Peru, Arequipa. One day, someone proposed raising money to give the children new clothes to wear at school. The money was raised, the clothes were bought and given, but the next day they had disappeared. They had been sold for drinking money. The people are fired on by their own government and so demand their rights in transport strikes that paralyse and impoverish the country. Yet despite all their ostentatious catholic piety, many Peruvians have yet to learn to treat each other with respect. This became glaringly obvious when we went to watch Inti Raymi in the head of the puma, Sacsayhuaman. We arrived at 9 in the morning in order to secure seats for a ceremony that would begin at 2 in the afternoon and were soon heckled by a woman behind us who whined throughout the day about us being too tall and obscuring her view (Nobody can whine like a Peruvian). For the first hour of the ceremony, we were given an uninterrupted view of the parade ground where the Inca was being carried on a litter to a central platform where he would perform a libation with chicha (a fermented drink made from corn) and make a symbolic sacrifice of a llama. As the hill overlooking Sacsayhuaman became more crowded, you could feel the tension in the air and some people stood up to get a better view to a chorus of “Bajate, Bajanse”. When they refused, the people above threw bags of rubbish and stones at them, despite the fact that there were tens of young children in the crowd. Plastic bags rained down, one of them hitting me on the back. The people below retaliated and in the tumult, hundreds of innocent onlookers decided to leave, standing up and angering those above yet more. From then on, we saw nothing. An old man struggled up a slope and then collapsed onto his knees before fainting. He was quickly helped up by a woman who hauled at his limp body, pressing his face into the folds of her blouse and restricting her airway. He was laid on his back and people jumped down from the terraces above with their own home brewed remedy. One woman proposed putting alcohol in the man’s nostrils, while a young adolescent offered to perform CPR. Luckily, a young American medical student was on hand to save the day. Meanwhile, wave upon wave of Peruvians tried to push their way through the throng while an old man lay on the floor, perhaps about to die. Crazy.
My four day jungle tour to Machu Picchu was fantastic, despite a conceited, unfit guide who would lag behind the group and abandoned us the day before we went up to The Lost City of the Incas. Our tour included Rachel and Scott, sun brazed Californians who live in San Francisco and work as an artist and teacher respectively, the two Johns, funny, gay Canadians on a short tour to Peru and Lydia, a bubbly English girl who has been surviving on five soles a day since her credit card was stolen. The tour started with mountain biking on a road bordering the Urubamaba valley, the Sacred valley of the Incas. We sped round tight corners as we descended from a high mountain pass to humid jungle, at times leaving the road for a dirt track whose bumps unseated both of the two johns who tumbled over the handlebars. Yohan consoled us by boasting that he could jump 10 metres on a bike. The second day included a steep hike through jungle to an Inca trail, past a group of ailing Irish who often stopped to catch their breath and later collapsed into hammocks or vomited into toilets. The Inca trail was one of the most spectacular sections of the treck, with perilously narrow steps and nothing separating you from a two hundred metre precipice. Yohan performed an Andean ceremony to the surrounding Apus, or mountain Gods, which involved addressing each mountain in turn and stripping three coca leaves to the stalks. With this, we were granted safe passage all the way to Machu Picchu. Salcantay loomed ahead of us, laden with snow, but it didn’t compare to our first view of Machu Picchu the following day as we stood on a rickety metal bridge riddled with holes. A vertical cliff face rose up hundreds of metres to an Inca trail that somehow traversed the impossible gradient. On top of the mountain, the three windows of the sun temple were silhouetted against the sky. The boring slog along the railway tracks finished in Aguas Calientes, a bizarrely modern tourist town crouching below towering mountains covered with trees and tropical vegetation. That same day we braved the vertiginous climb up Putucusi mountain to the side of Machu Picchu. We clambered up a series of almost vertical ladders, struggled up the rocky slopes with quads burning and gained the summit for our first view of Machu Picchu. We saw it from ninety degrees, as if in cross-section, the mountain of Machu Picchu descending into a hollow where the ruins stand. A ridge takes up on the right where the ruins end and bumble along to the foot of Huayna Picchu where some ruins still cling. To climb this mountain, you have to be one of the first four hundred people to enter Machu Picchu, and so the following morning, we crawled out of bed at 3:30 and began to walk at 4.
The torch beams swung around crazily in the darkness as we walked towards the bridge in the pitch black. For the first ten minutes we met nobody, but soon picked up the trail at the start of the steps. Despite the hour, the air was hot and humid and we were all bathed in sweat after the first flight of steps. Unusually for Seb, he hung behind, nursing his blisters and a brewing cold. In the darkness, the steps seemed to go on forever and I had to grope around to find the next step. After an hour of hard climbing, we began to smell bacon wafting from the 900 dollar-a-night hotel next to the entrance to Machu Picchu. We were among the first people to sit down on the steps and easily gained admission to Huaynu Picchu. The city looked spectacular as the sun rose slowly over the surrounding mountains. Llamas munched lazily at the grass covering the terraces and we were surrounded on all sides by tumbling terraces, constructions that looked like rustic cottages and the smooth stonework of sacred buildings. Next to the steep steps, irrigation channels carry water down the hillside. The water is supposed to come from an underground lake and the flow is constant throughout the year. We were given a tour by a man called Percy that was less than illuminating. All we were left with was uncertainty; uncertainty about what Machu Picchu was, how it was constructed and who was truly the first person to discover it. Some archaeologists have claimed that the site served as a haven for the Virgins of the Sun because only female skeletons were found in the cemetery. Others claimed that it was a prison, but the consensus today is that it was a get-away for the Inca Pachacutec and was one of the last safe havens for Incas fleeing the Spanish invasion. The trails leading to Machu Picchu were blocked and the lost city was not officially found until 1911 (of the 1880s depending on whom you believe), although the local people had known of its existence for centuries. The problem lies with the Spanish who seeked to destroy rather than to understand. Contrary to popular belief, Machu Picchu does not mean Old Mountain, but is a meaningless name coined by the Spanish. Furthermore, no Spaniard ever deciphered the complex Incan cords where the key to understanding the Tihuantinsuyo may lie. They are multi-coloured strands of fibre with knots of various types and colours. The size of the knots, their colours, the space between them and the direction of twist may all carry meaning. That said, they may merely have acted like the rosary in the Catholic Church, reminding the Incas of important facts and dates in a primarily oral culture. Quien sabe?
The late afternoon was magical as the slanting rays of Inti picked out the strict contours of the terraces and the rising hulk of Huayna Picchu. Exhausted, we took the tourist bus back down to Aguas Calientes, a rip off of Starbucks and some extortionate Mexican food. Quite a day!
Sunday, 21 June 2009
Odyssey
After ten days in Arequipa, gorging ourselves on chocolate cake and visiting the occasional site, David, Seb and I decided to take a bus as close as possible to the colonial city of Cusco to the north. In Arequipa, no-one had been able to tell us definitively if it was possible to reach Cusco; they would often furrow their brows, grumble about the “paro regional” and advise us that we should just stay in Arequipa for the next few days. We were like Odysseus’s men, lured into Circe’s abode and fated to gorge on food forever as pigs.
Nobody in Arequipa could tell us exactly why the inhabitants of the Cusco region had left their jobs and erected blockades around the city. Some speculated that it was in response to government atrocities in the north of Peru, where indigenous people were fired on by police, their bodies later dumped into the rainforest. Others thought that this merely provided a convenient pretext for some disorder. We later found out that the strike had more to do with the local water supply that the government is attempting to privatise.
Six hours after catching the bus, we found ourselves in the dusty, desolate town of Espinar. Despite the protestations of a local taxi driver, nothing was open and we ended up sheltering from the bitter cold in a hostel where we grabbed two hours of sleep before continuing on to Sicuani. At six in the morning, the bus jolted up to a roadblock, a line of huge stones traversing the road, surrounded by locals huddled round a campfire. Unusually for South America, we found all our bags waiting outside when we got off the bus, and the driver was in such a rush to leave that David got trapped inside.
We still had no idea of the walk that awaited us. A motorbike driver agreed to take us as far as he could, which I took to mean the town from which the bus would leave. We were soon to be disillusioned. Squashed into a truck, I experienced a feeling of adventure and exhilaration that I have never felt reclined in a comfortable seat on a large bus. I had just finished Che, La Vida por un Mundo Mejor by Paddy O´Donnell, and had his Bolivian “heroics” in mind. Without maps or communications with Cuba or La Paz, Che and his men hacked their way through the selva surrounded by soldiers trained by the American military. They had little to eat and Che was paralysed with asma attacks that left him incapacitated, laid out in a hammock carried by his men, smelling his own filth. He was captured with an orange in his pocket, weighing less than sixty kilograms. I am not idealistic enough to think that such a fate holds any charm.
The trailer shook with the vibrations of the motor and after fifteen minutes, several figures on bikes started to come towards us. The driver slowed down and pulled in to the side of the road. We were soon surrounded by gesticulating Peruvians, one of whom pulled out a nail from his pocket and punctured the wheels of the motorbike. They shouted at the driver for taking tourists and breaking the “paro”. We paid him what we could under the watchful gaze of the strikers, and left.
The road was perfectly straight and stretched off down the valley past fields of maize and lowing cows. We shouldered our bags that must have weighed thirty kilos and trudged off into a mirage of melting tarmac. Others walked in the same direction, many of them locals who were simply trying to get home. Three Cusquenas (inhabitants of Cusco) had been caught out by the strike while another woman was carrying a muti-coloured sack. A baby cooed inside. There were far more roadblocks than I had anticipated, many of them simply low lines of rock, perhaps topped off by a gnarled tree root. The bigger blockades consisted of trucks parked across the road. Locals congregated in wide circles and discussed the strike, ordinary people able to take the floor and express their views. We stopped once to listen and heard a small man speak in monotonous tone and ending each sentence with a resounding “Companeros”, comrades. I wonder if this strike has a socialist, anti-Western tinge. Later on in the day, we sat down at the side of the road and were mocked by the passing cyclists who laughed, called us gringos and told David that he was slow. In the last town before we caught the bus, the locals glared at me and an old woman had the temerity to hit me over the bottom with a wooden switch, much to the pleasure of the surrounding villagers who guffawed, revealing their discoloured, rotten teeth.
We knew that we would never make it to Cusco walking alone, so we paid the extortionate prices demanded by motorcyclists, tuc-tuc drivers and small children with trailers to take us the few kilometres between the roadblocks. On one occasion, we hopped into a trailer pulled by a small child on a bike and crawled along the rock-strewn road. Shortly after getting off to help the child push the trailer up a hill, we saw some bicycles racing towards us. Baja, baja (get off, get off) the child cried. In an ecstasy of fumbling, we ripped our bags from the trailer and pressed some coins into the child´s hand as he turned round and fled from the oncoming strikers. He got away, but a tuc-tuc driver wasn’t so lucky. A cyclist hung on to the window, grabbed a huge rock and threw it at the driver through the opening. I assume he missed because the tuc-tuc sped off into the distance.
Five hours after beginning our walk, the sun was at its zenith and was beginning to take its toll, despite the wide-brimmed leather hat that shaded my face from the sun. At one village, Tinta, the locals told us there was no lunch on offer because of the strike, and it was a similar story at the next village where an old man disappointed us with relish. Luckily, one comedor had stayed open and we forced down a revolting pasta dish that wouldn´t have been out of place in the Twits. Thereon in, we didn´t manage to catch any more transport and so had to brave the sun and the burning tarmac for some fifteen or twenty kilometres. Groups of locals on bikes patrolled the road, sometimes sending scouts further to ensure that no locals agreed to carry tourists (the irony is that locals themselves were let through). The most zealous of the strikers were young men of 18 or 19 years who took malicious pleasure in halting a motorbike and puncturing the wheels. They smiled at us mockingly as we passed. Huge blisters appeared on Seb´s feet and walking became toil. David himself began to suffer and lagged behind, rising over the brow of the hill with a vacant expression, his jumper wrapped around his head.
We passed over a hundred lorries held up before a bridge, passed locals playing football in the fields and had begun to despair of reaching Cusco that day when we reached the village of Checacube. Some motorcyclists refused to take us because they said their tyres would be punctured (pinchados). Luckily, a huge red truck pulled up on the square and the driver agreed to let us board, for a price of course. As we approached the barricades, we pulled our mochilas above our heads to deflect any flying rocks. But, the rocks never came. Instead, some of the strikers who were tired of their work decided to board the truck and go home. Che wouldn´t have been impressed. This is what saved us, because from then on, we passed through the blocks without any trouble and reached the bus shivering because of the icy wind. An odyssey indeed!
I sympathise with the strikers, but erecting roadblocks and paralysing a huge city is no way to protest or effect change. Surfing on the internet, I have found that this is no isolated event. The same thing happened at the end of 2008. Such actions can only harm the people of Peru in the long run by reducing GNP and discouraging foreign investment in the country. The government is perhaps reluctant about breaking up the strike because of what happened in the north of the country, but actions like this should not go unchallenged. We need peaceful protest, not disorder and violence.
After ten days in Arequipa, gorging ourselves on chocolate cake and visiting the occasional site, David, Seb and I decided to take a bus as close as possible to the colonial city of Cusco to the north. In Arequipa, no-one had been able to tell us definitively if it was possible to reach Cusco; they would often furrow their brows, grumble about the “paro regional” and advise us that we should just stay in Arequipa for the next few days. We were like Odysseus’s men, lured into Circe’s abode and fated to gorge on food forever as pigs.
Nobody in Arequipa could tell us exactly why the inhabitants of the Cusco region had left their jobs and erected blockades around the city. Some speculated that it was in response to government atrocities in the north of Peru, where indigenous people were fired on by police, their bodies later dumped into the rainforest. Others thought that this merely provided a convenient pretext for some disorder. We later found out that the strike had more to do with the local water supply that the government is attempting to privatise.
Six hours after catching the bus, we found ourselves in the dusty, desolate town of Espinar. Despite the protestations of a local taxi driver, nothing was open and we ended up sheltering from the bitter cold in a hostel where we grabbed two hours of sleep before continuing on to Sicuani. At six in the morning, the bus jolted up to a roadblock, a line of huge stones traversing the road, surrounded by locals huddled round a campfire. Unusually for South America, we found all our bags waiting outside when we got off the bus, and the driver was in such a rush to leave that David got trapped inside.
We still had no idea of the walk that awaited us. A motorbike driver agreed to take us as far as he could, which I took to mean the town from which the bus would leave. We were soon to be disillusioned. Squashed into a truck, I experienced a feeling of adventure and exhilaration that I have never felt reclined in a comfortable seat on a large bus. I had just finished Che, La Vida por un Mundo Mejor by Paddy O´Donnell, and had his Bolivian “heroics” in mind. Without maps or communications with Cuba or La Paz, Che and his men hacked their way through the selva surrounded by soldiers trained by the American military. They had little to eat and Che was paralysed with asma attacks that left him incapacitated, laid out in a hammock carried by his men, smelling his own filth. He was captured with an orange in his pocket, weighing less than sixty kilograms. I am not idealistic enough to think that such a fate holds any charm.
The trailer shook with the vibrations of the motor and after fifteen minutes, several figures on bikes started to come towards us. The driver slowed down and pulled in to the side of the road. We were soon surrounded by gesticulating Peruvians, one of whom pulled out a nail from his pocket and punctured the wheels of the motorbike. They shouted at the driver for taking tourists and breaking the “paro”. We paid him what we could under the watchful gaze of the strikers, and left.
The road was perfectly straight and stretched off down the valley past fields of maize and lowing cows. We shouldered our bags that must have weighed thirty kilos and trudged off into a mirage of melting tarmac. Others walked in the same direction, many of them locals who were simply trying to get home. Three Cusquenas (inhabitants of Cusco) had been caught out by the strike while another woman was carrying a muti-coloured sack. A baby cooed inside. There were far more roadblocks than I had anticipated, many of them simply low lines of rock, perhaps topped off by a gnarled tree root. The bigger blockades consisted of trucks parked across the road. Locals congregated in wide circles and discussed the strike, ordinary people able to take the floor and express their views. We stopped once to listen and heard a small man speak in monotonous tone and ending each sentence with a resounding “Companeros”, comrades. I wonder if this strike has a socialist, anti-Western tinge. Later on in the day, we sat down at the side of the road and were mocked by the passing cyclists who laughed, called us gringos and told David that he was slow. In the last town before we caught the bus, the locals glared at me and an old woman had the temerity to hit me over the bottom with a wooden switch, much to the pleasure of the surrounding villagers who guffawed, revealing their discoloured, rotten teeth.
We knew that we would never make it to Cusco walking alone, so we paid the extortionate prices demanded by motorcyclists, tuc-tuc drivers and small children with trailers to take us the few kilometres between the roadblocks. On one occasion, we hopped into a trailer pulled by a small child on a bike and crawled along the rock-strewn road. Shortly after getting off to help the child push the trailer up a hill, we saw some bicycles racing towards us. Baja, baja (get off, get off) the child cried. In an ecstasy of fumbling, we ripped our bags from the trailer and pressed some coins into the child´s hand as he turned round and fled from the oncoming strikers. He got away, but a tuc-tuc driver wasn’t so lucky. A cyclist hung on to the window, grabbed a huge rock and threw it at the driver through the opening. I assume he missed because the tuc-tuc sped off into the distance.
Five hours after beginning our walk, the sun was at its zenith and was beginning to take its toll, despite the wide-brimmed leather hat that shaded my face from the sun. At one village, Tinta, the locals told us there was no lunch on offer because of the strike, and it was a similar story at the next village where an old man disappointed us with relish. Luckily, one comedor had stayed open and we forced down a revolting pasta dish that wouldn´t have been out of place in the Twits. Thereon in, we didn´t manage to catch any more transport and so had to brave the sun and the burning tarmac for some fifteen or twenty kilometres. Groups of locals on bikes patrolled the road, sometimes sending scouts further to ensure that no locals agreed to carry tourists (the irony is that locals themselves were let through). The most zealous of the strikers were young men of 18 or 19 years who took malicious pleasure in halting a motorbike and puncturing the wheels. They smiled at us mockingly as we passed. Huge blisters appeared on Seb´s feet and walking became toil. David himself began to suffer and lagged behind, rising over the brow of the hill with a vacant expression, his jumper wrapped around his head.
We passed over a hundred lorries held up before a bridge, passed locals playing football in the fields and had begun to despair of reaching Cusco that day when we reached the village of Checacube. Some motorcyclists refused to take us because they said their tyres would be punctured (pinchados). Luckily, a huge red truck pulled up on the square and the driver agreed to let us board, for a price of course. As we approached the barricades, we pulled our mochilas above our heads to deflect any flying rocks. But, the rocks never came. Instead, some of the strikers who were tired of their work decided to board the truck and go home. Che wouldn´t have been impressed. This is what saved us, because from then on, we passed through the blocks without any trouble and reached the bus shivering because of the icy wind. An odyssey indeed!
I sympathise with the strikers, but erecting roadblocks and paralysing a huge city is no way to protest or effect change. Surfing on the internet, I have found that this is no isolated event. The same thing happened at the end of 2008. Such actions can only harm the people of Peru in the long run by reducing GNP and discouraging foreign investment in the country. The government is perhaps reluctant about breaking up the strike because of what happened in the north of the country, but actions like this should not go unchallenged. We need peaceful protest, not disorder and violence.
Wednesday, 17 June 2009
Stuck in Arequipa
I walked out of our hostel into the blinding sunlight that beat down upon the cobbled streets and bounced off the white sillar walls that stretched down the road towards the Plaza de Armas. Small, yellow taxis that might once have been Fiat Puntos, screech round corners and beep their pathetic, plaintive horns in the hope that someone will make way. Walking down the street you pass street vendors selling a non-descript meat scewered on a wooden pole and left to sizzle for hours on a charcoal burner, looking sad next to some dessicated, shrivelled potatoes. Toothless men in rags shelter in doorways and hold their caps out to you as you pass. Women pass in suits, shopkeepers throw water onto the pavement and scrub and you gain tantalysing glimpses of quiet, damp courtyards where people laze around and relax to the sound of gurgling water, surrounded by geraniums and the blue or ochre walls of yet another colonial building.
This is Arequipa, the City of the Eternal Blue Sky, a large, prosperous city in the South West of Peru that is renowned for being conservative and resenting the domination of Lima. The historic centre of the city has been declared a World Heritage Sight because of the uniformity of the architecture; almost all the colonial buildings are made of an off-white volcanic rock, Sillar and the city is dotted with mestizo architecture, featuring intricate stonework, leaves and grapes. In front of every church stands a green cross with a ladder that represents the fusion of the Catholic church with Incan and Pre-Incan religion. Despite the attacks of Dawkins and the onslaught of evolution, religion is still going strong here in South America (though perhaps it is on the decline) and signs of religious devotion can be found at every turn. It is, after all, called the Rome of the Americas. Near our favourtie nightclub, Deja Vu, the outstretched arm of a stern looking priest beckons the traveller onwards and in the adjacent street lies the huge monastery of Santa Catalina. It was opened to the public in 1970 after over three hundred years of seclusion and is a city within a city, its narrow streets and passageways winding their way past cloisters, potted plants, fountains and the cell of one Sor Anna who was made saint by Pope John Paul II for the miracles that she was said to have performed.
There was something exciting about losing yourself in this haven of tranquility, calm and peaceful despite the hundreds of tourists who pay to enter every day. Wherever you wander through the thick walls, you are confronted with the imposing outline of Misti volcano which hangs over the town, only a few kilometres from the city centre. It is still active and the overwhelming power of Arequipa´s tectonic forces have been can be seen in the ruins of one part of the monastery. Earthquakes devastate Arequipa on a regular basis and in 1868, the city was almost razed to the ground, only to be rebuilt by its industrious citizens. People are still drawn to the volcano, though, because of the fertile volcanic ash that is spewed over the surrounding fields and on a tour of the city, we saw hundreds of small, tin-roofed shacks and homesteads creeping their way up the steep slopes.
Where today´s citizens of Arequipa look to science to predict an earthquake, their ancestors looked to the Gods. The Andes mountain chain that runs up the Western coast of South America bristels with volcanos and no city more so than Arequipa which is surrounded by the Misti, Chachani and Pichu Pichu volcanos. The Inca empire expanded rapidly in the fifteenth century under the Emperor, Mayta Capac. Walking through the desert with his soldiers, they stumbled across the beautiful oasis of Arequipa, then inhabited by primitive, semi-sedentary tribes. The legend goes that tired by the long journey and in seek of rest, or enticed to live in the area by the beautiful, fertile land, Capac´s soldiers asked him if they could stop there. He replied in Quechua, "Ari Qhipay" (si quedaos), which means "Yes, stop here". Hence the name Arequipa. When natural (and perhaps political?) disasters occured anywhere in the Inca empire, a human sacrifice would be offered to the Gods to appease them. The Incas viewed volcanos as living beings who could be beneficient or wrathful, taking revenge on humans with ash and smoke. Many daughters of noble families grew up in the knowledge that they would be sacrificed to the Gods and their umbilical cord was kept so that it could be buried with them, a bridge to the beyond. Whenever an eruption occured, a ceremony would be performed in Cusco and a party would set out with the sacrificial offering, sometimes travelling thousands of kilometres to reach volcanoes of 6000 metres or higher. They scaled the mountains in replacable straw boots, cut steps into the hillside, survived artic temperatures before finally killing the intoxicated charge with a swift blow to the head. In the 1990s a thirteen year old girl, Juanita, was found on the volcano, Ampato (following the eruption of a nearby volcano that melted the thick layers of ice) and was moved to Arequipa for preservation. She is startling well preserved, hunched up in a chamber of ice, her skin and nails perfectly intact, except for drops of fat purged from her skin. Her eye sockets are black holes. The irony is that we are just as impotent as the Incas in preventing earthquakes and eruptions. At least they had peace of mind.
The Arequipenas are said to be rather haughty and consider themselves superior to the rest of Peru. In a nightclub I got chatting to a girl who asked me what I thought of Bolivia. When I replied that it was my favourite country so far, she furrowed her brow and retorted that all Bolivians were ugly and uneducated and that their cities were nothing compared to Peru. She obviously hasn´t been to Potosi or Tarija. In one breath she cast scorn not only upon Bolivia, but upon her compatriots in the Peruvian jungle and countryside who look not towards Europe and America but towards Pachamama (mother earth) and Pachatata. This kind of attitude may explain the muted reaction to government atrocities in the province of Bagua, northern Peru, where police opened fire upon indigenous protestors. The government has passed a law that is inimical to the indigenous citizens because it allows the government to exploit their natural habitat in order to extract oil and gas. They set up roadblocks and the government responded with violence. Around twenty policemen were killed along with an undetermined number of indigenous, whose bodies may have been collected by the police and dropped into the thick of the jungle from planes. Here in Arequipa, people put up posters denouncing the government and a small procession filed through the square, but there was no great public outrage. The air didn´t buzz with the news of murder. People continued to drink their coffee and eat oozing slabs of chocolate cake with blissful apathy. This is surely what happens when people see murder as an every day occurrence.
There was no chocolate cake in the Colca Canyon, a deep scar on the land that is reputed to be the deepest canyon in the world. Some even claim that it is twice as deep as the Grand Canyon, but David and I have been lied to so many times in Peru that we now assume a healthy scepticism. We took an overnight bus to the canyon, tried to sleep on an overcrowded bus that jumped around on the rough road and I almost lost my walking boots in the bustle. Our first view of the canyon was spectacular. Unlike the Grand Canyon that drops vertically down from the desert, Colca Canyon looks like a valley whose narrow bed curves between interlocking spurs and outcrops of rock that look like the butress roots of some great redwood. In some places, the hillside descends in sheer drops of lineated rock, but they are few and far between, allowing the hiker to walk down into the canyon on a steep path. We passed walkers who couldn´t speak for shouldering their packs and small, wizened locals who skipped past us on shortcuts worn into the rock. We reached the base of the canyon within three hours which is surprisingly green given that the river Colca is almost dry and that the deep gullies that descend from the snow-capped mountains are full of rocks show no hint of moisture. We climbed again, drank an Inka Kola (which tastes identical to Irn Bru, but contains yellow colouring instead of orange) in front of a stuffed fox and skidded our way down once more towards the Oasis where I collapsed into a hammock, surrounded by brutal, orange rock.
The narrow path zigzagged its way crazily up a hillside in a steep ascent that would have befitted the Incas. It was five in the morning and the sun had not yet come up as we began the climb, bananas in hand. The path was lit by a full moon and the sky glittered with stars. The first half of the walk passed without incident, apart from a rabid dog that gave me a nip on the knee. We scared it away with stones. The second half of the treck showed me how unfit I have become. As the sun began to rise, casting its horizontal rays over the canyon, David began to forge ahead and I lagged behind, breathing hard and looking at my feet. The path stretching on ahead was just too depressing. By the time I reached the top, I was my back was bathed in sweat. Orios have never tasted so good. The canyon is also famous for Condors and we went in search of them, attempting to reach a viewpoint by climbing over a wall. As I raised my weight onto a stone, it gave way and my outstretched hands fell forwards onto a cactus bristling with spines. Five long spines had pierced my left hand through my alpaca gloves, one of them driven a few centimetres into the skin. I tried to pull them out myself, but couldn´t handle the pain. A tour guide led me to a hospital draped with a poster warning against hepatitis. The nurse inside reassured me that I would live by recounting the story of a tour guide who had fallen backwards onto a cactus. One of the spines had pierced his lung.
I am writing such a long and convoluted blog because I can. A transport strike around Cusco has meant that no buses have left Arequipa for Cusco in the last four days. Today a normal service was resumed and we hope to travel to Cusco tonight, hopefully avoiding the marauding mob armed with stones. I have not yet mentioned the food here in Arequipa. The city is known as the gastronomic capital of Peru and much of the traditional food is served in Picanterias which serve spicy food and meat in an intimate setting. Cebicherias (this may be a spelling mistake since the dish is called Ceviche) serve raw fish marinated in lime juice and served with chilli and sweet potato. Chicha is a strong alcoholic drink made from maize and Rocoto relleno is another famous local dish. Rocoto is a spicy vegetable similar to Chili and about the size of an apple which is rellenado (filled) with meat and fish. And of course, you can´t forget the cuy (guinea pig) which arrives on you plate with head intact and leering teeth.
On a more frivolous note, nobody here in Peru seems to understand the difference between Scotland and England. Walking around a supermarket, I caught sight of some sweets called English toffees. On the packet is a picture of a rabidly scottish scotsman with flaming hair, kilt and bagpipes. A local newspaper referred to Andy Murray as English, an unpardonable offence, and the official drink of Arequipa is Kola Escocesa, a sickly purple drink which has no discernible link to Scotland. Do you think Scotland receives a share of the profits? I am also wondering whether the harsh wind of Patagonia has marred my virgin looks. When I got into a taxi to take me to the bus station on Saturday, the driver started questioning me about how I could afford such an expensive trip. I answered and then looked out of the window again. A minute later, he suddenly blurted out And how does it feel to leave you wife back in England?
This is Arequipa, the City of the Eternal Blue Sky, a large, prosperous city in the South West of Peru that is renowned for being conservative and resenting the domination of Lima. The historic centre of the city has been declared a World Heritage Sight because of the uniformity of the architecture; almost all the colonial buildings are made of an off-white volcanic rock, Sillar and the city is dotted with mestizo architecture, featuring intricate stonework, leaves and grapes. In front of every church stands a green cross with a ladder that represents the fusion of the Catholic church with Incan and Pre-Incan religion. Despite the attacks of Dawkins and the onslaught of evolution, religion is still going strong here in South America (though perhaps it is on the decline) and signs of religious devotion can be found at every turn. It is, after all, called the Rome of the Americas. Near our favourtie nightclub, Deja Vu, the outstretched arm of a stern looking priest beckons the traveller onwards and in the adjacent street lies the huge monastery of Santa Catalina. It was opened to the public in 1970 after over three hundred years of seclusion and is a city within a city, its narrow streets and passageways winding their way past cloisters, potted plants, fountains and the cell of one Sor Anna who was made saint by Pope John Paul II for the miracles that she was said to have performed.
There was something exciting about losing yourself in this haven of tranquility, calm and peaceful despite the hundreds of tourists who pay to enter every day. Wherever you wander through the thick walls, you are confronted with the imposing outline of Misti volcano which hangs over the town, only a few kilometres from the city centre. It is still active and the overwhelming power of Arequipa´s tectonic forces have been can be seen in the ruins of one part of the monastery. Earthquakes devastate Arequipa on a regular basis and in 1868, the city was almost razed to the ground, only to be rebuilt by its industrious citizens. People are still drawn to the volcano, though, because of the fertile volcanic ash that is spewed over the surrounding fields and on a tour of the city, we saw hundreds of small, tin-roofed shacks and homesteads creeping their way up the steep slopes.
Where today´s citizens of Arequipa look to science to predict an earthquake, their ancestors looked to the Gods. The Andes mountain chain that runs up the Western coast of South America bristels with volcanos and no city more so than Arequipa which is surrounded by the Misti, Chachani and Pichu Pichu volcanos. The Inca empire expanded rapidly in the fifteenth century under the Emperor, Mayta Capac. Walking through the desert with his soldiers, they stumbled across the beautiful oasis of Arequipa, then inhabited by primitive, semi-sedentary tribes. The legend goes that tired by the long journey and in seek of rest, or enticed to live in the area by the beautiful, fertile land, Capac´s soldiers asked him if they could stop there. He replied in Quechua, "Ari Qhipay" (si quedaos), which means "Yes, stop here". Hence the name Arequipa. When natural (and perhaps political?) disasters occured anywhere in the Inca empire, a human sacrifice would be offered to the Gods to appease them. The Incas viewed volcanos as living beings who could be beneficient or wrathful, taking revenge on humans with ash and smoke. Many daughters of noble families grew up in the knowledge that they would be sacrificed to the Gods and their umbilical cord was kept so that it could be buried with them, a bridge to the beyond. Whenever an eruption occured, a ceremony would be performed in Cusco and a party would set out with the sacrificial offering, sometimes travelling thousands of kilometres to reach volcanoes of 6000 metres or higher. They scaled the mountains in replacable straw boots, cut steps into the hillside, survived artic temperatures before finally killing the intoxicated charge with a swift blow to the head. In the 1990s a thirteen year old girl, Juanita, was found on the volcano, Ampato (following the eruption of a nearby volcano that melted the thick layers of ice) and was moved to Arequipa for preservation. She is startling well preserved, hunched up in a chamber of ice, her skin and nails perfectly intact, except for drops of fat purged from her skin. Her eye sockets are black holes. The irony is that we are just as impotent as the Incas in preventing earthquakes and eruptions. At least they had peace of mind.
The Arequipenas are said to be rather haughty and consider themselves superior to the rest of Peru. In a nightclub I got chatting to a girl who asked me what I thought of Bolivia. When I replied that it was my favourite country so far, she furrowed her brow and retorted that all Bolivians were ugly and uneducated and that their cities were nothing compared to Peru. She obviously hasn´t been to Potosi or Tarija. In one breath she cast scorn not only upon Bolivia, but upon her compatriots in the Peruvian jungle and countryside who look not towards Europe and America but towards Pachamama (mother earth) and Pachatata. This kind of attitude may explain the muted reaction to government atrocities in the province of Bagua, northern Peru, where police opened fire upon indigenous protestors. The government has passed a law that is inimical to the indigenous citizens because it allows the government to exploit their natural habitat in order to extract oil and gas. They set up roadblocks and the government responded with violence. Around twenty policemen were killed along with an undetermined number of indigenous, whose bodies may have been collected by the police and dropped into the thick of the jungle from planes. Here in Arequipa, people put up posters denouncing the government and a small procession filed through the square, but there was no great public outrage. The air didn´t buzz with the news of murder. People continued to drink their coffee and eat oozing slabs of chocolate cake with blissful apathy. This is surely what happens when people see murder as an every day occurrence.
There was no chocolate cake in the Colca Canyon, a deep scar on the land that is reputed to be the deepest canyon in the world. Some even claim that it is twice as deep as the Grand Canyon, but David and I have been lied to so many times in Peru that we now assume a healthy scepticism. We took an overnight bus to the canyon, tried to sleep on an overcrowded bus that jumped around on the rough road and I almost lost my walking boots in the bustle. Our first view of the canyon was spectacular. Unlike the Grand Canyon that drops vertically down from the desert, Colca Canyon looks like a valley whose narrow bed curves between interlocking spurs and outcrops of rock that look like the butress roots of some great redwood. In some places, the hillside descends in sheer drops of lineated rock, but they are few and far between, allowing the hiker to walk down into the canyon on a steep path. We passed walkers who couldn´t speak for shouldering their packs and small, wizened locals who skipped past us on shortcuts worn into the rock. We reached the base of the canyon within three hours which is surprisingly green given that the river Colca is almost dry and that the deep gullies that descend from the snow-capped mountains are full of rocks show no hint of moisture. We climbed again, drank an Inka Kola (which tastes identical to Irn Bru, but contains yellow colouring instead of orange) in front of a stuffed fox and skidded our way down once more towards the Oasis where I collapsed into a hammock, surrounded by brutal, orange rock.
The narrow path zigzagged its way crazily up a hillside in a steep ascent that would have befitted the Incas. It was five in the morning and the sun had not yet come up as we began the climb, bananas in hand. The path was lit by a full moon and the sky glittered with stars. The first half of the walk passed without incident, apart from a rabid dog that gave me a nip on the knee. We scared it away with stones. The second half of the treck showed me how unfit I have become. As the sun began to rise, casting its horizontal rays over the canyon, David began to forge ahead and I lagged behind, breathing hard and looking at my feet. The path stretching on ahead was just too depressing. By the time I reached the top, I was my back was bathed in sweat. Orios have never tasted so good. The canyon is also famous for Condors and we went in search of them, attempting to reach a viewpoint by climbing over a wall. As I raised my weight onto a stone, it gave way and my outstretched hands fell forwards onto a cactus bristling with spines. Five long spines had pierced my left hand through my alpaca gloves, one of them driven a few centimetres into the skin. I tried to pull them out myself, but couldn´t handle the pain. A tour guide led me to a hospital draped with a poster warning against hepatitis. The nurse inside reassured me that I would live by recounting the story of a tour guide who had fallen backwards onto a cactus. One of the spines had pierced his lung.
I am writing such a long and convoluted blog because I can. A transport strike around Cusco has meant that no buses have left Arequipa for Cusco in the last four days. Today a normal service was resumed and we hope to travel to Cusco tonight, hopefully avoiding the marauding mob armed with stones. I have not yet mentioned the food here in Arequipa. The city is known as the gastronomic capital of Peru and much of the traditional food is served in Picanterias which serve spicy food and meat in an intimate setting. Cebicherias (this may be a spelling mistake since the dish is called Ceviche) serve raw fish marinated in lime juice and served with chilli and sweet potato. Chicha is a strong alcoholic drink made from maize and Rocoto relleno is another famous local dish. Rocoto is a spicy vegetable similar to Chili and about the size of an apple which is rellenado (filled) with meat and fish. And of course, you can´t forget the cuy (guinea pig) which arrives on you plate with head intact and leering teeth.
On a more frivolous note, nobody here in Peru seems to understand the difference between Scotland and England. Walking around a supermarket, I caught sight of some sweets called English toffees. On the packet is a picture of a rabidly scottish scotsman with flaming hair, kilt and bagpipes. A local newspaper referred to Andy Murray as English, an unpardonable offence, and the official drink of Arequipa is Kola Escocesa, a sickly purple drink which has no discernible link to Scotland. Do you think Scotland receives a share of the profits? I am also wondering whether the harsh wind of Patagonia has marred my virgin looks. When I got into a taxi to take me to the bus station on Saturday, the driver started questioning me about how I could afford such an expensive trip. I answered and then looked out of the window again. A minute later, he suddenly blurted out And how does it feel to leave you wife back in England?
Tuesday, 9 June 2009
The islas and goodbye to an old friend
It has been a tumultuous five days, not just for me, but for the world; I have torn myself away from Bolivia, crossed the border into Peru, visited four islands and read of a massacre of farmers in the north of the country. Gordon Brown looked as if he was going to be forced from office, he was accused of using women as "stagprops" and Roger won his first French Open against the surprise finalist, Robin Soderling, making him only the sixth man to have won all four grand slam titles and equalling Pete Sampras´s astounding tally of fourteen majors.
After spending a day in La Paz and being treated like scum at an Israeli restaurant, I boarded a bus in the frenetic, dirty city of El Alto towards Lake Titicaca. As we left La Paz, the landscape quickly changed, the tall buildings and suffocating fumes of the capital giving way to flat, light brown countryside stretching off to my right towards rippling, snow-capped mountains. Wheat and barley is grown in this area, just as it was under the Tiwanaku culture which began as early as 1500BC. The shores of the lake, and the islands that dot it, ripple with hundreds of uniform terraces that are either Inca or Pre Inca and are used to prevent soil erosion and to allow farming on steep hillsides. My first view of the lake was spectacular. As we rounded a bend, a vast expanse of water lurched into view, made all the more picturesque by the countryside that surrounded it. A light wind rustled the surface of the water, but in the lee of the islands, the water looked like a mirror, creating sweeping bands of dark blue and blinding cristal. The name, Lake Titicaca is believed to come from the Aymara language. "Titi" means Puma (a sacred beast) and Kaka, grey (important to distinguish from the Spanish which means "shit"). I also read on Wikipedia that the lake is supposed to resemble a darting Puma.
Isla del Sol (Island of the Sun) was my first destination, a mass of rock resembling an octopus that is reputed to be the birthplace of the Inca sungod and the first Inca emperor, Manco Capac. He is said to have emerged from an outcrop of rock that is now called "titikala", or "roca sagrada". Next to this rock lies a sacrificial table where offerings were made to the gods and a little further from Inca ruins that resemble the dry stone walls of Yorkshire. I visited this "laberinto" (laberyinth) on my second day on the island and had to crouch down to fit through the succession of four foot doors that led from one small room to another and eventually ended in a dead end.
Once you pass the steet sellers and women forcing you to buy a pass of entry to the island, you discover a land of strange contrasts that has changed little in some areas since the time of Manco Capac. From the dock, I laboured up some moss-grown Inca steps that climb up the hillside and ate the local speciality, trout, in a low, rustic restaurant that overlooked the wide, sparkling bay. A string of snow capped mountains could be seen distinctly through the thin, limpid air. Once I had gained the height of hillside, fending off the approaches of street sellers, I walked south down the spine of the island amidst some of the most beautiful countryside that I have seen in South America. Because so little rain falls each year, the villagers plow their meagre terraces by hand and plant it with wheat, barley and other cereal crops that shined in the sun and created a patchwork of contrasting coloured plots that cascaded down the hillside towards the water below. As I walked, breathing hard in the mountain air, I saw women with billowing, voluminous dresses and dark shawls ushering sheep this way and that on barren slopes. They carried wooden switches that they would use when the sheep dared to disobey. Large spits of land descend into the water, tapering to join Inca ruins that now lie below the surface of the water (the water level was once much lower than it is now). As I ascended a small hillock, I passed a huge, fat American woman who was being followed by her "guide", a tiny, emaciated boy who could have been no older than seven or eight. He bent under the weight of her heavy bag, but seemed to be faring better than his charge who seemed to be at the point of capitulating to the thin air. Her swinging posterior was eventually lost in the distance.
I stayed that night in the village of Challapampa which sits in a cradle of land between the mainland and a spit in the north-east of the island. I had rushed to reach the village before dark fell and was rewarded with a view of pigs grazing in the fading light and children playing a variant of marbles with plastic bottle tops. As I sat on rock, overlooking the bay, a young girl tried to make me pay for taking a picture of her cow. Luckily, there was electricity that night, but when I ventured out for dinner, the dusty streets were deserted and the signs outside dwellings, reading "restaurante" and "comedor" seemed to mock me, for there was no light inside. In a narrow sidestreet off the main drag, a feeble light glowed in the blackness, beckoning me into a low room, which I first saw through a chink in the two doors. Sitting at a table were Hector and Paddy, the two lads from Leeds who used to play for Horsforth Dynamoes and whom I had previously bumped into in Puerto Natales (Patagonia) and Salta (northern Argentina). I sat down for a beer and a fat trout. Maybe there is a God.
On the way back from Isla del Sol to the mainland, I met David, and Englishman from Telford who attended Cambridge as a post-graduate. He let slip that he was glad that he hadn´t studied at Cambridge as an undergraduate and had to backtrack swiftly when I told him of my situation. We decided to visit the three island of Uros, Amantani and Taquile, but that first meant crossing the border to Puno and saying goodbye to my beloved Bolivia.
The country has treated me very well. It is a land of great natural beauty and the people are as friendly as any I have encountered in South America. Yet they labour under the injustices commited to them in the past; a naval sign on the wall in Copacabana proclaimed that Bolivia has a right to a sea port and that it should be a priority of the government to reclaim it from Chile (It was lost in the War of the Pacific). The day I left, the people of Uyuni began a six day strike to protest against the government´s decision not to pave the roads to and from Uyuni. Transport in and out of the town was blockaded and when some tourist tried to escape with a bribed taxi driver, a crowd surrounded his car and slashed the tires.
We had been told that Puno was a "shithole" and so we were pleasantly surprised when we found some great bakeries and some pool halls, despite the stinking green water around the dock. After playing some pool amidst drunk locals who sporadically broke into violence, we departed for the "Uros" islands, over thirty floating islands constructed of totora reeds, which sit a few kilometres from Puno. They are hidden in the reeds like a secret community. Some people believe that the Uros people were descendent of Polynesians, and they once spoke their own distinct language, Uro, before it was gradually replaced by the Aymara language. (the last Uro speaker died in the 50s). The Uro people fled to these islands in order to escape Incan contamination of their culture. As we approached the island, we were mobbed by women who greeted us in their local language, and we replied by saying "Wakili", hello. The reed islands rest on a base of roots that release a gas as they decompose, helping to keep them afloat. The reeds, however, have to be continually replaced, an arduous chore that falls to the women as the men go off fishing. All the buildings are also made of reeds and the women wear huge, colourful dresses and sell souvenirs from low stalls. The islands are a self-contained community, containing a school and a basic medical centre. A low women with a stoop told me that the people here prefer to cure their ailments with the plants that they grow in rectangular, upraised plots, not surprising in a country of curanderos (shamans or healers). The small girls wear a bell shaped hat coloured white, green and pink that is said to resemble the national flower of Peru, the Kantuta. All the small children stared at us inquisitively from uinder their broad-brimmed hats, hiding the terrible sunburn that blotched their smooth skin.
After an hour or two there, we travelled on to Amantani, a small, barren island where we would stay in the adobe house of a local, single mother called Maria. Her son was a tiny, smiling cutie called Roy and he had a sister called Luz. Maria was outwardly friendly, laughing at almost anything we said, but it was a laughter borne of loneliness and insecurity. She never told us what had happened to her husband. We were served eggs and quinoa soup in a low kitchen whose walls had grown black from the smoke of an open fire which was used for cooking. Maria would bustle round us and also attend to her three children and her mother, who spoke only Quechua. That night, we were draped in a poncho and Andean hat and led through the moonlight to the town hall where we participated in Andean dancing. It involved little more than locking hands with our respective hosts, rocking the shoulders back and forth and then being led in a long, winding snake. The women wore white blouses and black shawls and tucked their bulging stomachs under tight corsets which led down to pink dresses that twirled around as they danced. It was a relatively tame affair and by half past ten, we brushing our teeth in the light of a lone, guttering candle.
Our last stop was the island of Taquile which lies to the south of Amantani. As on the other islands, draught power is not used on Taquile because there is not enough pasture to support horeses and cows. The island is famed for its tight-knit textiles and the men a sombre outfit of black trousers and white shirt with black waistcoat. They also wear bright hats though, whose colour varies depending on whether they are married. A red hat means that a man is married, red mixed with white denotes that the man is single. Single men are expected to knit their own hats and their suitability as marriage partners depends on their skill at knitting and fishing. Traditionally, fathers judged their daughters´marriage partners by holding one of their hats above the sea and filling it with water. If the water seeped through the wool or alpaca, the man was considered unfit to marry the daughter. Once a man has decided to marry a woman, he must live with her for a trial period of one year because their is no divorce on the island. It is called the "watching" time. If the couple subsequently split, they must travel to the mainland to find another partner because they are considered "sullied". Jane Austen could have lived on Taquile. And so, our heads buzzing with all this information, we sat down on a rooftop terrace that overlooked the sea to enjoy a lunch of steamed fish mixed with onions and cumin seeds. Quite the life...
After spending a day in La Paz and being treated like scum at an Israeli restaurant, I boarded a bus in the frenetic, dirty city of El Alto towards Lake Titicaca. As we left La Paz, the landscape quickly changed, the tall buildings and suffocating fumes of the capital giving way to flat, light brown countryside stretching off to my right towards rippling, snow-capped mountains. Wheat and barley is grown in this area, just as it was under the Tiwanaku culture which began as early as 1500BC. The shores of the lake, and the islands that dot it, ripple with hundreds of uniform terraces that are either Inca or Pre Inca and are used to prevent soil erosion and to allow farming on steep hillsides. My first view of the lake was spectacular. As we rounded a bend, a vast expanse of water lurched into view, made all the more picturesque by the countryside that surrounded it. A light wind rustled the surface of the water, but in the lee of the islands, the water looked like a mirror, creating sweeping bands of dark blue and blinding cristal. The name, Lake Titicaca is believed to come from the Aymara language. "Titi" means Puma (a sacred beast) and Kaka, grey (important to distinguish from the Spanish which means "shit"). I also read on Wikipedia that the lake is supposed to resemble a darting Puma.
Isla del Sol (Island of the Sun) was my first destination, a mass of rock resembling an octopus that is reputed to be the birthplace of the Inca sungod and the first Inca emperor, Manco Capac. He is said to have emerged from an outcrop of rock that is now called "titikala", or "roca sagrada". Next to this rock lies a sacrificial table where offerings were made to the gods and a little further from Inca ruins that resemble the dry stone walls of Yorkshire. I visited this "laberinto" (laberyinth) on my second day on the island and had to crouch down to fit through the succession of four foot doors that led from one small room to another and eventually ended in a dead end.
Once you pass the steet sellers and women forcing you to buy a pass of entry to the island, you discover a land of strange contrasts that has changed little in some areas since the time of Manco Capac. From the dock, I laboured up some moss-grown Inca steps that climb up the hillside and ate the local speciality, trout, in a low, rustic restaurant that overlooked the wide, sparkling bay. A string of snow capped mountains could be seen distinctly through the thin, limpid air. Once I had gained the height of hillside, fending off the approaches of street sellers, I walked south down the spine of the island amidst some of the most beautiful countryside that I have seen in South America. Because so little rain falls each year, the villagers plow their meagre terraces by hand and plant it with wheat, barley and other cereal crops that shined in the sun and created a patchwork of contrasting coloured plots that cascaded down the hillside towards the water below. As I walked, breathing hard in the mountain air, I saw women with billowing, voluminous dresses and dark shawls ushering sheep this way and that on barren slopes. They carried wooden switches that they would use when the sheep dared to disobey. Large spits of land descend into the water, tapering to join Inca ruins that now lie below the surface of the water (the water level was once much lower than it is now). As I ascended a small hillock, I passed a huge, fat American woman who was being followed by her "guide", a tiny, emaciated boy who could have been no older than seven or eight. He bent under the weight of her heavy bag, but seemed to be faring better than his charge who seemed to be at the point of capitulating to the thin air. Her swinging posterior was eventually lost in the distance.
I stayed that night in the village of Challapampa which sits in a cradle of land between the mainland and a spit in the north-east of the island. I had rushed to reach the village before dark fell and was rewarded with a view of pigs grazing in the fading light and children playing a variant of marbles with plastic bottle tops. As I sat on rock, overlooking the bay, a young girl tried to make me pay for taking a picture of her cow. Luckily, there was electricity that night, but when I ventured out for dinner, the dusty streets were deserted and the signs outside dwellings, reading "restaurante" and "comedor" seemed to mock me, for there was no light inside. In a narrow sidestreet off the main drag, a feeble light glowed in the blackness, beckoning me into a low room, which I first saw through a chink in the two doors. Sitting at a table were Hector and Paddy, the two lads from Leeds who used to play for Horsforth Dynamoes and whom I had previously bumped into in Puerto Natales (Patagonia) and Salta (northern Argentina). I sat down for a beer and a fat trout. Maybe there is a God.
On the way back from Isla del Sol to the mainland, I met David, and Englishman from Telford who attended Cambridge as a post-graduate. He let slip that he was glad that he hadn´t studied at Cambridge as an undergraduate and had to backtrack swiftly when I told him of my situation. We decided to visit the three island of Uros, Amantani and Taquile, but that first meant crossing the border to Puno and saying goodbye to my beloved Bolivia.
The country has treated me very well. It is a land of great natural beauty and the people are as friendly as any I have encountered in South America. Yet they labour under the injustices commited to them in the past; a naval sign on the wall in Copacabana proclaimed that Bolivia has a right to a sea port and that it should be a priority of the government to reclaim it from Chile (It was lost in the War of the Pacific). The day I left, the people of Uyuni began a six day strike to protest against the government´s decision not to pave the roads to and from Uyuni. Transport in and out of the town was blockaded and when some tourist tried to escape with a bribed taxi driver, a crowd surrounded his car and slashed the tires.
We had been told that Puno was a "shithole" and so we were pleasantly surprised when we found some great bakeries and some pool halls, despite the stinking green water around the dock. After playing some pool amidst drunk locals who sporadically broke into violence, we departed for the "Uros" islands, over thirty floating islands constructed of totora reeds, which sit a few kilometres from Puno. They are hidden in the reeds like a secret community. Some people believe that the Uros people were descendent of Polynesians, and they once spoke their own distinct language, Uro, before it was gradually replaced by the Aymara language. (the last Uro speaker died in the 50s). The Uro people fled to these islands in order to escape Incan contamination of their culture. As we approached the island, we were mobbed by women who greeted us in their local language, and we replied by saying "Wakili", hello. The reed islands rest on a base of roots that release a gas as they decompose, helping to keep them afloat. The reeds, however, have to be continually replaced, an arduous chore that falls to the women as the men go off fishing. All the buildings are also made of reeds and the women wear huge, colourful dresses and sell souvenirs from low stalls. The islands are a self-contained community, containing a school and a basic medical centre. A low women with a stoop told me that the people here prefer to cure their ailments with the plants that they grow in rectangular, upraised plots, not surprising in a country of curanderos (shamans or healers). The small girls wear a bell shaped hat coloured white, green and pink that is said to resemble the national flower of Peru, the Kantuta. All the small children stared at us inquisitively from uinder their broad-brimmed hats, hiding the terrible sunburn that blotched their smooth skin.
After an hour or two there, we travelled on to Amantani, a small, barren island where we would stay in the adobe house of a local, single mother called Maria. Her son was a tiny, smiling cutie called Roy and he had a sister called Luz. Maria was outwardly friendly, laughing at almost anything we said, but it was a laughter borne of loneliness and insecurity. She never told us what had happened to her husband. We were served eggs and quinoa soup in a low kitchen whose walls had grown black from the smoke of an open fire which was used for cooking. Maria would bustle round us and also attend to her three children and her mother, who spoke only Quechua. That night, we were draped in a poncho and Andean hat and led through the moonlight to the town hall where we participated in Andean dancing. It involved little more than locking hands with our respective hosts, rocking the shoulders back and forth and then being led in a long, winding snake. The women wore white blouses and black shawls and tucked their bulging stomachs under tight corsets which led down to pink dresses that twirled around as they danced. It was a relatively tame affair and by half past ten, we brushing our teeth in the light of a lone, guttering candle.
Our last stop was the island of Taquile which lies to the south of Amantani. As on the other islands, draught power is not used on Taquile because there is not enough pasture to support horeses and cows. The island is famed for its tight-knit textiles and the men a sombre outfit of black trousers and white shirt with black waistcoat. They also wear bright hats though, whose colour varies depending on whether they are married. A red hat means that a man is married, red mixed with white denotes that the man is single. Single men are expected to knit their own hats and their suitability as marriage partners depends on their skill at knitting and fishing. Traditionally, fathers judged their daughters´marriage partners by holding one of their hats above the sea and filling it with water. If the water seeped through the wool or alpaca, the man was considered unfit to marry the daughter. Once a man has decided to marry a woman, he must live with her for a trial period of one year because their is no divorce on the island. It is called the "watching" time. If the couple subsequently split, they must travel to the mainland to find another partner because they are considered "sullied". Jane Austen could have lived on Taquile. And so, our heads buzzing with all this information, we sat down on a rooftop terrace that overlooked the sea to enjoy a lunch of steamed fish mixed with onions and cumin seeds. Quite the life...
Wednesday, 3 June 2009
Days of rain and some crocs
The whole week before I rode the most dangerous road in the world, people had been spreading rumours about an English guy who had fallen over the edge to his death. I didn`t take any notice, went with the same company and ended up shivering on a mountain 5000m above sea level, the surroundings wrapped in a mantle of fog. The first hour of the descent was not dangerous, though I did worry about catching hypothermia as the wind whistled through my clothes. The hail and rain was so intense at points that you had to squint into the grey beyond, occasionally closing your eyes. This first stretch was on paved tarmac, but it soon deteriorated into a steep, downhill dirt track, effectively a ledge cut into a vertical hillside, giving you incredibly views down into the valley below, but causing me to apply the brakes sharply at every turn as we approached the edge. I had expected to be so scared by the road that I would ride like a timorous beasty, and kick myself later, or feel bootganged into riding as fast as everyone else. The surprise was that I have never felt more secure on a bike, and for much of the time, it felt as if we were cycling on any other steep downhill road, maybe because the thick cloud hid the vertiginous drops from view. The vegetation here is a lush, semi-tropical green. Everything was saturated in water, and cascades of water dropped hundreds of metres from cliffs above. We stopped for lunch on a wide outcrop of rock at the head of which stood an Israeli monument. It commemorates the Israeli who died close to this spot. Him and his mate decided to make a video while riding the bikes (Sound a bit like tig on bikes, Alex?) and he strayed over the edge.
I spent that night in the small, mountainous town of Coroico before taking a bus to Rurrenebaque for the Pampas tour. The rain never let up, flooding the towns narrow streets and turning the alleys into a mud bath that I traversed in flip-flops, only to find that I had left my flip flop behind. All the people in my group for the Pampas tour were great, two bubbling, quirky Canadians complementing a funny Englishman and his uninformed Chinese girlfriend. Two Israeli girls made up the group. The other group that stayed in the same accomodation as us contained an interesting German family. The father loved to harrass animals with large sticks, wore socks with his sandals and had a squint. At dinner time, his wife would launch forth in her harsh, grating German accent, demanding that we give her the leftovers from our table and later complaining that the weed nowadays isn´t as good as in her day (presumably in the heavanly sixties). It is difficult to pinpoint what was exactly wrong with the daughter, but she had a vacant look, like an immolated cow.
Getting to the Pampas was an adventure in itself. The 4x4 lurched around in the thick mud, bringing out Schumacher-like driving from our chofer, and at one point several lorries had to be pulled out of the mud by a caterpillar. The Pampas here are a wide connection of waterways, divided by reeds and wetlands, which eventually drain into the mighty amazon. The three hour boat ride to our lodge on the first day gave us ample opportunity to marvel at the wildlife. Cranes and herons stood motionless on branches with their long beaks upturned, while the sound of the boat´s engine would disturb a resting stork which would swoop up into the air and beat its wings in undulating flight, its legs straight out behind it. We rounded bends to find caimans and capbybaras, a kind of overgrown hamster that is entirely vegetarian, while we were treated to the flight of the kingfisher, that would fall from a branch and flit its way along the surface of the water. The tiny, yellow squirrel monkeys provided some entertainment, but it was astounding to find two caimans waiting for us when we pulled up at the ranch (sitting at the front of the boat, it was always my job to tie up the boat). At first sight, it looked fiersome, long thick body rippling with prehistoric scales, its whole body motionless, ready for the strike...except that it was about as tame as a dog. Our guide, Reinaldo, went as far as to stroke its snout, and the following day we found it lolling around under the veranda, its mouth full of unfinished rice and pasta. When I suggested to the other guide that this animal was no longer wild, he looked riled and gave me the evil eye, which I returned. How is a caiman supposed to scrape rice from its mouth if it doesnt have a tongue. On the first night, we went looking for caimans in the dark. We found what we thought was a frog, but the silent peace of the night made up for any disappointment. There was no electricity in the cabins and I struggled to find my way with the dim light from my dying phone. Eventually, though, I settled down to the sound of cicadas and beguiled my soul with sleep.
On the second morning, we failed to find an anaconda in the cold, wet conditions (as cold blooded animals, snakes like to bathe in the sun) but the highlight of the day was fishing for pirahnas.We primed our hooks with small pieces of meat and launched them into the water where they were attacked by swarms of pirahnas that pushed the meat this way and that as they hit it like missiles. The problem was that they only ever nibbled the meat, making it nigh impossible to hook them; the best that I could do was a tiny, pubescent pirahna that was no bigger than a salmon par. We were all upstaged by one of the Israeli girls who looked like she had been pirahna fishing before. On the last day, we went swimming with dolphins, or rather, in the vecinity of dolphins, because the animals just wouldn´t play ball. I was the first to strip off and plunge into the warm water after a dolphin that had curved above the water´s surface just moments before. I kept swimming through the water that kept changing in temperature from pleasantly warm to freezingly cold, but the dolphin never resurfaced. I ended up being hauled back into the boat like a beached fish, only to see a whole family of the long nosed pink dolphins rise out of the water again. This time four of us jumped in, banged our palms against the boat to attract them and generally made a racket. We never saw another dolphin. Swimming in crocodile and pirahna infested waters just for that...a sacrifice too far.
I spent that night in the small, mountainous town of Coroico before taking a bus to Rurrenebaque for the Pampas tour. The rain never let up, flooding the towns narrow streets and turning the alleys into a mud bath that I traversed in flip-flops, only to find that I had left my flip flop behind. All the people in my group for the Pampas tour were great, two bubbling, quirky Canadians complementing a funny Englishman and his uninformed Chinese girlfriend. Two Israeli girls made up the group. The other group that stayed in the same accomodation as us contained an interesting German family. The father loved to harrass animals with large sticks, wore socks with his sandals and had a squint. At dinner time, his wife would launch forth in her harsh, grating German accent, demanding that we give her the leftovers from our table and later complaining that the weed nowadays isn´t as good as in her day (presumably in the heavanly sixties). It is difficult to pinpoint what was exactly wrong with the daughter, but she had a vacant look, like an immolated cow.
Getting to the Pampas was an adventure in itself. The 4x4 lurched around in the thick mud, bringing out Schumacher-like driving from our chofer, and at one point several lorries had to be pulled out of the mud by a caterpillar. The Pampas here are a wide connection of waterways, divided by reeds and wetlands, which eventually drain into the mighty amazon. The three hour boat ride to our lodge on the first day gave us ample opportunity to marvel at the wildlife. Cranes and herons stood motionless on branches with their long beaks upturned, while the sound of the boat´s engine would disturb a resting stork which would swoop up into the air and beat its wings in undulating flight, its legs straight out behind it. We rounded bends to find caimans and capbybaras, a kind of overgrown hamster that is entirely vegetarian, while we were treated to the flight of the kingfisher, that would fall from a branch and flit its way along the surface of the water. The tiny, yellow squirrel monkeys provided some entertainment, but it was astounding to find two caimans waiting for us when we pulled up at the ranch (sitting at the front of the boat, it was always my job to tie up the boat). At first sight, it looked fiersome, long thick body rippling with prehistoric scales, its whole body motionless, ready for the strike...except that it was about as tame as a dog. Our guide, Reinaldo, went as far as to stroke its snout, and the following day we found it lolling around under the veranda, its mouth full of unfinished rice and pasta. When I suggested to the other guide that this animal was no longer wild, he looked riled and gave me the evil eye, which I returned. How is a caiman supposed to scrape rice from its mouth if it doesnt have a tongue. On the first night, we went looking for caimans in the dark. We found what we thought was a frog, but the silent peace of the night made up for any disappointment. There was no electricity in the cabins and I struggled to find my way with the dim light from my dying phone. Eventually, though, I settled down to the sound of cicadas and beguiled my soul with sleep.
On the second morning, we failed to find an anaconda in the cold, wet conditions (as cold blooded animals, snakes like to bathe in the sun) but the highlight of the day was fishing for pirahnas.We primed our hooks with small pieces of meat and launched them into the water where they were attacked by swarms of pirahnas that pushed the meat this way and that as they hit it like missiles. The problem was that they only ever nibbled the meat, making it nigh impossible to hook them; the best that I could do was a tiny, pubescent pirahna that was no bigger than a salmon par. We were all upstaged by one of the Israeli girls who looked like she had been pirahna fishing before. On the last day, we went swimming with dolphins, or rather, in the vecinity of dolphins, because the animals just wouldn´t play ball. I was the first to strip off and plunge into the warm water after a dolphin that had curved above the water´s surface just moments before. I kept swimming through the water that kept changing in temperature from pleasantly warm to freezingly cold, but the dolphin never resurfaced. I ended up being hauled back into the boat like a beached fish, only to see a whole family of the long nosed pink dolphins rise out of the water again. This time four of us jumped in, banged our palms against the boat to attract them and generally made a racket. We never saw another dolphin. Swimming in crocodile and pirahna infested waters just for that...a sacrifice too far.
Wednesday, 27 May 2009
Sucre and the Shanghai of the Americas, La Paz
Today I saw the first cloud that I have seen in Bolivia, a cauliflower cumuluous cloud, scudding across the sky. That was before I went to a local bar to see Man United humiliated by a Barcelona side who make an art out of keeping the ball.
Two days ago, though, I was in Sucre, a pretty city of gleaming white colonial buildings that was named Bolivia´s capital in the new constitution. It is the most European city that I have visited, with wide sweeping streets and simple, yet elegant neoclassical facades. When I arrived, the city was in the grip of celebrations marking the bicentenary of the revolution of Charcas, or as the press in Sucre tried to claim, the first spark of Latin American independence. For the two days that I was there, a neverending parade of dignitaries, soldiers, musicians and citizens piled down the central street, Avenida Arce to the booming of a brass band. Sitting in cafes bordering the street, the windows and light fittings would literally shake with the reverberations of the drums outside. The church of San Francisco stood immediatly outside my hostel, and it is reputed that it was here that the bell first struck to call the people of South America to freedom. A dignitary gave a speech calling on the people of Bolivia to unite together to create a strong nation (The Bolivian moto is Union y Fuerza). Yet these celebrations showed what a divided, disunited country Bolivia is, despite the goodwill of the thousands of people who lined the streets to see the local chess and football club pass by. Morales decided to hold the bicentenary in a small village over a hundred kilometres from Sucre in a deliberate affront to the capital. Last year on the 25 May, a group of campesinos affiliated to MAS (Morales´s party, Movimiento al Socialismo) marched into the central square of Sucre and were promptly attacked by some Sucre residents who beat them, stripped them of their clothes and gave Sucre the reputation of being a racist city. Morales has also undermined the basic legal right to presumption of innocence by issuing a decree stating that the goods and property of people implicated in terrorism would be immediatly confiscated. He is not popular in Sucre, where a taxi driver told me that he was a mentiroso, a liar.
Tiring of the incessant street parades, I moved on to La Paz on a freezing bus, wearing only a tee-shirt and jumper. At first, La Paz seemed to be just like any other big city; busy, polluted and noisy. But the city revered by Ernesto Guevara de la Serna as the Shanghai of the Americas soon began to work its charm. Many of the old colonial buildings have been knocked down and rebuilt, but behind the church of San Francisco, narrow, cobbled alleyways still wend their way up the hillside towards El Alto, the fastest growing city in Bolivia, whose houses twinkle round the rim of the canyon at night. Poverty is as evident here as elsewhere in Bolivia. After drinking a coffee at the bourgeois Cafe Berlin on my first morning in La Paz, I passed a small indigenous women who had crouched down in a busy street to pee into a drain. She seemed to feel no shame or embarrasment at suffering this indignity. In the central square, pigeons flocked around a man holding seed in his hands and an old hunchbacked man stared plaintively into a shop window at a watch that he would never be able to afford. A plaque on the wall commemorated the people who were shot dead in this square by the government of Sanchez Lozada before it fled on mass to the USA.
The central artery for traffic in La Paz is El Paseo, more like a motorway than a central street. Colectivos stop every few yards so that a ticket seller can lean out of the window and holler the destinations in a piercing, machine gun spanish that I, at least, cannot understand. The mercado de hechinceria (witches market) consists of a long line of stalls on a shaded, cobbled street where old indigenous women sell dried llama foetuses (for good luck), animal amulets and plates of offerings to pachamama, which contain piles of coca leaves and fake money. Aphrodisiacs crowd the shelves. The owners of these stalls sit on the pavements in their black and grey protruding hats, so drowned in petticoats and shawls that they look like squat mushrooms, their legs and arms nowhere to be seen. High above was the central produce market selling everything, from beds and electronics to dried, stinking fish and cows innards. These markets are always fascinating because of the density of the stalls and due to the incredible sense of activity and vitality that they exude. On every corner sits a women selling freshly squeezed fruit juice and popcorn. The comedores, or eating halls are built of corrugated iron. Inside, small, dark men bend over their steaming soup, ladled out from huge vats by rotund women. There was even a pet section, assuming of course that the white rabbits and budgies were not being fattened up for tomorrow´s lunch.
La Paz has a big drug scene and while eating lunch in a cuban restaurant below a looming portrait of Che, two greasy Bolivians who I hadn´t spoken to up to that point slipped me a post-it note with a telephone number on and explained that I could ring it at any time to buy weed or coke. My brush with drugs continued as I visited the fascinating coca museum and later when I was led to the notorious route 36 by two of the guys in my hostel. Our taxi driver knocked on an iron gate that seemed to lead to an ordinary house and it was opened by a guard who scanned the street sheepishly before ushering us in and patting us down. Inside, the air was thick with smoke and people were ordering lines of coke from the bar, which came on top of CD cases. As the other guys snorted away, I sank into a chair, feeling somewhat out of place.
Two days ago, though, I was in Sucre, a pretty city of gleaming white colonial buildings that was named Bolivia´s capital in the new constitution. It is the most European city that I have visited, with wide sweeping streets and simple, yet elegant neoclassical facades. When I arrived, the city was in the grip of celebrations marking the bicentenary of the revolution of Charcas, or as the press in Sucre tried to claim, the first spark of Latin American independence. For the two days that I was there, a neverending parade of dignitaries, soldiers, musicians and citizens piled down the central street, Avenida Arce to the booming of a brass band. Sitting in cafes bordering the street, the windows and light fittings would literally shake with the reverberations of the drums outside. The church of San Francisco stood immediatly outside my hostel, and it is reputed that it was here that the bell first struck to call the people of South America to freedom. A dignitary gave a speech calling on the people of Bolivia to unite together to create a strong nation (The Bolivian moto is Union y Fuerza). Yet these celebrations showed what a divided, disunited country Bolivia is, despite the goodwill of the thousands of people who lined the streets to see the local chess and football club pass by. Morales decided to hold the bicentenary in a small village over a hundred kilometres from Sucre in a deliberate affront to the capital. Last year on the 25 May, a group of campesinos affiliated to MAS (Morales´s party, Movimiento al Socialismo) marched into the central square of Sucre and were promptly attacked by some Sucre residents who beat them, stripped them of their clothes and gave Sucre the reputation of being a racist city. Morales has also undermined the basic legal right to presumption of innocence by issuing a decree stating that the goods and property of people implicated in terrorism would be immediatly confiscated. He is not popular in Sucre, where a taxi driver told me that he was a mentiroso, a liar.
Tiring of the incessant street parades, I moved on to La Paz on a freezing bus, wearing only a tee-shirt and jumper. At first, La Paz seemed to be just like any other big city; busy, polluted and noisy. But the city revered by Ernesto Guevara de la Serna as the Shanghai of the Americas soon began to work its charm. Many of the old colonial buildings have been knocked down and rebuilt, but behind the church of San Francisco, narrow, cobbled alleyways still wend their way up the hillside towards El Alto, the fastest growing city in Bolivia, whose houses twinkle round the rim of the canyon at night. Poverty is as evident here as elsewhere in Bolivia. After drinking a coffee at the bourgeois Cafe Berlin on my first morning in La Paz, I passed a small indigenous women who had crouched down in a busy street to pee into a drain. She seemed to feel no shame or embarrasment at suffering this indignity. In the central square, pigeons flocked around a man holding seed in his hands and an old hunchbacked man stared plaintively into a shop window at a watch that he would never be able to afford. A plaque on the wall commemorated the people who were shot dead in this square by the government of Sanchez Lozada before it fled on mass to the USA.
The central artery for traffic in La Paz is El Paseo, more like a motorway than a central street. Colectivos stop every few yards so that a ticket seller can lean out of the window and holler the destinations in a piercing, machine gun spanish that I, at least, cannot understand. The mercado de hechinceria (witches market) consists of a long line of stalls on a shaded, cobbled street where old indigenous women sell dried llama foetuses (for good luck), animal amulets and plates of offerings to pachamama, which contain piles of coca leaves and fake money. Aphrodisiacs crowd the shelves. The owners of these stalls sit on the pavements in their black and grey protruding hats, so drowned in petticoats and shawls that they look like squat mushrooms, their legs and arms nowhere to be seen. High above was the central produce market selling everything, from beds and electronics to dried, stinking fish and cows innards. These markets are always fascinating because of the density of the stalls and due to the incredible sense of activity and vitality that they exude. On every corner sits a women selling freshly squeezed fruit juice and popcorn. The comedores, or eating halls are built of corrugated iron. Inside, small, dark men bend over their steaming soup, ladled out from huge vats by rotund women. There was even a pet section, assuming of course that the white rabbits and budgies were not being fattened up for tomorrow´s lunch.
La Paz has a big drug scene and while eating lunch in a cuban restaurant below a looming portrait of Che, two greasy Bolivians who I hadn´t spoken to up to that point slipped me a post-it note with a telephone number on and explained that I could ring it at any time to buy weed or coke. My brush with drugs continued as I visited the fascinating coca museum and later when I was led to the notorious route 36 by two of the guys in my hostel. Our taxi driver knocked on an iron gate that seemed to lead to an ordinary house and it was opened by a guard who scanned the street sheepishly before ushering us in and patting us down. Inside, the air was thick with smoke and people were ordering lines of coke from the bar, which came on top of CD cases. As the other guys snorted away, I sank into a chair, feeling somewhat out of place.
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