Cusco and area. Miercoles 17 de octubre hasta viernes 26 de
octubre
I spend another ten days in Cusco. I enjoy the weather (although the
rain is becoming a little more frequent), the vibe of the city, the people I
have got to know, and the physical beauty of the old city and the surrounding
mountains.
I have been running regularly in Cusco, early in the morning, on a route
which takes me out of the old city along a main street and then up into the
hills. You have to be alert as if you are on an obstacle course: there are all
kinds of holes in the roads and sidewalks, things sticking up out of the
sidewalk, as well as all manner of flotsam and jetsam along the roads. Traffic
is an interesting hazard here, one that keeps you very alert. Drivers do not
necessarily obey the signs: red lights are a suggestion only it would appear, so I use them as a
guide. They are not anything like a guarantee of safe passage. Many drivers
also seem to expect that you will get out of their way. On one run, I looked up
to see a bus speeding toward me (where no sidewalk I try to run facing traffic). I had just enough time to turn my shoulders
sideways to avoid having my right shoulder clipped by the bus.
On Saturday, (Oct 20) I decide to visit a couple of the local ruins in
and around town, that I have not visited. On a warm sunny morning, I make my
way upwards towards Sacsay Huamán, an Inca fortress high above the city at the
north end. To access it on foot, you follow the streets uphill. I stop at a
little restaurant for a breakfast, and afterward I try to pay with a 50 soles
bill (about $20) but the waitress/cook who is the only person there at that
hour, has no change. This is so common it is unbelievable. However, I leave her
the s/50 bill, and go downhill to find somewhere to get change. About the third
place I try is a travel agency and they have water bottles for sale. Since the
plastic lid of one of mine has cracked a few days ago, I buy one, and return
with the correct change, and retrieve my bill. Soon, I can see the big hill
upon which the ruins sit, and there is a road going around it. After a while, I
decide to take a scenic shortcut, right up the hill. I arrive on top in some
trees, and nearby is an enormous open grassy areas where the Fortress is. There
is a flock of half a dozen alpacas grazing: the grounds maintenance crew. (Throughout
my travels, I have seen sheep, llamas, and alpacas being used to keep grass
short in parks, playgrounds, and football (soccer) fields). The fortress itself
is built with huge stone blocks: I estimate one at 4 m tall, and 2 m wide: one
of the biggest blocks is reported to be
about 300 tonnes. It is also well located to make use of the top of the very
high hillside dominating the city, so that it really only needed defensive
walls on the back side. There are three parallel zigzagging walls which are as much
as 20 m tall. Began by the Incas in the 1440s, it took a hundred years and the
labour of 20 000 men to finish it. Although little of the inner structures
remain, these unmortared walls are in
excellent condition despite having survived almost 500 years and many
earthquakes.
Sacsay Huamán
The grounds
maintenance crew.
Before leaving, I went to the one edge of the steep hill overlooking the
city for a gorgeous view of the city which spills down a mountain valley, and
to the snow-covered peaks beyond. I noticed that there is a set of wood
railings around this lookout, and the wood is all held together with thick strips
of rawhide from cattle or llamas, with a fair bit of hair still clinging to it.
In the afternoon, I visited Q’oricancha, another ruin in the city
itself. Much of the inner part was destroyed in the 1600s by the Spaniards in
the building of a church and convent on the hill within its walls, although a
few of the mortar-less inner stone walls still stand. Originally there was a
temple and 4 small sanctuaries around a courtyard. There is only one small area
of one of the sancturary walls where the original mural art, which once covered
the walls, still survives. Before the Spaniards moved in, the inner courtyard
was encircled by a gold cornice, made of 700 solid gold sheets.The sacrificial
font in the centre was once decorated with 55 kg of gold. Below the temple was
an artificial garden whether everything in it was made of gold and silver and
encrusted with jewels. (Q’orikancha means ‘golden enclosure’ in Quechua).
Just down the street is a small textile museum which displays the
typical items and patterns that have been and still are woven. In the main
room, there are many woven shawls, ponchos, and scarves on display and for
sale, and there is a group of 5 women and 1 girl, dressed in the same
traditional dress that you commonly see in rural villages. The women were
all weaving on horizontal looms, an
unbelievable slow and painstaking endeavor.
On Sunday (octubre 21), at 6:30 in the morning, I go to one of the big
markets with Raquel, which is what she does every Sunday. Raquel and her sister
speak Quechua: their learned it from their parents as children. This comes in
handy for them as they both are involved in social work in many small villages.
It also comes in handy in the market. She purchased trout, potatoes, pineapples, leeks, cabbage,
celery, turnips, onions. I also bought some produce, and marveled at the many
varieties and colours of potato. The market was extremely busy and in one area,
all parts of butchered pigs, lambs, cattle were on display. Raquel has good
memories of lamb head stew. In another area, there are all kinds of seafood
including large shrimp, and rays cut up into small pieces. Raquel has about 15
kg of food to carry 1.5 km uphill to her home. It must be a lot harder without
someone to help carry the load.
Sacks of
different kinds of potatoes in the market.
Afterwards, about 10 AM, we go to see the Parade of the Virgin of Belem,
as this is the special week for this virgin (there are a lot of them). The
statue of the virgin with her very heavy silver litter had been moved to the
major Cathedral in town. We encountered the procession going thru the streets
of town with a lighter version of the Virgin. The procession was complete with
a cloud of smoke from burning incense, a speech from a priest, a marching band
and uniforms worn by all involved, and a large crowd following. Afterwards, we
spent time in the cathedral where the ‘real’ statue of the virgin is for now
for her special week: the platform upon which she is carried is made of finely
tooled pure silver, so heavy it takes 60 people to carry it. Later she will be
returned to her home church further away but in the city after her special
week. While in the church, we looked at some of the many altars and paintings. One
of the paintings was of the Last Supper with a roast guinea pig on a platter,
clearly painted here in the Andes. We listened to the music sung at different
parts of the Sunday service. One song was Bob Dylan’s ‘How Many Times?’ in
Spanish.
Afterward, Raquel and I get on a local bus. She was heading to a meeting
and changed buses. Later I changed buses as well to head out to Tipon, another
Inca ruin about 25 km east of town. When
I was dropped off by the bus, I walked down the main street into the village
which was below Tipon. I followed through the town, past a small zoo and then
onto a new paved highway up to the ruins. I did not find this very interesting.
So I followed a little trail up into the mountains. The mountainside was very
dry with lots of cactus. I ended up arriving on the plateau where Tipon was
situated maybe 500 m above the town below. The advantage of going this way, one
I was not expecting, was that I did not have to pay an entry. From the plateau,
you can see many fields in the distance that are very green in a very dry
environment: clearly irrigated fields. Things will soon green up: the rainy
season is coming.
The site itself is large with the remains of many buildings, large
terrace fields, and is known for the best
functioning aqueducts from the Inca era. There is in fact a very
impressive series of fountains fed by
the aqueducts. The retaining
walls for the terracing, all have sets of stairs to climb them composed of a
series of long flat rocks protruding from the wall, but each one offset from
the one below to form a staircase.
Fountains in Tipón
Walking down, I pass a big field where a game of soccer was taking
place. In South America there is always a game of soccer taking place. When I
get home, Raquel serves me a plate of fried trout with rice, yucca and beans.
She had had a big supper with family.
On Tuesday (23 octubre), I go by
bus to visit Moray,another ruin about 45 km west of Cusco. The bus drops me off
at the turn off to the town of Maras. There is a 3 km walk to town and another
7 km walk from there across country to the site itself. This area is one big
flat valley with mountains in the distance in all directions. To the west and
the north is a range of very high snow-covered mountains (snow does not begin
here until 5500 m or so) . The fields themselves seem to tilt downward to my
right, which is north, where it is another 8 km to the Rio Urubamba, the Sacred
Valley, and the mountains to the north are on the far side of it. I am walking on a narrow asphalt road
(undoubtedly due to the tourist draw of the ruins), which passes agricultural
fields. It is warm and the sun is high, and I pass through one stretch of road
whee I leave footprints in the asphalt with my sandals. The fields are large and flat and there is a
tractor in the distance. Whoever is farming here is not using oxen and machetes
like in the mountains. The fields look recently ploughed and planted or
fallowed. Not much to be seen, although some fields have corn, just starting,
and some are pastures. There is a herd of cattle, maybe 50 or so, in one
fieldIn the fields, I see many chestnut-collared sparrows, 3 small falcons
which look very much like kestrels (one on the ground, one on a wire, and one
flies by), a large flock of goldfinch relatives, and about a dozen mt carcaras
loafing in a ploughed field.
The town of Maras is almost entirely built of adobe bricks, with very
few buildings finished off with smooth plaster, just the rough bricks showing.
A significant number of these are falling down including a lot of adobe walls
around small fields within the town. There are very few public buildings I can
see and the town is mostly deserted. When I ask someone why, he tells me that most
people are out in the fields. On the outskirts of town, there is a new large
building going up which I am told is some kind of tourist facility: likely an
interpretative centre for the Moray ruins as well as the salt springs of
Salinas, 10 km to the north, where many families make a living by evaporating
the water from the springs in big rectangular enclosures. (From the photos I
have seen it is very beautiful.) There is also a new paved road to the ruins,
but I do not take it. It is quicker and more interesting to walk across
country. There are also tour operators who bring bicycles to the area and bike
to the ruins with tourists, and I do see some bike tracks as I head down the
trail. Later I encounter a few tourists returning from the ruins and later a small
encampment for cyclists operated by a tour company. The trail to Moray goes
through a small and then a much bigger coulee, with a steep climb down and back
up. I imagine theses coulees (dry steep valleys cut by rapid runoff after a
rain) are cutting much deeper and faster these days since so much of the land
is under annual cultivation. The coulees remind me very much of the vegetation
of southwestern Saskatchewan/southeastern Alberta. I pass irrigation channels
and dammed pools holding water for irrigation.
Around the coulees, there is much native vegetation: dry scrub with many
cactus and few trees. Then I come to an
area which is all recently ploughed and very flat: I assume that a lot of the
planting will wait until we are a little closer to the rainy season (Dec- Feb).
I cut across the fields as I see in the distance a road leading into an area
where there are parked cars, and beyond that low mountains rise up. Yet I still
do not see the ruins. When I arrive, I see why nothing was visible. The ruins are
in a very large depression, a large bowl, about 200 m deep. It is
awe-inspiring: symmetrical concentric circles of terraces around a flat central
bottom 50 m in diameter. There are a few people in the bottom looking like ants
from up here. Further away there are more terraces going up the mountainside,
in total maybe 15 ha. This site is thought to have been built for agricultural
testing using the many terraces for varietal testing in different
microclimates, an agricultural research station of the Incas.
Moray. About half of the site is visible in this photo. Note the three
people in the circle at the bottom.
On the long walk back, I see people out tending their flocks and I pass
more than one large family herding their animals home for the night. One family
has cattle, sheep, pigs, donkeys including one donkey that must like to take
off: it has its two front legs hobbled. A little later I see a small lamb by
itself, heading off in the direction of the family. It must have got separated
but it looks like it knows the way. A little later I see two donkeys munching
away in a small, young field of corn. Someone is not going to be too happy with
the owners.
Once I get on the main road and only a couple of km from the highway, a
bus stops for me going into the town of Maras. I get on which is probably a
mistake. It turns out to be a local bus, going back to Cusco by the most
indirect route possible. I am taken over very bumpy back roads and we stop at
all settlements no matter how small. After an hour or so, we end up back on the
highway, and I finally get off in Cusco after dark and kilometers from my
hostal. I walk however, stopping to have a hot supper. I have not really seen
the city from this direction.
One morning, I am waiting for Raquel for breakfast (which comes with the
room). When she gets back, she tells me that when she went to get some bread, she could not get away from a
neighbor who was on about the neighbourhood gossip. It took me a while to
understand, but the hostal on the corner was ‘moroso’, behind in its loan
payments to the bank. Sure enough, when I head out, I see the walls of the
building plastered with stickers which say ‘moroso’, which means delinquent. I
guess the first step banks take is to shame people into paying.
I notice a tiny new restaurant, Restaurante Salcanay, right on Recoleta,
the super narrow street near my hostal. It is just a small room really, and I
try it for supper. Many very small places only serve a fixed menu and do not
charge very much ($2 in this case), but the food here is much better than most:
very hearty and nicely seasoned. The owner, Selia, is a trained cook who has
been working as a chef for another restaurant but when she got pregnant (her
third, and she is very pregnant now) she was laid off, although I am not sure
why. Rather than do nothing, she decided to open her own restaurant.
Her 7-year old daughter, Merel , is serving for her. I tell her that she
is doing a great job which she is. I guess that this is enough encouragement,
as she sits down and we talk. She tells me all the words she knows in English
and she teaches me a few new words of Spanish (a couple after checking with her
Mom). She asks me some personal questions and when I tell her I am divorced,
she says, how sad. We exchange arithmetic problems (adding, subtracting and
multiplying). She knows her multiplication tables better than many teenagers I
have taught, and I teach her a couple of tricks to do more complicated
problems. We then switch to drawing: drawing pictures and figuring out what
they are and then to paper folding. Later her brother comes in from school around
6:30, and then her dad as well, and another customer. Talking to her Mom, Selia
tells me that she wants to start giving cooking lessons as well, asks for
advice on a sign in English and offers to give me a free lesson tomorrow.
When I come in the next day at lunch, she teaches me to make lomo saltado: a typical
Peruvian dish with sautéed and flambed beef, onions, tomato, garlic, served
with rice and fries (everything is). It
is good, but I see how big her ‘kitchen’ is: a corner of the room with a two
burner table top gas stove, a small refrigerator, and a tiny table in between.
She gives me this to eat but I also order a meal so I am end up eating more
than I want to be polite. I have a couple of more meals there before I leave
town and say goodbye to both Selia and Merel. I hope the restaurant works out:
I will have a chance to drop in on them
on my way back through in the new year.
There are a lot of pigeons in the main square in Cusco. Pigeons are
known among birders as ‘rock doves’ and are native to Europe where they nest on
cliffs. It is interesting to see that other dove species, native ones, have
taken the park beggar role in Popayan, Lima and Quito, while pigeons are in
charge both in Bogota, and here in Cusco. It would be interesting to understand
their immigration history here.
I was doing some reflecting on myself and realized that this is the
fourth time I have taken a year off from my regular path, and each time it has
renewed my enthusiasm, and given me a new perspective on things. At 18 after
high school, I left to ski and travel in Europe and the Middle East. At 23,
after finishing a BSc, I moved to Quebec City to learn French where I volunteered at a co-op radio station putting
together programs on environmental issues, worked as a ski patroller at Mt Ste
Anne, was on the executive of the local branch of Friends of the Earth, and
worked as a biological research assistant. At 37, I quit my job in research and
spent a year in the woods of northern Saskatchewan living off the land. Now at
57, I am travelling through northwestern South America, learning Spanish, and
experiencing as much as I possibly can of the Andes, the Amazon, and the
tropical Pacific. I probably won’t see the Pacific though until the last part
of my trip where I will explore it in three countries with the highlight being
a trip to the Galapagos.
Comparing the past times to this, I can see that there is a progression,
and that I am more comfortable with myself and the world than I have ever been,
and that life is much richer now for me than ever before. I am really not that
surprised that I am alone, without a partner. It has been hard to find a solid
relationship when I have not really put a high priority on it. More
importantly, I can say that I feel like I have spent a good part of my life
being socially handicapped, unable to relate to other people effectively. Each
partner I have had has taught me a lot and I do not regret past relationships.
But the fact that I feel that I can finally relate to people much more easily
now, and enjoy people much more than I ever have, may mean that I am finally
ready to have a deep relationship. Time will tell. Certainly I recognize that
most of the important work I have ahead of me requires working closely with a
lot of other people and I am finally ready to do that, too.
I do know that I am enjoying living very simply with few possessions. I
have been working on clearing out ‘stuff’ which is now all coalesced into a
storage locker in Thunder Bay, and I will have to have one more go at that in
the spring before I move out west. I have a ‘coach’ now in this endeavor who
has a system. I need a system to do this, as I know that less is more. I am
also heartened in some ways by how little stuff people get by on here. I do not
think you could base programs like ‘Storage wars’ in South America, or probably
anywhere other than North America. (The oil rich countries of the Middle East
maybe?) I am looking forward to going home but not to confronting the culture
of stuff. Stuff is killing the planet and North Americans are champions at
making and buying stuff. A lot of it should be illegal, or petroleum products
taxed so heavily that no one could afford unnecessary stuff. This brings me to
the warped economic idea of ‘competitive advantage’. Seems so obvious and
simple that people should produce only what they can produce efficiently and
cheaply and trade for the rest, even around the world. Makes sense, unless of
course you bring the natural world into the equation which is the ultimate
source of all that stuff. If you do, all of a sudden the idea of competitive advantage
seems unbelievably short-sighted. And it is one of the pervasive ideas, many of
them from economics, which is destroying our world. I guess that and the idea
of a ‘growing economy’.
One thing that has dawned on me since spending more than a month in Peru
where there is a very large indigenous population (in the Andes and the Amazon,
where I have spent almost all my time). Indigenous people in South America look
very similar to those in North America: many people here look like close
relatives of Ojibwe and Crees I know from the North. As well, they look an
awful lot like East Asians: Mongols, Chinese, Japanese, Indonesians, Tibetans,
Thai, etc. It is so clear to me now that this is where American natives (North
and South) came from. It also makes it a little easier to understand how Peru
could have had a president (Fujimori, who is now in jail for ordering the murder of civilians during his
presidency) for 10 years who is ethnic Japanese.
Changes I have noticed since I last traveled to Latin America: in 1984
(Mexico), Nicaragua (1988), and Mexico/Belize/Guatemala (1989). That makes it
about 23 years ago (not counting a short trip to Cuba, which is a world unto
itself, three years ago).
·
Education. Children everywhere, even in small Andean villages and in the
Amazon, are going to school and
universities are expanding greatly.
·
Cell phones are a huge industry and almost everyone has one.
·
Internet access rooms are
everywhere.
·
Video game rooms are everywhere.
·
Plastic bags were rare back then. Now they are everywhere and used for
everything imaginable. Even bottled water comes in plastic bags (cheaper than
bottles) and people on the street sell various drinks that are poured into
plastic bags and a straw is provided with them. Plastic bags with a rock inside
are used to make a sinker for fishing. Etc, etc.
·
Bottled water did not exist and now is everywhere.
I did not say these were all good things, just changes.
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