Lima- Cusco 16-17 setiembre

Lima – Cusco.  domingo 16 de setiembre – lunes 17 de setiembre.  

On Sunday morning, I wandered around a bit picking up local culture and buying a bit of food in the Mercado in Lima. For North American eyes, it is strange to see lots of animal heads, feet, tripe and other organs lying around in stalls for sale. One soon gets used to it. The fruit and vegetables  are not as perfect as seen in North America. These means two things. First, a less efficient transport system and less expense in packaging and storage. It also means that they undoubtedly contain less dyes and pesticides. My bus to Cusco is another overnight one from 2:30 PM to 1:00 PM the next day. I find a wallet in the Terminal while waiting. I take it to the desk and the woman there discovers that the owner is going to leave on the same bus as me, and asks me to give it to him. While sitting waiting, a man sits down nearby and I have the impression it is the same person as in the ID photos. It turns out it is, and he is so grateful he can not stop talking to me. In line for the bus, when I get to the front of the line the two officials there are asking me something I can not quite make out.  Finally I realize they are asking about the wallet. Returned to its owner I tell them, and there he is. On the bus, all night and much  of the next day, I mostly see sand dunes, at least during daylight hours. It is a long but uneventful journey. Arrived in Cusco at S 13.5^o W 72.0^o and 3500 m above sea level (msnm): I have gone a long way south from Quito in just a week.

Cusco.  Lunes 17-miercoles 19 setiembre

On arrival in early afternoon, I am not feeling great: likely a combo of altitude and lack of sleep on the bus. I get an email from Paul and MaryAnne saying to meet them in Aguas Calientes (the town below Machu Picchu) as they are planning to visit the site the following morning. With a quick check on the internet, I find that trains only leave in the morning, and  so I tell them  that I will meet them after they get back. As it turns out, I was wrong: there are several train companies (2 of 3 are foreign owned) and there are late afternoon buses but I was glad to wait anyway. I wanted to take my time to get to that iconic site. I arrange to meet Paul and Mary Anne in Urubamba, a small town in the Urubamba river valley otherwise known as the Sacred Valley of the Incas, on Thursday, so I have a couple of days.

Cusco is the ancient Inca capital, although now a city of 800 000 and without a doubt the most beautiful city in Peru. In the old city, which is large and centred around the central square, the Plaza de Armas, the streets are all cobblestone.  There are two enormous churches in the main square, both built on the foundations of former Inca palaces. The Catedral, from the 1600s, the biggest of the two, and the Iglesia de la Compañia de Jesus, the latter built in the 1570s and rebuilt after the devastating earthquake of 1650. (It is worth noting that the earthquake apparently did little damage to the Inca buildings and ruins which are found everywhere in this area.)

There are quite a few very old, large churches scattered throughout the old city and mostly they are built on the side of a square although none as big as the Plaza de Armas. I ended up visiting the Catedral during mass on a Sunday that is a religious holiday. It has 10 small chapels where you can pray to the Jesus or Mary of your choice (one is known as Señor de los Tremblores: Lord of Earthquakes), some with very elaborate altars and crosses, one cross is made of solid gold and diamonds. There are many old paintings and one particularly caught my attention: a scene of the last supper where the main serving dish has a roast guinea pig, the traditional holiday meal in the Andes (although it seemed to me that one guinea pig was a ridiculously small amount for 13 men, even if they were all saintly).

 

There is always a celebration or parade in Cusco. This parade was for the first day of spring (Sept 21) and was entirely made up of nursery school children from the whole area, each school with its own costume.

 

                        Part of the main square (Plaza de Armas) in Cusco, truly a beautiful city.

 

I visited the Inca Museum, where Inca pottery and textiles are on display. Also on display were skulls showing two kinds of interventions. In one, the skulls (I believe of nobles) have been developmentally altered to grow longer from back to front (which was the fashion). This was accomplished by putting some kind of wooden clamp on the heads of infants and keeping it on until about 7 years of age: undoubtedly very painful.  In others, trepanning (cutting a hole) of the skulls had been performed. Although in other cultures  this was sometimes done for therapeutic purposes  to relieve pressure after head trauma, the ones on display did not show any signs of healing meaning that these have been performed after death, as part of the mummy preparation. There was one room in the museum with several mummies on display and the kinds of jewelry and pottery that would have been buried with them. (I always thought that you couldn’t take it with you. The Incas apparently disagreed.)

I visited the Iglesia y Convento de la Merced, also rebuilt after the1650 earthquake, where there is a locked up display of a lot of church ornaments adorned with gold, silver, semi-precious stones and pearls. There are still a few nuns and monks in evidence in the city but the number now is very small.

I visited the Coca museum and the Museum of Sacred Plants (which also concentrated on Coca), the latter a little more professional than the former but both interesting. Both museums make a case for the decriminalization of cocaine, an awfully good case it would seem based on the extent of organized crime that benefits from its being illegal, the violence in South America caused by the ‘War on Drugs’, and the issues faced by addicts because of the lack of control of quality and the high street prices. A similar case (with much of the same reasons) is currently being made for the decriminalization of marijuana in several US states and in Canada in the Liberal Party of Canada and in BC. In Colorado, there is an upcoming referendum on actually legalizing pot.

I learned of the high nutritional value of coca leaves (high in protein, many vitamins and minerals). I also learned that while coca plants will grow in the Andes, it is primarily a rainforest plant and therefore was and is primarily grown in the rainforest. It still is grown there which is why large parts of the Colombian and to a lesser extent the Peruvian rainforest is so dangerous with illegal coca and cocaine production taking place there.

Because of its rainforest habitat, in the Andean civilizations coca was used primarily by the nobility. That is, until the Spaniards arrived. When the world’s richest silver deposit was discovered in Bolivia at Potosi, it soon was taken over and thousands of African and indigenous people were enslaved to work the mine. Coca leaves were found to allow the slaves to work harder with less food and thus coca became of common use thereafter in the Andes.

Most people know that Coca Cola is called that because it was originally developed as an elixir and then a soft drink which contained cocaine. What I did not know was that Coca Cola still uses Coca leaves in its manufacture, even though the cocaine is first extracted from the leaves. There is one Minnesota company licensed to import coca leaves and extract the cocaine (which is sold to the one American pharmaceutical licensed to use cocaine in some of its products) after which the leaves go into Coca Cola production.

Coca production is banned in Ecuador (closer relationship with the US). In Peru, coca production is legal but coca leaves can only be bought by government buyers (leaving the door open to a lot of government official corruption). In Bolivia, since the election of Evo Morales (who is Indigenous and a former coca farmer) in 2005, coca leaf production has been totally unregulated, and the Bolivian government first sought to have coca leaves removed from the UN list of prohibited drugs (2009) and, when unsuccessful, then withdrew (2011) from the  1961 United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs because it contravened Bolivia’s commitment  to preserve and protect the chewing of coca leaves as a cultural heritage and ancestral practice.

I also visit the Cacao museum. Cacao, like maize, potato, tomato, and coca (but unlike coconut, rice, coffee, banana, and cassava) is native to Central and South America.  There is a small scale chocolate factory here making excellent chocolate as well as a little café operation where they serve excellent hot chocolate with several variations. Cacao fruit is about 8 to 10 inches long, football-shaped, and grows right out of the cacao tree trunk. They are fairly common in the wild in the rainforest. The seeds are in pods within the fruit. The seeds are roasted, de-husked and then ground, giving an oily paste that is raw chocolate. From there, chocolate making is all about mixing in sugar, milk ingredients and melting and moulding, at a rate and temperature to create a pretty product with the right texture. It can be quite finicky.  While most cacao production is currently in west Africa (and there is a sorry history of human rights abuse associated with it), cacao production is growing rapidly in several South American countries especially Peru. Unfortunately, cacao fruit ripen in Peru in their winter, while we are now in spring.

The area of the main square, besides churches, has many stores, restaurants, tour operator,  and travel agencies catering to tourists. As well as the hordes of tourists, there are hordes of people on the street selling everything to tourists from photos with lambs and llamas, to jewellery, carved gourds, drawings, massages, knitted and woven goods. There are also people asking for donations for various causes, and beggars asking for handouts or making music to earn money. I buy some things I do not need, go for a massage, and talk to a lot of these people. It is the first time that I am talking to people where I am relatively unaware that I am speaking a foreign language. It is encouraging, and the people are generally friendly and happy. The one thing I cannot figure out are some of the people begging. There is one style of beggar (male and female) who do not say anything. They just mumble and look miserable and implore you to give. There is no ‘gracias’, ‘thankyou’ or ‘sulpaiki’ (in Quechua), nor do they look any less miserable.

I investigate several options for doing some mountain hikes and visiting the Amazon. It seems to me that, unless I start traveling with a group of 4 or more, it is cheaper and makes far more sense logistically to sign up for commercial excursions than trying to organize trips on my own, at least for now. So I start checking out various possibilities and begin to sign up for a few trips (or at least let tour operators know what I am looking for).