It seems I am destined to lie in dentists’ chairs around the world. My teeth are like the United Nations – they are sporting Hungarian, Thai, British and now Peruvian work. Since I’d lost that filling on the Inca Trail, there’s been practically nothing left of my back molar, so Mike convinces me to go see his dentist brother-in-law, Lucho, who apparently knows what he’s doing. I try to tell Mike that it’s not as simple as that, that it takes years to build the trust between dentist and patient, but he just doesn’t listen.
So I agree to a free checkup and Lucho confirms what I’d already suspected – that I need a crown, as well as a root canal and another urgent filling. Am dubious about the root canal, because according to Lucho, there’ll be very little left of my tooth, so he’ll have to rebuilt it using an artificial pin and a crown, but in the end I agree to the back crown at least.
I’ve had a phobia of dentists for as long as I can remember. Though I myself have never experienced serious pain at their hands, I’ve heard horror stories told by my parents of dental surgery in the Soviet Union, which was performed without any anaesthetic and which you’d regard as a session in a torture chamber. When I was a kid, I thought that by the time I was old (i.e. sixteen), I’d be over it. When I was sixteen, I figured that my fear would disappear by the time I hit twenty. I’m almost thirty and I still find myself lying rigid in the chair, mouth wide open, eyes bulging with the anticipation of pain that may or may not come. Going to the dentist is so undignified – it’s just like a visit to the gynaecologist. The only difference is the orifice in question; the discomfort and the vulnerability are about the same.
Lucho isn’t using the sucky tube thing, so I find myself spitting blood every minute; I must’ve lost about a gallon. I may have to rename myself ‘Bleeding Gums Kaminski’, like ‘Bleeding Gums Murphy’ in The Simpsons. Lucho thinks it’s hilarious that whenever he stops the procedure, I sit up and ask him: “Is it over?” There’s no pain, though, and after chomping down on a mould filled with yellow putty and fitted with a temporary crown, I’m released until the next visit. Lucho tells me that I may have a sugar-free sweetie for being so brave. I get the impression that he and Mike are making fun of me.
Dental adventures aside, I keep writing. Sometimes the writing is methodical, i.e. I focus on a particular part of the chapter, like Nazca, and try and work through that, but most of the time I find it difficult to focus on anything for too long and resort to flicking through the text, pausing at bits that I feel like updating at the time, and figuring I’ll fill in the gaps later on.
The map work is progressing nicely, though in order to complete the city maps, I first need to make a final decision as to which hostels and eateries to include for each city, and I’ve been known to agonise for hours over the merits of a particularly good dessert spot versus an equally good kebab joint. You can only include so many.
Have just re-read the chapter brief prepared by my editor, with suggestions for where to cut text and where to expand. Feel very protective of my Nazca section when I read that James suggests leaving the Nazca Lines but cutting all the outlying archaeological sites. I will argue against that vehemently; as it is, Nazca is viewed very much as a one-day destination, when it’s got so much more to offer. I wonder if I’d have liked Nazca as much if I hadn’t had an excellent guide and if I didn’t enjoy looking at human remains…
Since it’s the weekend, Mike, Monica and myself go out and explore more of Lima’s culinary delights. We visit Mar Azul, where the signature ceviche comes covered in a rocoto sauce; it’s tasty, but the ceviche purist in me rebels against the sight of bright red ceviche, as opposed to just chunks of white fish in lime juice. We meet up with a Couchsurfer who stayed at Mike and Monica’s before I arrived; she and her new friends meet us at a random little market stall which specialised in all things fishy, so it’s more ceviche for me, as well as seafood-fried rice. I thought I could go on eating the two indefinitely, but I think I may have reached saturation point as far as rice with miscellaneous tentacled things is concerned; I don’t understand why an average portion of rice should contain about seven pounds of boiled octopus. Yum rubbery yum.
What I haven’t lost the taste for is chicharrón, so will make sure to fit it more deep fried pork belly sandwiches before I leave. So much to eat and so little time.
I’ve begun to put down roots in Lima, so am not looking forward to having to uproot myself and fly home in two days. Still, I’ve got my hot date with Leo tomorrow (or mildly hot, since Mike’s coming along too)…
Monday 28 June 2010
Saturday 26 June 2010
Days 77-79 - sweet home Lima.
The travels may be over, but the work continues.
I immediately fall into my old Lima routine: when I’m not enthroned on my bean bag, surrounded by a mess of maps, notebooks, guidebooks and other assorted paperwork, typing while looking over Miraflores far below, Mike and I go foraging for food.
When I was here two years ago, we frequented the same jugería every morning for a pint of fresh juice and a butifarra sandwich, before he’d resume his work as a freelance translator and I got back to my typing. He tells me that that jugería had gone downhill since, so instead we visit La Lucha, just around the corner, and though I never eat breakfast at home, my day here seems incomplete without a spicy chicharrón (deep fried pork belly) sandwich.
Leo had told me that Gastón Acurio, the superstar chef, has released a book detailing all the best neighbourhood eateries in Lima, the holes-in-the-wall that only locals know about – the best place in town to eat a speciality, like ceviche de conchas negras, for example – and that this book is technically only available to people who open accounts with Banco Continental. Mike informs me that you can also get it on the black market, and since it would be an invaluable research tool if I were to come back to Lima, I drag him to the centre of Lima to help me search for it.
We check out the Metropolitano – the brand new swipe card-operated bus system with its own lanes which stretches north-south along Lima; for the next couple of weeks, it’s free, while they’re trying it out, and they have wardens in yellow vests, telling people where to stand and how to use the system. The queuing is orderly, we completely bypass all the traffic, and it makes going into the centre of Lima a pleasure rather than a chore.
There’s an enormous TV screen set up in the main plaza, flanked by giant inflatable Coca-Cola bottles – ‘blatant self-promotion on the mayor’s part’, according to Mike. A massive crowd is watching the World Cup game, while another, smaller crowd, is watching the changing of the guard. The goose-stepping is out of synch, just like last time.
Mike takes me to some discount book shops, where they sell a mix of illegal photocopies (including the book I seek) and proper versions. The search takes two minutes. I should’ve set him a more difficult task.
Foraging for food often seems to take up the entire day, since Lima is so huge, and Mike’s favourite places are so far apart. On the first day, we then catch a bus to the Jesús María area, where no tourists venture, just to find Cevichería Mary, a local institution famous for its leche de tigre – fish juices mixed with onion, lime juice and spicy rocoto pepper that in other places you’d knock straight back, but here it’s like a mini ceviche in a cup – it comes with battered, fried calamari. I try the leche de pantera – the same thing, but made with little black molluscs (conchas negras) only found along the north coast of Peru. My drink is the colour of muddy water, but it tastes amazing, and leaves you feeling energised.
In the evening, we go to another local institution – an anticucho stall on a street corner that’s been given the seal of approval by Gastón, so we get there early, when they’re just rolling the grill out; a few minutes later, the queue stretches around the block. There seems to be a street food revival, because beef heart kebabs are as ‘street’ as you can get, but the queue here consists of well-to-do yuppies. And oh my gaaaaad, are the kebabs good! We stick around to watch the mesmerising spectacle of the two chefs who systematically oil the grill, making huge flames shoot out, chop the kebabs, and deftly flip them so that they don’t burn, all in a shower of sparks.
Mike has less work this week than normal, so we’re free to wander the city at our leisure, going straight from breakfast to a juice stall at the local market, then walking off the food on the way to lunch at Pescados Capitales, for example – an excellent upscale fish restaurant where we lament the lack of good fish and seafood in the UK over exotic ceviche with peach and mandarin and seared tuna steak, or going to Lima’s Chinatown for a superb all-you-can-eat buffet. Then it’s another long ride or walk in search of dessert – the best ice cream in Miraflores at an Italian place frequented by the Mafia, or La Maga, the hole-in-the-wall offering the best tres leches pudding (also approved by Gastón). Then we typically have a siesta before settling down for several hours of work in the afternoon and evening.
I visit the local South American Explorers’ Club clubhouse to see what kind of facilities/information they have to offer and come away satisfied; they give me ample information for the Basics section of the Peru chapter – the part dealing with all the practicalities. I'll definitely send young Georgia their way (the new writer covering Lima and the north half of Peru).
I give Mike and Monica some time to themselves by going to see Sex and the City II at the nearby cinema. Those are two and a half of my life that I’ll never get back. I was a big fan of the series, but they were really pushing it with a second film; the plot is cringeworthy, and the women are really beginning to show their age – ‘Carrie Bradshaw’ in particular has a chicken neck.
Am beginning to fret a little about the amount of work I have to do over the coming month; progress seems slow, and I’m hacked off with my predecessor for clearly not putting enough effort into the updating work two years ago. To me, it's important not just to fulfil the norm, but to actively improve the existing guidebook, and I wonder why not everyone seems to share my view. The maps in particular take a very long time, because I’m particularly finicky when it comes to maps and wish to get every single detail right. I spend at least an hour poring over the road map of Peru in order to make sure that all the now-paved main roads are marked on correctly on the Rough Guide Peru map. I really need to get a move on, because not only do I have to finish the two chapters by the end of July, I also need to plan my next major venture – the trans-Siberian journey, due to commence at the beginning of August. Aaargh!
I immediately fall into my old Lima routine: when I’m not enthroned on my bean bag, surrounded by a mess of maps, notebooks, guidebooks and other assorted paperwork, typing while looking over Miraflores far below, Mike and I go foraging for food.
When I was here two years ago, we frequented the same jugería every morning for a pint of fresh juice and a butifarra sandwich, before he’d resume his work as a freelance translator and I got back to my typing. He tells me that that jugería had gone downhill since, so instead we visit La Lucha, just around the corner, and though I never eat breakfast at home, my day here seems incomplete without a spicy chicharrón (deep fried pork belly) sandwich.
Leo had told me that Gastón Acurio, the superstar chef, has released a book detailing all the best neighbourhood eateries in Lima, the holes-in-the-wall that only locals know about – the best place in town to eat a speciality, like ceviche de conchas negras, for example – and that this book is technically only available to people who open accounts with Banco Continental. Mike informs me that you can also get it on the black market, and since it would be an invaluable research tool if I were to come back to Lima, I drag him to the centre of Lima to help me search for it.
We check out the Metropolitano – the brand new swipe card-operated bus system with its own lanes which stretches north-south along Lima; for the next couple of weeks, it’s free, while they’re trying it out, and they have wardens in yellow vests, telling people where to stand and how to use the system. The queuing is orderly, we completely bypass all the traffic, and it makes going into the centre of Lima a pleasure rather than a chore.
There’s an enormous TV screen set up in the main plaza, flanked by giant inflatable Coca-Cola bottles – ‘blatant self-promotion on the mayor’s part’, according to Mike. A massive crowd is watching the World Cup game, while another, smaller crowd, is watching the changing of the guard. The goose-stepping is out of synch, just like last time.
Mike takes me to some discount book shops, where they sell a mix of illegal photocopies (including the book I seek) and proper versions. The search takes two minutes. I should’ve set him a more difficult task.
Foraging for food often seems to take up the entire day, since Lima is so huge, and Mike’s favourite places are so far apart. On the first day, we then catch a bus to the Jesús María area, where no tourists venture, just to find Cevichería Mary, a local institution famous for its leche de tigre – fish juices mixed with onion, lime juice and spicy rocoto pepper that in other places you’d knock straight back, but here it’s like a mini ceviche in a cup – it comes with battered, fried calamari. I try the leche de pantera – the same thing, but made with little black molluscs (conchas negras) only found along the north coast of Peru. My drink is the colour of muddy water, but it tastes amazing, and leaves you feeling energised.
In the evening, we go to another local institution – an anticucho stall on a street corner that’s been given the seal of approval by Gastón, so we get there early, when they’re just rolling the grill out; a few minutes later, the queue stretches around the block. There seems to be a street food revival, because beef heart kebabs are as ‘street’ as you can get, but the queue here consists of well-to-do yuppies. And oh my gaaaaad, are the kebabs good! We stick around to watch the mesmerising spectacle of the two chefs who systematically oil the grill, making huge flames shoot out, chop the kebabs, and deftly flip them so that they don’t burn, all in a shower of sparks.
Mike has less work this week than normal, so we’re free to wander the city at our leisure, going straight from breakfast to a juice stall at the local market, then walking off the food on the way to lunch at Pescados Capitales, for example – an excellent upscale fish restaurant where we lament the lack of good fish and seafood in the UK over exotic ceviche with peach and mandarin and seared tuna steak, or going to Lima’s Chinatown for a superb all-you-can-eat buffet. Then it’s another long ride or walk in search of dessert – the best ice cream in Miraflores at an Italian place frequented by the Mafia, or La Maga, the hole-in-the-wall offering the best tres leches pudding (also approved by Gastón). Then we typically have a siesta before settling down for several hours of work in the afternoon and evening.
I visit the local South American Explorers’ Club clubhouse to see what kind of facilities/information they have to offer and come away satisfied; they give me ample information for the Basics section of the Peru chapter – the part dealing with all the practicalities. I'll definitely send young Georgia their way (the new writer covering Lima and the north half of Peru).
I give Mike and Monica some time to themselves by going to see Sex and the City II at the nearby cinema. Those are two and a half of my life that I’ll never get back. I was a big fan of the series, but they were really pushing it with a second film; the plot is cringeworthy, and the women are really beginning to show their age – ‘Carrie Bradshaw’ in particular has a chicken neck.
Am beginning to fret a little about the amount of work I have to do over the coming month; progress seems slow, and I’m hacked off with my predecessor for clearly not putting enough effort into the updating work two years ago. To me, it's important not just to fulfil the norm, but to actively improve the existing guidebook, and I wonder why not everyone seems to share my view. The maps in particular take a very long time, because I’m particularly finicky when it comes to maps and wish to get every single detail right. I spend at least an hour poring over the road map of Peru in order to make sure that all the now-paved main roads are marked on correctly on the Rough Guide Peru map. I really need to get a move on, because not only do I have to finish the two chapters by the end of July, I also need to plan my next major venture – the trans-Siberian journey, due to commence at the beginning of August. Aaargh!
Wednesday 23 June 2010
Day 76 - Ballestas Islands and the Paracas Reserve.
By 8am, we’re lined up by the pier, next to several other groups all set to visit one of the two main attractions – the Ballestas Islands, home to numerous species of sea birds and animals, sometimes described as a ‘poor man’s Galapagos’. An enterprising fisherman is feeding a bunch of pelicans, who follow him around like a pack of dogs; he brings them close so that tourists can take photos and hands out his cap for a tip.
Since I’ve been to a similar marine nature reserve in Chile, I’m not quite as excited as the gaggle of tourists next to me, but feel that it’s my duty to check it out, in spite of the warning that the nautical conditions may fluctuate between mirror-still sea and nausea-inducing ten-metre waves.
When we actually do set off, after an hour’s delay due to fog, it’s somewhere in between: we bounce along small waves until a flash of fins to our left alerts us to the presence of a school of bottle-nosed dolphins. “We are lucky,” our guide tells us. “They were away for three weeks, but now they have come back.”
We sail past a giant cactus petroglyph on the sandy hillside; some say that it’s been put there by 16th century pirates as some kind of navigational tool. The islands themselves are twenty minutes away and I smell them long before we get there. The stench of guano is impressive, as is the sight of thousands of nesting Peruvian boobies, cormorants, seagulls and terns – grooming, fishing, squabbling, of Humboldt penguins waddling around the low cliffs, the giant stone archways, and the packs of sea lions asleep on smaller islets. The sky is dark with birds above a further island; we don’t get too close, as it’s an important nesting ground. The nearer island has a couple of decrepit-looking wooden huts, where a couple of people live permanently, making sure that no one lands on the islands, and a low stone wall runs along the border of the first island, making me wonder who put it there, and whether people used to live here, centuries ago.
Back on the mainland, it’s immediately time for a tour of the Paracas Reserve – the vast stretch of desert immediately beyond the village. I love the desert and particularly enjoy being let loose in a section where we go looking for 40 million-year old fossils, as this all used to be underwater. I find a few petrified spiral shells; they crumble into bright white crystals in my hand.
There’s a viewpoint overlooking what used to be a natural monument – a giant stone archway eroded by the sea, known as the Cathedral. It collapsed after the immense 2007 earthquake, but the remaining stone island is still home to clamouring Peruvian boobies. Far below, I can see sandpipers running away from encroaching waves, then turning around and pecking at the sand as the sea retreats.
The tour is pretty controlled, but we do get some free time, which I use to sit and stare at the sea, enjoying the smooth texture of shells and pebbles in my hand. I feel oddly comforted by the steady roar of the large Pacific waves.
At lunch at El Che in the village of Lagunillas, I get talking to Ann, a thirty eight-year old Italian-American photography professor. She’d taught English in Vladimir, in Russia, but was forced to leave before completing the year because she was denounced by some market traders as a Chechen rebel because of her dark hair and olive skin; it was 2004, just after the Beslan atrocities. She knew enough Russian to argue with the special forces, but they wouldn’t believe that she was American, even after she’d shown them her passport, and wouldn’t let her call the US embassy. Only when they took her to the school where she taught was the matter cleared up, but the US embassy then advised her to get the hell out of Russia. Well, I guess I don’t have to worry about going to Russia as a Russian and not as Her Majesty’s subject; even if you have a foreign passport, if they want to disregard your basic rights, they will do so, it seems, so it makes no difference.
Lunch goes on far too long, and Ann is cross about missing the opportunity to shoot the boats in the desert – that’s the kind of conceptual photography she’s into, she explains. In the morning, she didn't go to the islands, choosing to stay in the village and photograph the fishermen bringing in the day's catch. Her presence caused immense confusion, since tourists normally only come here for two things. "But why aren't you at the islands?" she was repeatedly asked.
I finish my rounds of Paracas and am glad to have found a couple of decent places not mentioned in any of the guidebooks.
That’s it. Research over. For the three-and-a-half hour journey to Lima, I’m engrossed in my book and trying to ignore “Hannah Montana - the Movie”. Met by Mike (wearing a dashing cap) at the Oltursa bus terminal and taken to my home away from home – his and Monica’s apartment in Miraflores. Even though it’s been two years since I’ve been here, when I sink onto my beanbag in front of the TV, it feels like I’ve never been away.
Looking forward to a week of rest, writing, and numerous culinary adventures.
Since I’ve been to a similar marine nature reserve in Chile, I’m not quite as excited as the gaggle of tourists next to me, but feel that it’s my duty to check it out, in spite of the warning that the nautical conditions may fluctuate between mirror-still sea and nausea-inducing ten-metre waves.
When we actually do set off, after an hour’s delay due to fog, it’s somewhere in between: we bounce along small waves until a flash of fins to our left alerts us to the presence of a school of bottle-nosed dolphins. “We are lucky,” our guide tells us. “They were away for three weeks, but now they have come back.”
We sail past a giant cactus petroglyph on the sandy hillside; some say that it’s been put there by 16th century pirates as some kind of navigational tool. The islands themselves are twenty minutes away and I smell them long before we get there. The stench of guano is impressive, as is the sight of thousands of nesting Peruvian boobies, cormorants, seagulls and terns – grooming, fishing, squabbling, of Humboldt penguins waddling around the low cliffs, the giant stone archways, and the packs of sea lions asleep on smaller islets. The sky is dark with birds above a further island; we don’t get too close, as it’s an important nesting ground. The nearer island has a couple of decrepit-looking wooden huts, where a couple of people live permanently, making sure that no one lands on the islands, and a low stone wall runs along the border of the first island, making me wonder who put it there, and whether people used to live here, centuries ago.
Back on the mainland, it’s immediately time for a tour of the Paracas Reserve – the vast stretch of desert immediately beyond the village. I love the desert and particularly enjoy being let loose in a section where we go looking for 40 million-year old fossils, as this all used to be underwater. I find a few petrified spiral shells; they crumble into bright white crystals in my hand.
There’s a viewpoint overlooking what used to be a natural monument – a giant stone archway eroded by the sea, known as the Cathedral. It collapsed after the immense 2007 earthquake, but the remaining stone island is still home to clamouring Peruvian boobies. Far below, I can see sandpipers running away from encroaching waves, then turning around and pecking at the sand as the sea retreats.
The tour is pretty controlled, but we do get some free time, which I use to sit and stare at the sea, enjoying the smooth texture of shells and pebbles in my hand. I feel oddly comforted by the steady roar of the large Pacific waves.
At lunch at El Che in the village of Lagunillas, I get talking to Ann, a thirty eight-year old Italian-American photography professor. She’d taught English in Vladimir, in Russia, but was forced to leave before completing the year because she was denounced by some market traders as a Chechen rebel because of her dark hair and olive skin; it was 2004, just after the Beslan atrocities. She knew enough Russian to argue with the special forces, but they wouldn’t believe that she was American, even after she’d shown them her passport, and wouldn’t let her call the US embassy. Only when they took her to the school where she taught was the matter cleared up, but the US embassy then advised her to get the hell out of Russia. Well, I guess I don’t have to worry about going to Russia as a Russian and not as Her Majesty’s subject; even if you have a foreign passport, if they want to disregard your basic rights, they will do so, it seems, so it makes no difference.
Lunch goes on far too long, and Ann is cross about missing the opportunity to shoot the boats in the desert – that’s the kind of conceptual photography she’s into, she explains. In the morning, she didn't go to the islands, choosing to stay in the village and photograph the fishermen bringing in the day's catch. Her presence caused immense confusion, since tourists normally only come here for two things. "But why aren't you at the islands?" she was repeatedly asked.
I finish my rounds of Paracas and am glad to have found a couple of decent places not mentioned in any of the guidebooks.
That’s it. Research over. For the three-and-a-half hour journey to Lima, I’m engrossed in my book and trying to ignore “Hannah Montana - the Movie”. Met by Mike (wearing a dashing cap) at the Oltursa bus terminal and taken to my home away from home – his and Monica’s apartment in Miraflores. Even though it’s been two years since I’ve been here, when I sink onto my beanbag in front of the TV, it feels like I’ve never been away.
Looking forward to a week of rest, writing, and numerous culinary adventures.
Day 75 - onwards to Paracas.
Tranquil morning by the lagoon. I check out several hostels and decide that I’m done with Huacachina. I debate taking a bodega tour to see how local wines and piscos are made, but decide that being drunk before lunch is not the best idea.
Since I’ve been told that all major bus companies stop in Paracas (an area which comprises the Paracas nature reserve and El Chaco the village that acts as a springboard for trips to the Ballestas Islands marine reserve), I decide to save some money by taking a Soyuz bus (4 soles) v. Cruz del Sur (20 soles).
Surprise! Soyuz doesn’t stop in Paracas; it stops at some godforsaken fork in the road known as Cruce Pisco, from where you have to catch a combi (shared taxi) to Pisco proper before you can catch another combi to Paracas itself. Since Pisco was wrecked by the 2007 earthquake and is known for being a bit of a rough place, and since most people who come to Pisco only come there to go to Paracas anyway, I decide to skip Pisco altogether. End up catching a combi to Pisco and then to avoid the hassle of changing transport, I agree to the combi driver’s suggestion that he drives me straight to Paracas for 15 soles. I end up saving 1 sol and give myself a very restrained round of applause.
We pass through an unattractive part of Pisco – adobe houses that have seen better days, trash in the gutters – and then pass through the seaside village of San Andrés – shacks advertising ceviche, little boats bobbing on the tide, pelicans flying. There’s a strong smell of the sea, followed by the stench of rotting garbage as we pull out of the village and ride along the coast amidst piles of rubble.
Paracas is supposed to be quite upscale, and the guesthouses here cost a wee bit more than in places I’ve stayed recently, but it’s not much to look at. After checking into the Refugio El Pirata, I have a quick wander round the waterfront. Some sellers have jewellery stalls set out, pelicans wait patiently for scraps from a fishermen, but there are very few people out and about, it’s overcast, and the whole place has a desolate air about it. The deserted playground at the other end of the waterfront, with its broken, rusty swings only adds to the impression.
After nearly three months of non-stop travel and research, I’m somewhat weary mentally. After a quick lunch at an excellent cevichería behind my guesthouse, where I have the best arroz con mariscos yet – with tiny melt-in-your-mouth scallops – I retreat to my cosy room and stay there until the evening, napping on my comfortable bed (the last few beds have had terrible mattresses and I woke up every morning a broken woman), and reading, totally engrossed in “A Girl With a Dragon Tattoo”.
There’s no nightlife here whatsoever, as I discover, taking an evening stroll. In the words of Leonard Cohen: “The place is dead as heaven on a Saturday night.” More importantly, there seem to be no places to eat on a Sunday night, though after some searching, I discover that one of the cevicherías does chicken. Nothing but roast chicken.
Early night in anticipation of the morning trip to the Ballestas Islands.
Since I’ve been told that all major bus companies stop in Paracas (an area which comprises the Paracas nature reserve and El Chaco the village that acts as a springboard for trips to the Ballestas Islands marine reserve), I decide to save some money by taking a Soyuz bus (4 soles) v. Cruz del Sur (20 soles).
Surprise! Soyuz doesn’t stop in Paracas; it stops at some godforsaken fork in the road known as Cruce Pisco, from where you have to catch a combi (shared taxi) to Pisco proper before you can catch another combi to Paracas itself. Since Pisco was wrecked by the 2007 earthquake and is known for being a bit of a rough place, and since most people who come to Pisco only come there to go to Paracas anyway, I decide to skip Pisco altogether. End up catching a combi to Pisco and then to avoid the hassle of changing transport, I agree to the combi driver’s suggestion that he drives me straight to Paracas for 15 soles. I end up saving 1 sol and give myself a very restrained round of applause.
We pass through an unattractive part of Pisco – adobe houses that have seen better days, trash in the gutters – and then pass through the seaside village of San Andrés – shacks advertising ceviche, little boats bobbing on the tide, pelicans flying. There’s a strong smell of the sea, followed by the stench of rotting garbage as we pull out of the village and ride along the coast amidst piles of rubble.
Paracas is supposed to be quite upscale, and the guesthouses here cost a wee bit more than in places I’ve stayed recently, but it’s not much to look at. After checking into the Refugio El Pirata, I have a quick wander round the waterfront. Some sellers have jewellery stalls set out, pelicans wait patiently for scraps from a fishermen, but there are very few people out and about, it’s overcast, and the whole place has a desolate air about it. The deserted playground at the other end of the waterfront, with its broken, rusty swings only adds to the impression.
After nearly three months of non-stop travel and research, I’m somewhat weary mentally. After a quick lunch at an excellent cevichería behind my guesthouse, where I have the best arroz con mariscos yet – with tiny melt-in-your-mouth scallops – I retreat to my cosy room and stay there until the evening, napping on my comfortable bed (the last few beds have had terrible mattresses and I woke up every morning a broken woman), and reading, totally engrossed in “A Girl With a Dragon Tattoo”.
There’s no nightlife here whatsoever, as I discover, taking an evening stroll. In the words of Leonard Cohen: “The place is dead as heaven on a Saturday night.” More importantly, there seem to be no places to eat on a Sunday night, though after some searching, I discover that one of the cevicherías does chicken. Nothing but roast chicken.
Early night in anticipation of the morning trip to the Ballestas Islands.
Sunday 20 June 2010
Day 74 - Huacachina and the perils of dune buggying.
Depart Nazca in the morning, though not before calling Leo and inviting him to lunch in Lima, since he’s going to go there in week or so to pick up a group of New Zealand students. Oh dear, this has all the markings of a bona fide crush: I can't stop thinking about him.
Take a wretched, ancient Soyuz bus to Ica. For the duration the two-hour journey I am subjected to a loud Nicolas Cage movie where he turns into something undead with a flaming skull. Smooth transition from bus terminal to the village of Huacachina; I catch a taxi straight from the bus terminal and Lucho the taxi driver feeds me biscuits.
Huacachina used to be a posh resort area based around a picturesque lagoon amidst giant sand dunes; in fact, you can still see it on the 50 sol notes. Now there’s nothing posh about it - it’s a magnet for adrenalin-mad backpackers who flock here in droves to go sandboarding and to ride the dune buggies. In fact, every second vehicle in the village is a dune buggy. When I first heard ‘dune buggy’, I imagined something like a golf course buggy, chugging sedately up and down the dunes, but it turned out to be something quite different.
A metal contraption with large wheels roars around the corner and skids to a stop by the tour agency. Think large open-plan car with a reinforced steel frame and heavily padded seats with harnesses, like the kind you’re strapped into on a roller coaster. There are eight of us; I’m in the second row and the thing takes off at great speed and roars up the nearest dune. We’re bouncing all over the place, especially the British girls in the back who keep swearing; didn’t realise what exactly they were signing up for. It really is like a roller coaster ride; the buggy rushes up to the dune’s crest, only to drop straight over the edge, taking our stomachs with it. Cue lots of screaming and hysterical laughter. The sand’s in our hair and in our eyes as the buggy rushes along at great speed, up and down the dunes, screeching around corners, sometimes barely balancing at a forty-five degree angle, plunging down near-vertical slopes again, setting off another chorus of screams. I love it, and cackle gleefully to myself, imagining my friends back home stuck in their office jobs. This is my office.
At the top of a particularly large sand dune, the sand boards come out. Our belligerent, unsmiling driver waxes them and shows us that we can go down on our stomachs if we’re not great on our feet. I’ve done sandboarding before in San Pedro, in the Atacama Desert, and recall falling over a lot, so I try the other way. Hurtling down a steep sand dune, head first, doesn’t seem terribly sensible, but then again, neither am I. An exhilarating alternative. I try standing on my feet when coming down the second dune, fall over, spit the sand out of my mouth and screech: “Puta madre, me caí!”, just like I’ve been taught by my San Pedro instructor. It means: “Bugger, I’ve fallen down!”
One of the British girls is particularly fearless and she’s the first one down every dune, even though she’s never done it before. Other groups join us and soon the dune side is crowded with skidding, rolling, sliding bodies. Sand clouds are everywhere.
We roar off to another dune, and another, even steeper and bigger one. Afterwards, a bunch of sand-covered creatures piles back into the buggy, the sand stuck to our sun cream, inside our clothes, in places where you wouldn’t imagine sand could get into. The sun sinks behind the dunes as our driver runs us up and down some more dunes at a reckless speed, rattling our bones and scaring the heck out of us. Dune buggy rides are not for the faint-hearted.
Hostal Salvatierra, where I’m staying, is a basic place with a warren of huge, basic rooms, a swimming pool and a patio dotted with listless dogs. Huacachina has a great many hostels for a tiny place and seems to exist solely for tourism.
Over a hamburger dinner at Desert Nights, I am hailed by a vaguely familiar-looking guy with a beard. Then I remember: he’s the British guy who climbed Huayna Picchu ahead of me, draped in the England flag on the day of the first World Cup match. Geoff invites me to join him and a motley crew of backpackers, and I end up having a lively dinner with Ruud the Israeli guy, Ed from Cambridge and a girl who thinks that my being a travel writer is the coolest thing ever. We swap travel tips and I ask Ruud why Israelis seem to always travel in groups. He says it’s because they tend to travel with a friend or two and then meet up and join up with other Israelis. He doesn’t like travelling in groups, and feels that many Israelis miss out on things they want to do, because they won’t do them alone, and if the group doesn’t do it, no one does. I agree that group travel can be a challenge; I also prefer to travel either alone or with just a single friend; there are fewer decisions to be made that way.
Geoff and Ed do card tricks. I go off to do my writing. Itchy feet. Moving on again in the morning.
Take a wretched, ancient Soyuz bus to Ica. For the duration the two-hour journey I am subjected to a loud Nicolas Cage movie where he turns into something undead with a flaming skull. Smooth transition from bus terminal to the village of Huacachina; I catch a taxi straight from the bus terminal and Lucho the taxi driver feeds me biscuits.
Huacachina used to be a posh resort area based around a picturesque lagoon amidst giant sand dunes; in fact, you can still see it on the 50 sol notes. Now there’s nothing posh about it - it’s a magnet for adrenalin-mad backpackers who flock here in droves to go sandboarding and to ride the dune buggies. In fact, every second vehicle in the village is a dune buggy. When I first heard ‘dune buggy’, I imagined something like a golf course buggy, chugging sedately up and down the dunes, but it turned out to be something quite different.
A metal contraption with large wheels roars around the corner and skids to a stop by the tour agency. Think large open-plan car with a reinforced steel frame and heavily padded seats with harnesses, like the kind you’re strapped into on a roller coaster. There are eight of us; I’m in the second row and the thing takes off at great speed and roars up the nearest dune. We’re bouncing all over the place, especially the British girls in the back who keep swearing; didn’t realise what exactly they were signing up for. It really is like a roller coaster ride; the buggy rushes up to the dune’s crest, only to drop straight over the edge, taking our stomachs with it. Cue lots of screaming and hysterical laughter. The sand’s in our hair and in our eyes as the buggy rushes along at great speed, up and down the dunes, screeching around corners, sometimes barely balancing at a forty-five degree angle, plunging down near-vertical slopes again, setting off another chorus of screams. I love it, and cackle gleefully to myself, imagining my friends back home stuck in their office jobs. This is my office.
At the top of a particularly large sand dune, the sand boards come out. Our belligerent, unsmiling driver waxes them and shows us that we can go down on our stomachs if we’re not great on our feet. I’ve done sandboarding before in San Pedro, in the Atacama Desert, and recall falling over a lot, so I try the other way. Hurtling down a steep sand dune, head first, doesn’t seem terribly sensible, but then again, neither am I. An exhilarating alternative. I try standing on my feet when coming down the second dune, fall over, spit the sand out of my mouth and screech: “Puta madre, me caí!”, just like I’ve been taught by my San Pedro instructor. It means: “Bugger, I’ve fallen down!”
One of the British girls is particularly fearless and she’s the first one down every dune, even though she’s never done it before. Other groups join us and soon the dune side is crowded with skidding, rolling, sliding bodies. Sand clouds are everywhere.
We roar off to another dune, and another, even steeper and bigger one. Afterwards, a bunch of sand-covered creatures piles back into the buggy, the sand stuck to our sun cream, inside our clothes, in places where you wouldn’t imagine sand could get into. The sun sinks behind the dunes as our driver runs us up and down some more dunes at a reckless speed, rattling our bones and scaring the heck out of us. Dune buggy rides are not for the faint-hearted.
Hostal Salvatierra, where I’m staying, is a basic place with a warren of huge, basic rooms, a swimming pool and a patio dotted with listless dogs. Huacachina has a great many hostels for a tiny place and seems to exist solely for tourism.
Over a hamburger dinner at Desert Nights, I am hailed by a vaguely familiar-looking guy with a beard. Then I remember: he’s the British guy who climbed Huayna Picchu ahead of me, draped in the England flag on the day of the first World Cup match. Geoff invites me to join him and a motley crew of backpackers, and I end up having a lively dinner with Ruud the Israeli guy, Ed from Cambridge and a girl who thinks that my being a travel writer is the coolest thing ever. We swap travel tips and I ask Ruud why Israelis seem to always travel in groups. He says it’s because they tend to travel with a friend or two and then meet up and join up with other Israelis. He doesn’t like travelling in groups, and feels that many Israelis miss out on things they want to do, because they won’t do them alone, and if the group doesn’t do it, no one does. I agree that group travel can be a challenge; I also prefer to travel either alone or with just a single friend; there are fewer decisions to be made that way.
Geoff and Ed do card tricks. I go off to do my writing. Itchy feet. Moving on again in the morning.
Saturday 19 June 2010
Day 73 - flight over the Nazca lines.
By 9am we’re at Nazca airport. I’ve been told to fly in the morning because in the afternoon the wind picks up and sometimes the airport shuts down because the small places can’t cope with it. Also, the lines are at their most visible either early in the morning or at around 3pm, when the angle of the sun accentuates their outlines. Flying at midday is bloody useless because the sun is directly above them and you can barely see them at all.
The ‘airport’ is a large waiting room where about ten different flight companies are represented. The Nazca Travel desk is conspicuously empty; two years ago, they had a fatal crash, after which the company changed its name until this year’s fatal crash. The other companies have no fatalities to their names.
Though we’re pretty much the first ones there, several groups go before us, because they’ve either paid through the nose or booked the flight weeks in advance. Since there’s no public phone, I sweettalk the lady at the check-in desk into letting me use her phone to call Leo and arrange for him to meet me at the airport after the flight so that we can go straight to the Cahuachi ruins.
The four or us pile into the tiny six-seater and then we’re off, rising rapidly above the parched ground. I almost chickened out of flying, since it doesn’t have the same attraction for me that it once did, but I am so glad I did this! The pussy way out is to go up the observation tower instead, from where you can see the outline of a giant tree and part of a lizard, but it can’t compare to flying over the lines. The flight last half an hour and we follow the pattern on our boarding cards – first the giant whale, then some giant triangles, then the monkey, and so on. The ride isn’t particularly bumpy, though when we hit the air pockets, our stomachs drop our from underneath us; it’s like a long and picturesque roller coaster ride, with sick bags thoughtfully provided.
The tiny plane circles around each giant figure on the ground, so that we get a look from both sides of the plane, and when it does, that’s when the pressure in your head builds and you feel a little dizzy. We fly over green fields, the bare rock of mountains, the dry paths of the summer rivers frozen on the desert plain.
The lines are certainly impressive. I marvel at the perfect symmetry of the giant spider, of the hummingbird’s tail, the spiral of the giant monkey’s tail, the long, snake-like neck of the flamingo. I wonder about thee ancient culture that put so much effort into these giant figures that they certainly couldn’t appreciate the way we can, from the air. Why are they here?
When we land, Leo pulls up and we’re off further into the desert along a bumpy dirt road towards the Cahuachi pyramids – a giant Nazca ceremonial complex where they used to go solely for religious purposes. Along the way we stop at another burial ground, where the ground is covered with bits of ancient cloth, hanks of human hair, fragments of pelvises, shattered skulls, human tibias. Some of the bones are laid out is strange patterns, and when I ask Leo for an explanation, he tells me that the grave robbers are local farmers who also come here and mess around with the bones. I’m amazed that they’re not superstitious, that they’re not concerned that the aggravated spirits of the dead might come after them. “In the mountains – yes. But here in the coast, we don’t care.” He does mention the story of a tourist who sent back a human hand because he kept having nightmares, but even some of his friends have human skulls at home because they believe that they guard the house against evil spirits. When they try to persuade Leo to pick up a human skull, he tells them: “I don’t need a skull guardian. I have a dog.” Even I would think twice about pocketing a skull from a foreign land; as much as I’d like to own one, I’d rather not disrespect the local dead.
Out of the forty-four pyramids at the Cahuachi site, only one is uncovered; the rest remain hillocks in the desert. The uncovered ceremonial pyramid is being renovated and restored, adobe bricks being added to crumbling, wrecked walls to make up for the damage done by El Niño a few years back. While it’s under renovation until next year, we can’t get too close, though when Leo speaks the guy guarding it and tells him that I’m a journalist, he lets us walk right up to the site. Nearby, there are some holes in the ground. “The Nazca used to use them as coolers, to store food.” Only small and skinny people could be lowered into the holes; yours truly would get lodged in the middle, courtesy of the spare tyre.
These pyramids get us onto the subject of the Egyptian ones, which prompts me to say that the latter was built using the slave labour of my ancestors and I end up giving Leo an abridged version of the history of the Jews. We discuss discrimination in Peru; as an indigenous person, he himself would be subject to discrimination if he weren’t a self-taught linguist and guide. He tells me of two journalists in Lima – one European-looking, one indigenous, who went to a nightclub; the indigenous one was turned away and since the whole thing was secretly filmed, the club had to pay a hefty fine.
I tell Leo more about my work and he eagerly offers to assist me with my research. He’s got no work all day, his wife’s been in Lima for the past six months, and he’s alone. He knows good places to eat, so I offer to buy him lunch, and we stop by “Los Amigos de Miguel”, a cevichería south of the centre. Leo’s great: he introduces me to the chef/owner, who gives us ceviche on the house, topped with tasty sea urchins, we plough through seafood-fried rice and Leo tells me that the place (which is pretty full) gets absolutely packed on Sundays because Miguel’s had a loyal following for a decade and because ceviche is thought to be a hangover cure. Best of all, this awesome place is in none of the guidebooks because the other writers clearly didn’t have the benefit of a true insider’s wisdom. Ha!
I learn new food terminology. I already know of ‘leche de tigre’ – the fish juices with chilli and lime juice. ‘Leche de pantera’ is similar, but with scallop juice from black scallops. Leo tells me that both are supposed to improve one’s performance in bed. There’s salsa on the radio; Marc Anthony is singing, and Leo tells me that he’s a great dancer, and that he recently embarrassed his son at a disco. His son told him that ‘old people were not supposed to dance like that’. “He’s jealous,” Leo grins.
I do believe I’m getting a crush on my guide. Though I'm stereotypically attracted to tall, dark and handsome, Leo’s adorable – only two or three inches taller than me, and physically a cross between Gandhi and a diminutive Leonard Cohen. I’ve been listening to Cohen too much lately. He’s also sixty-five, which is a new record for me, unless you count Mr Cohen himself, who’s seventy-five and counting. Just goes to show that there’s no such thing as ‘too old to be attractive’.
When we go over to Leo’s house after lunch to feed the remnants of our lunch to his beautiful Samoyed, Princessa, wonder if there’s scope for anything to happen. I certainly wouldn’t be opposed to it. It’s not really a house - it’s a collection of rooms scattered inside a gated property amidst bright pink bougainvillea and cacti. One of the rooms is his study, where he demonstrates a tape player that predated cassette tapes; he learned to use it when he worked in a language school in Lima, and he taught himself English and Italian because he couldn’t afford to go to university. His English is certainly very good and he does language practise at home every day. We go into his bedroom and end up watching “Charmed” on cable. It’s actually pretty funny.
I keep shuffling towards Leo along the bed, but know full well that I’d never try anything unless unequivocally given a green light by the other party. I settle for sitting a couple of inches from him and enjoy the sweet melancholy of being hyper-aware of the nearness of someone I cannot have.
The spell is broken by the arrival of one of his wife’s church friends who’d come to wash the off-white Princessa and Leo and I head off to the Museo Antonini, an excellent museum which houses artefacts found at the Cahuachi site, put together thanks to the efforts of the Italian archaeologist. For other visitors, the experience must be a lot duller than mine; I have the benefit of Leo’s knowledge, and he’s really passionate about his work. He talks me through the Nazca pottery, the household tools, including hairbrushes made with cactus needles, the collection of trophy head skulls, the foreheads pierced with small holes, with ropes running through them…
Leo seems happy to hang around, so to finish off, he walks me around the centre, showing me the best places for street food, such as the anticucho lady who’s always in the same spot, always overrun with customers and always gone by eight o’clock, the chicken joint that’s always full of locals, the best Chinese food place in town…We end up in the jugería by the market, and I order a surtido especial for both of us – a potent concoction involving several different fruit, condensed milk, egg, black Cusqueña beer, honey and algarobina. It’s surprisingly good and so filling that I’m gonna skip dinner.
Leo tells me that his wife, a Chilena from Santiago, wants to move back to Chile to be with her family, and that he doesn’t want to because he wouldn’t find work there (there isn’t exactly much in the way of archaeological remains near Santiago and he’s too old to be a trekking guide) and we get onto the subject of Russia and the standards of life there.
I’m very sorry to bid farewell to Leo. He thanks me for the lovely day and I wish I had more time here and more money to spend on his guiding services. I’ve made a good friend here and it sucks to have to move on.
The evening’s a bit anticlimactic: bus timetables, hostels, eateries. My research here is done. I hope to be able to come back here for work – next year, or the year after.
On to Huacachina tomorrow…
The ‘airport’ is a large waiting room where about ten different flight companies are represented. The Nazca Travel desk is conspicuously empty; two years ago, they had a fatal crash, after which the company changed its name until this year’s fatal crash. The other companies have no fatalities to their names.
Though we’re pretty much the first ones there, several groups go before us, because they’ve either paid through the nose or booked the flight weeks in advance. Since there’s no public phone, I sweettalk the lady at the check-in desk into letting me use her phone to call Leo and arrange for him to meet me at the airport after the flight so that we can go straight to the Cahuachi ruins.
The four or us pile into the tiny six-seater and then we’re off, rising rapidly above the parched ground. I almost chickened out of flying, since it doesn’t have the same attraction for me that it once did, but I am so glad I did this! The pussy way out is to go up the observation tower instead, from where you can see the outline of a giant tree and part of a lizard, but it can’t compare to flying over the lines. The flight last half an hour and we follow the pattern on our boarding cards – first the giant whale, then some giant triangles, then the monkey, and so on. The ride isn’t particularly bumpy, though when we hit the air pockets, our stomachs drop our from underneath us; it’s like a long and picturesque roller coaster ride, with sick bags thoughtfully provided.
The tiny plane circles around each giant figure on the ground, so that we get a look from both sides of the plane, and when it does, that’s when the pressure in your head builds and you feel a little dizzy. We fly over green fields, the bare rock of mountains, the dry paths of the summer rivers frozen on the desert plain.
The lines are certainly impressive. I marvel at the perfect symmetry of the giant spider, of the hummingbird’s tail, the spiral of the giant monkey’s tail, the long, snake-like neck of the flamingo. I wonder about thee ancient culture that put so much effort into these giant figures that they certainly couldn’t appreciate the way we can, from the air. Why are they here?
When we land, Leo pulls up and we’re off further into the desert along a bumpy dirt road towards the Cahuachi pyramids – a giant Nazca ceremonial complex where they used to go solely for religious purposes. Along the way we stop at another burial ground, where the ground is covered with bits of ancient cloth, hanks of human hair, fragments of pelvises, shattered skulls, human tibias. Some of the bones are laid out is strange patterns, and when I ask Leo for an explanation, he tells me that the grave robbers are local farmers who also come here and mess around with the bones. I’m amazed that they’re not superstitious, that they’re not concerned that the aggravated spirits of the dead might come after them. “In the mountains – yes. But here in the coast, we don’t care.” He does mention the story of a tourist who sent back a human hand because he kept having nightmares, but even some of his friends have human skulls at home because they believe that they guard the house against evil spirits. When they try to persuade Leo to pick up a human skull, he tells them: “I don’t need a skull guardian. I have a dog.” Even I would think twice about pocketing a skull from a foreign land; as much as I’d like to own one, I’d rather not disrespect the local dead.
Out of the forty-four pyramids at the Cahuachi site, only one is uncovered; the rest remain hillocks in the desert. The uncovered ceremonial pyramid is being renovated and restored, adobe bricks being added to crumbling, wrecked walls to make up for the damage done by El Niño a few years back. While it’s under renovation until next year, we can’t get too close, though when Leo speaks the guy guarding it and tells him that I’m a journalist, he lets us walk right up to the site. Nearby, there are some holes in the ground. “The Nazca used to use them as coolers, to store food.” Only small and skinny people could be lowered into the holes; yours truly would get lodged in the middle, courtesy of the spare tyre.
These pyramids get us onto the subject of the Egyptian ones, which prompts me to say that the latter was built using the slave labour of my ancestors and I end up giving Leo an abridged version of the history of the Jews. We discuss discrimination in Peru; as an indigenous person, he himself would be subject to discrimination if he weren’t a self-taught linguist and guide. He tells me of two journalists in Lima – one European-looking, one indigenous, who went to a nightclub; the indigenous one was turned away and since the whole thing was secretly filmed, the club had to pay a hefty fine.
I tell Leo more about my work and he eagerly offers to assist me with my research. He’s got no work all day, his wife’s been in Lima for the past six months, and he’s alone. He knows good places to eat, so I offer to buy him lunch, and we stop by “Los Amigos de Miguel”, a cevichería south of the centre. Leo’s great: he introduces me to the chef/owner, who gives us ceviche on the house, topped with tasty sea urchins, we plough through seafood-fried rice and Leo tells me that the place (which is pretty full) gets absolutely packed on Sundays because Miguel’s had a loyal following for a decade and because ceviche is thought to be a hangover cure. Best of all, this awesome place is in none of the guidebooks because the other writers clearly didn’t have the benefit of a true insider’s wisdom. Ha!
I learn new food terminology. I already know of ‘leche de tigre’ – the fish juices with chilli and lime juice. ‘Leche de pantera’ is similar, but with scallop juice from black scallops. Leo tells me that both are supposed to improve one’s performance in bed. There’s salsa on the radio; Marc Anthony is singing, and Leo tells me that he’s a great dancer, and that he recently embarrassed his son at a disco. His son told him that ‘old people were not supposed to dance like that’. “He’s jealous,” Leo grins.
I do believe I’m getting a crush on my guide. Though I'm stereotypically attracted to tall, dark and handsome, Leo’s adorable – only two or three inches taller than me, and physically a cross between Gandhi and a diminutive Leonard Cohen. I’ve been listening to Cohen too much lately. He’s also sixty-five, which is a new record for me, unless you count Mr Cohen himself, who’s seventy-five and counting. Just goes to show that there’s no such thing as ‘too old to be attractive’.
When we go over to Leo’s house after lunch to feed the remnants of our lunch to his beautiful Samoyed, Princessa, wonder if there’s scope for anything to happen. I certainly wouldn’t be opposed to it. It’s not really a house - it’s a collection of rooms scattered inside a gated property amidst bright pink bougainvillea and cacti. One of the rooms is his study, where he demonstrates a tape player that predated cassette tapes; he learned to use it when he worked in a language school in Lima, and he taught himself English and Italian because he couldn’t afford to go to university. His English is certainly very good and he does language practise at home every day. We go into his bedroom and end up watching “Charmed” on cable. It’s actually pretty funny.
I keep shuffling towards Leo along the bed, but know full well that I’d never try anything unless unequivocally given a green light by the other party. I settle for sitting a couple of inches from him and enjoy the sweet melancholy of being hyper-aware of the nearness of someone I cannot have.
The spell is broken by the arrival of one of his wife’s church friends who’d come to wash the off-white Princessa and Leo and I head off to the Museo Antonini, an excellent museum which houses artefacts found at the Cahuachi site, put together thanks to the efforts of the Italian archaeologist. For other visitors, the experience must be a lot duller than mine; I have the benefit of Leo’s knowledge, and he’s really passionate about his work. He talks me through the Nazca pottery, the household tools, including hairbrushes made with cactus needles, the collection of trophy head skulls, the foreheads pierced with small holes, with ropes running through them…
Leo seems happy to hang around, so to finish off, he walks me around the centre, showing me the best places for street food, such as the anticucho lady who’s always in the same spot, always overrun with customers and always gone by eight o’clock, the chicken joint that’s always full of locals, the best Chinese food place in town…We end up in the jugería by the market, and I order a surtido especial for both of us – a potent concoction involving several different fruit, condensed milk, egg, black Cusqueña beer, honey and algarobina. It’s surprisingly good and so filling that I’m gonna skip dinner.
Leo tells me that his wife, a Chilena from Santiago, wants to move back to Chile to be with her family, and that he doesn’t want to because he wouldn’t find work there (there isn’t exactly much in the way of archaeological remains near Santiago and he’s too old to be a trekking guide) and we get onto the subject of Russia and the standards of life there.
I’m very sorry to bid farewell to Leo. He thanks me for the lovely day and I wish I had more time here and more money to spend on his guiding services. I’ve made a good friend here and it sucks to have to move on.
The evening’s a bit anticlimactic: bus timetables, hostels, eateries. My research here is done. I hope to be able to come back here for work – next year, or the year after.
On to Huacachina tomorrow…
Day 72 - Nazca.
Day 72 – Nazca.
Nazca has figured in my imagination for many, many years. As a kid I read not just the Nancy Drew mystery involving the famous Nazca lines, but also a book where some unspeakable evil uses the lines as a portal into our world, and it’s up to an intrepid boy to stop it – for the life of me, I can’t remember what the book was called. And now I have made up my mind to fly over the lines in spite of my reservations about dinky little airplanes.
Am awake at 5am because I’m cold (Cruz del Sur provides crapulous little blankets), and because the air-con’s been switched off. If there’s one thing I enjoy more than stewing in my own bodily gases, it’s stewing in the bodily gases of a dozen strangers.
Watch the sun slowly rise over the bare mountains which look blue at dawn. The bus negotiates hairpin bends as it descends into the valley. The landscape here is parched, dotted with the odd cactus. It reminds me of the land around Arica in Chile.
At the bus terminal, I come across the ‘vultures’, described by fellow travellers: persistent touts who try to persuade passengers to go to their hostel, join their tour. Their tactic is to provide cheap rooms and overcharge like mad for any tours, so for a flight worth $60, you might pay $100. The Walk On Inn where I’m staying sends a car to pick me up when I call them, and I immediately set out to explore the city. My first thought is to try and organise a tour of the nearby archaeological sites today, then the flight’s booked for tomorrow morning, and then I can get out of town in the afternoon.
Nazca is dusty, but sunny and cheerful, the streets of the centre lined with colourful two-storey residential buildings and shops. Pass a bustling fruit market on my way to the main Plaza. Since it’s just past 8am, not many places are open. Make my way along Bolognesi, the main drag, checking the places on my map. Pop into Alegría Tours at the namesake hotel, since it’s been recommended in all the guidebooks.
The guy at the desk points me to a small middle-aged man. I introduce myself, flash the Rough Guide to Peru and Leo the guide immediately talks to the girl taking tour bookings, telling her that since I’m a guidebook writer, I should come along for free. She refuses to book me on the tour at all, saying that it’s a private group, and tells me to come back in the afternoon. Leo furtively takes me aside and tells me to wait at the Ovalo – the roundabout a block away. A minute later, the minibus pulls up and Leo motions for me to hop inside, explaining to the group that I’m an illicit passenger.
We drive out into the sun-bleached desert near Nazca, to the Chauchilla cemetery, one of the town’s biggest attractions after the Nazca lines. Nazca’s a bit of a one-day town; most people come here to fly over the lines, then maybe fit in one of the nearby archaeological sites in the afternoon, and then they get out of town by the evening, flying on to Cusco, catching a bus to Arequipa…
First, there’s a modern cemetery, used by local farmers. The colour of the crosses signifies the age and gender of the dead: white for children, black for married adults, blue-green for teenagers and light blue for single women. There’s an awning made of woven dried cane for buses to park under, and a path marked with white stones leads towards the uncovered tombs. Leo explains that the tombs have been looted at will by numerous grave robbers, who’ve come here to look for pottery and gold to sell to tourists on the black market. The plain is scattered with human bones and shards of pottery.
The uncovered tombs are under similar cane awnings, and Las Trancas, the community now in charge of the cemetery, has carefully arranged the surviving mummies in the pits along with their belongings, and has carefully placed the loose skulls and bones in the pits as well. Leo explains that the men had shoulder-length hair, the women had hair down to their waists, and the chiefs had the longest hair of all, so we all guess the gender of the mummies, sitting in their pits in foetal positions. These are all Nazca mummies, dating back to 400BC – 800AD. They all sit, facing east, because the Nazca used to worship the sun. Leo tells us that he’s surprised, because even yesterday some of the pits didn’t have mummies in them; this means that whoever had them in their back yards is now returning them.
“The Nazca mummified everybody – rich, poor – and everyone was buried in the same cemetery with their belongings, to be used in the next life.” A child mummy sits next to a mummy of a parrot – a beloved pet. Some of the mummies are missing their heads. Some have mortars and pestles next to them, which the women would have used for cooking. One male mummy is so wrapped up in textiles that he looks like he’s wearing a puffa jacket. I’m into mortality and human remains, so am loving the cemetery.
Moving on, we stop at a pottery workshop, where the family uses traditional techniques and museum catalogues to create replica Nazca and Moche pottery, up to and including the use to paintbrushes made of replica baby hair. The whole process is interesting, and I end up getting a Nazca plate for my parents. I don’t think they’d appreciate the explicit Moche pots which feature every type of sex imaginable – from anal to bestiality. The Moche were big on fertility.
Since prospecting for gold in the nearby hills is a good way for Nazca residents to earn money if they haven’t learned any trade and are only capable of unskilled labour, we visit a gold processing workshop also, where the guy in charge demonstrates the scale models of the equipment they use and then we go out back to where salsa is blaring from the radio and several young men are balancing on wooden boards on top of giant metal cylinders, moving from side to side to crush the rock underneath. They keep it up for a few hours, and that, combined with five days a week in the hills, is how they make maybe $200 a month.
After dropping me off at the Ovalo again, Leo makes plans to meet me for a private tour in the afternoon for ‘a reasonable price’.
Stumble upon the Cevichería El Limón, a lime-green place full of locals which does superb ceviche and seafood-fried rice. The World Cup is unavoidable.
“I’m a freelance guide. I work for several different companies, but today I’m free,” Leo tells me. We go off to the Paredones, the area on the outskirts of Nazca where the ancient Cantayoc aqueducts are located. I’m expecting something like the Roman ones in Spain, but they turn out to be stone spirals in the ground, leading down to the water. “It used to be possible to go from one aqueduct to another, but since the last earthquake it’s been forbidden.” They are still being used for the irrigation of the nearby fields.
A guy dressed in a robe with feathered headgear is leading a gringo couple around. They descend along one of the spirals to the water, where the shaman instructs the girl to wave her hands above the outstretched palms of her partner. Leo tells me that some credulous people believe that the aqueducts possess some kind of mysterious energy. As far as he’s concerned, the shaman is a charlatan who’s ripping off the couple.
He points out a desert plant with huge spikes, which local farmers plant around their fields as natural barbed wire, the carob trees which the goats and the pigs love, and whose pods are used to made algarobina – a sweet chocolaty liquid. We then go up a dusty little hillock to look at Las Agujas – The Needles. I’m expecting some tall, thin rock formations, but they are, in fact, long, thin triangles etched perfectly into the desert plain by the Nazca. Why? No one knows, just like no one really knows why they etched the giant figures of animals which can only really be appreciated from the air.
As Leo walks me around the Paredones ruins – where the Inca ruler stayed when visiting the area – he points out the pits dug all over the landscape. “These were also done by grave robbers. Since the rich and the poor were buried in the same place, they keep digging until they find a mummy buried with gold or pottery.” As we look down into the ruins, a small feathered head with round yellow eyes pops up – it’s a desert owl. I’ve never seen owls which are a) out during the day and b) which dig holes in the ground. Nearby is a burrow where it must live.
When Leo drops me off, he offers to take me the Cahuachi ruins the next day after my flight provided he’s free. “It’s best to go in the morning because in the afternoon the wind picks up and there may be a sand storm.” Debate rejecting his offer in favour of Cerro Blanco – the world’s biggest sand dune that looms beyond the town, and a hot destination for sand boarders. Hot literally; the girl at reception informs me that a trip to the dune involved a 5am start and a three-hour uphill slog. Next time, perhaps. Call Leo and confirm tomorrow, making up my mind also to stay another night.
In preparation for tomorrow’s flight, I go to the Maria Reiche Planetarium at the posh Nazca Lines Hotel. Maria Reiche was a German mathematician who devoted her life to studying the Nazca lines, and the show at the small planetarium discusses her theories and proves to be rather interesting. She believed that the lines were a giant astronomical calendar and that several of the animals are aligned with various constellations – the giant monkey with the Big Dipper and the giant spider with Orion. As for the straight lines and triangles which cross the plain, she claimed that they were aligned with the sun’s rays during the solstices. Her explanations are more credible than those of various fruit loops, one of whom suggested that the lines were created by aliens as landing strips for their space craft. The presentation ends with a look through a telescope at the moon and at Saturn and the Sikh family remains behind to take photos, while I go for one of the worst meals of the trip so far – lacklustre pizza at the Los Angeles restaurant.
Nazca has figured in my imagination for many, many years. As a kid I read not just the Nancy Drew mystery involving the famous Nazca lines, but also a book where some unspeakable evil uses the lines as a portal into our world, and it’s up to an intrepid boy to stop it – for the life of me, I can’t remember what the book was called. And now I have made up my mind to fly over the lines in spite of my reservations about dinky little airplanes.
Am awake at 5am because I’m cold (Cruz del Sur provides crapulous little blankets), and because the air-con’s been switched off. If there’s one thing I enjoy more than stewing in my own bodily gases, it’s stewing in the bodily gases of a dozen strangers.
Watch the sun slowly rise over the bare mountains which look blue at dawn. The bus negotiates hairpin bends as it descends into the valley. The landscape here is parched, dotted with the odd cactus. It reminds me of the land around Arica in Chile.
At the bus terminal, I come across the ‘vultures’, described by fellow travellers: persistent touts who try to persuade passengers to go to their hostel, join their tour. Their tactic is to provide cheap rooms and overcharge like mad for any tours, so for a flight worth $60, you might pay $100. The Walk On Inn where I’m staying sends a car to pick me up when I call them, and I immediately set out to explore the city. My first thought is to try and organise a tour of the nearby archaeological sites today, then the flight’s booked for tomorrow morning, and then I can get out of town in the afternoon.
Nazca is dusty, but sunny and cheerful, the streets of the centre lined with colourful two-storey residential buildings and shops. Pass a bustling fruit market on my way to the main Plaza. Since it’s just past 8am, not many places are open. Make my way along Bolognesi, the main drag, checking the places on my map. Pop into Alegría Tours at the namesake hotel, since it’s been recommended in all the guidebooks.
The guy at the desk points me to a small middle-aged man. I introduce myself, flash the Rough Guide to Peru and Leo the guide immediately talks to the girl taking tour bookings, telling her that since I’m a guidebook writer, I should come along for free. She refuses to book me on the tour at all, saying that it’s a private group, and tells me to come back in the afternoon. Leo furtively takes me aside and tells me to wait at the Ovalo – the roundabout a block away. A minute later, the minibus pulls up and Leo motions for me to hop inside, explaining to the group that I’m an illicit passenger.
We drive out into the sun-bleached desert near Nazca, to the Chauchilla cemetery, one of the town’s biggest attractions after the Nazca lines. Nazca’s a bit of a one-day town; most people come here to fly over the lines, then maybe fit in one of the nearby archaeological sites in the afternoon, and then they get out of town by the evening, flying on to Cusco, catching a bus to Arequipa…
First, there’s a modern cemetery, used by local farmers. The colour of the crosses signifies the age and gender of the dead: white for children, black for married adults, blue-green for teenagers and light blue for single women. There’s an awning made of woven dried cane for buses to park under, and a path marked with white stones leads towards the uncovered tombs. Leo explains that the tombs have been looted at will by numerous grave robbers, who’ve come here to look for pottery and gold to sell to tourists on the black market. The plain is scattered with human bones and shards of pottery.
The uncovered tombs are under similar cane awnings, and Las Trancas, the community now in charge of the cemetery, has carefully arranged the surviving mummies in the pits along with their belongings, and has carefully placed the loose skulls and bones in the pits as well. Leo explains that the men had shoulder-length hair, the women had hair down to their waists, and the chiefs had the longest hair of all, so we all guess the gender of the mummies, sitting in their pits in foetal positions. These are all Nazca mummies, dating back to 400BC – 800AD. They all sit, facing east, because the Nazca used to worship the sun. Leo tells us that he’s surprised, because even yesterday some of the pits didn’t have mummies in them; this means that whoever had them in their back yards is now returning them.
“The Nazca mummified everybody – rich, poor – and everyone was buried in the same cemetery with their belongings, to be used in the next life.” A child mummy sits next to a mummy of a parrot – a beloved pet. Some of the mummies are missing their heads. Some have mortars and pestles next to them, which the women would have used for cooking. One male mummy is so wrapped up in textiles that he looks like he’s wearing a puffa jacket. I’m into mortality and human remains, so am loving the cemetery.
Moving on, we stop at a pottery workshop, where the family uses traditional techniques and museum catalogues to create replica Nazca and Moche pottery, up to and including the use to paintbrushes made of replica baby hair. The whole process is interesting, and I end up getting a Nazca plate for my parents. I don’t think they’d appreciate the explicit Moche pots which feature every type of sex imaginable – from anal to bestiality. The Moche were big on fertility.
Since prospecting for gold in the nearby hills is a good way for Nazca residents to earn money if they haven’t learned any trade and are only capable of unskilled labour, we visit a gold processing workshop also, where the guy in charge demonstrates the scale models of the equipment they use and then we go out back to where salsa is blaring from the radio and several young men are balancing on wooden boards on top of giant metal cylinders, moving from side to side to crush the rock underneath. They keep it up for a few hours, and that, combined with five days a week in the hills, is how they make maybe $200 a month.
After dropping me off at the Ovalo again, Leo makes plans to meet me for a private tour in the afternoon for ‘a reasonable price’.
Stumble upon the Cevichería El Limón, a lime-green place full of locals which does superb ceviche and seafood-fried rice. The World Cup is unavoidable.
“I’m a freelance guide. I work for several different companies, but today I’m free,” Leo tells me. We go off to the Paredones, the area on the outskirts of Nazca where the ancient Cantayoc aqueducts are located. I’m expecting something like the Roman ones in Spain, but they turn out to be stone spirals in the ground, leading down to the water. “It used to be possible to go from one aqueduct to another, but since the last earthquake it’s been forbidden.” They are still being used for the irrigation of the nearby fields.
A guy dressed in a robe with feathered headgear is leading a gringo couple around. They descend along one of the spirals to the water, where the shaman instructs the girl to wave her hands above the outstretched palms of her partner. Leo tells me that some credulous people believe that the aqueducts possess some kind of mysterious energy. As far as he’s concerned, the shaman is a charlatan who’s ripping off the couple.
He points out a desert plant with huge spikes, which local farmers plant around their fields as natural barbed wire, the carob trees which the goats and the pigs love, and whose pods are used to made algarobina – a sweet chocolaty liquid. We then go up a dusty little hillock to look at Las Agujas – The Needles. I’m expecting some tall, thin rock formations, but they are, in fact, long, thin triangles etched perfectly into the desert plain by the Nazca. Why? No one knows, just like no one really knows why they etched the giant figures of animals which can only really be appreciated from the air.
As Leo walks me around the Paredones ruins – where the Inca ruler stayed when visiting the area – he points out the pits dug all over the landscape. “These were also done by grave robbers. Since the rich and the poor were buried in the same place, they keep digging until they find a mummy buried with gold or pottery.” As we look down into the ruins, a small feathered head with round yellow eyes pops up – it’s a desert owl. I’ve never seen owls which are a) out during the day and b) which dig holes in the ground. Nearby is a burrow where it must live.
When Leo drops me off, he offers to take me the Cahuachi ruins the next day after my flight provided he’s free. “It’s best to go in the morning because in the afternoon the wind picks up and there may be a sand storm.” Debate rejecting his offer in favour of Cerro Blanco – the world’s biggest sand dune that looms beyond the town, and a hot destination for sand boarders. Hot literally; the girl at reception informs me that a trip to the dune involved a 5am start and a three-hour uphill slog. Next time, perhaps. Call Leo and confirm tomorrow, making up my mind also to stay another night.
In preparation for tomorrow’s flight, I go to the Maria Reiche Planetarium at the posh Nazca Lines Hotel. Maria Reiche was a German mathematician who devoted her life to studying the Nazca lines, and the show at the small planetarium discusses her theories and proves to be rather interesting. She believed that the lines were a giant astronomical calendar and that several of the animals are aligned with various constellations – the giant monkey with the Big Dipper and the giant spider with Orion. As for the straight lines and triangles which cross the plain, she claimed that they were aligned with the sun’s rays during the solstices. Her explanations are more credible than those of various fruit loops, one of whom suggested that the lines were created by aliens as landing strips for their space craft. The presentation ends with a look through a telescope at the moon and at Saturn and the Sikh family remains behind to take photos, while I go for one of the worst meals of the trip so far – lacklustre pizza at the Los Angeles restaurant.
Day 71 - last day in Cusco.
Discover that the porters’ manhandling of my rucksack during the Inca Trail has resulted in new alarming tears; sew them up the best I can and hope that it makes it to Lima.
Time to tie up loose ends. I methodically start higher up, in San Blas, and work my way down, checking map locations of everything, street by street. Stop by the South American Explorers’ clubhouse to thank Mary and Mark for their help. Find a new Dutch café on Choquechaka. Buy presents at the Coca Museum. Have the most awesome chicharrón de cerdo (spiced deep-fried pork) at Pacha Papa for my early lunch. Treat myself to ceviche at Chi Cha for my second lunch, since dinner on board the bus is bound to be less than exciting.
Get caught up in the parades going on in the main plaza. The last couple of days it’s been the Carnaval Cusqueño, which explains why I’ve seen kids practising dance routines by the cathedral at night. On the first day, little kids were dressed up and dancing in the streets, but today is clearly the main event; metal barriers are set up along the streets to keep the crowd at bay, there’s deafening brass band music everywhere, milling spectators with cameras, stilt walkers dressed in lurid colours, people blowing bubbles, kids carrying giant balloons…Each school has different costumes and dances; some kids are dressed in traditional ponchos, headdresses, embroidered woolly hats, while others are painted like Indians, dancing barefoot with spears. Others still are dressed as skunks, complete with fat tails sewn to their bottoms. Bizarre.
While I watch the spectacle, a street urchin offers to shine my hiking boots. Twice. "Where you fron?" he asks me with a strong accent. What does it matter? My boots still won't get shined. He then moves on to a gringo woman and offers to shine her white trainers. Scraping the barrel…
Finish viewing tour companies, places to eat; visit the Qorikancha site museum, which has a missable collection of pottery shards, though the trepanned skulls hold my attention, as always, particularly since there’s a detailed explanation as to why and how they were trepanned. Though they used coca leaves as anaesthetic, I’d hate to have my skull drilled with an obsidian implement.
Time to go. Time to bid farewell to the friendly chaos, the myriad people approaching you around the plaza, offering massage, bad artwork, cigarettes, the women in traditional dress carrying baby lambs and leading llamas, just in case you want your picture taken with them, the men dressed as Incas, who are happy to pose with you by the original Inca wall for a small fee, the two-inch wide pavements in San Blas, where you have to plaster yourself against the wall to dodge the traffic…It seems like I’ve been here forever, and am now getting itchy feet.
Hail a cab with a middle-aged driver across the street from Hostal Andrea. Cusco cabs are rumoured to be hit and miss in terms of robberies, but he looks like a friendly old chap. When I tell him that I’m from England, he goes on about the ‘woman of iron’. Ah, good old Maggie Thatcher. His son works as a tour guide in Arequipa and wants to marry a gringita. The driver himself is from Nazca and gets excited about my visiting his home town.
At the bus station I discover that I’ve left ‘The Last Juror’ by John Grisham back at the hostel. Curses! I’d just gotten to the part where everyone’s gonna start getting murdered. I hate being interrupted in the middle of a book!
Am somewhat distracted by ‘Women’, out in-flight chick flick. Have a front row seat upstairs and the night drive to Nazca is uneventful, unless you count my falling into someone’s lap on the way to the loo due the bus taking tight corners at speed.
Time to tie up loose ends. I methodically start higher up, in San Blas, and work my way down, checking map locations of everything, street by street. Stop by the South American Explorers’ clubhouse to thank Mary and Mark for their help. Find a new Dutch café on Choquechaka. Buy presents at the Coca Museum. Have the most awesome chicharrón de cerdo (spiced deep-fried pork) at Pacha Papa for my early lunch. Treat myself to ceviche at Chi Cha for my second lunch, since dinner on board the bus is bound to be less than exciting.
Get caught up in the parades going on in the main plaza. The last couple of days it’s been the Carnaval Cusqueño, which explains why I’ve seen kids practising dance routines by the cathedral at night. On the first day, little kids were dressed up and dancing in the streets, but today is clearly the main event; metal barriers are set up along the streets to keep the crowd at bay, there’s deafening brass band music everywhere, milling spectators with cameras, stilt walkers dressed in lurid colours, people blowing bubbles, kids carrying giant balloons…Each school has different costumes and dances; some kids are dressed in traditional ponchos, headdresses, embroidered woolly hats, while others are painted like Indians, dancing barefoot with spears. Others still are dressed as skunks, complete with fat tails sewn to their bottoms. Bizarre.
While I watch the spectacle, a street urchin offers to shine my hiking boots. Twice. "Where you fron?" he asks me with a strong accent. What does it matter? My boots still won't get shined. He then moves on to a gringo woman and offers to shine her white trainers. Scraping the barrel…
Finish viewing tour companies, places to eat; visit the Qorikancha site museum, which has a missable collection of pottery shards, though the trepanned skulls hold my attention, as always, particularly since there’s a detailed explanation as to why and how they were trepanned. Though they used coca leaves as anaesthetic, I’d hate to have my skull drilled with an obsidian implement.
Time to go. Time to bid farewell to the friendly chaos, the myriad people approaching you around the plaza, offering massage, bad artwork, cigarettes, the women in traditional dress carrying baby lambs and leading llamas, just in case you want your picture taken with them, the men dressed as Incas, who are happy to pose with you by the original Inca wall for a small fee, the two-inch wide pavements in San Blas, where you have to plaster yourself against the wall to dodge the traffic…It seems like I’ve been here forever, and am now getting itchy feet.
Hail a cab with a middle-aged driver across the street from Hostal Andrea. Cusco cabs are rumoured to be hit and miss in terms of robberies, but he looks like a friendly old chap. When I tell him that I’m from England, he goes on about the ‘woman of iron’. Ah, good old Maggie Thatcher. His son works as a tour guide in Arequipa and wants to marry a gringita. The driver himself is from Nazca and gets excited about my visiting his home town.
At the bus station I discover that I’ve left ‘The Last Juror’ by John Grisham back at the hostel. Curses! I’d just gotten to the part where everyone’s gonna start getting murdered. I hate being interrupted in the middle of a book!
Am somewhat distracted by ‘Women’, out in-flight chick flick. Have a front row seat upstairs and the night drive to Nazca is uneventful, unless you count my falling into someone’s lap on the way to the loo due the bus taking tight corners at speed.
Day 70 - the Sacred Valley.
It’s cold and sunny when I exit the ceremonial hut with my fellow ayahuasca participants. The Australian girl tells me that she also found that the images she saw were directly affected by the music. Kush drives us down in a Landrover even more ancient than the Volkswagen Beatle. It stalls constantly and sounds like it’s in danger of blowing up or experiencing serious mechanical failure.
I’m weak from lack of food, so I sign up for a day tour of the Sacred Valley with Expediciones Vilca, which involves minimal effort and lots of time on the bus. Besides several stops with plenty of opportunity for shopping/having your picture taken with dressed up women and haughty-looking llamas, we actually visit several important archaeological sites. At Pisaq we go up to an ancient fortress atop a mountain, from where there are superb views of the valley and the Inca terracing below. The mountainside opposite the fortress is riddled with holes – that’s where the tombs were before they got robbed by opportunistic grave robbers who also happen to be very good climbers.
At the fortress, our guide, a cheerful Quechua chap, points out a guinea pig enclosure and a slab of rock where they used to lay out dead bodies for the condors to come and peck out the liver, the kidneys, etc., after which the body was mummified and entombed in the mountainside. Condors – two of which are circling high above us – were seen as intermediaries between this world and the spirit world, so once they were done eating your insides, they carried off your spirit to the next world.
I discover my new favourite snack – choclo con queso (corn with cheese): boiled corn on the cob with large, pale grains, that comes with a slice of delicious local cheese. “Honey, I’m not sure I should eat the cheese,” a middle-aged American tells his wife. “Do you think it’s pasteurised?” I’m willing to bet that it’s not.
After feeding time at the gringo zoo (a buffet lunch in Urubamba), I skip the tour of the Ollanta ruins, since I’ve been there already, and use the time to decide what I’ve got left to see in Cusco.
Our last stop is in Chinchero, where we get a demonstration of how the local women make textiles using traditional methods. A teenage girl, Mariela, lets us handle different types of wool – sheep and llama – and she refers to the sheep wool as ‘donkey wool’ confusing the non-cheese eating American until he gets that she’s pulling his leg. The llama wool’s a lot softer. Mariela demonstrates how they use a local plant as shampoo to wash the wool, and sure enough, her tub is soon full of suds. Then she brings round different plants which are used to dye the wool, including cochineal, and dips the washed wool into the ready dyes to demonstrate how the process works. We then observe weaving at a traditional loom before we’re let loose to ‘shop till we drop’, encouraged by Mariela. The textiles are of excellent quality compared to a lot of tat sold on the streets of Cusco, and I wish I had more money/room in luggage.
Am wrecked by the end of the of the visit and fidget through the tour of the village’s ancient church. To me, its only distunguishing feature is the painting of angels with parrot wings - a jungle adaptation of the Bible. Tired of being approached by sellers, and getting ready to move on, both from the Sacred Valley and from Cusco. A month is a long time.
I’m weak from lack of food, so I sign up for a day tour of the Sacred Valley with Expediciones Vilca, which involves minimal effort and lots of time on the bus. Besides several stops with plenty of opportunity for shopping/having your picture taken with dressed up women and haughty-looking llamas, we actually visit several important archaeological sites. At Pisaq we go up to an ancient fortress atop a mountain, from where there are superb views of the valley and the Inca terracing below. The mountainside opposite the fortress is riddled with holes – that’s where the tombs were before they got robbed by opportunistic grave robbers who also happen to be very good climbers.
At the fortress, our guide, a cheerful Quechua chap, points out a guinea pig enclosure and a slab of rock where they used to lay out dead bodies for the condors to come and peck out the liver, the kidneys, etc., after which the body was mummified and entombed in the mountainside. Condors – two of which are circling high above us – were seen as intermediaries between this world and the spirit world, so once they were done eating your insides, they carried off your spirit to the next world.
I discover my new favourite snack – choclo con queso (corn with cheese): boiled corn on the cob with large, pale grains, that comes with a slice of delicious local cheese. “Honey, I’m not sure I should eat the cheese,” a middle-aged American tells his wife. “Do you think it’s pasteurised?” I’m willing to bet that it’s not.
After feeding time at the gringo zoo (a buffet lunch in Urubamba), I skip the tour of the Ollanta ruins, since I’ve been there already, and use the time to decide what I’ve got left to see in Cusco.
Our last stop is in Chinchero, where we get a demonstration of how the local women make textiles using traditional methods. A teenage girl, Mariela, lets us handle different types of wool – sheep and llama – and she refers to the sheep wool as ‘donkey wool’ confusing the non-cheese eating American until he gets that she’s pulling his leg. The llama wool’s a lot softer. Mariela demonstrates how they use a local plant as shampoo to wash the wool, and sure enough, her tub is soon full of suds. Then she brings round different plants which are used to dye the wool, including cochineal, and dips the washed wool into the ready dyes to demonstrate how the process works. We then observe weaving at a traditional loom before we’re let loose to ‘shop till we drop’, encouraged by Mariela. The textiles are of excellent quality compared to a lot of tat sold on the streets of Cusco, and I wish I had more money/room in luggage.
Am wrecked by the end of the of the visit and fidget through the tour of the village’s ancient church. To me, its only distunguishing feature is the painting of angels with parrot wings - a jungle adaptation of the Bible. Tired of being approached by sellers, and getting ready to move on, both from the Sacred Valley and from Cusco. A month is a long time.
Wednesday 16 June 2010
Day 69 - travels out of my mind.
An unusually unproductive morning. I try to find a city tour that takes in the main archaeological sites, as well as a day tour covering the Sacred Valley. Too late for the latter today, so I try to arrange the former.
Commit to the ayahuasca ceremony even though I’m finding it difficult not eating the whole day. It’s supposed to be no alcohol, no meat, no sex, no spices, no citrus fruit, no fat and no sugar for at least a day before the ceremony. The woman at the Casa de la Gringa tells me that I can get away with eating some plain vegetables. It turns out to be really hard to find an item even on the menu of the strictly veggie El Encuentro that doesn’t involve any of the banned items. I wonder if avocado salad counts as fat.
Miss my city tour. It’s not completely my fault; the woman at Andina Tours tells me that people get collected either from their hotels or from in front of the cathedral. Turns out that you have to sign up in advance. I don’t understand how this is possible, how I can spend over a week in Cusco and somehow not manage to fit everything in.
At 6pm, I’m waiting at the Casa de la Gringa. Since shaman ceremonies are becoming more and more popular, I tell myself that I’m doing this in the name of research, when in fact it’s because I want to know what kind of images my mind will throw out. Ayahuasca is used as a healing plant, and never for recreation. I want to see if it’ll help cure what ails me.
Kush the shaman arrives. It seems he’s in demand; he also does ceremonies for the Shaman Shop. He looks suitably shaman-like – shoulder-length greying hair, slightly outlandish clothes. Myself and two others follow him to the most ancient Volkswagen Beetle I’ve ever seen. It’s part dark blue, part rust, and it chugs precariously down from the San Blas square. There’s myself, Eddie the Mexican New Yorker, Katarina the Ukrainian New Yorker and another Eastern European guy whose name even I struggle with.
We drive up and up. The lights of Cusco spread out before us. It’s Golgotha, the spaceport from the Simon R. Greene books. Trying to take a particularly steep climb, the Volkswagen Beetle gives up the ghost and stalls. Kush leads us up through the dark streets, accompanied by the dog chorus of the neighbourhood canines.
Behind a steel gate, there’s a garden. A stone puma guards the steps down into the ceremonial hut – an adobe building lit by dim reddish bulbs and candles, with a thatched roof and skylights. Inside, it’s carpeted; there are several berths covered with thick woollen blankets and two shrines – a white one, composed of multi-tiered triangles atop a circle, with fresh flowers on top, surrounded by round white cushions – presumably for the San Pedro ceremony – and a more arcane-looking one – a dark low table with candles, crystals, giant dark feathers, mysterious little bottles, rocks spread out on a cloth. We settle down on our berths, overlooked by an aggressive-looking stuffed bird of prey perched on a high windowsill, and are joined by several more latecomers – an Aussie couple, a Spanish girl, an elfin girl wearing a woolly hat who looks like she might be a regular here.
Kush checks that we all have plenty of water and hands out plastic buckets and toilet roll, since ayahuasca often induces vomiting, which is considered to be part of the cleansing process. Since ayahuasca is most effective when you approach it with a particular purpose, we talk to the shaman about what we’re hoping to get out of this. Eddie says that he feels a negative balance within himself, that he suffers from fear of failure, and wishes to shed that negativity. I second that. Kush asks us all whether we’ve ever experimented with anything before, to see how much he should give us to start with. When I tell him that I’ve tried magic mushroom tea and marijuana, he smiles.
Kush lights a candle, then takes a small bottle of liquid, pours it into a stone receptacle filled with ashes, and sets it on fire. It burns with a strong blue light. He lowers his head and says something that sounds like a prayer, in a language that I don’t understand. In the candlelight, something about his face reminds me of Anthony Hopkins. He shakes a bottle filled with pinkish liquid and pours different measures us all. The glasses are handed out by his assistant.
The liquid has a strong, bitter and organic taste, with grit at the bottom. I gulp it down, wrap myself in blankets and wait for something to happen. We talk some more. I go to the bathroom, feel some nausea and am mildly sick. That’s the only effect I feel and I wonder if I’d made a mistake by eating those vegetables; I heard that sometimes food can prevent you from having visions. When I come back to my berth, I suddenly feel very sleepy, lie down and close my eyes. Kush begins to chant.
Immediately, I begin to see kaleidoscopic shapes, psychedelic colours, lime-green snakes moving, changing in time with the chanting. When the chanting changes tempo, so do the shapes. I’m mesmerised. Feel strangely removed from my body; it’s as if something is raising my body up, while another force is pressing down on it; when the feeling gets too intense, I open my eyes for a second and it abates. Close my eyes again. Again, my body seems far away; when I twitch my nose, it feels like my face doesn’t belong to me, like the time dental analgesia numbed my chin and I could feel the texture of my skin, but no feeling inside. I coin a term for this detachment: what I feel is near-farness.
I can’t tell if I’m warm or cold; if I’m a bit cold, I’m too lethargic to move. I think there are shivers running down my spine – not running, but creeping slowly; I see them as lines of light, slow and thick like molasses. The chanting is replaced by the playing of a flute – a repetitive trill that triggers more images, more changing colours. I’m not directing my visions; I’m a passive passenger.
When I open my eyes one time, I see a giant dark figure in the middle of room that looks like half-man, half-animal, possibly a wolf. I wonder if I’m now hallucinating with my eyes open. Then the giant figure moves into the candlelight and turns into Kush again.
Even when the chanting and the music stops, the sounds reverberate inside my head, become voices, building up to a crescendo. When it becomes too much, I open my eyes, see Eddie sitting up, the shaman kneeling in front of him, holding giant feathers in the air, one in each hand, chanting. I sit up for a sip of water. Kush asks me if I’m okay, asks if I want some more ayahuasca. At the time, I don’t think it’s having too much of an effect, so I accept another half-measure.
I lose all sense of time; I don’t know if minutes have passed, or hours, whether I have been dreaming of hallucinating. It seems that the second measure takes hold almost immediately, bringing with it more images – abstract colours, the face of an Andean child, a woman, an old person. Then an undead face covered in cobwebs thrusts itself at me, but it’s not frightening, just startling. Then the images seem to shake, and my body as well, and I think that I’m in an earthquake, yet when I open my eyes, all is silent and still; a star shines through the skylight and the lights are dimmer. Am aware of nausea, discomfort in my belly.
More voices, more faces – tribesmen from the jungle, animals; the jungle green is encroaching on my space, it’s intense; they’re not friendly, nor overly hostile; once again, there’s no fear. The sounds build up in my head, and turn into a ringing in my ears which builds up and up. A wave of nausea overtakes me, I open my eyes and vomit darkly into the bucket next to me. Kush’s chanting, and the ringing in my ears seems to cover up the sound of my being sick, at least to me. Everyone else is lying still, my vision is blurred, the room is spinning. I imagine that I’m purging myself of my negativity, as well as my vegetables.
Then it feels as if I dreamed it. Am not sure if I was even sick; only the slight rasping in my throat makes me sit up and check the bucket. Affirmative. I don’t know if I do that seconds after or hours after; time has no significance. The candle above the door seems to be crackling with purple lightning. Immediate relief after purging, and I sink back down.
More images come, obeying the repetitive chant, the reed flute of the shaman’s assistant, the light drumming. Time and again, I can’t believe that I didn’t believe that ayahuasca would be so intense. Images come even if I’m lying in the foetal position, but they’re easier to receive if I’m on my back.
I don’t know at what point the shaman falls silent. I sleep a dreamless sleep until it’s morning, and I can see the sun through the skylight.
Commit to the ayahuasca ceremony even though I’m finding it difficult not eating the whole day. It’s supposed to be no alcohol, no meat, no sex, no spices, no citrus fruit, no fat and no sugar for at least a day before the ceremony. The woman at the Casa de la Gringa tells me that I can get away with eating some plain vegetables. It turns out to be really hard to find an item even on the menu of the strictly veggie El Encuentro that doesn’t involve any of the banned items. I wonder if avocado salad counts as fat.
Miss my city tour. It’s not completely my fault; the woman at Andina Tours tells me that people get collected either from their hotels or from in front of the cathedral. Turns out that you have to sign up in advance. I don’t understand how this is possible, how I can spend over a week in Cusco and somehow not manage to fit everything in.
At 6pm, I’m waiting at the Casa de la Gringa. Since shaman ceremonies are becoming more and more popular, I tell myself that I’m doing this in the name of research, when in fact it’s because I want to know what kind of images my mind will throw out. Ayahuasca is used as a healing plant, and never for recreation. I want to see if it’ll help cure what ails me.
Kush the shaman arrives. It seems he’s in demand; he also does ceremonies for the Shaman Shop. He looks suitably shaman-like – shoulder-length greying hair, slightly outlandish clothes. Myself and two others follow him to the most ancient Volkswagen Beetle I’ve ever seen. It’s part dark blue, part rust, and it chugs precariously down from the San Blas square. There’s myself, Eddie the Mexican New Yorker, Katarina the Ukrainian New Yorker and another Eastern European guy whose name even I struggle with.
We drive up and up. The lights of Cusco spread out before us. It’s Golgotha, the spaceport from the Simon R. Greene books. Trying to take a particularly steep climb, the Volkswagen Beetle gives up the ghost and stalls. Kush leads us up through the dark streets, accompanied by the dog chorus of the neighbourhood canines.
Behind a steel gate, there’s a garden. A stone puma guards the steps down into the ceremonial hut – an adobe building lit by dim reddish bulbs and candles, with a thatched roof and skylights. Inside, it’s carpeted; there are several berths covered with thick woollen blankets and two shrines – a white one, composed of multi-tiered triangles atop a circle, with fresh flowers on top, surrounded by round white cushions – presumably for the San Pedro ceremony – and a more arcane-looking one – a dark low table with candles, crystals, giant dark feathers, mysterious little bottles, rocks spread out on a cloth. We settle down on our berths, overlooked by an aggressive-looking stuffed bird of prey perched on a high windowsill, and are joined by several more latecomers – an Aussie couple, a Spanish girl, an elfin girl wearing a woolly hat who looks like she might be a regular here.
Kush checks that we all have plenty of water and hands out plastic buckets and toilet roll, since ayahuasca often induces vomiting, which is considered to be part of the cleansing process. Since ayahuasca is most effective when you approach it with a particular purpose, we talk to the shaman about what we’re hoping to get out of this. Eddie says that he feels a negative balance within himself, that he suffers from fear of failure, and wishes to shed that negativity. I second that. Kush asks us all whether we’ve ever experimented with anything before, to see how much he should give us to start with. When I tell him that I’ve tried magic mushroom tea and marijuana, he smiles.
Kush lights a candle, then takes a small bottle of liquid, pours it into a stone receptacle filled with ashes, and sets it on fire. It burns with a strong blue light. He lowers his head and says something that sounds like a prayer, in a language that I don’t understand. In the candlelight, something about his face reminds me of Anthony Hopkins. He shakes a bottle filled with pinkish liquid and pours different measures us all. The glasses are handed out by his assistant.
The liquid has a strong, bitter and organic taste, with grit at the bottom. I gulp it down, wrap myself in blankets and wait for something to happen. We talk some more. I go to the bathroom, feel some nausea and am mildly sick. That’s the only effect I feel and I wonder if I’d made a mistake by eating those vegetables; I heard that sometimes food can prevent you from having visions. When I come back to my berth, I suddenly feel very sleepy, lie down and close my eyes. Kush begins to chant.
Immediately, I begin to see kaleidoscopic shapes, psychedelic colours, lime-green snakes moving, changing in time with the chanting. When the chanting changes tempo, so do the shapes. I’m mesmerised. Feel strangely removed from my body; it’s as if something is raising my body up, while another force is pressing down on it; when the feeling gets too intense, I open my eyes for a second and it abates. Close my eyes again. Again, my body seems far away; when I twitch my nose, it feels like my face doesn’t belong to me, like the time dental analgesia numbed my chin and I could feel the texture of my skin, but no feeling inside. I coin a term for this detachment: what I feel is near-farness.
I can’t tell if I’m warm or cold; if I’m a bit cold, I’m too lethargic to move. I think there are shivers running down my spine – not running, but creeping slowly; I see them as lines of light, slow and thick like molasses. The chanting is replaced by the playing of a flute – a repetitive trill that triggers more images, more changing colours. I’m not directing my visions; I’m a passive passenger.
When I open my eyes one time, I see a giant dark figure in the middle of room that looks like half-man, half-animal, possibly a wolf. I wonder if I’m now hallucinating with my eyes open. Then the giant figure moves into the candlelight and turns into Kush again.
Even when the chanting and the music stops, the sounds reverberate inside my head, become voices, building up to a crescendo. When it becomes too much, I open my eyes, see Eddie sitting up, the shaman kneeling in front of him, holding giant feathers in the air, one in each hand, chanting. I sit up for a sip of water. Kush asks me if I’m okay, asks if I want some more ayahuasca. At the time, I don’t think it’s having too much of an effect, so I accept another half-measure.
I lose all sense of time; I don’t know if minutes have passed, or hours, whether I have been dreaming of hallucinating. It seems that the second measure takes hold almost immediately, bringing with it more images – abstract colours, the face of an Andean child, a woman, an old person. Then an undead face covered in cobwebs thrusts itself at me, but it’s not frightening, just startling. Then the images seem to shake, and my body as well, and I think that I’m in an earthquake, yet when I open my eyes, all is silent and still; a star shines through the skylight and the lights are dimmer. Am aware of nausea, discomfort in my belly.
More voices, more faces – tribesmen from the jungle, animals; the jungle green is encroaching on my space, it’s intense; they’re not friendly, nor overly hostile; once again, there’s no fear. The sounds build up in my head, and turn into a ringing in my ears which builds up and up. A wave of nausea overtakes me, I open my eyes and vomit darkly into the bucket next to me. Kush’s chanting, and the ringing in my ears seems to cover up the sound of my being sick, at least to me. Everyone else is lying still, my vision is blurred, the room is spinning. I imagine that I’m purging myself of my negativity, as well as my vegetables.
Then it feels as if I dreamed it. Am not sure if I was even sick; only the slight rasping in my throat makes me sit up and check the bucket. Affirmative. I don’t know if I do that seconds after or hours after; time has no significance. The candle above the door seems to be crackling with purple lightning. Immediate relief after purging, and I sink back down.
More images come, obeying the repetitive chant, the reed flute of the shaman’s assistant, the light drumming. Time and again, I can’t believe that I didn’t believe that ayahuasca would be so intense. Images come even if I’m lying in the foetal position, but they’re easier to receive if I’m on my back.
I don’t know at what point the shaman falls silent. I sleep a dreamless sleep until it’s morning, and I can see the sun through the skylight.
Day 68 - Ollantaytambo and back to Cusco.
Sleep for twelve hours.
Ollanta is a really lovely Andean village during the day – adobe houses, narrow cobbled streets, friendly people. The main square’s a mess; they’re digging it up completely.
Walk around the extensive Inca ruins along the side of the mountain. The views of the valley from the top are amazing. Spot another set of ruins directly across the village; I don’t believe they’re mentioned anywhere and it looks like there’s just as good a view from up there. Ask around, and the proprietress of the nicest budget guesthouse tells me how to get there. Find the footpath leading up and mark it on my map.
It’s getting late-ish, so I grab some vegetarian burritos at Hearts Café on the square. It’s a project started by an old British woman who moved to Peru a few years ago, and all proceeds go towards various projects involving battered women and children, abandoned elderly, etc. I do wonder why it takes foreigners sometimes to start to sort things out, why there’s a lack of home-grown Peruvian philanthropists.
Wild ride back to Cusco via Urubamba in combis (shared taxis). Both drivers go too fast and duck into the correct lane at the last second. There’s a funeral procession taking up a chunk of the street. “Queremos justicia para Amilca” read the placards. Looks like it’s a murder victim.
Check into a real cheapie gem – Hostal Andrea. It’s a wee walk from the main square, but my room’s got a superb view of Cusco, a double bed and cable TV – all for 25 soles. The only downside are the ice-cold showers. Thank goodness for my Russian childhood.
Swept up in yet another parade by Plaza San Francisco; there are dancing gorillas, men in intricately embroidered outfits that resemble Spanish conquistador clothes until I notice that some of them have Egyptian pharaoh heads and pyramids on them. Puzzling. There are some kids practising some kind of dance routine in front of the cathedral as well.
Check out Qorikancha, the site of the largest Inca temple where a lot of the original stonework survives with a Spanish church on top of it. Apart from the perfect precision of ancient doorways, the complex showcases a painting of the night sky. The Incas thought of the Milky Way as the ‘celestial river’ and gave names to the constellations of darkness – the dark spots on the Milky Way between the stars. You have the llama, the toad, the partridge and the serpent. I want to learn more about the Inca astrological beliefs, but the planetarium is only open on Saturdays.
Spend an hour at the bus terminal, gathering practical info on various routes and bus companies. Buy the most expensive bus ticket of the trip so far – an overnight super-cama to Nazca, complete with super-plush seats and on-board meals.
Try Korma Sutra for dinner. It’s got the best mango lassi I’ve tasted in ages and large portions of Indian food, though the spice mixture in the tikka masala tastes different from what I’m used to back home. Am treating myself because am supposed to fast tomorrow before the night ceremony involving the hallucinogenic ayahuasca vine.
Ollanta is a really lovely Andean village during the day – adobe houses, narrow cobbled streets, friendly people. The main square’s a mess; they’re digging it up completely.
Walk around the extensive Inca ruins along the side of the mountain. The views of the valley from the top are amazing. Spot another set of ruins directly across the village; I don’t believe they’re mentioned anywhere and it looks like there’s just as good a view from up there. Ask around, and the proprietress of the nicest budget guesthouse tells me how to get there. Find the footpath leading up and mark it on my map.
It’s getting late-ish, so I grab some vegetarian burritos at Hearts Café on the square. It’s a project started by an old British woman who moved to Peru a few years ago, and all proceeds go towards various projects involving battered women and children, abandoned elderly, etc. I do wonder why it takes foreigners sometimes to start to sort things out, why there’s a lack of home-grown Peruvian philanthropists.
Wild ride back to Cusco via Urubamba in combis (shared taxis). Both drivers go too fast and duck into the correct lane at the last second. There’s a funeral procession taking up a chunk of the street. “Queremos justicia para Amilca” read the placards. Looks like it’s a murder victim.
Check into a real cheapie gem – Hostal Andrea. It’s a wee walk from the main square, but my room’s got a superb view of Cusco, a double bed and cable TV – all for 25 soles. The only downside are the ice-cold showers. Thank goodness for my Russian childhood.
Swept up in yet another parade by Plaza San Francisco; there are dancing gorillas, men in intricately embroidered outfits that resemble Spanish conquistador clothes until I notice that some of them have Egyptian pharaoh heads and pyramids on them. Puzzling. There are some kids practising some kind of dance routine in front of the cathedral as well.
Check out Qorikancha, the site of the largest Inca temple where a lot of the original stonework survives with a Spanish church on top of it. Apart from the perfect precision of ancient doorways, the complex showcases a painting of the night sky. The Incas thought of the Milky Way as the ‘celestial river’ and gave names to the constellations of darkness – the dark spots on the Milky Way between the stars. You have the llama, the toad, the partridge and the serpent. I want to learn more about the Inca astrological beliefs, but the planetarium is only open on Saturdays.
Spend an hour at the bus terminal, gathering practical info on various routes and bus companies. Buy the most expensive bus ticket of the trip so far – an overnight super-cama to Nazca, complete with super-plush seats and on-board meals.
Try Korma Sutra for dinner. It’s got the best mango lassi I’ve tasted in ages and large portions of Indian food, though the spice mixture in the tikka masala tastes different from what I’m used to back home. Am treating myself because am supposed to fast tomorrow before the night ceremony involving the hallucinogenic ayahuasca vine.
Day 67 - Machu Picchu and Aguas Calientes.
Awake at 4am. By the time I get to the bus stop at 4.30am, there’s already a massive queue of people. There are shops open already, so you can buy bottled water, sunscreen, walking sticks…What the majority of the people don’t seem to realise is that plastic bottles, food and walking sticks are not allowed on the Machu Picchu site.
As it turns out, that ban is not really enforced, which is unfortunate. It really incenses me to see trash in the ruins. I want to grab the person who thoughtfully left an empty juice carton and a banana skin under a bush and yell: “What, is this too heavy for you to carry, you puny little weakling?!” Particularly disgusted by a puddle at the bottom of the climb to Huayna Picchu with some toilet paper in it; some woman couldn’t control her bladder, clearly. I don’t mind responsible visitors breaking the rules (on top of Huayna Picchu, there were some hikers making coffee on a camping stove, but they took everything with them) but people who just don’t give a shit about the mess they make shouldn’t bother visiting a place if they’re not going to respect it.
In spite of Miguel’s worries, I have no trouble using yesterday’s permit. Though I’m on the sixth bus, I manage to get one of the four hundred tickets for the Huayna Picchu climb.
Wander through the ruins while it’s still pre-sunrise and most people are bunched up at the guardian hut and other viewpoints. I run my hands over the stonework, appreciating the incredible craftsmanship. Miguel is right: the Spanish were never conquerors – they were destroyers. They took apart remarkable buildings to build their own inferior ones with the stones (incidentally, Inca architecture withstood recent powerful earthquakes, while colonial architecture did not), they tortured and killed the Inca to get their gold, but they didn’t manage to destroy the people. The Quechua are still here. Luckily, the Spanish never found Machu Picchu. It must be hard being Miguel; while he’s clearly of mixed heritage, he identifies with the indigenous people and laments the fact that his Quechua isn’t very good.
When the first rays of the sun come over the mountain and hit Huayna Picchu, I hold my breath. Other people are busy snapping away, but I don’t think any photo can do this justice. It's one of the most marvellous things I’ve ever seen.
Reunited with the others by the most overpriced hotel in Peru ($1000/night) by the main entrance, I go on a proper tour of the ruins. Miguel remarks on the religious significance of the site, which would’ve been visited by the Inca ruler once a year from Cusco, the Inca capital. He points out landmarks, such as the holy window of the Temple of the Sun; during the winter solstice, the first ray of the sun, passes through the window first. He also shows us places where the Inca stonework is coming apart; Machu Picchu is sinking, and the huge number of visitors does not help. He’s bitter because the Lima authorities care more about profit than long-term preservation.
Mark complains about the morning stampede. After passing through the checkpoint at the last campsite, everyone made for the Sun Gate, some people pushing, some deliberately holding others up. The guys (minus Amy) decide to go climb Machu Picchu mountain, which is higher than Huayna Picchu but less visited, for some reason, while I head off to climb Huayna Picchu. My original plan was to see as much of the ruins as possible, but Miguel dissuades me from trying to descend to the Temple of the Moon. Firstly, you have to take the Huayna Picchu route, and then it’s a long descent along an overgrown trail which is frequented by poisonous snakes, allegedly. I’m almost tempted to go down just to see if I can spot the snakes, but there isn’t enough time.
The climb up Huayna Picchu takes just forty minutes, and you can hold on to steel cables for most of the really steep bits, but there are some seriously precarious stone steps which give me trouble on the way down. In the end, I swallow my pride and go down on my bottom, figuring that dirty trousers are better than dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse. Towards the top, there’s a squeeze through a natural cave and then a wooden ladder takes you to the very top, which is really crowded. I manage to find a quiet spot and enjoy the wind and the sun on my skin, and the sight of the tiny ruins, far below. Really glad I pressed on to Aguas Calientes yesterday.
All templed out after seven hours at the ruins with no food. Back in Aguas Calientes I stuff myself at the buffet at Toto’s House which includes sushi, sweet potato salad and awesome alpaca carpaccio. Finish up by checking out the accommodation; pleased to have found some nice new places.
Not impressed with the train. It’s slow, there’s no leg room, and we don’t even leave on time. Wait, that’s just like back home. When I finally reach my guesthouse in Ollanta, I’m dead on my feet and don’t even have the energy to go find food.
As it turns out, that ban is not really enforced, which is unfortunate. It really incenses me to see trash in the ruins. I want to grab the person who thoughtfully left an empty juice carton and a banana skin under a bush and yell: “What, is this too heavy for you to carry, you puny little weakling?!” Particularly disgusted by a puddle at the bottom of the climb to Huayna Picchu with some toilet paper in it; some woman couldn’t control her bladder, clearly. I don’t mind responsible visitors breaking the rules (on top of Huayna Picchu, there were some hikers making coffee on a camping stove, but they took everything with them) but people who just don’t give a shit about the mess they make shouldn’t bother visiting a place if they’re not going to respect it.
In spite of Miguel’s worries, I have no trouble using yesterday’s permit. Though I’m on the sixth bus, I manage to get one of the four hundred tickets for the Huayna Picchu climb.
Wander through the ruins while it’s still pre-sunrise and most people are bunched up at the guardian hut and other viewpoints. I run my hands over the stonework, appreciating the incredible craftsmanship. Miguel is right: the Spanish were never conquerors – they were destroyers. They took apart remarkable buildings to build their own inferior ones with the stones (incidentally, Inca architecture withstood recent powerful earthquakes, while colonial architecture did not), they tortured and killed the Inca to get their gold, but they didn’t manage to destroy the people. The Quechua are still here. Luckily, the Spanish never found Machu Picchu. It must be hard being Miguel; while he’s clearly of mixed heritage, he identifies with the indigenous people and laments the fact that his Quechua isn’t very good.
When the first rays of the sun come over the mountain and hit Huayna Picchu, I hold my breath. Other people are busy snapping away, but I don’t think any photo can do this justice. It's one of the most marvellous things I’ve ever seen.
Reunited with the others by the most overpriced hotel in Peru ($1000/night) by the main entrance, I go on a proper tour of the ruins. Miguel remarks on the religious significance of the site, which would’ve been visited by the Inca ruler once a year from Cusco, the Inca capital. He points out landmarks, such as the holy window of the Temple of the Sun; during the winter solstice, the first ray of the sun, passes through the window first. He also shows us places where the Inca stonework is coming apart; Machu Picchu is sinking, and the huge number of visitors does not help. He’s bitter because the Lima authorities care more about profit than long-term preservation.
Mark complains about the morning stampede. After passing through the checkpoint at the last campsite, everyone made for the Sun Gate, some people pushing, some deliberately holding others up. The guys (minus Amy) decide to go climb Machu Picchu mountain, which is higher than Huayna Picchu but less visited, for some reason, while I head off to climb Huayna Picchu. My original plan was to see as much of the ruins as possible, but Miguel dissuades me from trying to descend to the Temple of the Moon. Firstly, you have to take the Huayna Picchu route, and then it’s a long descent along an overgrown trail which is frequented by poisonous snakes, allegedly. I’m almost tempted to go down just to see if I can spot the snakes, but there isn’t enough time.
The climb up Huayna Picchu takes just forty minutes, and you can hold on to steel cables for most of the really steep bits, but there are some seriously precarious stone steps which give me trouble on the way down. In the end, I swallow my pride and go down on my bottom, figuring that dirty trousers are better than dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse. Towards the top, there’s a squeeze through a natural cave and then a wooden ladder takes you to the very top, which is really crowded. I manage to find a quiet spot and enjoy the wind and the sun on my skin, and the sight of the tiny ruins, far below. Really glad I pressed on to Aguas Calientes yesterday.
All templed out after seven hours at the ruins with no food. Back in Aguas Calientes I stuff myself at the buffet at Toto’s House which includes sushi, sweet potato salad and awesome alpaca carpaccio. Finish up by checking out the accommodation; pleased to have found some nice new places.
Not impressed with the train. It’s slow, there’s no leg room, and we don’t even leave on time. Wait, that’s just like back home. When I finally reach my guesthouse in Ollanta, I’m dead on my feet and don’t even have the energy to go find food.
Monday 14 June 2010
Day 66 - Inca Trail, day 3.
Sleep intermittently. So does Jared, who now has an upset stomach. I offer him my charcoal tablets, my cure-all.
Get cross with whichever stupid girl’s managed to block the loo with toilet paper. In Peru, you never put bog roll down the toilet; the plumbing can’t cope with it. Use a stick to fish it out. Some people just leave the mess for others to fix, and it hacks me off.
6.50am start. Carry on with my stopping, wheezing, starting technique, and make it to the Runkurakay Inca ruin in half an hour, rather than forty minutes, as predicted by Miguel. I like his approach; maybe he deliberately overestimates the time it should take us, or maybe we’re fitter than average. Miguel explains the history of the Inca lookout post, and we carry on. After twenty minutes, I reach the false summit with a small bofedál, then the pass in another fifteen minutes. Mark’s already there, having scrambled up to higher ground for some meditative time. I scramble up another small peak, admire the view. Build a little stone cairn as an offering to the mountain gods. Mark and I are the first ones down the steep stone steps, which takes us down to the Sayaqmarka fortress. Awesome views of the valley below and the trail, which continues on the opposite side of the valley. Miguel points out examples of Inca stonework – both pirka (stone and mortar) and imperial (large blocks of stone slotted together with no gaps). It really does only take us ten minutes to walk down and then up to the Chaquicocha campsite, where some of the groups are stopping for an early lunch. We’re pressing on to Wiñayhuayna, the last campsite before Machu Picchu.
The walk from Chaquicocha to the final Phuyupatamarka pass is the loveliest bit of the hike so far. It runs through stretches of cloud forest, up gentle slopes, with stupendous views of the valley opening up on the left-hand side. Best of all, I’m alone; the three-day groups are way ahead, and the others are having lunch. Hummingbirds flit among the flowers.
We rest at the pass, but I’m keen to press on; the delicious smells emanating from the cooking tents are making me hungry. Plus, I’ve figured out how the guys can have their holiday, and I can do my research: Miguel will take me to the final checkpoint and tell them to let me through because I have an emergency and have to be in Aguas Calientes that night, while everyone else camps at Wiñayhuayna. Then I’ll meet up with the group at Machu Picchu in the morning. Am pondering this scenario as I pound my way down the super-steep stone steps, graciously put down by the Incas. The steps are murder on my knees, but after forty minutes, they give way to gentler ground, and it’s full tilt ahead for the campsite. When I see Inca terracing in the middle of a densely forested slope, followed by electricity pylons, I know that I’m close.
I come to a fork in the path, and remember Miguel’s advice: “Not the left one”. On and on, downwards. Got the same tune playing on a loop in my head, the popular Russian wartime song, “Katiusha”.
As I speed on downwards, I weigh up my personal preferences versus professional responsibilities. It’d be nice to stay in the campsite, read mountaineering stories and rest my feet (I can feel my big toes beginning to form blisters). At the same time, I know that in order to make up for the day I’m going to lose on the 17th due to the strike, I need to be in Aguas Calientes tonight, and I’d like to maximise my time in Machu Picchu, and climb Huayna Picchu – the mountain that looms behind the ruins. To do that, I have to be one of the first 400 people there, and these days, you can only do that if you’re coming from Aguas Calientes. They used to let people set off early from the Wiñaywayna campsite, but these days you can only pass the checkpoint at 5.30am at the earliest, because the trail is quite dangerous in the dark.
Finally, some tents come into view. I spot one of our porters and he leads me down to our ledge. I see only three tents and know that Miguel’s message got through. I’ll be going ahead to Aguas Calientes.
After a three-course lunch which includes vegetarian ceviche (mushroom), the cook and the porters line up to say goodbye to me. I shake everyone’s hand and thank them. The assistant cook, Jorge, is coming with me to carry my luggage. I’ve already talked about tips with the other guys and have left them enough for everyone. Basic rule of thumb is that the porters get around 50 soles, a bit more for the porter coordinator and the cook, and the guide is separate. They do work hard, and I bet they still get paid miserly wages. Plus, they work constantly: the staff are due to catch the 5am train back to Cusco the following morning, and they’ll most likely be starting another tour the following day.
Miguel walks me to the checkpoint. Technically, it’s forbidden for me to go on without a guide, since trekkers have been less than responsible in the past, and Miguel and I have decided that my ‘emergency’ story is not going to fly if I want to use the same entry ticket for Machu Picchu the next day rather than forking out an extra 120 soles. Miguel complains about the stupidity of the rangers; he’s had to argue with them already, because as far as the paperwork is concerned, we should be in Machu Picchu today; they’ve surely heard about the strike, but don’t seem to put two and two together. They like the groups that have half-killed themselves, walking to Wiñaywayna in two days, because they remain within the set brackets of the paperwork.
In the end, Miguel tells the truth; he tells the ranger that I have to go to Aguas Calientes for work and shows him the letter from Rough Guides. He and the ranger argue for a while, but that’s about whether all of us will be able to use Machu Picchu passes which are a day old. We’ll find out tomorrow morning.
Jorge and I set off. The trail skirts the mountain, rising and falling gently, and luckily, we’re in the shade all the time. There’s a bare patch on a mountain across the valley – the sign of a giant landslide. We chat a little when I’m not too out of breath. He’s been working as a porter and assistant cook for nine years. His Quechua face is ageless, but he tells me that he’s thirty four and has brothers in Cusco and Lima; no mention of a family, though. I gush about how much I love the landscape, how we have nothing like it at home, and it’s true – the mountains here are stupendous, the air is fresh, the weather is sunny and warm, and after acclimatising to the altitude, I’ve never felt better.
Jorge is carrying his backpack strapped to mine. When I see him pick up my long-suffering Kelty by the battered and fragile top bit, I grind my teeth, but it hasn’t fallen apart yet. I tell him that I’m used to carrying thirty kilos normally, but that at this altitude, that would be very difficult. Ask him if his work is hard, or whether he’s used to it. “It’s always hard,” he tells me. “I have to carry a lot”, and I feel guilty about that extra book in my rucksack that I could’ve done without.
Jorge has no water, so I offer him my camel pack several times and he accepts gratefully. I’ve been thinking a lot about our responsibilities towards our staff, who make the Inca Trail hike not just possible, but really comfortable, and vow that I will help to improve working conditions for them. That’ll be harder than getting penny pinchers to walk out of restaurants if they haven’t been presented with a legal bill, because the really cheap travellers are likely to accept the cheapest Inca Trail, meaning that the conditions for the staff are below par. I’ll give it due thought, though.
In “Dark Shadows Falling”, Joe Simpson talks about the appalling treatments of Sherpas by the rich customers climbing the Everest. True climbers a) often climb without assistance and b) feel responsibility for other climbers and those who assist them, whereas people who pay for a guided tour up the mountain do not. People who have paid $70,000 for the climb balked at paying $200 per head to have their staff evacuated when there have been terrible storms on the Everest, and left them to die. They don’t care sufficiently to make sure the Sherpas have adequate clothing and mountaineering equipment. I’m appalled by what I read.
Since normally the porters walk to catch the first train out of Aguas Calientes on the morning of the last day, it means that Jorge is going to be stuck in town overnight, thanks to me. I decide that I’ll pay for his food and accommodation on top of his tip because he is my responsibility.
We reach a spectacularly steep section of stone steps leading up, and Jorge assures me that they’re the last uphill before Intipunku – the Sun Gate - from where you get your first glimpse of Machu Picchu. Sure enough, a path paved by the Incas leads to a stone gate, and there it is – the distant set of ruins with tall Huayna Picchu looming right behind it – so familiar from the photos I’ve seen, and yet still spectacular. It’s sunset, and the ruins are lit with a golden light. I tell Jorge that it makes a real impression, but he shrugs. He sees Machu Picchu every week. There are other people sitting on the edge, some of whom are doing the ‘two-day’ (read: four hours’ hike) tour and some of whom are day trippers who have come up from the ruins for some pictures.
We press on and reach the ruins after twenty minutes. Jorge comments that I walk well; I wonder if sometimes I’ve been walking too fast for him, since he’s been carrying a heavy load all day and must be tired. We walk down to the bus stop, and I buy his ticket. They can see that he’s clearly a porter, but they still charge 15 soles for the forty-minute ride down along hairpin bends. He’s the only porter on the bus, the only dark-skinned non-gringo and I’m willing to bet that he’s never taken this air conditioned bus before. I squeeze in between two fat tourists who quickly make room for me. I haven’t showered in three days. Ha.
My first thought when we get to Aguas Calientes is: “How did Gibraltar get here?” Both are very touristy, and the former is squeezed in between tall mountains, whereas Gibraltar is hemmed in by The Rock and the sea. Every other place is a restaurant or a place to stay and they’re selling all kinds of overprices souvenirs everywhere. They’ve certainly got a ready market for them: 90% of visitors to Machu Picchu are day trippers from Cusco, and though the Inca Trail feels crowded, the hikers make up only 10% of all visitors.
We find my Hostal Los Caminantes, just off the train tracks, and though my reservation was for the following day, I still get a room. Jorge’s crashing with some friends; I bid him farewell. I don’t believe I’ve ever enjoyed a hot shower as much or for as long.
Errands to run. Map work to do. Find the train station and try to change my ticket, but since it’s been changed already due to the strike, I have to buy a new one. $43 for the hour-and-a-half to Ollata. Daylight robbery. It’s actually more pricey than British trains – ironic, really, since Peru Rail is owned by a British company.
Dinner at El Indio Feliz – very popular restaurant with upmarket food that actually stands out from the myriad places which offer pizza, pasta and guinea pig. Plus, they don’t have waiters loitering by the door, waiting to pounce on potential customers. Everything’s fresh and imaginatively prepared.
Very early bedtime in anticipation of the 4am wakeup.
Get cross with whichever stupid girl’s managed to block the loo with toilet paper. In Peru, you never put bog roll down the toilet; the plumbing can’t cope with it. Use a stick to fish it out. Some people just leave the mess for others to fix, and it hacks me off.
6.50am start. Carry on with my stopping, wheezing, starting technique, and make it to the Runkurakay Inca ruin in half an hour, rather than forty minutes, as predicted by Miguel. I like his approach; maybe he deliberately overestimates the time it should take us, or maybe we’re fitter than average. Miguel explains the history of the Inca lookout post, and we carry on. After twenty minutes, I reach the false summit with a small bofedál, then the pass in another fifteen minutes. Mark’s already there, having scrambled up to higher ground for some meditative time. I scramble up another small peak, admire the view. Build a little stone cairn as an offering to the mountain gods. Mark and I are the first ones down the steep stone steps, which takes us down to the Sayaqmarka fortress. Awesome views of the valley below and the trail, which continues on the opposite side of the valley. Miguel points out examples of Inca stonework – both pirka (stone and mortar) and imperial (large blocks of stone slotted together with no gaps). It really does only take us ten minutes to walk down and then up to the Chaquicocha campsite, where some of the groups are stopping for an early lunch. We’re pressing on to Wiñayhuayna, the last campsite before Machu Picchu.
The walk from Chaquicocha to the final Phuyupatamarka pass is the loveliest bit of the hike so far. It runs through stretches of cloud forest, up gentle slopes, with stupendous views of the valley opening up on the left-hand side. Best of all, I’m alone; the three-day groups are way ahead, and the others are having lunch. Hummingbirds flit among the flowers.
We rest at the pass, but I’m keen to press on; the delicious smells emanating from the cooking tents are making me hungry. Plus, I’ve figured out how the guys can have their holiday, and I can do my research: Miguel will take me to the final checkpoint and tell them to let me through because I have an emergency and have to be in Aguas Calientes that night, while everyone else camps at Wiñayhuayna. Then I’ll meet up with the group at Machu Picchu in the morning. Am pondering this scenario as I pound my way down the super-steep stone steps, graciously put down by the Incas. The steps are murder on my knees, but after forty minutes, they give way to gentler ground, and it’s full tilt ahead for the campsite. When I see Inca terracing in the middle of a densely forested slope, followed by electricity pylons, I know that I’m close.
I come to a fork in the path, and remember Miguel’s advice: “Not the left one”. On and on, downwards. Got the same tune playing on a loop in my head, the popular Russian wartime song, “Katiusha”.
As I speed on downwards, I weigh up my personal preferences versus professional responsibilities. It’d be nice to stay in the campsite, read mountaineering stories and rest my feet (I can feel my big toes beginning to form blisters). At the same time, I know that in order to make up for the day I’m going to lose on the 17th due to the strike, I need to be in Aguas Calientes tonight, and I’d like to maximise my time in Machu Picchu, and climb Huayna Picchu – the mountain that looms behind the ruins. To do that, I have to be one of the first 400 people there, and these days, you can only do that if you’re coming from Aguas Calientes. They used to let people set off early from the Wiñaywayna campsite, but these days you can only pass the checkpoint at 5.30am at the earliest, because the trail is quite dangerous in the dark.
Finally, some tents come into view. I spot one of our porters and he leads me down to our ledge. I see only three tents and know that Miguel’s message got through. I’ll be going ahead to Aguas Calientes.
After a three-course lunch which includes vegetarian ceviche (mushroom), the cook and the porters line up to say goodbye to me. I shake everyone’s hand and thank them. The assistant cook, Jorge, is coming with me to carry my luggage. I’ve already talked about tips with the other guys and have left them enough for everyone. Basic rule of thumb is that the porters get around 50 soles, a bit more for the porter coordinator and the cook, and the guide is separate. They do work hard, and I bet they still get paid miserly wages. Plus, they work constantly: the staff are due to catch the 5am train back to Cusco the following morning, and they’ll most likely be starting another tour the following day.
Miguel walks me to the checkpoint. Technically, it’s forbidden for me to go on without a guide, since trekkers have been less than responsible in the past, and Miguel and I have decided that my ‘emergency’ story is not going to fly if I want to use the same entry ticket for Machu Picchu the next day rather than forking out an extra 120 soles. Miguel complains about the stupidity of the rangers; he’s had to argue with them already, because as far as the paperwork is concerned, we should be in Machu Picchu today; they’ve surely heard about the strike, but don’t seem to put two and two together. They like the groups that have half-killed themselves, walking to Wiñaywayna in two days, because they remain within the set brackets of the paperwork.
In the end, Miguel tells the truth; he tells the ranger that I have to go to Aguas Calientes for work and shows him the letter from Rough Guides. He and the ranger argue for a while, but that’s about whether all of us will be able to use Machu Picchu passes which are a day old. We’ll find out tomorrow morning.
Jorge and I set off. The trail skirts the mountain, rising and falling gently, and luckily, we’re in the shade all the time. There’s a bare patch on a mountain across the valley – the sign of a giant landslide. We chat a little when I’m not too out of breath. He’s been working as a porter and assistant cook for nine years. His Quechua face is ageless, but he tells me that he’s thirty four and has brothers in Cusco and Lima; no mention of a family, though. I gush about how much I love the landscape, how we have nothing like it at home, and it’s true – the mountains here are stupendous, the air is fresh, the weather is sunny and warm, and after acclimatising to the altitude, I’ve never felt better.
Jorge is carrying his backpack strapped to mine. When I see him pick up my long-suffering Kelty by the battered and fragile top bit, I grind my teeth, but it hasn’t fallen apart yet. I tell him that I’m used to carrying thirty kilos normally, but that at this altitude, that would be very difficult. Ask him if his work is hard, or whether he’s used to it. “It’s always hard,” he tells me. “I have to carry a lot”, and I feel guilty about that extra book in my rucksack that I could’ve done without.
Jorge has no water, so I offer him my camel pack several times and he accepts gratefully. I’ve been thinking a lot about our responsibilities towards our staff, who make the Inca Trail hike not just possible, but really comfortable, and vow that I will help to improve working conditions for them. That’ll be harder than getting penny pinchers to walk out of restaurants if they haven’t been presented with a legal bill, because the really cheap travellers are likely to accept the cheapest Inca Trail, meaning that the conditions for the staff are below par. I’ll give it due thought, though.
In “Dark Shadows Falling”, Joe Simpson talks about the appalling treatments of Sherpas by the rich customers climbing the Everest. True climbers a) often climb without assistance and b) feel responsibility for other climbers and those who assist them, whereas people who pay for a guided tour up the mountain do not. People who have paid $70,000 for the climb balked at paying $200 per head to have their staff evacuated when there have been terrible storms on the Everest, and left them to die. They don’t care sufficiently to make sure the Sherpas have adequate clothing and mountaineering equipment. I’m appalled by what I read.
Since normally the porters walk to catch the first train out of Aguas Calientes on the morning of the last day, it means that Jorge is going to be stuck in town overnight, thanks to me. I decide that I’ll pay for his food and accommodation on top of his tip because he is my responsibility.
We reach a spectacularly steep section of stone steps leading up, and Jorge assures me that they’re the last uphill before Intipunku – the Sun Gate - from where you get your first glimpse of Machu Picchu. Sure enough, a path paved by the Incas leads to a stone gate, and there it is – the distant set of ruins with tall Huayna Picchu looming right behind it – so familiar from the photos I’ve seen, and yet still spectacular. It’s sunset, and the ruins are lit with a golden light. I tell Jorge that it makes a real impression, but he shrugs. He sees Machu Picchu every week. There are other people sitting on the edge, some of whom are doing the ‘two-day’ (read: four hours’ hike) tour and some of whom are day trippers who have come up from the ruins for some pictures.
We press on and reach the ruins after twenty minutes. Jorge comments that I walk well; I wonder if sometimes I’ve been walking too fast for him, since he’s been carrying a heavy load all day and must be tired. We walk down to the bus stop, and I buy his ticket. They can see that he’s clearly a porter, but they still charge 15 soles for the forty-minute ride down along hairpin bends. He’s the only porter on the bus, the only dark-skinned non-gringo and I’m willing to bet that he’s never taken this air conditioned bus before. I squeeze in between two fat tourists who quickly make room for me. I haven’t showered in three days. Ha.
My first thought when we get to Aguas Calientes is: “How did Gibraltar get here?” Both are very touristy, and the former is squeezed in between tall mountains, whereas Gibraltar is hemmed in by The Rock and the sea. Every other place is a restaurant or a place to stay and they’re selling all kinds of overprices souvenirs everywhere. They’ve certainly got a ready market for them: 90% of visitors to Machu Picchu are day trippers from Cusco, and though the Inca Trail feels crowded, the hikers make up only 10% of all visitors.
We find my Hostal Los Caminantes, just off the train tracks, and though my reservation was for the following day, I still get a room. Jorge’s crashing with some friends; I bid him farewell. I don’t believe I’ve ever enjoyed a hot shower as much or for as long.
Errands to run. Map work to do. Find the train station and try to change my ticket, but since it’s been changed already due to the strike, I have to buy a new one. $43 for the hour-and-a-half to Ollata. Daylight robbery. It’s actually more pricey than British trains – ironic, really, since Peru Rail is owned by a British company.
Dinner at El Indio Feliz – very popular restaurant with upmarket food that actually stands out from the myriad places which offer pizza, pasta and guinea pig. Plus, they don’t have waiters loitering by the door, waiting to pounce on potential customers. Everything’s fresh and imaginatively prepared.
Very early bedtime in anticipation of the 4am wakeup.
Day 65 - Inca Trail, day 2.
By the time we get moving, it’s already light, though not yet sunrise. Chastised by Miguel the day before for having too much weight in my rucksack (14kg rather than 6kg), I repack. He allows me the extra 3kg, since that’s the sleeping bag provided by Q’ente, but everything else has to go into my day pack, which ends up weighing 10kg. Maybe bringing my laptop was not strictly necessary….
Miguel introduces the rest of the team – Isidro the cook, Jorge the assistant cook, head porter and seven other porters. Before certain regulations were introduced recently, there were fewer porters, each carrying way more weight, and I’ve heard stories of them eating leftovers and not having anywhere warm to sleep. Miguel tells me that there are still no regulations on the other trails – Salcantay, Vilcabamba, etc., and there are companies which get away with treating their porters badly, and they put up with it, because if they won’t work, other people will work under those conditions in their place. Am keeping an eagle eye on both our team and the other teams which pass us for any sign of abuse.
I let the rest of my group pass me when we start out. Am grateful to Miguel for not insisting that we walk as a group. He tells us to take our time and walk at our own pace, meeting either at the second water stop, or up at the pass if it’s getting too cold at the water stop.
The first part is a dirt path along a gentle slope, amidst lush vegetation. In spite of the morning cold, I’m wet through with sweat almost instantly, and constantly out of breath in spite of the gentle incline. Uphill hikes are not my forte. I’m not very fit, and find myself walking up to the nearest bend in the path, stopping to catch my breath, wheezing like a broken bellows, and then setting off again for the next bend. I know that it’s poor technique, that it’s best to pace yourself, to walk slowly but constantly, but in this case, it’s getting up to that pass by any means possible. What I lack in fitness, I make up for in grim determination. The good thing is that I am ‘the average hiker’, so I time myself between stops in order to record in the guidebook how long each section should take.
A large Peru Treks group walks by. They stop, and a deeply tanned, bearded guy comes over to me, grinning. I don’t recognise him at first, and wonder who the hell he is, when it turns out that it’s Tim from the jungle. Looks like he’s regained the power of speech. He greets me and chats to me as if the days of silence never happened.
They’re all carrying their own gear, and at least half of their group is going faster than me. I’m not that bothered, knowing that I’m a lot faster on the downhill, provided my knees don’t play up. What does concern me is that Miguel said that it should take around an hour to get to the first water stop, then another two to get to the next one, and another couple of hours to get to the pass. I reach a clearing packed with campers after forty minutes or so, find the rest of my group there, rest for a few minutes and press on, partly because I get cold very very quickly, my sweaty t-shirt turning to ice, and partly because I believe that I’m yet to reach the first water stop of Ayapata.
An hour later, wheezing and gasping my way up a mixture of stone steps, steep bends, and dirt path winding through mossy forest, past a stream, I still haven’t reached it. Am thinking how demoralising it will be if it takes me two hours to do an estimated one-hour hike. Just think how long it will then take me to get to the pass! Since Miguel informed me that there’s going to be another strike on the 17th, meaning that I have one day less in Cusco, I still haven’t given up hope of talking the rest of group into doing the hike in three days and getting to Aguas Calientes on the night of the third day – which would mean extra walking today, and with me being the weakest member of the team, that’ll be a challenge and a half.
Two hours after setting out, I come out at the Llulluchapampa campsite, the one that was supposed to take three hours. I’m actually faster than average! Immense relief. Once again, I only stay long enough to look down into valley below, now coloured by the rays of the rising sun, before the cold induces me to press on.
After a little while, the forest gives way to the exposed, sunny slope. I can see numerous backpackers inching up it in single file. Porters pass the hikers, slowly but without stopping, carrying large loads. They have none of our technical gear and are wearing old sandals, but that doesn’t seem to hinder them. I keep setting myself short-term goals: that rock over there, that bush beyond that, and make my way up.
Miguel finally catches up with me, sees me chewing coca leaves and offers me some llipta (the stuff that activates the coca leaves – compressed ashes, in this case). He chips off a little bit, tells me stick it in the middle of coca leaves, and I stuff a handful under my cheek. I keep chewing as I plod on, and maybe it’s the juices, maybe it’s partly physical and partly psychological, but going up does seem to become easier. I keep putting new leaves under my cheek as the existing ones diminish. Half of my mouth and my tongue have gone numb; Miguel says that that always happens to first-timers. When I spit out the green mush, I discover that I’m missing a filling. Must’ve chomped down on the llipta a bit too hard.
Make it to the top in three hours, forty five minutes! A cold mist is creeping down. People are having their photos taken with the valley behind them, holding up scribbled signs: Dead Woman’s Peak, 4,215m. Amy tells me that Tim the weird American’s been inciting other members of his group to scramble up the little peaks above the pass. He just can’t keep still.
Miguel tells us that we need to make a decision: camp at Pacaymayo campsite, as originally planned, or press on and try to make it in three days. My group’s not keen. As Amy explains, the Inca Trail has been the whole point of their trip to Peru; they’ve spent a lot of money, changing their plane tickets in order to stay the extra day, and they’d like to spend as much time as possible on the trail, instead of Aguas Calientes. As for me, I’d like to press on, partly to have more time at Machu Picchu, and partly to save a day and complete all my research. I ask Miguel if it’s possible for the guys to camp on the last night, and for me to go on to Aguas Calientes, and he tells me that it’s not allowed, that the permit is given for a specific group, that the group has to stay together. I acquiesce.
The way down is easier. Steep stone steps descend into the mist of the valley on the other side of the pass, and I go down quickly, zigzagging, using my hiking poles. The porters pretty much run down the steps. I remember myself, aged seventeen, when holidaying with my best friend in Canada, running full tilt down the side of a hill, leaping crazily over fallen logs, revelling in the fact that my body did exactly what I told it, and knowing even then that it wouldn’t last forever. Compared to the agile, sure-footed porters, I’m a real klutz.
Beat the others to the campsite. From there, we can see tomorrow’s trail climb steeply up the densely forested mountain and disappear. Tomorrow’s the last pass, only 300m higher than we are now, compared to the 1,200m climb of today, but it looks a lot higher than 300m. The Pacamayu stream runs right past Miguel’s tent. Mine is slightly slower down the slope from the others, to protect them from my snoring.
Read “Dark Shadows Falling” by Joe Simpson, of “Touching the Void” fame; he’s the climber who dragged himself to safety with a badly shattered knee after his partner was forced to cut the rope and leave him for dead. He talks about the 1996 Everest disaster, documented by fellow climber Jon Krakauer, in which many people died due to overcrowding and incompetence, combined with a killer storm. He’s making the point that Everest is now a playground of the rich, as opposed to that of elite climbers; if you can afford to spend $70,000, it doesn’t matter if you don’t have experience; you get guided up the mountain and the sherpas set up your camp for you. Simpson disapproves. I think I do, as well.
Over dinner, I express amazement that Mark and Jared have to do their own taxes; back home, only freelancers have to do that. They grill me about the recent bipartisanship displayed during the UK elections, and I tell them that while I’d vote for Lib Dems as the lesser of three evils, I wasn’t impressed by Nick Clegg’s populist move of pledging free tuition fees for students. I don’t want my taxes to pay for some dosser to take ‘media studies’ or some other equally useful subject.
At night, it’s properly cold. Am wearing my jumper on top of the three layers.
Miguel introduces the rest of the team – Isidro the cook, Jorge the assistant cook, head porter and seven other porters. Before certain regulations were introduced recently, there were fewer porters, each carrying way more weight, and I’ve heard stories of them eating leftovers and not having anywhere warm to sleep. Miguel tells me that there are still no regulations on the other trails – Salcantay, Vilcabamba, etc., and there are companies which get away with treating their porters badly, and they put up with it, because if they won’t work, other people will work under those conditions in their place. Am keeping an eagle eye on both our team and the other teams which pass us for any sign of abuse.
I let the rest of my group pass me when we start out. Am grateful to Miguel for not insisting that we walk as a group. He tells us to take our time and walk at our own pace, meeting either at the second water stop, or up at the pass if it’s getting too cold at the water stop.
The first part is a dirt path along a gentle slope, amidst lush vegetation. In spite of the morning cold, I’m wet through with sweat almost instantly, and constantly out of breath in spite of the gentle incline. Uphill hikes are not my forte. I’m not very fit, and find myself walking up to the nearest bend in the path, stopping to catch my breath, wheezing like a broken bellows, and then setting off again for the next bend. I know that it’s poor technique, that it’s best to pace yourself, to walk slowly but constantly, but in this case, it’s getting up to that pass by any means possible. What I lack in fitness, I make up for in grim determination. The good thing is that I am ‘the average hiker’, so I time myself between stops in order to record in the guidebook how long each section should take.
A large Peru Treks group walks by. They stop, and a deeply tanned, bearded guy comes over to me, grinning. I don’t recognise him at first, and wonder who the hell he is, when it turns out that it’s Tim from the jungle. Looks like he’s regained the power of speech. He greets me and chats to me as if the days of silence never happened.
They’re all carrying their own gear, and at least half of their group is going faster than me. I’m not that bothered, knowing that I’m a lot faster on the downhill, provided my knees don’t play up. What does concern me is that Miguel said that it should take around an hour to get to the first water stop, then another two to get to the next one, and another couple of hours to get to the pass. I reach a clearing packed with campers after forty minutes or so, find the rest of my group there, rest for a few minutes and press on, partly because I get cold very very quickly, my sweaty t-shirt turning to ice, and partly because I believe that I’m yet to reach the first water stop of Ayapata.
An hour later, wheezing and gasping my way up a mixture of stone steps, steep bends, and dirt path winding through mossy forest, past a stream, I still haven’t reached it. Am thinking how demoralising it will be if it takes me two hours to do an estimated one-hour hike. Just think how long it will then take me to get to the pass! Since Miguel informed me that there’s going to be another strike on the 17th, meaning that I have one day less in Cusco, I still haven’t given up hope of talking the rest of group into doing the hike in three days and getting to Aguas Calientes on the night of the third day – which would mean extra walking today, and with me being the weakest member of the team, that’ll be a challenge and a half.
Two hours after setting out, I come out at the Llulluchapampa campsite, the one that was supposed to take three hours. I’m actually faster than average! Immense relief. Once again, I only stay long enough to look down into valley below, now coloured by the rays of the rising sun, before the cold induces me to press on.
After a little while, the forest gives way to the exposed, sunny slope. I can see numerous backpackers inching up it in single file. Porters pass the hikers, slowly but without stopping, carrying large loads. They have none of our technical gear and are wearing old sandals, but that doesn’t seem to hinder them. I keep setting myself short-term goals: that rock over there, that bush beyond that, and make my way up.
Miguel finally catches up with me, sees me chewing coca leaves and offers me some llipta (the stuff that activates the coca leaves – compressed ashes, in this case). He chips off a little bit, tells me stick it in the middle of coca leaves, and I stuff a handful under my cheek. I keep chewing as I plod on, and maybe it’s the juices, maybe it’s partly physical and partly psychological, but going up does seem to become easier. I keep putting new leaves under my cheek as the existing ones diminish. Half of my mouth and my tongue have gone numb; Miguel says that that always happens to first-timers. When I spit out the green mush, I discover that I’m missing a filling. Must’ve chomped down on the llipta a bit too hard.
Make it to the top in three hours, forty five minutes! A cold mist is creeping down. People are having their photos taken with the valley behind them, holding up scribbled signs: Dead Woman’s Peak, 4,215m. Amy tells me that Tim the weird American’s been inciting other members of his group to scramble up the little peaks above the pass. He just can’t keep still.
Miguel tells us that we need to make a decision: camp at Pacaymayo campsite, as originally planned, or press on and try to make it in three days. My group’s not keen. As Amy explains, the Inca Trail has been the whole point of their trip to Peru; they’ve spent a lot of money, changing their plane tickets in order to stay the extra day, and they’d like to spend as much time as possible on the trail, instead of Aguas Calientes. As for me, I’d like to press on, partly to have more time at Machu Picchu, and partly to save a day and complete all my research. I ask Miguel if it’s possible for the guys to camp on the last night, and for me to go on to Aguas Calientes, and he tells me that it’s not allowed, that the permit is given for a specific group, that the group has to stay together. I acquiesce.
The way down is easier. Steep stone steps descend into the mist of the valley on the other side of the pass, and I go down quickly, zigzagging, using my hiking poles. The porters pretty much run down the steps. I remember myself, aged seventeen, when holidaying with my best friend in Canada, running full tilt down the side of a hill, leaping crazily over fallen logs, revelling in the fact that my body did exactly what I told it, and knowing even then that it wouldn’t last forever. Compared to the agile, sure-footed porters, I’m a real klutz.
Beat the others to the campsite. From there, we can see tomorrow’s trail climb steeply up the densely forested mountain and disappear. Tomorrow’s the last pass, only 300m higher than we are now, compared to the 1,200m climb of today, but it looks a lot higher than 300m. The Pacamayu stream runs right past Miguel’s tent. Mine is slightly slower down the slope from the others, to protect them from my snoring.
Read “Dark Shadows Falling” by Joe Simpson, of “Touching the Void” fame; he’s the climber who dragged himself to safety with a badly shattered knee after his partner was forced to cut the rope and leave him for dead. He talks about the 1996 Everest disaster, documented by fellow climber Jon Krakauer, in which many people died due to overcrowding and incompetence, combined with a killer storm. He’s making the point that Everest is now a playground of the rich, as opposed to that of elite climbers; if you can afford to spend $70,000, it doesn’t matter if you don’t have experience; you get guided up the mountain and the sherpas set up your camp for you. Simpson disapproves. I think I do, as well.
Over dinner, I express amazement that Mark and Jared have to do their own taxes; back home, only freelancers have to do that. They grill me about the recent bipartisanship displayed during the UK elections, and I tell them that while I’d vote for Lib Dems as the lesser of three evils, I wasn’t impressed by Nick Clegg’s populist move of pledging free tuition fees for students. I don’t want my taxes to pay for some dosser to take ‘media studies’ or some other equally useful subject.
At night, it’s properly cold. Am wearing my jumper on top of the three layers.
Day 64 - Inca Trail, day 1.
Picked up at 1am. Driving through the night for what seems like eternity. Bumpy dirt roads. At one point we ford a rather large stream. We stop in Ollanta, in the sacred Valley. “No porters”, Miguel says, deflated. We drive off again. Half-asleep, I crossly think: “That’s it. It’s a complete fiasco. We’re going back to Cusco. Again. I’m just gonna have to give up on the idea of hiking the Inca Trail and take the train to Machu Picchu.” Finally, we stop at a campsite. We seem to be in Ollanta again. Miguel and the cook pile out and tell us that we can stay in the car while they prepare breakfast. It’s 4am. Looks like we’re hiking after all.
We’re the first to reach the Piskacucho checkpoint by the bridge across the Urubamba river – the start of the traditional Inca Trail. Since today is designated ‘training day’ by Miguel, we take it very easy, walking at a very relaxed pace up the gentle incline. Meet numerous locals, many riding bikes. Kids walking to school on the other side of the river. Miguel points out that during the rainy season, the Urubamba was so engorged that it almost reached the railway tracks. There’s still no rail service between Ollanta and Cusco due to the damage done by the landslides. “When the landslides happened, I got stuck in Aguas Calientes with the tourists,” Miguel tells us. The town by Machu Picchu began to run out of food and essential supplies. The tourists were airlifted first, followed by women and children, and the young men like him were left for last. “Machu Picchu was closed for two months. There was no work.”
On one hand, Miguel is dependent on Machu Picchu for his livelihood; on the other hand, he wants to preserve the incredible monument and complains that even though UNESCO have decreed that the site should only be visited by only 1,500 people per day, the Lima authorities have placed no restrictions on the number of daily visitors, meaning you get over 2,000 people trampling over the ruins on any given day.
We stop at a couple of villages along the way. Not impressed with my predecessor’s efforts; they wrote a single paragraph about day one – nothing about trail conditions and half of it about how ‘you’ll be offered chicha (fermented maize beer) everywhere.’ No one’s offered me chicha yet.
The trail climbs steeply up a hill, where there’s a sun shelter. A woman is selling drinks and so is her little daughter. “So, not everyone goes to school,” I comment to Miguel. He asks the little girl why she isn’t at school and she looks askance at her mother. Miguel tells me that, unfortunately, not all parents see the value of even a primary school education; they didn’t go to school and they prefer their kids to help earn money. Even if kids go to school, the classes are taught in Spanish, and not in Quechua, you often get three grades in the same classroom, and to go to high school, kids have to go to big cities – an expense which farmer parents can’t really afford.
I walk in front with Miguel and we chat about his work. His favourite clients are Brits, Americans, Canadians, Australians. The French complain a lot. So do the rich Peruvians. The Israelis want to pay as little as possible. I don’t like Israeli-bashing, but I want to hear exactly what their reputation is. “They want rooms for ten soles – in Cusco. Then they might stay there a week and then run away without paying. Or they might say that they’ve had something stolen, and argue about the price.” Okay, so they’re penny pinchers, but they’re certainly not the only ones. And maybe if they’re staying in really cheap digs, maybe they do get stuff stolen, and most people would complain about that.
An idea is forming in my head. Guidebooks can wield enormous power, right? So what if I were to somehow harness the power of the penny pinchers and use it to bring about social change…I’ve written earlier about tax dodging in Peru – how many businesses don’t present customers with a proper receipt. If word were to get out to the penny pinchers that they don’t have to pay for anything that’s not presented as a proper ‘boleto de venta’ or a ‘factura’, they’d love that. They’ll just walk out without paying and soon enough, businesses catering too gringos will be forced to do everything above board. Taxes will get paid, and maybe social conditions for the most deprived will improve.
We’re looking down from the viewpoint. At the bottom of the mountain are the spectacular terraced Inca ruins of Patallaqta – a fortress. Miguel explains the history. He talks for too long. When he lets us loose, I speed off downhill, enjoying the silence, the sun, the spectacular colours of the mountains. We’ve been passed by several groups which are doing the Inca Trail in three days due to the strike; they have no time to linger and enjoy the scenery.
The last part of the hike runs along a gentle incline along the Cusichaca stream. The bushed around us provide little shade and walking briskly in the midday sun at an increasing altitude is taking its toll. I’m gasping for breath and have to give up my place in the front; it’s clear that Amy, Jared and Mark are way fitter than me.
Still, when we get to Wallyabamba, our lunch spot, I’m keen to carry on afterwards for another couple of hours so that we have less far to go tomorrow. Miguel’s unable to get permission from the rangers to camp higher up, so we’re staying put for the rest of the day.
The porters have erected the kitchen tent. Our lunch is a three-course meal which includes guacamole and meat in a fancy fruity sauce. This is gourmet compared to other camp food I’ve eaten. I certainly didn’t expect two three-course meals per day.
The whole area is divided into several campsites, with a family looking after each one. Roosters wander among our tents. There are no showers (though I see a porter bathe in the stream) and the toilet is the worst I’ve seen so far – a squatter loo which is a hole in the ground. The floor is covered with mostly mud, we hope, and it looks like it was last visited by someone with severe diarrhoea and really poor aim. The bugger failed to figure out that you have to manually flush the loo using the buckets of water outside the door. Grim.
There’s nothing to do before dinner but read, snooze, stretch sore muscles, and have a wander up to the little Inca ruin a short uphill walk away. I get out of breath even doing that, and wonder how I’ll survive the toughest part of the hike tomorrow – the climb to Dead Woman’s Pass. Mark’s asleep on the grass at the fortress. The porters are playing a lively game of football. I’m impressed; they all seemed to be carrying way too much, though Miguel’s assured me that maybe the bags just look big.
Early night because we have a 5.30am start the next day. Sleep very well – almost too warm in my triple cocoon of sleeping bag, fleece liner and silk liner inside the fleece one.
We’re the first to reach the Piskacucho checkpoint by the bridge across the Urubamba river – the start of the traditional Inca Trail. Since today is designated ‘training day’ by Miguel, we take it very easy, walking at a very relaxed pace up the gentle incline. Meet numerous locals, many riding bikes. Kids walking to school on the other side of the river. Miguel points out that during the rainy season, the Urubamba was so engorged that it almost reached the railway tracks. There’s still no rail service between Ollanta and Cusco due to the damage done by the landslides. “When the landslides happened, I got stuck in Aguas Calientes with the tourists,” Miguel tells us. The town by Machu Picchu began to run out of food and essential supplies. The tourists were airlifted first, followed by women and children, and the young men like him were left for last. “Machu Picchu was closed for two months. There was no work.”
On one hand, Miguel is dependent on Machu Picchu for his livelihood; on the other hand, he wants to preserve the incredible monument and complains that even though UNESCO have decreed that the site should only be visited by only 1,500 people per day, the Lima authorities have placed no restrictions on the number of daily visitors, meaning you get over 2,000 people trampling over the ruins on any given day.
We stop at a couple of villages along the way. Not impressed with my predecessor’s efforts; they wrote a single paragraph about day one – nothing about trail conditions and half of it about how ‘you’ll be offered chicha (fermented maize beer) everywhere.’ No one’s offered me chicha yet.
The trail climbs steeply up a hill, where there’s a sun shelter. A woman is selling drinks and so is her little daughter. “So, not everyone goes to school,” I comment to Miguel. He asks the little girl why she isn’t at school and she looks askance at her mother. Miguel tells me that, unfortunately, not all parents see the value of even a primary school education; they didn’t go to school and they prefer their kids to help earn money. Even if kids go to school, the classes are taught in Spanish, and not in Quechua, you often get three grades in the same classroom, and to go to high school, kids have to go to big cities – an expense which farmer parents can’t really afford.
I walk in front with Miguel and we chat about his work. His favourite clients are Brits, Americans, Canadians, Australians. The French complain a lot. So do the rich Peruvians. The Israelis want to pay as little as possible. I don’t like Israeli-bashing, but I want to hear exactly what their reputation is. “They want rooms for ten soles – in Cusco. Then they might stay there a week and then run away without paying. Or they might say that they’ve had something stolen, and argue about the price.” Okay, so they’re penny pinchers, but they’re certainly not the only ones. And maybe if they’re staying in really cheap digs, maybe they do get stuff stolen, and most people would complain about that.
An idea is forming in my head. Guidebooks can wield enormous power, right? So what if I were to somehow harness the power of the penny pinchers and use it to bring about social change…I’ve written earlier about tax dodging in Peru – how many businesses don’t present customers with a proper receipt. If word were to get out to the penny pinchers that they don’t have to pay for anything that’s not presented as a proper ‘boleto de venta’ or a ‘factura’, they’d love that. They’ll just walk out without paying and soon enough, businesses catering too gringos will be forced to do everything above board. Taxes will get paid, and maybe social conditions for the most deprived will improve.
We’re looking down from the viewpoint. At the bottom of the mountain are the spectacular terraced Inca ruins of Patallaqta – a fortress. Miguel explains the history. He talks for too long. When he lets us loose, I speed off downhill, enjoying the silence, the sun, the spectacular colours of the mountains. We’ve been passed by several groups which are doing the Inca Trail in three days due to the strike; they have no time to linger and enjoy the scenery.
The last part of the hike runs along a gentle incline along the Cusichaca stream. The bushed around us provide little shade and walking briskly in the midday sun at an increasing altitude is taking its toll. I’m gasping for breath and have to give up my place in the front; it’s clear that Amy, Jared and Mark are way fitter than me.
Still, when we get to Wallyabamba, our lunch spot, I’m keen to carry on afterwards for another couple of hours so that we have less far to go tomorrow. Miguel’s unable to get permission from the rangers to camp higher up, so we’re staying put for the rest of the day.
The porters have erected the kitchen tent. Our lunch is a three-course meal which includes guacamole and meat in a fancy fruity sauce. This is gourmet compared to other camp food I’ve eaten. I certainly didn’t expect two three-course meals per day.
The whole area is divided into several campsites, with a family looking after each one. Roosters wander among our tents. There are no showers (though I see a porter bathe in the stream) and the toilet is the worst I’ve seen so far – a squatter loo which is a hole in the ground. The floor is covered with mostly mud, we hope, and it looks like it was last visited by someone with severe diarrhoea and really poor aim. The bugger failed to figure out that you have to manually flush the loo using the buckets of water outside the door. Grim.
There’s nothing to do before dinner but read, snooze, stretch sore muscles, and have a wander up to the little Inca ruin a short uphill walk away. I get out of breath even doing that, and wonder how I’ll survive the toughest part of the hike tomorrow – the climb to Dead Woman’s Pass. Mark’s asleep on the grass at the fortress. The porters are playing a lively game of football. I’m impressed; they all seemed to be carrying way too much, though Miguel’s assured me that maybe the bags just look big.
Early night because we have a 5.30am start the next day. Sleep very well – almost too warm in my triple cocoon of sleeping bag, fleece liner and silk liner inside the fleece one.
Wednesday 9 June 2010
Days 62 & 63 - the Inca Trail fiasco.
Am awoken by a terrific racket just after 6am; it sounds like someone’s trying to break down my door. When I open my eyes, the big white cat is in the room and I have no idea how he got in. My room at the Casa de la Gringa is a quirky little hole atop a tall ladder; mind you, there’s a gap above the door that a cat could just about squeeze through…
The cat decides to join me in bed and lies on my stomach, purring. So much for sleeping in.
Have a morning Inca Trail briefing at the Q’ente office. There are three other people there – all my age and all American. Apparently, we were supposed to be joined by two more people, but when they found out that it’s a 5am departure on the first day, they cancelled their booking. Fruit loops. Our guide is late. Almost an hour late, in fact, and I pace the room and fidget.
The two people manning the desk are pretty useless; it shouldn’t take two of them to deal with one customer. When it’s finally my turn to pay for the extras – my own porter, a single supplement for having my own tent, and upgrade to the Vistadome train – it turns out that the boss won’t accept my South American Explorers club card (5%) discount). Given that it would’ve meant a discount of $4 and considering that I should’ve gotten the single supplement for free anyway, since they can’t make you share with a stranger of the opposite gender, I’m not impressed. He’s getting an ad worth £500 for a trip worth $390. Miser.
When Miguel the guide arrives, we go over the map of the Inca Trail, and he tells us how many hours we’ll be walking each day, where we’ll be sleeping, what we need to bring... Dismayed to find that drinking water is not included for the first two days, and that we have to provide our own. By the time the briefing is finished, it’s almost lunchtime.
Check out the contemporary art museum on the Plaza Regocijo. It’s one of the places that you need the boleto turistico for (the all-encompassing tourist ticket that covers all the important Inca ruins; they throw in a few forgettable city attractions as well). The museum is hit-and-miss; one hall’s devoted entirely to one local guy, and all his paintings look the same; none of them grab me. The second hall is better: psychedelic representations of llamas; haunting, metallic faces; a painting of an ukuko at the Ausangate festival…
I’ve sufficiently recovered from jungle belly to go and haunt Cicciolina and gorge myself on their imaginative
tapas (battered prawns with roast sweet potato and wasabi mayo gets my vote) and tiradito – the Peruvian version of sashimi (better than sashimi, in my opinion).
Off to the market to find items needs for the expedition. It’s great – musty, full of funny smells, fruit and sugar cane stalks piled high, herbal potions and assorted jungle medicine for sale, dried out llama foetuses to bury under your new house for good luck, colourful ponchos, necklaces made of seeds, bags of coca leaves, juice stalls, insalubrious little eateries, hunks of browning meat attracting flies…
I’m soon the proud owner of a bag of coca leaves (the woman didn’t have the thing that you put under your cheek for maximum energy, though), a kilo of passion fruit, a baseball cap declaring that Che Guevara lives (I left my favourite hat on the bus from Manu), and a bunch of llama toenails tied together with colourful string (possibly used for decoration or possibly as a rattle).
Am driven nuts by the intermittent wi-fi connection at the Casa, so spend time at the SAE clubhouse trying to make arrangements for later on in the trip.
Print, sign and scan my Lonely Planet contract and email it to the commissioning editor. On Choquechaka I stumble across Prasada - a vegetarian hole-in-the-wall and before I know it, I’m eating falafel perched on a stool next to pierced and dreadlocked types. Why is it that vegetarianism and saving the planet often goes with matted hair and reggae beats? The falafel’s good, though, and so is the homemade ají and something resembling raita. The American girl next to me proceeds to educate me about the different Inca trails she’s done.
Am having a nap when one of the Casa’s staff knock on my door. It seems we’re leaving at 1am, not 5am. Why??? Something about trouble with trains. Don’t manage to sleep at all before I get picked up. Miguel informs us that there’s a strike and that they’re blocking all the roads out of Cusco. I snooze. Wake up to find that we’ve been returned to Cusco because all the roads are already blocked. Quite happy to return to bed.
Another meeting at the Q’ente office at 9am. It’s not clear how long the strike will last; it may be over by tonight, or it might not. Q’ente need to verify that our trekking permits can be changed to the next day. The Americans have to fly home on Saturday, so they have to find out whether they can change their tickets; otherwise it’s the three-day option, which compressed three days’ hiking into two – ten one day, fifteen the next, all at an altitude. That doesn’t sound terribly enjoyable.
We agree to meet again at 3pm when all options have been considered.
I really shouldn’t have gone for Bread & Breakfast at Cicciolina - not because their gourmet breakfasts are not good, but because it’s a wasted meal; regardless of whether I eat breakfast or not, I’m always hungry by lunchtime anyway.
Very productive morning. I visit the Pre-Columbian art museum, with its fine collection of Nazca and Mochica pottery, ornately carved Mochica ceremonial staffs, small stone carved llamas, and other Inca crafts. Then it’s the Inca museum, with more pre-Inca pottery (the animal representations are particularly good), dioramas of traditional Andean life, miniature pottery and tiny metal llamas, to be buried with important bodies as offerings to the gods…You’ll be surprised to know that the most compelling exhibits for me were the trepanned and ritually deformed skulls, and the superb collection of mummies – all placed in a ‘homely’ setting, eerily lit by red light: a baby mummy seems to be looking up at the adult mummy, and another adult mummy is for some reason sticking its head out of an oversized clay pot, bit enough to hold a human.
Outside in the courtyard, indigenous women are weaving colourful cloths using traditional equipment. The crafts on sale are of excellent quality, but I remind myself that I have absolutely no room in my luggage.
After these two museums, the Museo Histórico Regional is overkill; it also showcases pre-Columbian arrowheads and pottery shards but it does also display Inca weapons and has an excellent section on Inca jewellery and offerings to the gods. I breeze through the post-colonial painting section; I’m afraid that the chubby cherubs, the gaunt Jesuses and the pious-looking saints all look the same to me. Am struck by the savagery of Spanish conquest – they completely ignored the complex art and local culture and completely ravaged the place – stealing all the gold and melting it down, and having Tupac Amaru publicly drawn and quartered when he refused to reveal the whereabouts of the legendary ‘city of gold’. Europe, the centre of civilisation, my hind foot.
At 3pm, we find ourselves sitting around for an hour (again). The Americans can change their tickets, if need be, and they’d prefer to do the trail in four days. I waver, having been told that it’s perfectly doable in three, because it means losing time on the way back (I lose my Vistadome ticket and have to take the 9.30pm departure from Aguas Calientes), which means I have no time to see Ollantaytambo that day, and so on, but at the same time, I do want to enjoy the Inca trail rather than have to death march it.
I shamefacedly admit that I’m drawn to the golden arches in the main square. I happen to have a craving for French fries. There’s a whole bunch of gringos there, many on their Apple macs. I refuse to believe that so many people need them for work. Welcome to the digital age, when one can’t travel to Peru without popping to the local McDonalds to check one’s email.
I redeem myself somewhat by stopping at my favourite antichucho stall. I figure that when you have your favourite heart kebab place, that’s when you practically count as a local.
Now it’s a question of waiting and waiting. I’ve just been told that we’re going to leave at 1am again, so it may be a repeat of this morning…
The cat decides to join me in bed and lies on my stomach, purring. So much for sleeping in.
Have a morning Inca Trail briefing at the Q’ente office. There are three other people there – all my age and all American. Apparently, we were supposed to be joined by two more people, but when they found out that it’s a 5am departure on the first day, they cancelled their booking. Fruit loops. Our guide is late. Almost an hour late, in fact, and I pace the room and fidget.
The two people manning the desk are pretty useless; it shouldn’t take two of them to deal with one customer. When it’s finally my turn to pay for the extras – my own porter, a single supplement for having my own tent, and upgrade to the Vistadome train – it turns out that the boss won’t accept my South American Explorers club card (5%) discount). Given that it would’ve meant a discount of $4 and considering that I should’ve gotten the single supplement for free anyway, since they can’t make you share with a stranger of the opposite gender, I’m not impressed. He’s getting an ad worth £500 for a trip worth $390. Miser.
When Miguel the guide arrives, we go over the map of the Inca Trail, and he tells us how many hours we’ll be walking each day, where we’ll be sleeping, what we need to bring... Dismayed to find that drinking water is not included for the first two days, and that we have to provide our own. By the time the briefing is finished, it’s almost lunchtime.
Check out the contemporary art museum on the Plaza Regocijo. It’s one of the places that you need the boleto turistico for (the all-encompassing tourist ticket that covers all the important Inca ruins; they throw in a few forgettable city attractions as well). The museum is hit-and-miss; one hall’s devoted entirely to one local guy, and all his paintings look the same; none of them grab me. The second hall is better: psychedelic representations of llamas; haunting, metallic faces; a painting of an ukuko at the Ausangate festival…
I’ve sufficiently recovered from jungle belly to go and haunt Cicciolina and gorge myself on their imaginative
tapas (battered prawns with roast sweet potato and wasabi mayo gets my vote) and tiradito – the Peruvian version of sashimi (better than sashimi, in my opinion).
Off to the market to find items needs for the expedition. It’s great – musty, full of funny smells, fruit and sugar cane stalks piled high, herbal potions and assorted jungle medicine for sale, dried out llama foetuses to bury under your new house for good luck, colourful ponchos, necklaces made of seeds, bags of coca leaves, juice stalls, insalubrious little eateries, hunks of browning meat attracting flies…
I’m soon the proud owner of a bag of coca leaves (the woman didn’t have the thing that you put under your cheek for maximum energy, though), a kilo of passion fruit, a baseball cap declaring that Che Guevara lives (I left my favourite hat on the bus from Manu), and a bunch of llama toenails tied together with colourful string (possibly used for decoration or possibly as a rattle).
Am driven nuts by the intermittent wi-fi connection at the Casa, so spend time at the SAE clubhouse trying to make arrangements for later on in the trip.
Print, sign and scan my Lonely Planet contract and email it to the commissioning editor. On Choquechaka I stumble across Prasada - a vegetarian hole-in-the-wall and before I know it, I’m eating falafel perched on a stool next to pierced and dreadlocked types. Why is it that vegetarianism and saving the planet often goes with matted hair and reggae beats? The falafel’s good, though, and so is the homemade ají and something resembling raita. The American girl next to me proceeds to educate me about the different Inca trails she’s done.
Am having a nap when one of the Casa’s staff knock on my door. It seems we’re leaving at 1am, not 5am. Why??? Something about trouble with trains. Don’t manage to sleep at all before I get picked up. Miguel informs us that there’s a strike and that they’re blocking all the roads out of Cusco. I snooze. Wake up to find that we’ve been returned to Cusco because all the roads are already blocked. Quite happy to return to bed.
Another meeting at the Q’ente office at 9am. It’s not clear how long the strike will last; it may be over by tonight, or it might not. Q’ente need to verify that our trekking permits can be changed to the next day. The Americans have to fly home on Saturday, so they have to find out whether they can change their tickets; otherwise it’s the three-day option, which compressed three days’ hiking into two – ten one day, fifteen the next, all at an altitude. That doesn’t sound terribly enjoyable.
We agree to meet again at 3pm when all options have been considered.
I really shouldn’t have gone for Bread & Breakfast at Cicciolina - not because their gourmet breakfasts are not good, but because it’s a wasted meal; regardless of whether I eat breakfast or not, I’m always hungry by lunchtime anyway.
Very productive morning. I visit the Pre-Columbian art museum, with its fine collection of Nazca and Mochica pottery, ornately carved Mochica ceremonial staffs, small stone carved llamas, and other Inca crafts. Then it’s the Inca museum, with more pre-Inca pottery (the animal representations are particularly good), dioramas of traditional Andean life, miniature pottery and tiny metal llamas, to be buried with important bodies as offerings to the gods…You’ll be surprised to know that the most compelling exhibits for me were the trepanned and ritually deformed skulls, and the superb collection of mummies – all placed in a ‘homely’ setting, eerily lit by red light: a baby mummy seems to be looking up at the adult mummy, and another adult mummy is for some reason sticking its head out of an oversized clay pot, bit enough to hold a human.
Outside in the courtyard, indigenous women are weaving colourful cloths using traditional equipment. The crafts on sale are of excellent quality, but I remind myself that I have absolutely no room in my luggage.
After these two museums, the Museo Histórico Regional is overkill; it also showcases pre-Columbian arrowheads and pottery shards but it does also display Inca weapons and has an excellent section on Inca jewellery and offerings to the gods. I breeze through the post-colonial painting section; I’m afraid that the chubby cherubs, the gaunt Jesuses and the pious-looking saints all look the same to me. Am struck by the savagery of Spanish conquest – they completely ignored the complex art and local culture and completely ravaged the place – stealing all the gold and melting it down, and having Tupac Amaru publicly drawn and quartered when he refused to reveal the whereabouts of the legendary ‘city of gold’. Europe, the centre of civilisation, my hind foot.
At 3pm, we find ourselves sitting around for an hour (again). The Americans can change their tickets, if need be, and they’d prefer to do the trail in four days. I waver, having been told that it’s perfectly doable in three, because it means losing time on the way back (I lose my Vistadome ticket and have to take the 9.30pm departure from Aguas Calientes), which means I have no time to see Ollantaytambo that day, and so on, but at the same time, I do want to enjoy the Inca trail rather than have to death march it.
I shamefacedly admit that I’m drawn to the golden arches in the main square. I happen to have a craving for French fries. There’s a whole bunch of gringos there, many on their Apple macs. I refuse to believe that so many people need them for work. Welcome to the digital age, when one can’t travel to Peru without popping to the local McDonalds to check one’s email.
I redeem myself somewhat by stopping at my favourite antichucho stall. I figure that when you have your favourite heart kebab place, that’s when you practically count as a local.
Now it’s a question of waiting and waiting. I’ve just been told that we’re going to leave at 1am again, so it may be a repeat of this morning…
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