Cusco wasn’t built for modernity. But, like any older city, that has not stopped it from eating it up: chewing, swallowing and digesting some confused mixture of narrow cobbled streets and 50-seat luxury tourist busses, Incan stonewalls housing McDonalds’ selling Inca Cola Lite and McPollos. It is vast and expansive, divided into lots of different barrios (neighborhoods) that, just like in New York, have different connotations and stories to go along with them. I live in Santa Ursula, a quiet, middle class neighborhood, about a ten-minute taxi ride or 20-minute combi ride from the center of the city.
But the part that I’ve recently found most interesting it the Plaza de Armas, which is the tourist center and oldest part of the city. From there you can see the Andes tumbling around you on all sides, and, because of the way it’s laid out—with two huge churches towering over the square and the rest adjoining two story buildings running the length of all sides, and very small side streets leading away from it as if they’re almost just barely escaping—you feel almost trapped. Outside this idyllic snow globe scene it looks like someone has just spilled civilization all around you, because the pattern of development that is built into the sides of the mountains is so random: large swaths of green cut into expanses of streetlights and red-roofed houses, and you can see streets abruptly ending for no reason. But the view from the second floor balcony of the restaurant doesn’t allow for much thought other than how lucky you are to be sitting there.
The Plaza de Armas is so beautiful that is almost doesn’t seem real. There is no trash anywhere, and armed policemen are dissipated all around so as to assure that nothing gets too stirred up in this tourist nerve center. (I was sitting on the steps of the square’s overpowering and awe inspiring Cathedral one day drinking a soda, and a trash collector dressed in a blue uniform wearing a painters mask over her mouth came up to me with a plastic bag and motioned for me to throw my cup away. I hadn’t even finished yet! It reminded me of the October at Columbia, where they actually hire people to sweep up the leaves that blanket College Walk.) In the middle of the square lies a huge fountain, green marble and decorated with white relief sculpture, and four bronze mermaid sculptures at the base. It is surrounded by slate paths that cut into the gardens teeming with flowers that are vibrantly colored and never so much as droop their heads. People sit on the benches watching the children who are trying to sell them finger puppets for one sol, and the artists who just want you to look at their portfolios, and, conveniently, accept both Visa and MasterCard.
Surrounding the central park/garden are two level shops and restaurants, most of which have a second floor balcony that looks out onto the city. The two towering buildings were originally built as churches, and I think both still are used for that purpose, although the larger of the two now doubles as a museum. I have yet to enter into it, but I have peered in and it looks exactly like the kind of beautifully ornate Catholic Church that one would expect in one of the bigger cities in a Latin American country. The other Church I haven’t seen open its doors, save for Sunday, so I’m not sure about the interior. (The exterior, I promise, is quite beautiful.) The shops and restaurants are what one would expect from the kernel of tourism: that is, they’re mostly overpriced alpaca sweater stores and real Incan Gold jewelry shops. It’s an odd scene on an average afternoon, because they sit about 15 or 20 yards back from the street that runs around the square, with a beautiful slate sidewalk separating them. Walk along the sidewalk and you’ll be accosted by small children, no older than 6 or 7, who are belligerently trying to sell you finger puppets, “only un sol, por favor,” or candies. And when I say belligerently, I mean it. They grab you and hit you and skitter away because they expect that, if you originally felt bad for them, the fact that they’ve just hit you means that you’re no longer feeling bad and are just annoyed. (I was walking out of a store the other day, holding a soda, and a boy ran up to me and tried to grab my cup from me. When I protested he tried to reach into the pocket of my jacket, so I just wriggled a bit and began to walk quickly. He was unfazed and moved onto the next person wearing NorthFace.) The Cusqeñans I’ve talked to don’t empathize with the children at all, and just assume that their parents are standing a ways off, either peddling alpaca hats or else hoping that their son or daughter will extract enough sympathy to make a few soles. But whatever you felt when the child tried to reach into your pocket quickly dissipates, as you cross the cobblestone street and walk into the park, looking at all the flowers and happy people, allowing this oasis to seep into their pores for just a second more.
The sterility and cleanliness of it surely doesn’t take anything away from the beauty of the Plaza, but just prompts you to think for a second about the disparity between this oasis and the rest of the city. Maybe that’s why it’s nice to go there when you have the luxury, like I do, of living in a different, non-tourist part of the city. Are Santa Ursula or Wanchaq, two neighborhoods with working class Cusqeñans, any more authentic than the Plaza de Armas? In one way, of course they are. (And, how am I defining that word, authentic, anyway?) They are the reality of living in the city, and don’t provide the frills of instant trash collection or police eager to pounce on anyone who dares to stir up anything that even closely resembles trouble, with a capital T. They are where the people who are selling the paintings go at the end of the night, when all the tourists have gone into their hotels or are eating Italian food.
But in another way, it is just a different reality, one that is sometimes hard for gringos like me to swallow. Tourism is a huge part of the Cusqeñan economy, and the Plaza de Armas is the reality of the need to exploit it, expressly so they can go back to Santa Ursula and put food on their table. I don’t judge my host brother Fernando, a salesman for a line of dietary supplements called HerbaLife, for trying to sell a healthier lifestyle to people; why should I judge the woman in the plaza who, wearing brightly colored “indigenous” style clothes, try to charge me one sol to take a picture of her and her alpaca that she leads on a string? She is only trying to sell me an image of Cusco, just like Fernando is trying to sell me an image of a vitamin filled life.
In one of the classes I’m taking we have talked a lot about conscientious tourism, and what it means to be a mindful visitor. It is uncomfortable to watch people dressing themselves up for you, selling their culture to you for 30 cents. Maybe it’s because I’m just more accustomed, but I actually prefer the belligerent man who stands outside the Chipotle on Broadway between 110th and 111th streets, asking if “someone can help me get something for dinner tonight,” to the Quechua speaking woman who wants me to take a picture with her. But then, who am I to feel bad for her, if she is making her choice to make her living that way? A bit of neocolonialist guilt, I suppose.
Well, I clearly don’t have any answers. I am hoping a few more trips to the Plaza de Armas, and a few more discussions with taxi drivers will help me figure it out. For now, just an indulgent blog post.
And now, to bed.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Saturday, February 14, 2009
I first met Ursula last Tuesday when we were staying in Urubamba. She came to give us each an oral exam that would place us in our respective Spanish classes, and my first words to her were, “antes del examen querría decir, lo siento,” which, (very) roughly translated means, “before this exam I would just like to say, I’m sorry.” She only laughed and assured me that it would be easy and that I would be fine. It turned out to be true: I didn’t get struck by lightening or eaten by an alpaca during the ten minute exam, and I left feeling like maybe I could actually speak some permutation of the Spanish that fluent speakers could understand. I’m sure I wouldn’t have felt that way without Ursula’s interjected bits of laughter when I tried to make jokes, which were frequent because I wanted to do all I could to detract the attention from my Spanish. She and her friend (also a Spanish teacher for our group) left after giving us exams, and all of us who came back from our tests saying something to the effect of, “wow she was so nice, I really hope she’s my teacher!”
The next day, though, was our trip to Machu Picchu, so the 15 of us quickly forgot all about the kindness of Ursula and Viviana, turning our minds instead to the massive Incan ruins and to our impending meeting with our homestay families and to our return to Cusco.
Monday, we remembered again. Ursula, as it turned out, was teaching my Spanish class and was ever patient with our misconjugations and incorrect pronunciation. Like all good language teachers I know—and, after taking seven years of Spanish and befriending a French teacher it’s more than a few—she was both kind and understanding, pushing us to speak correctly and slowly, and only very subtly registering her confusion as she tried to decode what we said.
Two days ago I was coming home from the internet café in my neighborhood, carrying my computer which had almost no battery life left in it. I went into my room, where I had been charging my computer for the past week, to plug it in but much to my chagrin the green light didn’t go on and it didn’t register a charge. “Okay,” I thought, “maybe it’s the outlet. But, after trying the charger in each of the 4 outlets in my room and in the dining room, I began to think that it was maybe my charger. I was on the phone with Dad, and, as is typical for me, I got incredibly frustrated and began swearing and let the problem take over. (I have very little patience when things don’t work like they should, but it’s something I need to work on because there is absolutely no use in living like everything is the most important thing.) The next morning when I got to school I again tried my charger in the outlets there, thinking that maybe some spirit had vexed my house in the night, rendering all the outlets useless.
I was beginning to consider my options for getting a new one—as it was I had about 32 minutes of life left before the computer would be dead as a doornail. There is one Apple store in Peru—they’re not so popular here, and I was about to find out why—and it’s in Lima. I walked into class and asked Ursula if she wouldn’t mind helping me call the store after class, to see if they could send me one and how much it would cost. “Por supeuesto, of course” she answered, as if it wasn’t even a question that needed asking. At 12:00, with cell phone and notebook in hand, so she could write down what the person at the story was saying, she came with me into the courtyard an made the call. Turns out that the reason people don’t like Apple products here is because they are exceedingly expensive (not much different than in the U.S.); for a new charger it was going to cost 689 soles, about $225, and more than most people here make in a month.
Ursula had a different idea. She hung up the phone and said that she had a friend that worked at a computer store and would I like to go there and see if he could fix it, or if he knew someone who could? “Ahh, muchas gracias sí, si es ok.” After spending 3 hours listening to me battle the imperfect and preterit tenses, Ursula was willing to walk with me to computer store to help me work out my relatively miniscule problem. As it turned out, she was not only willing to walk with me there, but also to stand there with me and translate while I tried to groped for words like “outlet,” “blue spark” and “voltage.” The man took the charger and told me to come back at 7:30.
As we walked out of the store, around 1:15, she asked me what I was going to do until 2:30 when I had to be back at school. “I’m not sure, maybe eat a little lunch,” and I asked her if she knew of anyplace to get a salteña, which is very similar to an empanada. She began to give me directions to the best salteñeria in the city, but after a minute decided that she would just take me there herself. We walked up two steps into a small restaurant. I knew she was right about it being the best in the city, because it was filled and I was only one of two gringos. I could also taste that she was right about 10 minutes later, when there was a piping hot pastry sitting in front of me. It was delicious, and certainly the best empanada I’ve ever had. The dough was just a bit sweet, which worked in perfect tandem with it’s savory richness. The filling is a juicy mixture of chicken, onion, ground beef, raisins and a hard boiled egg. When you sprinkle some lime juice on top and some slightly tangy and spicy salsa, the mix of flavors is like a sensory definition of synergy. The coarsely textured and disparate flavor bursts out of the not quite flakey but not quite chewy dough, and makes you feel so lucky to have been shown this secret place that you have the urge to write an ode in the style of Yeats to whoever you brought you there. (Alas, a blog post and journal entry will have to do.)
Ursula kindly sat with me and talked a bit about her self—what she is studying at university (literature), where else she had lived in Peru (Arequipa) and a bit about Peruvian politics (former President Alejandro Toledo, was not actually very popular, even though he was the first indigenous president). She also obliged me by allowing me to show my thanks by paying the 80 cents for her salteña. As we were leaving she leaned to me and gave me her cell phone number, telling me to please call her if I needed anymore help of if there was anything else she could do. I said that I was sure it would be fine, and tried once again to break the language barrier to tell her how much I appreciated her kindness. I think what came out was, “ahh thank you so much for your helpfulness today.” Certainly not as eloquent as if I’d been speaking English, but I hope she could hear my gratitude in my tone of voice, and see it in the way I was standing up a bit straighter, feeling so much better.
She went back to her apartment to study, nearly 2 hours after ending class, and I left to walk around and explore Cusco, listening to George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord.” It fit my jaunty and upbeat mood perfectly, and it is the right song for a hot day in Cusco when you’ve just realized that you’re not alone in a foreign city and that karma really does transcend the language barrier, if words don’t always. I hope I will return Ursula’s favor in kind to someone, but more than that I hope that Ursula gets the favor returned to her, 10-fold or 100-fold or more. She certainly deserves it.
(A side note: I picked up my now functioning computer charger from the store at 7:30 last night.)
And now, to bed.
The next day, though, was our trip to Machu Picchu, so the 15 of us quickly forgot all about the kindness of Ursula and Viviana, turning our minds instead to the massive Incan ruins and to our impending meeting with our homestay families and to our return to Cusco.
Monday, we remembered again. Ursula, as it turned out, was teaching my Spanish class and was ever patient with our misconjugations and incorrect pronunciation. Like all good language teachers I know—and, after taking seven years of Spanish and befriending a French teacher it’s more than a few—she was both kind and understanding, pushing us to speak correctly and slowly, and only very subtly registering her confusion as she tried to decode what we said.
Two days ago I was coming home from the internet café in my neighborhood, carrying my computer which had almost no battery life left in it. I went into my room, where I had been charging my computer for the past week, to plug it in but much to my chagrin the green light didn’t go on and it didn’t register a charge. “Okay,” I thought, “maybe it’s the outlet. But, after trying the charger in each of the 4 outlets in my room and in the dining room, I began to think that it was maybe my charger. I was on the phone with Dad, and, as is typical for me, I got incredibly frustrated and began swearing and let the problem take over. (I have very little patience when things don’t work like they should, but it’s something I need to work on because there is absolutely no use in living like everything is the most important thing.) The next morning when I got to school I again tried my charger in the outlets there, thinking that maybe some spirit had vexed my house in the night, rendering all the outlets useless.
I was beginning to consider my options for getting a new one—as it was I had about 32 minutes of life left before the computer would be dead as a doornail. There is one Apple store in Peru—they’re not so popular here, and I was about to find out why—and it’s in Lima. I walked into class and asked Ursula if she wouldn’t mind helping me call the store after class, to see if they could send me one and how much it would cost. “Por supeuesto, of course” she answered, as if it wasn’t even a question that needed asking. At 12:00, with cell phone and notebook in hand, so she could write down what the person at the story was saying, she came with me into the courtyard an made the call. Turns out that the reason people don’t like Apple products here is because they are exceedingly expensive (not much different than in the U.S.); for a new charger it was going to cost 689 soles, about $225, and more than most people here make in a month.
Ursula had a different idea. She hung up the phone and said that she had a friend that worked at a computer store and would I like to go there and see if he could fix it, or if he knew someone who could? “Ahh, muchas gracias sí, si es ok.” After spending 3 hours listening to me battle the imperfect and preterit tenses, Ursula was willing to walk with me to computer store to help me work out my relatively miniscule problem. As it turned out, she was not only willing to walk with me there, but also to stand there with me and translate while I tried to groped for words like “outlet,” “blue spark” and “voltage.” The man took the charger and told me to come back at 7:30.
As we walked out of the store, around 1:15, she asked me what I was going to do until 2:30 when I had to be back at school. “I’m not sure, maybe eat a little lunch,” and I asked her if she knew of anyplace to get a salteña, which is very similar to an empanada. She began to give me directions to the best salteñeria in the city, but after a minute decided that she would just take me there herself. We walked up two steps into a small restaurant. I knew she was right about it being the best in the city, because it was filled and I was only one of two gringos. I could also taste that she was right about 10 minutes later, when there was a piping hot pastry sitting in front of me. It was delicious, and certainly the best empanada I’ve ever had. The dough was just a bit sweet, which worked in perfect tandem with it’s savory richness. The filling is a juicy mixture of chicken, onion, ground beef, raisins and a hard boiled egg. When you sprinkle some lime juice on top and some slightly tangy and spicy salsa, the mix of flavors is like a sensory definition of synergy. The coarsely textured and disparate flavor bursts out of the not quite flakey but not quite chewy dough, and makes you feel so lucky to have been shown this secret place that you have the urge to write an ode in the style of Yeats to whoever you brought you there. (Alas, a blog post and journal entry will have to do.)
Ursula kindly sat with me and talked a bit about her self—what she is studying at university (literature), where else she had lived in Peru (Arequipa) and a bit about Peruvian politics (former President Alejandro Toledo, was not actually very popular, even though he was the first indigenous president). She also obliged me by allowing me to show my thanks by paying the 80 cents for her salteña. As we were leaving she leaned to me and gave me her cell phone number, telling me to please call her if I needed anymore help of if there was anything else she could do. I said that I was sure it would be fine, and tried once again to break the language barrier to tell her how much I appreciated her kindness. I think what came out was, “ahh thank you so much for your helpfulness today.” Certainly not as eloquent as if I’d been speaking English, but I hope she could hear my gratitude in my tone of voice, and see it in the way I was standing up a bit straighter, feeling so much better.
She went back to her apartment to study, nearly 2 hours after ending class, and I left to walk around and explore Cusco, listening to George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord.” It fit my jaunty and upbeat mood perfectly, and it is the right song for a hot day in Cusco when you’ve just realized that you’re not alone in a foreign city and that karma really does transcend the language barrier, if words don’t always. I hope I will return Ursula’s favor in kind to someone, but more than that I hope that Ursula gets the favor returned to her, 10-fold or 100-fold or more. She certainly deserves it.
(A side note: I picked up my now functioning computer charger from the store at 7:30 last night.)
And now, to bed.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
My plan had been foiled. As I stood at the exit of Terminal H in the Miami Airport, I looked longingly at the first class club that taunted me with its free drinks and bags of mini pretzels. I had to exit the terminal to get my checked suitcase, but without my boarding pass for my next flight I couldn’t get back into the concourse and proudly display my card that would grant me access. “Well,” I thought, “I suppose the rogue Peruvian trip starts now.”
I found my bag and a place to store it, promptly exited the airport and found a taxi. “Take me to your favorite place in Miami, please? I need to be back at the airport at 6:00, so not too far.”
“Ah, yes, I know,” said my Haitian cab driver. “I’ll take you to Mangoes, you can dance and drink and watch the ocean from your table.” It all sounded good to me, and a mere $32 later, I stepped out of my green taxi (who knew, they come in colors other than yellow?!) and onto Ocean Boulevard, the busiest street in South Beach and the only separation between the billions of dollars of real estate that tower up above the sunburned tourists and the Atlantic. The first thing I saw was a two-toned Buick Special, teal and white, regally sitting outside The Avalon hotel. I felt like I had taken a taxi from 2009 to 1957, instead of from the airport to downtown. I walked along the strip, past the hotels and restaurants that boasted 10 pound lobsters and 32 ounce mojitos and crab legs longer than my arm, and thought about my upcoming trip. For now I was feeling okay, and had Mom’s words ringing in my head: Julie, you’re joining the ranks of all the Fillmore’s and Appel’s who have taken trips like this one, and come back richer people. I felt like I was beginning my rite of passage; it was my turn to have stories and I was going to take advantage of it, damnit. The first way I did so was with a mojito and a dolphin sandwich on the porch of the Waldorf Towers, a stucco hotel that looks pretty much the same as the rest of the hotels along the strip. I don’t think I’d ever eaten dolphin before, so I was surprised when I found how much it tastes like swordfish, only a bit creamier and milder. With tartar sauce and lemon and some seasoned French fries, it was the best last American meal I could have hoped for. After I finished my lunch I crossed the street and stepped onto the whitest beach I’d ever seen. It was about 4 o’clock by then, so there were not many people left on the beach; only a few scattered here and there, desperately grabbing at their sun shawls to keep them from blowing away in the wind, which had picked up since I’d crossed the street. I sat down next to a big wooden box that looked like it held beach chairs and stared at the Miami skyline and the larger than life cruise ships that cluttered up the harbor. I just sat for a while, listening to the CD that Eben had made me before I left, and thought about the people who I didn’t even know, that would become my friends in the next 3 ½ months. It’s an odd feeling, like shadows following you around: you can feel their presence but as for their personality or their sense of humor or their hair color, it’s all a mystery. And, after a good bit of that kind of dangerous metaphysical thinking, I got up, dipped my feet in the water, left the beach, and got in a cab back to the airport.
From there, time seemed to slow down and has seemed to move at a snail’s pace until now. (I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing—quite to the contrary I’m getting to experience everything and everyone with a sense of time that I’ve never had before. I’ve only been here for 6 days, but I keep having to remind myself that it’s been that short of a time, as I feel like I’ve been here for about 6 months.)
The group, who by now had sat together in the airport in Miami and Cusco for a combined 5 hours and was beginning to get along like old friends at a reunion, got into Cusco around 11 o’clock on Sunday morning, and was immediately whisked to Urubamba, a small city about an hour outside Cusco best known for it’s position on the PeruRail train to Machu Picchu. The hotel we checked into, Hotel Maizal, was beautiful and peaceful and the perfect place to transition the U.S. to Peru. It is best described as a compound, as it is completely walled in and is a sanctuary unto itself; a respite from the busy street that lies right outside the front gate. There is one big building, divided into 9 sleeping rooms, a separate dining room building with wireless internet and water cooler, and another structure that we used for a classroom. All three buildings lie on probably ¾ of an acre, the rest of which is a beautifully kept lawn complete with a fire pit, a huge bird cage with the loudest parrots I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing, a weeping willow tree, lots of beautiful gardens with odd and beautiful looking flowers, and a babbling brook. (I kid you not—there was literally a small stream running through the middle of the lawn—talk about peaceful!) Oh yeah, and the Andes rise up from the ground on all sides, creating the humbling and literally awesome feeling of living in a huge brown and green basin. The first morning I woke up and walked outside to see the clouds gently hanging low, obscuring the tops of the peaks, as if they were tired and needed a rest from being up so high.
We spent two days in Urubamba, during which we had various seminars on how to stay safe in Cusco and avoid petulant health problems like altitude sickness and Rabies (I surely won’t go near another wild dog ever again), and went on some excursions into surrounding towns.
Then we went to Machu Picchu.
Surprisingly, as we all know how 5:15 in the morning feels and all wish we didn’t, no one said a word about having to wake up at 5:15 to catch our combi (like a bus but less safe—for those of you who have been to Ghana, it’s a lot like a tro tro). After a less than safe combi ride, we boarded PeruRail, which runs from Urubamba to Machu Picchu. As you descend down you can see the vegetation begin to change noticeably, from trees and grass to jungle like vines and thick reeds. Corn doesn’t grow down here—it’s much too densely populated with other plants. As you descend into the valley that will eventually bring you to Machu Picchu, the ride gets slower and slower, because of the abundance of trains coming from the other direction. (They only have 1 track, and only a few spots where trains can pass one another, so whenever another train is approaching you have to stop for as long as it takes for the other train to come chugging by.) Finally you get to the city at the base of the mountain—I’m not sure it has a name, but all I saw was an over-abundance of people selling not-so-cheap novelty items that say “Machu Picchu” on them—and get into an air conditioned bus that will take up to the actual entrance of the park. I’m sure this is designed for American or European (or other rich) tourists—the train ride there is $60, the bus ride up is $14, and entrance to the park is some obscene amount of money (I’m forgetting now). It even costs 1 sol (=Peruvian currency, equal to about 33 cents) to go to the bathroom! But then you enter the park, and you forget how much you spent because you’re overcome with what you’re seeing in front of you: huge green towers above you, and thousands of moss covered rocks, that have been painstakingly fit together over hundreds of thousands of years. The ruins are incredible: they are so vast (like the mountains they are covering) and so intricately built that it’s hard to remember that you’re actually seeing them. You feel like you’re a cut out picture that’s been placed on a National Geographic magazine with the title: Wonders of Peru. The colors don’t vary much when you’re looking at the ruins, because it’s so hard to take them in all at once. I had to take more than a few pictures to remember that they were actually right in front of me. We climbed up into the ruins (you can walk right in to them and walk around, as if you’re taking a tour of an old house), and our guide kept telling us about all the rock formations, and what they meant to the Incas. I just looked around and felt that eerie sensation that I get when I’m looking at Jim Morrison’s pants in the Hard Rock Café, or at Lady Bird’s inauguration gown at the Museum of American History. People actually lived here 600 years ago! I entered into that dangerous metaphysical thought territory again: it’s in places like that where I feel like a dot on the infinite line of humanity, like I’m playing only a bit part in this play that’s been going on for thousands of years and will be going on for thousands more.
After we had taken a tour of the ruins as went down to the base for lunch, and then were free to roam around by ourselves for a few hours. A few friends and I found ourselves on the way up to Intipunku, or “La Puerta del Sol,” the Door of the Sun. It’s a beautiful hike up to the left of Machu Picchu on a trail that eventually will lead all the way back to Cusco. We hiked up it with another American we’d met during lunch, for about 50 minutes, until we reached the top, which was 2,720 meters up. Quite a difficult hike, but worth every minute of it, because I have never seen anything like it before. It kind of felt like when you’re sitting in the Imax at Liberty Science Center, and the movie begins to be shot from the birds-eye-view, except for that you’re actually living it and breathing it. At the top we stopped for about 20 minutes, where we took some typical tourist pictures, and sat and marveled at the view for a while. Then we hiked back down, got back on the bus, got to the train, back to the combi, and ate dinner at our hotel, wondering what we had really just seen.
On Thursday we packed up camp in Urubamba and boarded a luxury bus for Cusco, where we would meet our host families. I grew more and more nervous as we approached the city—sure, my host family would be nice enough, but what if that was it? I started to wonder about the $35 in New York souvenirs I had brought: what if they thought they were tacky? What if they already had 4 Statue of Liberty figurines in their house? What if they only ate tripe and sauerkraut? It turns out my worrying—like so much of it throughout the trip, actually—was all for the naught. My señora is a lovely woman, who is ever accommodating and loves to cook (good fit there!) and wants to teach someone how. She has a son who is a chef (nice match up there, too!) and daughter who works for LAN airlines. There are two girls, 15 and 18, who work in the house all day, and the father of the children who comes at night sometimes. (I’m still not 100% sure about their relationship, but I don’t think it would be the most polite thing to ask about it.) I have a very quaint room all to myself, with a bed, desk and a drawer that locks, so I can keep my finger puppets and pictures in there when I’m not home. I haven’t spent too much time here, though, because on Saturday morning, at 6:30, we boarded another luxury tour bus, this time destined for Lake Titicaca.
The ride, normally six hours, took a bit longer because of all the bathroom stops we made, but by 1:45 we were in Puno, the city that lies at the edge of the highest navigable lake in the world. We boarded a boat to take us to La Isla de los Uros Q’hantati, one in an archipelago of floating islands made from dried reeds that have been packed down, bound, and fastened to the ground so they won’t float away. There are many islands like the one way stayed on, all of which cater to tourists like our group. The island is only about 200 yards long by 100 yards wide, and has about 10 huts (also made of reeds), which we all slept in. There are 8 indigenous people who live there all the time, and are constantly giving people like me the “indigenous experience,” by which I mean that they are serving them trout and quinoa, taking them fishing with nets and letting them dress up in native garb. Being there gave me an odd feeling, somewhat like what I’d imagine living in the “It’s A Small World” Disney World attraction is like. Still it was nice to walk around barefoot on the reeds, and there is nothing like waking up early in the morning and looking out at a lake that is 3,800 meters above sea level. It reminded me of being in Rhode Island during that tiny sliver of time when not even the golfers are out on the golf course and the day is just deciding whether or not it really wants to start. It’s that point of tangency between night and day, and I think the most peaceful stolen piece of time in the entire day.
Around 8 o’clock we boarded our boat back to the Puno, and when we got there we were immediately guided towards La Avenida Bolivar, where the Festividad Virgen de la Candelaria was going on. The week long celebration to honor the Vigren Mary was capped off by today’s festivities that included a parade, music and dancing. The parade consisted of dancing troupes, all dressed up in impossibly bright and ornate costumes marching about 100 yards and then stopping to do an impeccably choreographed dance. I saw dozens of different dancing troupes, all wearing different costumes, ranging from scary Diablo attire to full gorilla-like suits. Neon green, purple and day-glo orange seemed to be the favorite of all the colors, but you literally cannot think of a color that wasn’t represented in some way. Marching bands were interspersed among the groups, and the entire parade had to be at least ½ a mile long or more. Street vendors were selling all kinds of food, none of which I ate because I had been duly warned about it’s safety (although I’m going to have to stop on that “culinary safety kick” if I’m going to have anything interesting to talk about, so stay tuned for interesting stories about food and hopefully no stories about the aftermath), and carnival souvenirs. One man had a pole of cotton candy 15 feet high! I found a spot watching the parade with a few of my friends, and we stood drinking a beer and watching the parade of senses flow by. The parade seemed to be suspended in time and place, an entity all to its own. It was 10 o’clock on Sunday morning, and people were dressed in ridiculously grandiose costumes, marching and dancing in the biggest parade of the year! It was like being in an entity all of its own, that could own fit into a continuum of its own being—the past was only past parades, and the future only next year’s. It couldn’t exist outside Puno either. Something about the buildings, that weren’t old or new but just existent, and the streets that were just wide enough to hold four dancers or tuba players. We were a few minutes late getting back to our bus, because the wall of people was only semi-permeable, but it was worth it if only because I got to put on a gorilla head.
And now, to bed.
I found my bag and a place to store it, promptly exited the airport and found a taxi. “Take me to your favorite place in Miami, please? I need to be back at the airport at 6:00, so not too far.”
“Ah, yes, I know,” said my Haitian cab driver. “I’ll take you to Mangoes, you can dance and drink and watch the ocean from your table.” It all sounded good to me, and a mere $32 later, I stepped out of my green taxi (who knew, they come in colors other than yellow?!) and onto Ocean Boulevard, the busiest street in South Beach and the only separation between the billions of dollars of real estate that tower up above the sunburned tourists and the Atlantic. The first thing I saw was a two-toned Buick Special, teal and white, regally sitting outside The Avalon hotel. I felt like I had taken a taxi from 2009 to 1957, instead of from the airport to downtown. I walked along the strip, past the hotels and restaurants that boasted 10 pound lobsters and 32 ounce mojitos and crab legs longer than my arm, and thought about my upcoming trip. For now I was feeling okay, and had Mom’s words ringing in my head: Julie, you’re joining the ranks of all the Fillmore’s and Appel’s who have taken trips like this one, and come back richer people. I felt like I was beginning my rite of passage; it was my turn to have stories and I was going to take advantage of it, damnit. The first way I did so was with a mojito and a dolphin sandwich on the porch of the Waldorf Towers, a stucco hotel that looks pretty much the same as the rest of the hotels along the strip. I don’t think I’d ever eaten dolphin before, so I was surprised when I found how much it tastes like swordfish, only a bit creamier and milder. With tartar sauce and lemon and some seasoned French fries, it was the best last American meal I could have hoped for. After I finished my lunch I crossed the street and stepped onto the whitest beach I’d ever seen. It was about 4 o’clock by then, so there were not many people left on the beach; only a few scattered here and there, desperately grabbing at their sun shawls to keep them from blowing away in the wind, which had picked up since I’d crossed the street. I sat down next to a big wooden box that looked like it held beach chairs and stared at the Miami skyline and the larger than life cruise ships that cluttered up the harbor. I just sat for a while, listening to the CD that Eben had made me before I left, and thought about the people who I didn’t even know, that would become my friends in the next 3 ½ months. It’s an odd feeling, like shadows following you around: you can feel their presence but as for their personality or their sense of humor or their hair color, it’s all a mystery. And, after a good bit of that kind of dangerous metaphysical thinking, I got up, dipped my feet in the water, left the beach, and got in a cab back to the airport.
From there, time seemed to slow down and has seemed to move at a snail’s pace until now. (I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing—quite to the contrary I’m getting to experience everything and everyone with a sense of time that I’ve never had before. I’ve only been here for 6 days, but I keep having to remind myself that it’s been that short of a time, as I feel like I’ve been here for about 6 months.)
The group, who by now had sat together in the airport in Miami and Cusco for a combined 5 hours and was beginning to get along like old friends at a reunion, got into Cusco around 11 o’clock on Sunday morning, and was immediately whisked to Urubamba, a small city about an hour outside Cusco best known for it’s position on the PeruRail train to Machu Picchu. The hotel we checked into, Hotel Maizal, was beautiful and peaceful and the perfect place to transition the U.S. to Peru. It is best described as a compound, as it is completely walled in and is a sanctuary unto itself; a respite from the busy street that lies right outside the front gate. There is one big building, divided into 9 sleeping rooms, a separate dining room building with wireless internet and water cooler, and another structure that we used for a classroom. All three buildings lie on probably ¾ of an acre, the rest of which is a beautifully kept lawn complete with a fire pit, a huge bird cage with the loudest parrots I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing, a weeping willow tree, lots of beautiful gardens with odd and beautiful looking flowers, and a babbling brook. (I kid you not—there was literally a small stream running through the middle of the lawn—talk about peaceful!) Oh yeah, and the Andes rise up from the ground on all sides, creating the humbling and literally awesome feeling of living in a huge brown and green basin. The first morning I woke up and walked outside to see the clouds gently hanging low, obscuring the tops of the peaks, as if they were tired and needed a rest from being up so high.
We spent two days in Urubamba, during which we had various seminars on how to stay safe in Cusco and avoid petulant health problems like altitude sickness and Rabies (I surely won’t go near another wild dog ever again), and went on some excursions into surrounding towns.
Then we went to Machu Picchu.
Surprisingly, as we all know how 5:15 in the morning feels and all wish we didn’t, no one said a word about having to wake up at 5:15 to catch our combi (like a bus but less safe—for those of you who have been to Ghana, it’s a lot like a tro tro). After a less than safe combi ride, we boarded PeruRail, which runs from Urubamba to Machu Picchu. As you descend down you can see the vegetation begin to change noticeably, from trees and grass to jungle like vines and thick reeds. Corn doesn’t grow down here—it’s much too densely populated with other plants. As you descend into the valley that will eventually bring you to Machu Picchu, the ride gets slower and slower, because of the abundance of trains coming from the other direction. (They only have 1 track, and only a few spots where trains can pass one another, so whenever another train is approaching you have to stop for as long as it takes for the other train to come chugging by.) Finally you get to the city at the base of the mountain—I’m not sure it has a name, but all I saw was an over-abundance of people selling not-so-cheap novelty items that say “Machu Picchu” on them—and get into an air conditioned bus that will take up to the actual entrance of the park. I’m sure this is designed for American or European (or other rich) tourists—the train ride there is $60, the bus ride up is $14, and entrance to the park is some obscene amount of money (I’m forgetting now). It even costs 1 sol (=Peruvian currency, equal to about 33 cents) to go to the bathroom! But then you enter the park, and you forget how much you spent because you’re overcome with what you’re seeing in front of you: huge green towers above you, and thousands of moss covered rocks, that have been painstakingly fit together over hundreds of thousands of years. The ruins are incredible: they are so vast (like the mountains they are covering) and so intricately built that it’s hard to remember that you’re actually seeing them. You feel like you’re a cut out picture that’s been placed on a National Geographic magazine with the title: Wonders of Peru. The colors don’t vary much when you’re looking at the ruins, because it’s so hard to take them in all at once. I had to take more than a few pictures to remember that they were actually right in front of me. We climbed up into the ruins (you can walk right in to them and walk around, as if you’re taking a tour of an old house), and our guide kept telling us about all the rock formations, and what they meant to the Incas. I just looked around and felt that eerie sensation that I get when I’m looking at Jim Morrison’s pants in the Hard Rock Café, or at Lady Bird’s inauguration gown at the Museum of American History. People actually lived here 600 years ago! I entered into that dangerous metaphysical thought territory again: it’s in places like that where I feel like a dot on the infinite line of humanity, like I’m playing only a bit part in this play that’s been going on for thousands of years and will be going on for thousands more.
After we had taken a tour of the ruins as went down to the base for lunch, and then were free to roam around by ourselves for a few hours. A few friends and I found ourselves on the way up to Intipunku, or “La Puerta del Sol,” the Door of the Sun. It’s a beautiful hike up to the left of Machu Picchu on a trail that eventually will lead all the way back to Cusco. We hiked up it with another American we’d met during lunch, for about 50 minutes, until we reached the top, which was 2,720 meters up. Quite a difficult hike, but worth every minute of it, because I have never seen anything like it before. It kind of felt like when you’re sitting in the Imax at Liberty Science Center, and the movie begins to be shot from the birds-eye-view, except for that you’re actually living it and breathing it. At the top we stopped for about 20 minutes, where we took some typical tourist pictures, and sat and marveled at the view for a while. Then we hiked back down, got back on the bus, got to the train, back to the combi, and ate dinner at our hotel, wondering what we had really just seen.
On Thursday we packed up camp in Urubamba and boarded a luxury bus for Cusco, where we would meet our host families. I grew more and more nervous as we approached the city—sure, my host family would be nice enough, but what if that was it? I started to wonder about the $35 in New York souvenirs I had brought: what if they thought they were tacky? What if they already had 4 Statue of Liberty figurines in their house? What if they only ate tripe and sauerkraut? It turns out my worrying—like so much of it throughout the trip, actually—was all for the naught. My señora is a lovely woman, who is ever accommodating and loves to cook (good fit there!) and wants to teach someone how. She has a son who is a chef (nice match up there, too!) and daughter who works for LAN airlines. There are two girls, 15 and 18, who work in the house all day, and the father of the children who comes at night sometimes. (I’m still not 100% sure about their relationship, but I don’t think it would be the most polite thing to ask about it.) I have a very quaint room all to myself, with a bed, desk and a drawer that locks, so I can keep my finger puppets and pictures in there when I’m not home. I haven’t spent too much time here, though, because on Saturday morning, at 6:30, we boarded another luxury tour bus, this time destined for Lake Titicaca.
The ride, normally six hours, took a bit longer because of all the bathroom stops we made, but by 1:45 we were in Puno, the city that lies at the edge of the highest navigable lake in the world. We boarded a boat to take us to La Isla de los Uros Q’hantati, one in an archipelago of floating islands made from dried reeds that have been packed down, bound, and fastened to the ground so they won’t float away. There are many islands like the one way stayed on, all of which cater to tourists like our group. The island is only about 200 yards long by 100 yards wide, and has about 10 huts (also made of reeds), which we all slept in. There are 8 indigenous people who live there all the time, and are constantly giving people like me the “indigenous experience,” by which I mean that they are serving them trout and quinoa, taking them fishing with nets and letting them dress up in native garb. Being there gave me an odd feeling, somewhat like what I’d imagine living in the “It’s A Small World” Disney World attraction is like. Still it was nice to walk around barefoot on the reeds, and there is nothing like waking up early in the morning and looking out at a lake that is 3,800 meters above sea level. It reminded me of being in Rhode Island during that tiny sliver of time when not even the golfers are out on the golf course and the day is just deciding whether or not it really wants to start. It’s that point of tangency between night and day, and I think the most peaceful stolen piece of time in the entire day.
Around 8 o’clock we boarded our boat back to the Puno, and when we got there we were immediately guided towards La Avenida Bolivar, where the Festividad Virgen de la Candelaria was going on. The week long celebration to honor the Vigren Mary was capped off by today’s festivities that included a parade, music and dancing. The parade consisted of dancing troupes, all dressed up in impossibly bright and ornate costumes marching about 100 yards and then stopping to do an impeccably choreographed dance. I saw dozens of different dancing troupes, all wearing different costumes, ranging from scary Diablo attire to full gorilla-like suits. Neon green, purple and day-glo orange seemed to be the favorite of all the colors, but you literally cannot think of a color that wasn’t represented in some way. Marching bands were interspersed among the groups, and the entire parade had to be at least ½ a mile long or more. Street vendors were selling all kinds of food, none of which I ate because I had been duly warned about it’s safety (although I’m going to have to stop on that “culinary safety kick” if I’m going to have anything interesting to talk about, so stay tuned for interesting stories about food and hopefully no stories about the aftermath), and carnival souvenirs. One man had a pole of cotton candy 15 feet high! I found a spot watching the parade with a few of my friends, and we stood drinking a beer and watching the parade of senses flow by. The parade seemed to be suspended in time and place, an entity all to its own. It was 10 o’clock on Sunday morning, and people were dressed in ridiculously grandiose costumes, marching and dancing in the biggest parade of the year! It was like being in an entity all of its own, that could own fit into a continuum of its own being—the past was only past parades, and the future only next year’s. It couldn’t exist outside Puno either. Something about the buildings, that weren’t old or new but just existent, and the streets that were just wide enough to hold four dancers or tuba players. We were a few minutes late getting back to our bus, because the wall of people was only semi-permeable, but it was worth it if only because I got to put on a gorilla head.
And now, to bed.
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