Taste Familiarity Paradigm

"Taste Familiarity Paradigm" is a term researchers use when experimenting with getting kids to eat their vegetables. One approach gave children vegetables to eat; another showed them pictures of vegetables.

I never found a comfortable source of nutrition in Peru this trip; everything tasted strange - maybe it was the terroir, the differences in the soil, the fertilizers, the techniques, the strains of plant and animal - or maybe just that as their tastes differ, so does their cuisine. But they don't know how to do a burger, a pizza, or a sandwich, and their own dishes take some getting used to.

The scrambled eggs were okay. I liked their fruit juices, though they differed from here. Everything else I would try, then look further along for something else. 

Of course, I'm old now, and used to what I know. Even Canadian food seems strange to me - and, of course, it is a little different; a box of Wheat Thins Original bought in Port Angeles, Washington is a slightly different product than Wheat Thins Original bought just across the border in Victoria, British Columbia. The texture and flavor differ. I never did find a good box of crackers in BC. One thing the US does is good crackers. Our rednecks aren't bad either.

So I was happy to get back to my little tornado bait residence and see that I still had a box of Cheezits in the cupboard. 

It's going take a while for this trip to settle in, to internalize, to process. It's good to be home, the familiar is a deep comfort. But it was beautiful there, if strangely so, and interesting. The bit about contempt has its truth too; traveling the US got boring a long time back, and it was more pleasurable then, before the population doubled and created the universal strip mall. Peru has changed too, in the ten years since I was last there; it has become much more proud of its Inca heritage - maybe for mainly economic reasons, the tourists put their money down on Machu Picchu, and maybe from their own internal emergence. 

By the time I left I had been through moments of boredom and loneliness that I wouldn't feel here because I jack into this computer screen and the actual terroir fades back into a gray haze; there I would be forced to take some kind of action. It would feel very different to have my own place there. 

And, for a foodie, the markets are stunning.

So goes this account, except for the pix I hope I may now include. 

Capac Raymi

Great Festival of the Summer Solstice

It occurred to me that in this town of two thousand there is no significant income gap. There are the laborers with hand tools and a load on their backs, and the owners of the stores and lodgings with their own cars, but walk the streets and the houses are all pretty much the same mud brick and field stone - none of them rise above the others, boasting of HDTV, jacuzzis, roombas, or a staff of servants. 

There is a little cluster of houses visible on a hillside north of town, though, and I thought the well-to-do might live there, so I took a morning walk. A very pretty one into greenery, sunup, and birdsong.

It started out cobblestone, turned to concrete, then to dirt road, and stayed dirt past the little neighborhood, which turned out to be the same as the rest, a campesino vecinidad. It was a pleasant walk so I kept on; and around a bend, at the very top of the valley, was the finca, the estate.

I counted, in the distance, 28 windows along the front face of light chocolate stucco, and there were two or three more tiled roofs and other sides; it isn't an apartment complex or a hotel, it is a residence, set against lush green mountain slopes and overlooking prosperous fields of maize and grain. The gate, a double wooden door in neat stone pylons, faced the dirt road and opened to a grassy stone track a couple hundred meters long to a twin gate at the manor itself. I walked the mud road on by above; there is no other access.

Some great owner lives there. They get in and out by a grassy trail, unless they have a helipad up there. The surrounding scenery is the most idyllic, the most edenic I've seen in Peru - a wider range of forest flora, an arcadian paradise.

So there is your gap; off by itself, one family. If I lived here long enough someone would tell me who they are.

Today is the Inca celebration of the summer solstice, Capac Raymi, the Great Festival. It was their biggest holiday, the state gave everybody five days off with free food, drink, and dazzling ceremony. Modern Peru pretty much ignores this fiesta in favor of the winter solstice, Inti Raymi, into which they pour a lot of phony Inca tourist stuff - I can spot like four or five really obvious blunders in their production, the worst of which is the Inca himself in all his long-haired bravissimo. The Incas cut their hair above their ears; it was part of the symbology of royalty, and showed off their huge golden earplugs, another badge of superiority. They should know that.

But on this day, the youth of the empire became adults, and earned their grownup names. The boys competed in a grueling footrace through the highlands outside Cusco. And throughout the Tawantinsuyu, the Four Regions, the common folk would would be treated to a golden and feathered panoply of the might of the empire and the glory of the gods.

Actually, they got about a hundred days a year off at government expense; about what we do. Plus entertainment and refreshments. They could envy only the French.

Now I'll go out and see if this town gives any recognition to Capac Raymi. And, I spied some ruins to the east yet to see.

Nope, oblivious. Took a walk along a trail to the last of the ruins I know about, and selfie in front of a handsome gateway that may and may not have been originally inca - the INC, Instituto Nacional de Cultura I think I told you, is so good at faking inca stuff it gets hard to tell. In the plaza a long-hair local tried with an obsequious air not entirely consonant with the somewhat truculent "excuse me, can I pass" in the square a few minutes earlier, to sell me some CDs of authentic Andean music. I asked him in spanish how many notes in the inca system of music and he said, wait, let me remember, but he could't; answer: five. And no stringed instruments. Well, I'll get over it. That Peru has not made a national holiday of my cumpleaños.

Time now to take photos for local color, not to record archaeology. Of people. I'm shy about that though, I don't know how they feel about it. I remember french youths on the metro mocking my cell cam with some hostility. But people are what make a good picture. That will be my mission for the next couple days. I have seen so many I'd like to memorialize. Though, in general, I don't like to suffocate immediate experience with the camera. It is always a relief when I feel I've done with data collection and can just breathe in the vicinity.

A fair amount of day left, and it's warm now. I've got my strength back, what there is of it, and probably more, I'm doing a lot of walking compared to normal life. I have just projected myself into each of you, into what you may be doing now, and I deeply wish you well.



Later...

The manor house. Forget it. 

Long ago in Ecuador I saw two young guys on a bench silently watching the Marias, the young girls in maid's uniforms going to work; two cute ones passed, and one of the guys said to the other, "Pura fantasma." Pure fantasy.

Well, that's what my take on the big house was; pure fantasy. I took my laptop to the smart son, with googlemaps zoomed to Ollantaytambo, showed him a satview of that big estate, and learned that it is an unfinished hotel. That's all. Not a great family hacienda. Just a story I told myself. Like most of life.

*Note to spanish speakers: it should read, pura fantasia," pure fantasy, but what I heard was pura fantasma so that's what I'll report






  

Cusi Rimac

Happy Talk

Inti is shining, the sky is blue, strange birds sing, the curse is lifted. The middle-school kids in their blue-and-white striped futbol suits or below-the-knee gray uniform skirts or slacks flock by on the terrace above to the collegio past the cemetery - beyond that, the way turns to a cow path through the fields, then a river-stone trail that turns to an actual stream every now and then, past the cornfields to the ruins of Q'ellu Racay, the old emperor's river retreat. They go by in threes or fours, girl and girl and girl, boy and boy and boy, carrying soccer balls or book bags, or in twos or alone; sometimes boy and girl. All dark hair bronze skin, the boys with good hair, the girls with Inca noses and small chins. Laughing or head down. Just like us, I guess.

The curse is lifted - inexplicably, the Verizon customer service chat choices weren't grayed out today, and I got Amy, who informed me that I need to add a plus and a one to my international calls. I dwell in darkness. Then, for the first time, Capital One let me log in to my online banking. I swear every previous attempt failed, saying I couldn't do it from here. I paid Verizon. And the sun shines and the birds sing and children are still unknowing.

Oh don't be cynical. You can know and still be happy.

Maybe I'll take a 2.5 Sol bus to Yucay today, see what's left of Sayri Tupac's palace. The post title: Cusi = happy; Rimac = speaker. Happy talk. 

Three of the interesting people I've encountered - all men about my age. 

In Pisac, I admired the work of a jeweler in the artisan market, stuck my head in his shop to ask if any of it was his work, figuring he was selling various artists' pieces on consignment - there were hundreds of pieces in a variety of styles. Turns out it was all his.

He is the son of a Spanish ambassador to the US. They had a servant who worked in silver and stone, who told the five-year-old Ricci (Placido Quillo Zegarra), "I know you will be an intellectual, but you must learn to do something with your hands."  Ricci learned from him, and from others, and though he graduated with an advanced degree in economics and practiced that profession in London, this is what he does.

In 1965 he and a Canadian friend bought motorcycles - his a BMW - and rode from New Mexico to Alaska. He passed through San Francisco in '66, grew his hair long, smoked pot. Hey, we were there then doing that...did we pass on the street? Probably. 

He lists places he saw in the US - Massachusetts, Indianapolis, DC, New Orleans, LA - he liked John Dos Passos, Whitman, Joplin, Morrison...loves New York. When in London he roamed Europe. He's in Peru now because the economy tanked in Spain and the food's no good in Ecuador. He misses culture here, the people are illiterate and drunk. 

His craftsmanship is superb and artistry beautiful and stylistically varied. He laughs a lot. 

Now compare with Miguel Chavez of Urubamba.

Walking down the dirt road from my hostel to find some soup and from a side street comes an imposing figure, tall, in all black and red, with gray mustache and goatee, walking imperious; I give him a look, he returns a cold glance as I pass. 

And yet; not ten steps past and he's at my elbow, asking where I’m from in Spanish. When I admit my nationality, he switches to accented English. He says he’s a pilot, I ask him what kind of plane, he takes out his wallet and shows me a photographs, a Cessna 120 and 160. I tell him I once flew to Ecuador in a Cessna 210. He invites me to sit in the square and talk, another old bored guy I think, he says he's about to participate in a hotel opening in Yucay, Hotel Sayri Tupac; I beg off, am searching for soup.

Half an hour later I haven’t found any soup so I think I’ll go the square and find that old guy, Miguel Chavez, but I run into him sooner, and he says we will now resolve all your problems. He fixes that one, anyway, he knows a place nearby where the senora will make you anything you want.

The man is a story teller; his life is like the guy in Gary Jenning's Aztec, a full life, except maybe more so. He went to Brooklyn at 16 to become, for his father, a Rockerfeller - instead he became a socialist. He didn't like the way certain people were treated. He heard being a pilot was hard but everybody respected a pilot and gave them money and sex, so he went to San Jose and learned to fly, working for a Del Monte cannery for $25/hour to do so. He piloted for a while. Then he heard that being an actor in Hollywood was hard and cool, so he went there, became an extra, hung out with guys like Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra and Anthony Quinn, who captained a collection of Spanish-speaking actors. Turns out Miguel looked like Sal Mineo (girls would want to stroke him on the street) so he got to be Sal Mineo’s double, did his death in Exodus. 

Later there was a socialist coup in Peru so he joined it, and the government sent him to Prague to become an economist, but when he graduated there was a rightist government so he had to stay in Germany for 20 years, where he married and had two kids.

Okay, so both of these guys are educated as economists and did time in New York and California. Miguel, though, is traveling in more glamorous circles and getting mixed up in history. If he's fabricating, he's smooth and a quick thinker, because I am introducing the topics much of the time, and he's right on them. For instance, I bring up the Sendero Luminoso in Peru, and Tupamaru, two bothersome leftist guerrilla outfits. Without a pause, he tells me that while he is still in Germany, because of his weight as a socialist, Tupamaru wants him to join them; he has conditions, however, they can’t meet - for one, stop fighting with Sendero Luminoso. Sendero also wants him to join them, but again, he needs them to clean up their act a bit; none of this infighting. I've got this skeptical little grin but he's going blithely on; he doesn't miss anything, though; he's got a sharp eye.

Now, these days, besides being an advisor for this new hotel, he’s a prime mover in a project outside of Yucay and in the mountains above Ollantaytambo to bring spinning wheels to the indians. He’s got a whole stack of photos - he’d just picked them up when I encountered him - of him with inca women and drop spindles and new spinning wheels. He has just introduced the spinning wheel to the andes. A couple years ago he was watching women spin and decided it was an inefficient process, so he (keyboard finger action) checked around until he found some people who make spinning wheels in New Zealand. He negotiates, they’ll give him a deal, 15 of them for $20k. He sends proposals to the New Zealand government, and a couple years later they get back to him with yes, they’ll pay the tab. Then he finds spinning wheel teachers in Germany and gets them here. He is also getting woodworkers here to make them. He tells me to youtube “pisac textiles.” Sure enough, there are three videos, two of which have him, with longer hair and a bigger beard, but yeah, that's him, in 2008, the Cuyo Grande project.

As we eat - I add some breaded chicken to my soup, buy him a beer - we are talking a lot of topics, largely political, since we're in Peru and he has this history. Bringing spinning wheels and communist insurgents together, suddenly we're in Canada in the 70's.

Now, he says, in 1975 the Canadian indians got together and founded the Council of First Nations, with their own parliament, recognized by the canadian government and the UN. They then invited aborigines from all over the world to join them and after discussion they decided to make revolution without arms. This is what our socialist friend Miguel Chavez is doing with the spinning wheels (the class struggle in Peru now is between the mestizos and the indians); making unarmed revolution.

Well, that's not exactly how Wikipedia tells the story, but history looks different when you're in it - I've been in history and remembered it my own way. 

Miguel's tales portray a man to whom other men come for his power. But then, he is impressive.

Still. Check out this story.There was a moment when Sendero was poised to take Lima by force, the rich oppressors in the center outnumbered by the poor on the edges, all waiting for sendero to send arms...I’ve seen that center and those barrios; that's how it is...and at the same time an election is coming up. One faction wants to take arms while the iron is hot, and another to see how the election works out. But both Sendero and Tupamaru are barred from running candidates in the election; so who do they call on to represent their cause? They call on Miguel, who is technically not a member, to stand. While they are still arguing (Miguel declined) El Chino, Fujimoto, gets elected and kills them all. Miguel says, “and I’m sitting here.” 

Sitting pretty because when Germany reunited there weren’t enough jobs for the east german youth so germany offered pensions - at full wage - to some old guys to open up jobs for the poor. So Miguel is getting good pay for life for whatever work he was doing to support himself and his family in unified Germany.

Now all those historical figures begging Miguel to be their leader seems pretty far-fetched, but then, Miguel’s son just published a book, in German, which he wanted to show me, about the Sendero Luminoso. Got his PhD with it. I asked if he was in it, and he says, “a little bit.”

When I get back I'll watch Exodus - it's on my hard drive - to see Sal Mineo die.

One more story. I'm in Urubamba nosing around private lands to try to see where Wayna Capac's estate, Quispihuanca, used to lie - trespassing around the east side, clambering over a dip in a stone fence and through some little fields, to get a look at what I thought was the living area and the courtyard with the sacred white rock. Through the eucalyptus foliage I spy motion, a campesino there, little guy in dirty clothes doing something to a newly turned field, and I turn back, I don't want a conflict. Then I stop myself. Why not give it a try? 

I approach slowly, not to spook him, and ask in Spanish if I can pass through his property to the ruins. He regards me suspiciously, leans on his digging tool, and begins a series of questions - where from, what state, what name, what living, what am I doing here, and as I answer, apparently to his satisfaction, he comes closer and begins to smile. Pretty soon he's giving me a thorough and informed tour of the site. I had been totally disoriented, what I thought was the front was the back. I would not have figured all that out for myself, or been sure I was right if I had theorized correctly. I left satisfied with the exploration; I even found the sacred white rock, in the other direction, west, preserved by a little white rope. 

The man’s name is Julio Guevarra, inheritor of that property through many generations of Spaniards - it sounded like back to the conquistadores, but he’d be richer if it went that far. His daughter works the desk of my hostel (kind of a spoiled valley girl to my eye) and her fiance does the same for the morning shift. He is about my age, spry, climbs up over walls like a kid, in faded soiled peasant clothes, landowner and farmer, a friend to the stranger who has the cortesa to ask.

Okay. Thanks for listening. Permission to skip the boring parts is always yours. Life is improved with the lifting of the curse, whatever it consisted, of, so I think I'll put on some pants and see what's happening in the plaza. Get a strawberry jugo.

Yana Hamut'a

Black Thoughts

It's a fine day in the Andes - cool in the mornings, hot before noon, chilly in the afternoon, temperate in the evening. The light is sublime. I discovered a new ruin, not on any tours, a riverside retreat, they speculate, of the greatest of the Sapa Incas, the most influential personality known to the precolumbian new world; Pachacuti, Earth-Changer. I sat, foot dangling, on a corner of wall in the perfect noon, Urubamba river rush blending with the burble of the fountains running through this abandoned resort - the incas loved their stone, and they loved living water. There was a two-story tower with windows north and south to watch the river and the channelled waters both. They call the place Q'ellu Racay. My Spanish-Quechua dictionary tells me "q'ellu" is "yellow," but "racay" I cannot pin down. Well, Quechan orthography is going through changes these days, so spelling is nebulous - "rakay" means poultry, "rakiy" means divorce, and "raqay" is hut, or ruined house. You decide. Oh, you didn't pick "Golden Divorce," did you?

I found the place searching "Jean Pierre Protzen," who wrote the definitive work on the inca architecture in Ollantaytambo. Every now and then I prompted myself to buy it, but the cheapest copy available online is $220 US, and I lacked the nerve. It would have been worth it.

I'd upload photos, but the wifi would just say "loading one file" all night until I gave up; and, to you, it would just look like the foundations of some Norman farmhouse; fieldstone walls. You pretty much have to be an andeanist to get some of these ruins, it is an acquired taste. I think this site was intentionally humble in its construction, a quiet place for the great man to go to be alone and hear the silence behind the rushing water. Other Inca work will communicate to you, when I get back to a strong connection.

Which is today's theme: Yana Hamut'a: Black Thoughts.

Recognizing the sometimes sugary tone of this record, please note that the flip side, the dark side, of all this is not ignored. The inca artefacts will pall, I can't play with them all the time; sometimes everything I've gained coming here will seem like less than everything I've left behind. The people don't really like you. Did I say this already? And there are inconveniences...

Verizon has stranded me here with no international capability - I can't call out of Peru. They didn't tell me this would happen when I had them set me up with data down here; it didn't happen this way in Australia or France. But the grind is, the real betrayal is, there is no way to contact them to fix anything. Not by phone, not by email, not by web interface. Every avenue shuts down when it sees where I am. I could write them a letter; that's it. And I'm moving too fast for a reply.

Well, I could find a number and call on a local phone, maybe? That occurred to me today, but it wouldn't make me feel much better, and getting that to happen in this hostel wouldn't be fun. See below.

I owe Verizon for two month's service, but I can't pay, because my online banking service has done the same thing - it closes all approaches when it sees that I'm out of the country - there is no solution by web. I can't reach them.

Ah well, next time I'll know better. But they should make some simple email link available, both of them.

I said the people won't really like you, you are a stranger, an intruder. Of course, that's not always true; some of the locals do warm to you. Here, in this albergue, it's kind of mixed and iffy.

I locked myself out of my room - what an idiot - which caused the management some inconvenience. I berate myself for that. But then, you'd think they'd have a protocol in place for such an event.

Instead, the owner doesn't have any contingency plan for keys locked in the room - there's a cloth sack of about 100 unidentified random keys, and he didn't even know where how to find that, his adolescent daughter had to dig it out of somewhere; then he tries each one, but in such a hurry that he can't be sure he really has tried it; then throws them into a pile so he can't tell which one's he's tried and which not. Now you know, every lock comes with at least two keys, and that's true here too, because I saw the boxes they come in. The guy is dumb as a fucking post. He brought a hammer and pliers as his solution, and was going to knock off the knob, until I pointed out to his more effective eldest son that the bathroom window - glass slats fixed to a lever - could be removed, and the son divined a way to remove four slats and drop the four-year-old younger son, Inti (runasimi for "sun;" the kids seemed to have inca names) through to open the door from the inside.

Attitudes toward me may have changed after that, but I'm not really sure he doesn't like me, his smile is too obligatory to tell. One of the two or three senoras, however, consistently ducks down the stairs when she sees me coming; another, the principal one, is helpful enough when she's around, which is sporadically. The elder son does seem to like and respect me, as far as I can tell, and he's the smart one. There are about six four-year-olds (more or less) and they seem to regard me with suspicion, which is the best measure of the general opinion; but I don't think they really care much about any of their gringo guests, they're much more into their own family life. This is off-season, so they may think it's not their job really until June or whenever, I don't know.

Okay, so I'll always be an outsider here, but so what, I was in Berkeley too, and more so in East Lansing, where I was raised, and being a foreigner is a plus to some folk here. I can live with that, I guess. And there are the expats, dug in somewhere here - I suspect that after a few months here, when I've proved myself, they'd seek me out and whisper me their secret password.

Black thoughts! Fuck Verizon, how can they do this to a customer, they know you are in a far place and that they are your means of communication, why don't they plan for that?

Why didn't I?

What if the bandwidth I've got here now is as good as it gets? And I can never upload jpgs?

Twice so far the electricity has gone out in three out of four provinces in the state of Cusco. That wouldn't happen under the Incas.

Stranger in a strange land, under the sheltering sky. What a gas. I saw some willowy woman with a Nefertiti profile in an ankle-length skirt turn down a soliciting guide and go alone up the stairs to the main ruins today. Later she passed a few yards away in the plaza; I sort of smiled. Maybe she smiled back, my vision allows for fantasies at that range. Maybe I'll run into her again. Everybody else around are in twos and threes, threes and fours, twenties and thirties. Her colors were good. I don't need to get laid, just to share some qualities.

In Q'ellu Racay I met a couple from Quito, Ecuador - she was Australian, he Peruvian; they were there for a "ceremony." I could talk inca with him, we speculated about the wall I was resting on - could it support both a roof and an access walk to the second-story punku, gateway? I learned how to pronounce kallanka. We would have kicked that stuff around for a while, but he had a ceremony to get to.

I'm going to post this and dist to my chosen few back home. That's all it's for. I'll clean up this post later.

Dusk. Venus is out in the southwest, has been every night lately; it's called Chaska Coyllur, the long hair star. It's female here too. It floats over a snaggle-tooth peak off in the distance; the Olympic Peninsula has its beauty but where I live, not like this.

Tupac Yauri

Staff of Gold

When the first Inca, Manco Capac, left his cave and went in search of a place to build, the gods told him to carry a staff of gold - tupac yauri -  and to push it into any good ground he found, and when it sunk its length into the earth, he was home. That's the Inca establishment myth.

When I got off the bus by the plaza of Ollantaytambo, the golden staff of my critical heart shlorped into the river stone street and I'd found the sweet spot. If there's any place I can live in South America, it will be here.

The seductive blend of gringo comforts and Andean authenticity. They call themselves “The Living Inca City, and in fact the natives keep house in the original Inca grid, behind walls of awesome imperial stonework, the stuff unbelievers want to ascribe to alien technology because they can't accept that the Peruvians did it themselves with sand and water, and of fieldstone-and-adobe dwellings the hatun runi, common folk, occupied.

I stand by my 28-pound backpack and scan the shops around the Plaza de Armas (every Peruvian town has one) and I see half a dozen restaurants serving pizza and indigenous dishes  – colorful displays of artisan handwork, old senoras in tall white pilgrim hats bent under bulging burlap sacks, an ATM, and on the green peaks that surround the town, the Inca ruins, descending the escarpment like a whispered song.

There's wifi in all the hostels and coffee shops. In the stores you can get processed cheese in plastic, trail bars, Almond Joys, to help you acclimatize to alien skies. Plenty of bottled water. But these people aren't' got up in quaint native costumes to cater to the tourists (except a few ladies in brightly embroidered shawls and inverted-bowl hats) that they will take off when they get home to sit in front of the TV; they live like this.

This is a scouting trip; I came down here to see if I could maybe make it long-term, expatriate, live in some different way in my last ten or fifteen viable years on earth. I don't know, but if I'm going to do it among the traces of the pre-contact cultures I've been studying in books since I found two-page pamphlet on the incas in some seventh grade classroom, this is where.

I'll have to eat without "frozen entrees." The wifi is erratic and slow. The ruins are beautiful and ever mysterious, but they'll pall at times. They're not my only interest. The people won't, for the most part, like me that much - I'm an intruder. I won't like them so well either; but then, I'd lost interest in my own native neighbors long ago. Here at least I'm open to meeting a few interesting characters, and I have. 

Eight more days. Earthquakes yesterday, tremors. In San Fran they come as shaking, and you wait for them to be over; here, like a bomb, boom, and you wait for the next. The locals, looking scared, say this never happens, not in all their lives. But there were three of those detonations in maybe twelve hours. We're surrounded by rocky peaks, some with convex faces that could tear off and thunder down; but I went out looking today and I think it'd take a ten to get anything onto this building. Later I find it was a 4.3 in Tacna, 700+ klicks north, on the coast.

I started out on the coast - Lima might as well be LA, supermarkets and SUVs; on the outskirts are serious barrios, but you never go to those in LA either. I saw Pachacamac, Caral, some of the many Wakas (temple complexes) in the city; all hulking mounds of adobe bricks. Went to Trujillo, also on the sea; saw Chan Chan, Moche. Then to Cusco, in the sierras - there it's different. Everything turns Andean. Videoed the stonework all around, went to Sacsayhuaman. After a few days I tried to walk to Pisac.

That was the other aim of this trip, to walk the Sacred Valley with a 26-lb pack, to see how much walking I still have in me at 68. Didn't work, though. The day I took off I was two kinds of sick, bacterial and altitude, and had eaten one stupid burger in two days. And the climb out of town was way worse than I imagined; thousands of steep stone steps up - the worst ascent, objectively, I have ever made, pack or no. I did it, though. The Policia Turista, three of them on Honda 250 motorcycles, found me sick as a dog, having just puked up that burger, panting. They put me on a bus - so crammed with locals I didn't think they could fit another, but they did - to Pisac.

Pisac; more National Geographic with every step. Lively town, full of color, narrow crowded streets, a famous market, famous ruins above. After a couple days there, to Urubamba, Plain of the Spiders; not a tourist town - there's a great estate of the Emperor Wayna Capac (Rich Kid) there, but undeveloped and unknown. Nothing gringo about it. You'd have to be willing to leave it all behind to live there.

The last leg goes to Ollantaytambo and I'm there now, weighing the factors. I could come back here, rent an apartment, make it my home. Wouldn't cost more than my $500 place in the Olympic Peninsula, I bet - right now the Sol is about .36 of the dollar. But what can you buy with it? Not milk; fifty percent of Peruvians are lactose intolerant, and just about all the indians. This is mestizo country, a lot of Inca DNA, and back in the hills are the purebloods, shorter, darker, poorer, illiterate, oppressed by the mestizos according to an interesting character who tells me he has recently introduced the spinning wheel to the mountain textile-weavers as a revolutionary act. He tells a good story, that and more, but there are two or three Youtube videos to back him up.

So, no milk - there's one lady in the mercado abastaja, where the real people buy, who sells cafe con leche; you can buy some warm milk from her for half a sol or so, if you have your own container. I did, but something gave me the runs that night - might have been the cheese I got there, or the slices of chicken on a stick from the senora by my place; or that heated milk, fresh from the cow.

Sometimes I walk the streets of the old town where the inca canchas still stand under spanish plaster - the inca peoples lived in small walled compounds with three or four houses facing a courtyard; canchas. I walk, then stand staring at the cut stone, trying to understand, trying figure out what they were doing, thinking. No one knows, really. They may have more information than I do, but they don't know how the colossal wrecks the incas left behind really functioned. There are hundreds of structures that baffle the archaeologists and historians, the descendants of the builders. They don't know whether the interiors and exteriors were decorated, or how; they don't know which buildings had second stories, or how they may have been used. There are many houses with no front wall - what were they for? There are theories, some cogent, but they don't know. One ruin here consists of rectangular one-room (the incas built in one-room) structures with no entrance and small windows along the floor. 

After a while I decided they might be storage chambers, colcas, and the windows were for air flow. Entrances in adobe wall extensions, now gone. Maybe.

I'll be staring at these stone walls and some Peruvian will come up to me, an old one or a young one, a sophisticate with a guide's certificate or a toothless campesino, and they will try to tell me. Two of them - well, the two I just described  both told me that those stones are communications, with the gods, with men - I'm looking at heavy, polygonal blocks of granite carved to fit together to make a wall, as if just doing that isn't enough work, and they tell me the stones form a pattern - this one is the tail - that, that is a nose - this one is a drawing, a sketch, it is a kind of flower. I apologize, my spanish isn't good enough to follow all that he is saying...I don't see it...

But I'm looking at some fieldstone walls up near the Sun Temple, and I see that they are of different colors, blue, rose, faun, green, that will be vivid in the rain, that glow in the sun, and it is clear that it is no accident - a few yards away are other walls of similar size components; all dun. But I've never heard, or read, anyone take notice of the polychrome stone stone buildings. Then again, there are many stones distinctly carved into painstaking contours, clearly saying something, but what? To whom? There are towering rock faces rising from edifices built of carved stones, and there are geometric shapes and formed depressions gouged at great labor into them. They are saying something. 

The incas loved their stone. They were crazy for stone. What were they thinking? Those helpful guys may have known what they were talking about. 

This stuff is going to bore the pants off anyone not into Incas. (I'm going to capitalize, or not, the proper nouns arbitrarily. Do not go mad.) You may skim. It's a major siren song calling me here, instead of Ecuador or Rich Coast or the Loire Valley, or Quintana Roo. I will go on about these lost civilizations every now and then.

I've met more people on this trip than I have in the last ten years in the States, and some of them are interesting and likeable. 

One thing they do the hell out of down here are jugos, fruit and berry juices mixed with milk (they get it somewhere) and blended. Luscious, and good for you too. 

Pix

Pretty pictures, all worth at least 11 words
(re-dated from 12/26/13 to place at the end)







The trapezoid, the Inca insignia - it speaks to efficiency, and to not knowing the keystone arch

There's a lot of vertical differential here - you pretty much have to deal with your acrophobia. Mine got to me now and then.

The Incas loved their stone...

and living water

Are they a code?

Or music?

Sometimes they built to impress...

Actually, I don't know what they were thinking...so I'd stand and stare and wonder...

They were mighty engineers

And they chose their places carefully and well

and integrated into the scene

With their particular aesthetic

Or so I say...

Aff.