Adios, see you later, Land of the Incas.
Not quite, but soon. December 8 I fly out, to get the annuity set up, see people, and do the annual meeting of the Institute of Andean Studies. From there, to Asia, I guess. You know all this, insofar as you want to.
I put down a thousand US to hold a room here for nine months. I've made arrangements for the Barriga-Terans to care for the three remaining cats. Two others, Foo Fighter and Sniffles Leapy Outercat, died. Feline leukemia, Fabrizio the vet thinks. I hope the survivors are here when I come back.
So I plan to come back here. Who knows what one will feel after travel to other faraway places, or returning to one's native land? Maybe this place will lose its allure. But I've been happy here, and learned here that the world isn't all the same everywhere, nor are people.
What is "home?" What does that word mean? If I could get a residency visa, this could be home. Maybe I'll make a serious try when I come back in six or eight months, if they let me back in. I think they will. A failed attempt could, as I mentioned, get me barred forever due to my FBI record. But I'll take that risk.
Man, I've liked this place. It is changing fast, growing fast, but the ground itself, the ancient spirit, will stay, and the old ways of the people will outlast my remaining ten or twenty years, before it goes all Abercrombie and Fitch. No use to cling to anything anyway. Shakespeare's bookstore shut their doors, that was the cue I was waiting for to know the old Berkeley is well and truly dead, although, really, it died in the late 70's with the onset of that hideous concept, "politically correct." Now what's left of the Left repudiates the term, claims they never really meant it; but they did.
I guess I'll never learn. I'm trying to know that what's real is what's now, and it has no definition, no beginning, no end, no name, no center. Just two cats back-to-back on the windowsill in the morning sun. The quiet, distant voices, birdsong, a rooster across two fields. Clouds lit and shadowed caught on the mountainside. There is no sentiment in any of it. That is good. I'll get dressed now.
Leonard Cohen isn't gone. He is singing to us sweetly from a window in the tower of song.
Saturday, December 3, 2016
I hiked to Machu Picchu a few days ago, 28 kilometers, 17.4 miles. It was a pretty good trail. A remote drive crashed and took a lot of photo records with it, so I went there to replace some of them. Got some good shots, too. Saw more of the ruin than I had the two times before.
Often had to wait until the tourists cleared out to get a clean view - thousands of people taking tens of thousands of selfies, all day long. I fear for how the place will look in ten years, though I have to say that the place itself seems well preserved, checking my photos against those taken by Hiram Bingham in 1912, and Martin Chambi in the 1920's. I'm suspicious, though, of the "restoration" done by the Ministry of Culture in some of the more decayed sections.
I leave here early Monday morning, doing a couple days in Cusco before flights. Hope I don't forget anything important. Hope I make that flight from Lima, the schedule cuts a little close and I've got to go through Migración.
Hope I didn't gush too much writing this record. What Jack Aubrey calls "mere enthusiasm." I don't mind embarrassing myself, but I'd rather not do it at your expense.
If I luck into a good place to rent in Port Angeles for a couple of months, I'm inclined to come down to the Bay Area in early January after all. The Institute of Andean Studies annual meeting takes place in Berkeley on the 6th and 7th, and I'd like to see if any of the authors of the books here next to my bed (or on the Kindle) will be there. Reading the titles of the papers and posters to be given there serves to show how little I know of this field, after dabbling in it since 1958. So, here this stops. If I come back, it'll just be more of the same.
See ya around, maybe.
 |
| Lauren at the top of a six-hour climb to Intipunku, the Gate of the Sun, above Ollantaytambo |
Not quite, but soon. December 8 I fly out, to get the annuity set up, see people, and do the annual meeting of the Institute of Andean Studies. From there, to Asia, I guess. You know all this, insofar as you want to.
I put down a thousand US to hold a room here for nine months. I've made arrangements for the Barriga-Terans to care for the three remaining cats. Two others, Foo Fighter and Sniffles Leapy Outercat, died. Feline leukemia, Fabrizio the vet thinks. I hope the survivors are here when I come back.
So I plan to come back here. Who knows what one will feel after travel to other faraway places, or returning to one's native land? Maybe this place will lose its allure. But I've been happy here, and learned here that the world isn't all the same everywhere, nor are people.
What is "home?" What does that word mean? If I could get a residency visa, this could be home. Maybe I'll make a serious try when I come back in six or eight months, if they let me back in. I think they will. A failed attempt could, as I mentioned, get me barred forever due to my FBI record. But I'll take that risk.
Man, I've liked this place. It is changing fast, growing fast, but the ground itself, the ancient spirit, will stay, and the old ways of the people will outlast my remaining ten or twenty years, before it goes all Abercrombie and Fitch. No use to cling to anything anyway. Shakespeare's bookstore shut their doors, that was the cue I was waiting for to know the old Berkeley is well and truly dead, although, really, it died in the late 70's with the onset of that hideous concept, "politically correct." Now what's left of the Left repudiates the term, claims they never really meant it; but they did.
So yeah, things change. Dust in the wind. And what does any of it ever matter anyway? It means what it means to us as long as we are what we are, and then, whatever there is if there is anything, and I suspect there's not even nothing, is what it is or isn't what it isn't. But now there is you, and I, and the cats, and people of Ollantaytambo, Peru. I'll go out and look at them in a few minutes. And Marie, the nineteen-year-old German couchsurfer in the next room, another creature whose being puzzles me, breathes. I can be confident of that. Her placid character, sure of the world, I don't know quite what to make of it. Is that "innocence?" But she's funny. "Dooonald! Do it for me!" (re: Melania wanting a war.) She's staying an extra couple days, which pleases me. I like it when people dig being in the this town, the way you enjoy meeting people who like your favorite obscure band or book or creed or whatever you relate to. We like to share our favorite illusions in an illusory world. That makes them real.
I guess I'll never learn. I'm trying to know that what's real is what's now, and it has no definition, no beginning, no end, no name, no center. Just two cats back-to-back on the windowsill in the morning sun. The quiet, distant voices, birdsong, a rooster across two fields. Clouds lit and shadowed caught on the mountainside. There is no sentiment in any of it. That is good. I'll get dressed now.
Leonard Cohen isn't gone. He is singing to us sweetly from a window in the tower of song.
 |
| Johanna and Tanja, inspired by the photo of upsidedown Lauren |
Saturday, December 3, 2016
I hiked to Machu Picchu a few days ago, 28 kilometers, 17.4 miles. It was a pretty good trail. A remote drive crashed and took a lot of photo records with it, so I went there to replace some of them. Got some good shots, too. Saw more of the ruin than I had the two times before.
Often had to wait until the tourists cleared out to get a clean view - thousands of people taking tens of thousands of selfies, all day long. I fear for how the place will look in ten years, though I have to say that the place itself seems well preserved, checking my photos against those taken by Hiram Bingham in 1912, and Martin Chambi in the 1920's. I'm suspicious, though, of the "restoration" done by the Ministry of Culture in some of the more decayed sections.
I leave here early Monday morning, doing a couple days in Cusco before flights. Hope I don't forget anything important. Hope I make that flight from Lima, the schedule cuts a little close and I've got to go through Migración.
Hope I didn't gush too much writing this record. What Jack Aubrey calls "mere enthusiasm." I don't mind embarrassing myself, but I'd rather not do it at your expense.
If I luck into a good place to rent in Port Angeles for a couple of months, I'm inclined to come down to the Bay Area in early January after all. The Institute of Andean Studies annual meeting takes place in Berkeley on the 6th and 7th, and I'd like to see if any of the authors of the books here next to my bed (or on the Kindle) will be there. Reading the titles of the papers and posters to be given there serves to show how little I know of this field, after dabbling in it since 1958. So, here this stops. If I come back, it'll just be more of the same.
See ya around, maybe.
