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.
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.
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