Tupac Yauri: Helmet Cams and Talking to Myself on the Plain of Ghosts

Abra Málaga

The new GoPro helmet cam fell off the helmet, so I stuck it to the front fender of the bike and went off riding into the mountains and the jungle, to Espiritu Pampas, Plain of Ghosts, the remote holdfast of the last four rebel Incas after the Spanish conquest. They held out there, making themselves a pain in the royal ass, for thirty years and more.

I really wanted to post some of these road vids here, but despite being well under the allowed hundred megs, and despite showing as successfully uploaded on the draft, damn if I can get them to show up on the published website.

However; I can run them through YouTube, although they lose some production value.

Into the jungle and across a bridge to

Espiritu Pampas

So incrementally I learn to get them up here;l now the problem is that when they play through they leave with the next vid on the YouTube list, with no way back to where you started. I'll see if I can hack through that jungle. If no, maybe I'll replace them with still shots and this will be one more boring recounting of a ride into the back country and return, featuring one more fall off the stupid bike. Ankle bunged up and still can't walk on it too good. Should have listened to the doc in the Centro de Salud in Kiteni and not walked on it for a few days.

He and his nurse gave me a shot in the butt (antibiotic), pain pills, the usual palp-and-rotate check for broken bones, and bandaged it up for support; price? $0.78 US

Talking to myself on the Plain of Ghosts

I went into the ruins with a sheaf of plans and charts printed from Vincent Lee's Forgotten Vilcabamba: Final Stronghold of the Incas, came out bug bitten on the legs and arms but having identified all sectors of the site. He got some relationships and features wrong, but I'm not knocking that; he went into uncut jungle to make those drawings; every minute I spent there I was more impressed that he could eke out any idea at all what he was stumbling around in.

The guys from the Ministry of Culture who are indexing pottery shards from the site and also excavating and preserving it, let me sleep in their campamento, and fed me too. Part because I knew what I was there to see, part because I knew some of their workers and archaeologists, in fact live with them - and part because they're okay people.

Alright, going to publish this. If it's organized under, above, and around blurry crappy videos, the upload failed, and I'll revise.