Over the weekend

Words of the day:

serpenteante: winding
regatear: to haggle
quemadura del sol: sunburn

Over the weekend, I visited two sets of Incan ruins. On Saturday, I walked up to Sacsaywamán, a set of ruins overlooking Cusco. The word sounds a lot like "sexy woman," but it's false advertising. The ruins were used by the Incans to lay siege to Cusco after the Spanish came and took it over. In 1536 the Spanish, who I guess were strugging mightily to hold Cusco while being under constant attack from the forces of Manco Inca, managed to capture Sacsawamán with a cavalry of 50 men. Apparently thousands of Incan dead littered the site after the defeat, and the Cusco coat of arms includes eight condors in a kind of grotesque commemoration of all the carrion-eating birds who came for the dead.

The walk was a bit rough, mostly uphill, made somehow worse by the fact that Saturday was the first consistently sunny day in Cusco since I´ve been here. Black rain jackets absorb and conserve heat amazingly well, I found. Beyond the entrance to the ruins, there is a long and somewhat steeply climbing road, down which flew three teenagers on bicycles when I was about halfway up. I also was intercepted on my way up by a young man from Cusco who seemed very friendly and of course tried to sell his services as a guide once we got to the top, for 40 soles, which in Cusco is ridiculously expensive.

The ruins were, of course, astonishing, and no description or even pictures can really do it justice. A lot of the stones that comprised the old fortress were pilfered after Incan times and used to build churches and other structures in Cusco. But a not insignificant portion of the ruins remains, and many of the stones are astonishingly huge and correspondingly heavy, and were presumably carried somehow to the site by the Incans. And after that, they had to be shaped so they could fit together and not fall down whenever some Incan, exhausted from hauling several multi-ton stones up the hill, leaned against one for a rest. What used to be the fortress looks out over Cusco, and on the day I was there you could see for miles. Behind the fortress is a wide green pasture, upon which grazed a few alpacas. Behind that were the foundations of what are thought to be large towers and other structures, used in Incan times for shelter, and storage of food and water. I walked around for an hour and a half or so, then trekked back down. At the bottom of the aforementioned road I bought some orange juice squeezed right in front of me from one of several vendors selling the exact same thing. I got back to my host family´s home in time for lunch, with newly tired legs and, sadly and foolishly, a healthy sunburn.

Sunday was probably my most interesting day here so far. I spent the day at Pisac, the name of a town and of the ruins that overlook it from a mountain far, far overhead. I went with Catherine, who I think I've mentioned before as one of the other students in the Amigos language school, and one of her friends from the hostel in which she is staying, an extremely well-traveled New Zealander by the name of Daniel.

To get to Pisac from Cusco by road, you typically take un collectivo, which is basically a van driven with reckless abandon by a Cusqueño. After searching for about 45 minutes for the departure point, we sat in the back of the van and took off for Pisac, with, of all things, "Love Shack" playing on the radio. By and large, automobiles in Cusco have comparatively few frills, and one of the things typically done without is a healthy set of shocks. So it is literally possible to feel every single imperfection in the road, of which there are many. Between that, and the fact that in this extremely mountainous area of Peru most roads outside of town are switchbacks writ large, I rather quickly developed rather persistent nausea. Fortunately, I sat next to an open window; the fresh air was a good soporific. The driver rather fearlessly passed more than a few vehicles while heading straight into blind turns. In one case he passed a bus despite the presence of a large and uncomfortably close oncoming truck. In addition to healthy shocks, Cusqueñian vehicles lack what in America would be called "pick-up," and the oncoming truck flashed its lights at us for what seemed like several minutes before we pulled back into our lane. In general, whenever I ride in a taxi or a collectivo, I try to take comfort in the fact that every driver in Cusco seems to have a shared understanding that there are few, if any, rules of the road, and is able to switch from offensive to defensive driving seemingly without thinking.

Pisac is known for its massive outdoor market, and Sundays are typically the busiest days. After we arrived we wandered the market, and I purchased a rather nice handmade bag in which I placed several subsequently purchased souvenirs. Being from America it's a major switch to encounter merchandise without a price tag on it. It's expected that you will haggle, just like in The Life of Brian. For example, one merchant tried to sell me a very nice alpaca shawl. His initial price was 300 soles, which is around $125 dollars, give or take. Just by my trying to walk away from the guy he dropped the price to 100 soles. I probably could have gotten it for less, but my new bag was already a little heavy, and hiking the Pisac ruins lay ahead.

We ate lunch at a little restaurant owned and operated by a woman from Colorado. She sold healthy, vegetarian fare, and on a lark I ordered some kambucha, which is fermented tea, and in no way uniquely Peruvian. It actually tasted quite good, a little like cider, and it supposedly has any number of excellent health properties. So I'm not sure whether to blame it and the live bacterial cultures it contained for the return of my nausea, or just poor luck. Ultimately I ate very little lunch, and wasn´t able to participate that much in the very interesting conversation about career and personality types and success and the nature of happiness that Daniel and Catherine were having.

Let me say a little about this chap Daniel. He's a few years younger than me, intelligent, loquatious beyond belief, and a born traveler. He's from New Zealand, but has spent time in, among other places, the UK, Albania, and Thailand, and along the way has developed a coherent and detailed philosophy about his way of life (as your more committed and inquisitive wanderers tend to do, I imagine.) In part, he has a healthy and almost absolutist skepticism about the whole idea of "career," or a job to which you commit yourself over time, partly in hopes of advancement or the achievement of status. For him, the desirability of a career is an idea that is, in ways both explicit and implicit, taught to us from a very young age. It is taught even though having a career isn't necessarily appropriate for all people, or a sure or even likely way to fulfillment or happiness, and even though the idea may serve the system more than the people within the system. For him, the primary purpose of a career is the achievement of status, and status, for him, is empty, an accumulation of power and prestige and outward signs of success and wealth that ultimately doesn´t contribute to your happiness or to your development as a person. Better to avoid arrangements that limit your freedom of movement and choice, or that ask you to conform to particular expectations that may be inconsistent with who you are as a person. I actually think this last idea is probably what he was mostly driving at in the various conversations that the three of us had during the day. The idea of "playing the game" in order to secure some sort of advancement, even if doing so is somehow in contradiction with your own nature and your own desires, was, I think, the most offensive to him. I think I'm doing him justice, though he would probably quibble with a number of details, and would offer any number of qualifications and discursions.

I'm not going to get into what I think about all this, because I'm actually still thinking about it and working it out. Feel free to comment, though.

At this point, I'm going to break off. This post is already too ridiculously long. More later today or tomorrow!