Apologies to those to whom I send email relatively frequently. I am presently in Chachapoyas, a lovely little town in the northern highlands of Peru where time passes like a lazy river and the internet loads like another river that is in a slow and lazy competition with the first river and is winning hands down. Loading my email account takes a truly geological length of time, and the connection is frequently sketchy at best. As soon as I have access to a better connection, I should be able to do some catching up, email-wise.
Chachapoyas's main claim to fame is its proximity to Kuelap, a pre-Incan set of ruins dating back to the mid-first millenium of the common era. I'm beginning to think that much of Peru's pre-modern history can be understood as a series of efforts to build the most impressive cities possible on the highest mountains possible. Kuelap is in slightly worse shape than Machu Picchu, but is still amazing in its own right. It is, as I said, atop a fairly tall mountain, with correspondingly incredible views of the valleys below. It's surrounded by a wall of stone, with a narrow entrance on one side through which you walk to find a steep incline up to the main area of the city. A few of the stones on the walls on either side of the entryway have figures carved into them, including a cayman and a rather eerie human face. Most of the buildings had, understandably, crumbled either partly or fully in the many hundreds of years since the site was occupied, but what remained was still quite remarkable. In many of the circular dwellings were narrow corrals where people kept guinea pigs - the food, not the pet - and several had underground chambers with portals in the very center of the dwellings. These were apparently used as the resting places for the remains of family members (after about a year's worth of burial at another more distant site to allow decomposition to run its full course.) One large wall served as a mausoleum - through a small hole you could see the pelvis and femur of one of Kuelap's former inhabitants.
Tonight the tour group is heading out for dinner, and tomorrow I'm off to see some ancient sarcophagi and the third largest waterfall in the world. Seems like a reasonable way to end this trip. Thursday and Friday are essentially travel days.
Hope all is well at home. Looking forward to seeing you all again.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Monday, March 21, 2011
On the bus
Overnight, I took an 11 hour bus ride from Chiclayo to Chachapoyas. Here's what it was like:
Actually, it wasn't like that in the slightest. There was music, but it was coming from the radio of a young man sitting near me, and instead of making me want to dance it made me want to curl up in a ball and cry.
Here's what it was actually like:
The ride and duration were actually similar. However, we lacked a Keanu Reeves figure to maintain order, and the driver wasn't nearly as hot as Sandra Bullock. He was more of a Paul Giamatti type. Try sleeping through this sort of thing, by the way.
After carefully considering the options, I think this reflects my general bus riding experience overnight:
In which I'm Steve Martin or Martin Short. I prefer Martin Short; Steve Martin is funny, don't get me wrong, but I find Martin Short to be a much more accessible comedian, even if he isn't quite as brilliant. But the bus was at least 10 or 15 degrees hotter on the inside than on the outside, on account of the fact that there were over 50 of us crammed together in seats that sort of reclined and without air conditioning or openable windows. Now, I paid about $11 for the bus ride, so I got exactly what I paid for. I did have water, thankfully, and lip balm, but I have since booked a return trip for tomorrow that should be much kinder.
Hope all is well at home.
Actually, it wasn't like that in the slightest. There was music, but it was coming from the radio of a young man sitting near me, and instead of making me want to dance it made me want to curl up in a ball and cry.
Here's what it was actually like:
The ride and duration were actually similar. However, we lacked a Keanu Reeves figure to maintain order, and the driver wasn't nearly as hot as Sandra Bullock. He was more of a Paul Giamatti type. Try sleeping through this sort of thing, by the way.
After carefully considering the options, I think this reflects my general bus riding experience overnight:
In which I'm Steve Martin or Martin Short. I prefer Martin Short; Steve Martin is funny, don't get me wrong, but I find Martin Short to be a much more accessible comedian, even if he isn't quite as brilliant. But the bus was at least 10 or 15 degrees hotter on the inside than on the outside, on account of the fact that there were over 50 of us crammed together in seats that sort of reclined and without air conditioning or openable windows. Now, I paid about $11 for the bus ride, so I got exactly what I paid for. I did have water, thankfully, and lip balm, but I have since booked a return trip for tomorrow that should be much kinder.
Hope all is well at home.
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Premodern humans - what did they know?
Today I'm in a town called Chiclayo, along the north coast. Its main claim to fame is a nearby set of ruins of fantastic proportions, dating back to the early to mid-first millenium of the common era. The site - a cluster of tombs next to a set of pyramids, all still being excavated - was found in the late 80s, apparently after a nearby archeologist noticed a surge of unusual items on the black market. Graverobbers had apparently found and started raiding the site, followed by nearby inhabitants. The archeologist managed to stop the graverobbing partly by employing many of the locals as excavators, a brilliant bit of social engineering that would probably be called socialism by most of the political class in America.
Anyway, the most significant find at the site was the tomb of a man since dubbed the Lord of Sipan. He is thought to have been the ruler of his particular civilization, on account of the fact that he was adorned with and his tomb was stuffed with, among other things, elaborate necklaces, earrings, headgear, breastplates, staffs, pottery, his wife, his concubine, animal sacrifices, and one or two human sacrifices to top it all off. Interestingly, one of the human sacrifices - apparently meant to be his guardian in the underworld - had his feet lopped off. No word on whether this was done before or after he was himself sent on his way to the underworld, but the speculation is that this was done to discourage running away. I'm not sure how they know this, and I'm also not sure I like the explanation, as it seems a heavy handed, though admittedly practical, solution to the problem. I prefer to think that it pertains to the use, or lack thereof, of the feet in the afterlife, and it seems like it was a symbolic way of binding him to his master.
In any case, I took a tour today and visited the excavation site and the pyramids. There's also a very impressive museum which contains many of the artifacts recovered from the site. Unfortunately, pictures were not allowed within the museum, so the link is the best I can do. Suffice to say that the civilization of Sipan had craftsmen and women who I would bet lots of money on if there was such a thing as March Madness for the artisans of human civilizations in eras past. Granted, these were all made for the Big Kahuna, but still, the obvious creativity and intricacy of many of the artifacts was quite extraordinary to behold. Elaborate necklaces made of thousands upon thousands of beads, banners of copper plated with gold, sceptres adorned with miniatures of gods or temples or even the Lord of Sipan himself, very finely wrought lace, and even a necklace made of white shell inlaid with an intricate design of red shell. You can see that in the lower right hand corner of the linked page. More on that in a minute.
Like many premodern peoples, the people of Sipan drew their ideas of deities and the spiritual world from the animal kingdom. So if you look at the pictures you can see representations of a crab-god and an octopus-god, for example. And there were others, including, but not limited to, cat-gods, fox-gods, lizard-gods, spider-gods, and bat-gods. These deities - if that's even the right term - were incorporated into the vast majority of artifacts in one way or another, and the craftsmanship was uniformly painstaking. The idea that the natural world was also the world of the spirit was central to these people, as it was central to the Incans. It's just striking to me how, despite its dominance over the past two millenia, the idea of One God is an anomaly, in the long view of human history. One wonders if that's been such a good thing.
As a brief aside, I must commend to anyone reading this blog a book by Barry Lopez called Apologia. It's very short, illustrated by some evocative wood carvings. In it, Lopez describes a cross-country trip he takes, during which he makes a point of stopping whenever he sees roadkill, and trying to pay it the respect of dragging it off the road and giving it as proper a burial - or at least ceremony - as he can. He observes that, in indiginous cultures past, every single animal killed along the road had a spirit, or was a spirit. We, including I, often forget this in the name of progress and speed, but I imagine our slaughter of the animals that have the misfortune of wandering out in front of our cars and trucks would be regarded with no small amount of horror by even our own indiginous ancestors.
One of the artifacts in particular caught my attention: the shell necklace I referenced above. Our tour guide called our attention to it, making a point of observing that the design on it was not painted on, but rather was that of red shell inlaid into the dominant white shell. The picture gives you some idea. The small description accompanying the display (in Spanish) said that the design is meant to evoke the undulations of a swimming catfish, but a close look brought other things to my mind. I think you can see this in the picture, which is, again, at the very bottom right hand corner on the page. To me, it looks like the double helix of DNA.
No doubt this is nothing more than coincidence, but even if it is, I find it moving in an uncanny sort of way. There is, undoubtedly, a tendency amongst some Western folks like me to romanticize and idealize the lifeways of premodern humans, particularly their obvious and deeply intuitive connection with their natural surroundings. Life for the Sipan people was undoubtedly difficult in countless ways. Even the Lord of Sipan himself apparently died at age 45 of unclear causes, though his bones show evidence of osteoporosis. (The guide speculated that this was largely because the Lord of Sipan was carried everywhere by servants and slaves, who no doubt had excellent bone strength as a result.) And let's not forget the human sacrifices to appease some of these animal-gods I was raving about earlier.
But Western Civilization, in making the ideas of rationality and progress central to its identity, and in marginalizing ideas of intuition and spirituality, is missing something. By its nature it disassembles, breaks down, analyzes, demystifies, and in general operates on the belief that an understanding of all the parts of something will enable an understanding of the whole. Even though I'm a doctor in the tradition of Western medicine, I'm increasingly of the opinion that this belief is nothing short of sheer folly and arrogance. The belief that something can be completely understood - and, by implication, controlled - invariably leads to disaster. The recent oil spill in the Gulf and the nuclear crisis in Japan are just two obvious examples.
So if things cannot and can never be understood fully, what are we to do with the gap between our understanding and the myth of total understanding? I think that's a space best filled with things like reverence, awe, respect, humility, genuflection, ritual, story. I think that premodern humans, understanding (purely in a scientific sense) much less than us, needed those things in order to navigate their world in a way that we don't, exactly. But their closeness to the natural world, the immediacy and spirituality of that world for them, leads me to believe that it's not impossible for the structure of DNA to have made an appearance on a piece of jewelry almost 2000 years before its discovery by Watson and Crick. After all, it's an intricate part of almost all life on the planet.
Enough for now. Hope all is well at home.
Anyway, the most significant find at the site was the tomb of a man since dubbed the Lord of Sipan. He is thought to have been the ruler of his particular civilization, on account of the fact that he was adorned with and his tomb was stuffed with, among other things, elaborate necklaces, earrings, headgear, breastplates, staffs, pottery, his wife, his concubine, animal sacrifices, and one or two human sacrifices to top it all off. Interestingly, one of the human sacrifices - apparently meant to be his guardian in the underworld - had his feet lopped off. No word on whether this was done before or after he was himself sent on his way to the underworld, but the speculation is that this was done to discourage running away. I'm not sure how they know this, and I'm also not sure I like the explanation, as it seems a heavy handed, though admittedly practical, solution to the problem. I prefer to think that it pertains to the use, or lack thereof, of the feet in the afterlife, and it seems like it was a symbolic way of binding him to his master.
In any case, I took a tour today and visited the excavation site and the pyramids. There's also a very impressive museum which contains many of the artifacts recovered from the site. Unfortunately, pictures were not allowed within the museum, so the link is the best I can do. Suffice to say that the civilization of Sipan had craftsmen and women who I would bet lots of money on if there was such a thing as March Madness for the artisans of human civilizations in eras past. Granted, these were all made for the Big Kahuna, but still, the obvious creativity and intricacy of many of the artifacts was quite extraordinary to behold. Elaborate necklaces made of thousands upon thousands of beads, banners of copper plated with gold, sceptres adorned with miniatures of gods or temples or even the Lord of Sipan himself, very finely wrought lace, and even a necklace made of white shell inlaid with an intricate design of red shell. You can see that in the lower right hand corner of the linked page. More on that in a minute.
Like many premodern peoples, the people of Sipan drew their ideas of deities and the spiritual world from the animal kingdom. So if you look at the pictures you can see representations of a crab-god and an octopus-god, for example. And there were others, including, but not limited to, cat-gods, fox-gods, lizard-gods, spider-gods, and bat-gods. These deities - if that's even the right term - were incorporated into the vast majority of artifacts in one way or another, and the craftsmanship was uniformly painstaking. The idea that the natural world was also the world of the spirit was central to these people, as it was central to the Incans. It's just striking to me how, despite its dominance over the past two millenia, the idea of One God is an anomaly, in the long view of human history. One wonders if that's been such a good thing.
As a brief aside, I must commend to anyone reading this blog a book by Barry Lopez called Apologia. It's very short, illustrated by some evocative wood carvings. In it, Lopez describes a cross-country trip he takes, during which he makes a point of stopping whenever he sees roadkill, and trying to pay it the respect of dragging it off the road and giving it as proper a burial - or at least ceremony - as he can. He observes that, in indiginous cultures past, every single animal killed along the road had a spirit, or was a spirit. We, including I, often forget this in the name of progress and speed, but I imagine our slaughter of the animals that have the misfortune of wandering out in front of our cars and trucks would be regarded with no small amount of horror by even our own indiginous ancestors.
One of the artifacts in particular caught my attention: the shell necklace I referenced above. Our tour guide called our attention to it, making a point of observing that the design on it was not painted on, but rather was that of red shell inlaid into the dominant white shell. The picture gives you some idea. The small description accompanying the display (in Spanish) said that the design is meant to evoke the undulations of a swimming catfish, but a close look brought other things to my mind. I think you can see this in the picture, which is, again, at the very bottom right hand corner on the page. To me, it looks like the double helix of DNA.
No doubt this is nothing more than coincidence, but even if it is, I find it moving in an uncanny sort of way. There is, undoubtedly, a tendency amongst some Western folks like me to romanticize and idealize the lifeways of premodern humans, particularly their obvious and deeply intuitive connection with their natural surroundings. Life for the Sipan people was undoubtedly difficult in countless ways. Even the Lord of Sipan himself apparently died at age 45 of unclear causes, though his bones show evidence of osteoporosis. (The guide speculated that this was largely because the Lord of Sipan was carried everywhere by servants and slaves, who no doubt had excellent bone strength as a result.) And let's not forget the human sacrifices to appease some of these animal-gods I was raving about earlier.
But Western Civilization, in making the ideas of rationality and progress central to its identity, and in marginalizing ideas of intuition and spirituality, is missing something. By its nature it disassembles, breaks down, analyzes, demystifies, and in general operates on the belief that an understanding of all the parts of something will enable an understanding of the whole. Even though I'm a doctor in the tradition of Western medicine, I'm increasingly of the opinion that this belief is nothing short of sheer folly and arrogance. The belief that something can be completely understood - and, by implication, controlled - invariably leads to disaster. The recent oil spill in the Gulf and the nuclear crisis in Japan are just two obvious examples.
So if things cannot and can never be understood fully, what are we to do with the gap between our understanding and the myth of total understanding? I think that's a space best filled with things like reverence, awe, respect, humility, genuflection, ritual, story. I think that premodern humans, understanding (purely in a scientific sense) much less than us, needed those things in order to navigate their world in a way that we don't, exactly. But their closeness to the natural world, the immediacy and spirituality of that world for them, leads me to believe that it's not impossible for the structure of DNA to have made an appearance on a piece of jewelry almost 2000 years before its discovery by Watson and Crick. After all, it's an intricate part of almost all life on the planet.
Enough for now. Hope all is well at home.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
The thing about wetsuits
I learned something today about wetsuits. Wetsuits are meant to be put on, and little to no time is meant to pass between this and the time in which you enter the water. It's a basic law of wetsuits. If you happen to put on a wetsuit and then sit around on a patio for 15 minutes, while, say, your surfing instructor tries to corral a number of preadolescent boys into their wetsuits so they can go surfing, and is trying to locate his own wetsuit in the meantime, you and everyone else who walks by the patio will invariably be thinking, why are you sitting around on a patio in a wetsuit? You will start to feel like a second rate superhero who was in the midst of donning his costume to engage in some crime-fighting, when the entire Justice League of America decided to show up and clean house before you've even managed to get your boots on. Naturally, after having gone through all the trouble of putting on your spandex supersuit, you don't want to turn around and strip it off, so you decide to lounge around nonchalantly for at least a little while, as if you were going to hang out in spandex irrespective of whether or not those assholes in the Justice League swooped in from nowhere to steal your thunder. Again.
This, by the way, is why Superman and Batman and Spider Man and so on have secret identities. It doesn't have anything to do with anonymity, or with protecting the ones they love, or with avoiding the difficulty and pressure of being super all the time. It's because wearing spandex all the time makes you look like a jerk. It also has the potential to really mess with you.
Along these lines, I highly recommend the graphic novel The Watchmen. Look at Rorschach for an example of someone who decides to be his super self all the time.
This, by the way, is why Superman and Batman and Spider Man and so on have secret identities. It doesn't have anything to do with anonymity, or with protecting the ones they love, or with avoiding the difficulty and pressure of being super all the time. It's because wearing spandex all the time makes you look like a jerk. It also has the potential to really mess with you.
Along these lines, I highly recommend the graphic novel The Watchmen. Look at Rorschach for an example of someone who decides to be his super self all the time.
On the beach
Okay, so I´ve spent the past two days doing next to nothing at the beach in a little town called Huanchaco, about 9 hours north of Lima. Being on the beach and all, it´s been a fishing village for much longer than it´s been a tourist attraction for folks like me, but I think they´ve been surfing here for quite a while as well. The fishermen use these very interesting-looking boats made out of reeds. They are fat on one end - the end on which the fishermen sit, solo - and taper down from there. The thin end curls slightly, like an elf's shoe. The boats look like a new form of punctuation, basically.
So I haven't been doing nothing, strictly speaking. I took some surfing lessons, and managed to remain standing more often than not. I also spent some time watching some surfers, which was humbling. It´s always a treat to watch people do things well, no matter what those things are, you know? Otherwise, I´ve been reading and writing a fair amount. There´s something about the sound of the surf that makes such things easier.
The keys on this keyboard are sticky, so this will be a short post. Tentative plans for today are to go north to a town called Chiclayo, which has a witch doctors' market. After that, I may go to a town called Chachapoyas, which is further inland but which has, among other things, a pretty spectacular nearby waterfall and some ruins. After that, I may head back to the beach for the last day or so. The less time I spend in Lima, the better, as you may have gathered from the post below.
Hope all is well at home.
So I haven't been doing nothing, strictly speaking. I took some surfing lessons, and managed to remain standing more often than not. I also spent some time watching some surfers, which was humbling. It´s always a treat to watch people do things well, no matter what those things are, you know? Otherwise, I´ve been reading and writing a fair amount. There´s something about the sound of the surf that makes such things easier.
The keys on this keyboard are sticky, so this will be a short post. Tentative plans for today are to go north to a town called Chiclayo, which has a witch doctors' market. After that, I may go to a town called Chachapoyas, which is further inland but which has, among other things, a pretty spectacular nearby waterfall and some ruins. After that, I may head back to the beach for the last day or so. The less time I spend in Lima, the better, as you may have gathered from the post below.
Hope all is well at home.
Monday, March 14, 2011
Lima, city of Biblical traffic jams
So I'm in Lima, sitting in an overpriced internet cafe in a bus station. I'm heading north to a city called Trujillo overnight, and from there to a city called Huanchaco, on the ocean. Supposedly it's a good surfing site, with the downside being that everyone apparently knows this, meaning that I'm likely to be only one of many tourists there this time of year.
I flew from Cusco to Lima this morning. I was a little sad to say goodbye to Cusco, whose charm is all the more endearing after being subjected to a day's worth of Lima. Imagine Manhattan. Then quadruple the number of cars, and hold up the biggest funhouse mirror you can conceive of, so that the relatively tidy grid of streets is bent in all sorts of crazy directions. That's much of Lima. I walked part of the way to the bus station, and from a pedestrian overpass you could look up and down the expressway and not see the end of the line of cars, all honking impotently. It was like an automotive example of the vanishing point. It is, quite frankly, insane that anyone builds places like this. Unless, of course, your goal is to make the maximum number of people frustrated and unhappy.
Lima does sit right on the Pacific ocean, so I took a stroll there today. As I approached the beach, I was met by an older man who offered me a flyer and some surfing lessons. His name was Doc Ricardo Garcia, retired psychologist and now full time surfer. He was fun to talk to. A surfer for over fifty years, mostly self-taught but introduced to it by his aunt, he now gives lessons and hangs out on the beach. His sister, he said, studied in Raleigh, North Carolina, some years ago, and now works in Peru in the field of macroeconomics. She is, he said, "the white sheep of the family." The black sheep, of course, is him. He owns a number of 60s era cars, which he tinkers with and restores in his spare time. He knew seemingly everyone on the beach, and was a fine salesman of his services as an instructor, as well as those of his colleagues. The beginner's board, he said, is so easy "it's like driving an automatic car."
I regretted not being able to get some lessons from him.
So, soon off to Trujillo, a few days around there (with some sightseeing of some non-Incan ruins,) then off to either more sites in the north, or perhaps a quick doubling back to the south.
Hope all is well at home.
I flew from Cusco to Lima this morning. I was a little sad to say goodbye to Cusco, whose charm is all the more endearing after being subjected to a day's worth of Lima. Imagine Manhattan. Then quadruple the number of cars, and hold up the biggest funhouse mirror you can conceive of, so that the relatively tidy grid of streets is bent in all sorts of crazy directions. That's much of Lima. I walked part of the way to the bus station, and from a pedestrian overpass you could look up and down the expressway and not see the end of the line of cars, all honking impotently. It was like an automotive example of the vanishing point. It is, quite frankly, insane that anyone builds places like this. Unless, of course, your goal is to make the maximum number of people frustrated and unhappy.
Lima does sit right on the Pacific ocean, so I took a stroll there today. As I approached the beach, I was met by an older man who offered me a flyer and some surfing lessons. His name was Doc Ricardo Garcia, retired psychologist and now full time surfer. He was fun to talk to. A surfer for over fifty years, mostly self-taught but introduced to it by his aunt, he now gives lessons and hangs out on the beach. His sister, he said, studied in Raleigh, North Carolina, some years ago, and now works in Peru in the field of macroeconomics. She is, he said, "the white sheep of the family." The black sheep, of course, is him. He owns a number of 60s era cars, which he tinkers with and restores in his spare time. He knew seemingly everyone on the beach, and was a fine salesman of his services as an instructor, as well as those of his colleagues. The beginner's board, he said, is so easy "it's like driving an automatic car."
I regretted not being able to get some lessons from him.
So, soon off to Trujillo, a few days around there (with some sightseeing of some non-Incan ruins,) then off to either more sites in the north, or perhaps a quick doubling back to the south.
Hope all is well at home.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
This is why they call it the rainy season, Machu Picchu edition, continued, etc
Yesterday I made it back from the rainforest, and for all I would, in general circumstances, complain about the paving of America, smooth roads uncovered by landslides are an unrecognized luxury. More about that later.
Getting back to the Machu Picchu hike, on day two we awoke to an overcast sky but no rain. Unfortunately, this didn't last long. This was especially unfortunate, as day 2 of the trek is generally one of the most spectacular, in terms of views. We had about an hour of no rain and overcast but not befogged skies, but not long after our first rest stop the drizzle started. One of the things I learned pretty quickly is that, when you see the porters dropping their 50 kilogram packs from their backs and deploying their cheap but effective plastic ponchos, that's a sign that you should too. About midway up the day's ascent - to 4200 meters, the highest point on the trail - the porters en masse decided that things were going to get worse before they got better, and suddenly they all were wearing yellow plastic. I held out for a little while longer, but my shoes were getting somewhat soggy, as was my backpack, so I stopped and recognized the inevitable. By this time, the clouds had descended from the sky and enveloped the mountains, and visibility was woefully poor.
The climb was arduous, much of it along stone stairs, but making it to the peak did feel like something of an accomplishment, even if all I could see was gray and rain. I did get a good look at the sign saying that this was the highest point on the Inca Trail, so there is that.
The descent wasn't much better, though the clouds thinned out enough for us to get a nice view of one of the many impressive waterfalls along the way. It rained through lunch, despite everyone's fervent prayers to the contrary. Hiking after lunch took us by some Incan ruins, which were shrouded in fog and somewhat eerier for it. After several hours we made our campsite, assembled with amazing speed in a complete downpour by the porters. I climbed inside my tent, peeled off and squeezed out my socks, and picked out some drier clothes. As the afternoon wore on, the rain diminished, and we managed to get some decent views from the campsite. I got a chance to practice being a doctor as well - one of our guides had a minor plastic surgery to remove some ugly scar on the left side of his face only two days before we departed on the tour. The site was weeping a little, and he was nervous about it. Fortunately, it didn't look infected, wasn't the least bit tender, and he felt fine, so I gave him a small pat on the back, reassurance, and a bill for $120 for the consultation. Okay, one of those things isn't true. Also, as an aside, it's nice to feel useful.
During dinner our main guide, Freddy, told us some of the history of Machu Picchu as well as of the Incans. Pretty fascinating stuff, again made all the more impressive by the relatively short time the Incans were around as an organized civilization. What we call the Inca trail is actually just a fragment of a much more extensive system of roads reaching from Chile into (I think) Ecuador. They had no coherent system of written language, though they apparently did use written symbols, an early precursor. The Incans were conquerers, subjugating their neighbors with greater and greater ease as they grew stronger. The Spanish visited similar treatment upon them, I suppose; I despair a little at this phenomenon. Peoples and civilizations can coexist, but once one of them gets a taste of power and glory, conflict and conquest and savagery seem inevitable. (As an aside, my favorite author, David Mitchell, explores this idea in many of his books, including Cloud Atlas, my favorite.)
Day 3 was significantly better. The hike was shorter, the sun shone for at least part of the day, and we saw some impressive Incan ruins unimpeded by clouds. It did rain a little later in the day, but without the steadiness of the previous day. After reaching camp, we all availed ourselves of the "hot" showers available in the nearby restaurant - actually lukewarm, but still very pleasant. On the patio outside the showers, some of the porters played a game of futbol, which meant dodging the ancient and slightly flat futbol they were using after emerging from the showers. We passed part of the afternoon playing a card game introduced to the group by the Danish girls. It was a simple game, a little noisy, and involved trying to create four of a kind in your hand and avoiding being the last to grab a stone from the center of the table once someone had done so. Some of the porters even joined in.
After dinner we returned to the restaurant for beer and relaxation. Most of the hikers and many of the porters go to this restaurant on the third day, and it turns into a makeshift discotheque. I went with the intention of having one or two beers and calling it a night; we had to wake up at about 4:30am the following morning to make the Sun Gate looking over Machu Picchu by sunrise. Unfortunately, our guide, Freddy, asked if anyone wanted some rum, and things really went downhill from there. When your glass of rum and coke is constantly full, despite the fact that you seem to be drinking from it constantly, that should be taken as a warning that some unknown person or persons are maliciously refilling it. I did manage to awaken the next day as scheduled, but I felt exactly like you would expect after drinking too much rum and then getting up at 4:30 in the morning.
On day 4, it rained all morning, of course. The Sun Gate typically affords an impressive view of Machu Picchu, but the clouds were, as usual, formidable. The main event at the Sun Gate was not the view of Machu Picchu but witnessing one alpaca pursuing another up the trail, through the Sun Gate, then down the opposite side. The pursuer had romantic intentions; the pursuee, given her agitated bleating and heedless galloping (she nearly knocked over more than a few hikers on her ascent,) didn't seem to care for the attention.
As we got to Machu Picchu, the clouds started to thin out. It is, of course, much more impressive in person than in pictures. An ancient city of stones and terracing surrounded by impossibly tall mountain peaks. In its heyday, it apparently served as home for about 600 people, which seemed a small number to me. Interestingly, there were parts of it still under construction at the time it was abandoned. If I recall correctly, it was at least 60 years in the making. We toured the site for several hours, with the most magnificent views to be had from a sort of watchguard's post atop tens of rows of terracing. You couldn't help but imagine people living there 500 years ago. This was actually the most... well, perplexing part for me. The landscape in Peru is almost uniformly astonishing and awe-inspiring, and around Machu Picchu it's almost as if this aspect of Peru is distilled into its essence. Everything about it - the mountain peaks, the deep valleys, the distant rivers, the clouds, the sun casting mighty shadows against cliff faces - was humbling beyond description. It was almost a relief to leave after a few hours, because of this. That some people considered this home half a millenium ago is unsettling. How can people live amidst such impersonal beauty? What resources did they draw upon? What made their work worthy of the world in which they lived? They must have found ways to make their lives resonate with meaning that at least approached the grandeur of their surroundings, but it's hard for me to imagine the work that must have taken every single day. The midwest has its own singular beauty, but the scale seems more approachable. Maybe that's because it's nothing for us to get in our cars and drive for a few hours. Mastery - or at least the appearance of mastery - of our environment is mostly an American phenomenon, I think, but it is, of course, illusion. We'd probably do well to find ways of letting that illusion go.
All right, enough for now. Tomorrow I'm flying from Cusco to Lima, and heading up the coast in search of a reasonably comfortable beach. If I have a chance I'll sit down and write some more tomorrow, but Tuesday is a possibility as well.
I hope all is well at home. I returned to discover that the cabal of sociopaths now running Wisconsin finally dropped all pretense of concern for the state's budget and passed their odious union-busting legislation as a standalone bill. Fortunately, for most people the fight has just begun.
Getting back to the Machu Picchu hike, on day two we awoke to an overcast sky but no rain. Unfortunately, this didn't last long. This was especially unfortunate, as day 2 of the trek is generally one of the most spectacular, in terms of views. We had about an hour of no rain and overcast but not befogged skies, but not long after our first rest stop the drizzle started. One of the things I learned pretty quickly is that, when you see the porters dropping their 50 kilogram packs from their backs and deploying their cheap but effective plastic ponchos, that's a sign that you should too. About midway up the day's ascent - to 4200 meters, the highest point on the trail - the porters en masse decided that things were going to get worse before they got better, and suddenly they all were wearing yellow plastic. I held out for a little while longer, but my shoes were getting somewhat soggy, as was my backpack, so I stopped and recognized the inevitable. By this time, the clouds had descended from the sky and enveloped the mountains, and visibility was woefully poor.
The climb was arduous, much of it along stone stairs, but making it to the peak did feel like something of an accomplishment, even if all I could see was gray and rain. I did get a good look at the sign saying that this was the highest point on the Inca Trail, so there is that.
The descent wasn't much better, though the clouds thinned out enough for us to get a nice view of one of the many impressive waterfalls along the way. It rained through lunch, despite everyone's fervent prayers to the contrary. Hiking after lunch took us by some Incan ruins, which were shrouded in fog and somewhat eerier for it. After several hours we made our campsite, assembled with amazing speed in a complete downpour by the porters. I climbed inside my tent, peeled off and squeezed out my socks, and picked out some drier clothes. As the afternoon wore on, the rain diminished, and we managed to get some decent views from the campsite. I got a chance to practice being a doctor as well - one of our guides had a minor plastic surgery to remove some ugly scar on the left side of his face only two days before we departed on the tour. The site was weeping a little, and he was nervous about it. Fortunately, it didn't look infected, wasn't the least bit tender, and he felt fine, so I gave him a small pat on the back, reassurance, and a bill for $120 for the consultation. Okay, one of those things isn't true. Also, as an aside, it's nice to feel useful.
During dinner our main guide, Freddy, told us some of the history of Machu Picchu as well as of the Incans. Pretty fascinating stuff, again made all the more impressive by the relatively short time the Incans were around as an organized civilization. What we call the Inca trail is actually just a fragment of a much more extensive system of roads reaching from Chile into (I think) Ecuador. They had no coherent system of written language, though they apparently did use written symbols, an early precursor. The Incans were conquerers, subjugating their neighbors with greater and greater ease as they grew stronger. The Spanish visited similar treatment upon them, I suppose; I despair a little at this phenomenon. Peoples and civilizations can coexist, but once one of them gets a taste of power and glory, conflict and conquest and savagery seem inevitable. (As an aside, my favorite author, David Mitchell, explores this idea in many of his books, including Cloud Atlas, my favorite.)
Day 3 was significantly better. The hike was shorter, the sun shone for at least part of the day, and we saw some impressive Incan ruins unimpeded by clouds. It did rain a little later in the day, but without the steadiness of the previous day. After reaching camp, we all availed ourselves of the "hot" showers available in the nearby restaurant - actually lukewarm, but still very pleasant. On the patio outside the showers, some of the porters played a game of futbol, which meant dodging the ancient and slightly flat futbol they were using after emerging from the showers. We passed part of the afternoon playing a card game introduced to the group by the Danish girls. It was a simple game, a little noisy, and involved trying to create four of a kind in your hand and avoiding being the last to grab a stone from the center of the table once someone had done so. Some of the porters even joined in.
After dinner we returned to the restaurant for beer and relaxation. Most of the hikers and many of the porters go to this restaurant on the third day, and it turns into a makeshift discotheque. I went with the intention of having one or two beers and calling it a night; we had to wake up at about 4:30am the following morning to make the Sun Gate looking over Machu Picchu by sunrise. Unfortunately, our guide, Freddy, asked if anyone wanted some rum, and things really went downhill from there. When your glass of rum and coke is constantly full, despite the fact that you seem to be drinking from it constantly, that should be taken as a warning that some unknown person or persons are maliciously refilling it. I did manage to awaken the next day as scheduled, but I felt exactly like you would expect after drinking too much rum and then getting up at 4:30 in the morning.
On day 4, it rained all morning, of course. The Sun Gate typically affords an impressive view of Machu Picchu, but the clouds were, as usual, formidable. The main event at the Sun Gate was not the view of Machu Picchu but witnessing one alpaca pursuing another up the trail, through the Sun Gate, then down the opposite side. The pursuer had romantic intentions; the pursuee, given her agitated bleating and heedless galloping (she nearly knocked over more than a few hikers on her ascent,) didn't seem to care for the attention.
As we got to Machu Picchu, the clouds started to thin out. It is, of course, much more impressive in person than in pictures. An ancient city of stones and terracing surrounded by impossibly tall mountain peaks. In its heyday, it apparently served as home for about 600 people, which seemed a small number to me. Interestingly, there were parts of it still under construction at the time it was abandoned. If I recall correctly, it was at least 60 years in the making. We toured the site for several hours, with the most magnificent views to be had from a sort of watchguard's post atop tens of rows of terracing. You couldn't help but imagine people living there 500 years ago. This was actually the most... well, perplexing part for me. The landscape in Peru is almost uniformly astonishing and awe-inspiring, and around Machu Picchu it's almost as if this aspect of Peru is distilled into its essence. Everything about it - the mountain peaks, the deep valleys, the distant rivers, the clouds, the sun casting mighty shadows against cliff faces - was humbling beyond description. It was almost a relief to leave after a few hours, because of this. That some people considered this home half a millenium ago is unsettling. How can people live amidst such impersonal beauty? What resources did they draw upon? What made their work worthy of the world in which they lived? They must have found ways to make their lives resonate with meaning that at least approached the grandeur of their surroundings, but it's hard for me to imagine the work that must have taken every single day. The midwest has its own singular beauty, but the scale seems more approachable. Maybe that's because it's nothing for us to get in our cars and drive for a few hours. Mastery - or at least the appearance of mastery - of our environment is mostly an American phenomenon, I think, but it is, of course, illusion. We'd probably do well to find ways of letting that illusion go.
All right, enough for now. Tomorrow I'm flying from Cusco to Lima, and heading up the coast in search of a reasonably comfortable beach. If I have a chance I'll sit down and write some more tomorrow, but Tuesday is a possibility as well.
I hope all is well at home. I returned to discover that the cabal of sociopaths now running Wisconsin finally dropped all pretense of concern for the state's budget and passed their odious union-busting legislation as a standalone bill. Fortunately, for most people the fight has just begun.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
More light posting
So, on short notice I booked a trip to the rainforest, leaving tomorrow, returning next Saturday. After that, all blogging, all the time.
So this is why they call it the rainy season: Machu Picchu edition
I survived the four day trek to Machu Picchu, with several layers of sunblock and insect repellent, as well as my own version of a 5 o'clock shadow (times four days) to show for it.
On day 1, I awoke at about 4:30am, and immediately heard the sound of rain outside my window. The hostel in which I stayed has a courtyard covered by a hard plastic roof, and it sounded like a downpour of biblical proportions. It ended up being not so bad, more a gentle rain than anything else. The tour bus came by a little after 5am; I was the last of the group to be collected. There were 11 of us total: four Australians, two Danes, two Germans, and two Argentinians. With two tour guides, we made for a cozy little group.
The bus trip was, for the most part, relaxing, though matters got more interesting near the beginning of the trail (known as the 82nd kilometer.) Every rainy season I expect there are occasional difficulties with mudslides and such. We fortunately didn't encounter any such problems; however, at one point, just above the Urubamba river (which looked to me like a long series of really-pissed-off-River-God level rapids,) the left lane of the road had actually washed away, leaving a single lane over which our driver expertly drove our bus.
A few words about the bus driver. Near the end of the drive, we actually cruise along some narrow and somewhat rough roads, as you might expect for rural and relatively underdeveloped Peru. For longish stretches of this road, it is impossible for more than one vehicle to pass, which required occasional backing up and seemingly physically impossible squeezing of one large vehicle by another. At one point we were facing a truck, and for about four minutes there was a lot of gesticulating and rapid jabbering in Spanish, before our driver finally gave in and backed up our good-sized tourist bus perhaps a tenth of a mile before the truck was able to pass us. After that, he took off at rather astonishing speed down this bumpy, narrow back-country Peruvian road, driving in such a way as to suggest that going backward again was not even really an option. When the next truck coming straight at us inevitably appeared, I think our driver actually accelerated. The truck helpfully flashed its lights at us, which our driver just took as a sign of weakness. He had remarkable faith in the braking system of our bus, which indeed did not fail when he decided to use them about ten feet away from the bumper of the other truck. As you might expect, the truck was the one who ended up backing up.
Day 1 of the hike was probably the best, in terms of weather. The rain stopped, the sun came out, and the clouds cleared for most of the day. I put up a scant few pictures on my flickr account, and in one of them you can see the peak of a mountain off in the distance. Pretty stunning. The one downside to the day - to the whole hike, actually - was that I was apparently the only one who had to haul just about all of his belongings himself. Nearly everyone else carried day packs, as they had hired porters ahead of time. The option of hiring a porter was not one offered to me by the company through which I booked the trip, and I get the sense that a great deal does depend on which agency you choose.
But the views were amazing, and while the hike was pretty rigorous on the first day, it was manageable. We stopped around 1pm for lunch, which, in a pattern that was to be repeated for the next few days, was better than just about anything I've eaten for weeks here. And not just because I was hungry. The rain started up again around lunch time, then slacked off immediately after - the timing couldn't have been much better.
We reached the campsite about three or four hours after lunch. The nights get pretty cold here, but my sleeping bag was up to it. The night sky was mind-blowing, as there was no artificial light for miles around. The Milky Way looked like very finely spread dust; it was possible to pick out even the dimmest stars within it.
I'm going to cut this short for the moment. More later, probably - the music in this internet cafe is getting to be a bit much.
On day 1, I awoke at about 4:30am, and immediately heard the sound of rain outside my window. The hostel in which I stayed has a courtyard covered by a hard plastic roof, and it sounded like a downpour of biblical proportions. It ended up being not so bad, more a gentle rain than anything else. The tour bus came by a little after 5am; I was the last of the group to be collected. There were 11 of us total: four Australians, two Danes, two Germans, and two Argentinians. With two tour guides, we made for a cozy little group.
The bus trip was, for the most part, relaxing, though matters got more interesting near the beginning of the trail (known as the 82nd kilometer.) Every rainy season I expect there are occasional difficulties with mudslides and such. We fortunately didn't encounter any such problems; however, at one point, just above the Urubamba river (which looked to me like a long series of really-pissed-off-River-God level rapids,) the left lane of the road had actually washed away, leaving a single lane over which our driver expertly drove our bus.
A few words about the bus driver. Near the end of the drive, we actually cruise along some narrow and somewhat rough roads, as you might expect for rural and relatively underdeveloped Peru. For longish stretches of this road, it is impossible for more than one vehicle to pass, which required occasional backing up and seemingly physically impossible squeezing of one large vehicle by another. At one point we were facing a truck, and for about four minutes there was a lot of gesticulating and rapid jabbering in Spanish, before our driver finally gave in and backed up our good-sized tourist bus perhaps a tenth of a mile before the truck was able to pass us. After that, he took off at rather astonishing speed down this bumpy, narrow back-country Peruvian road, driving in such a way as to suggest that going backward again was not even really an option. When the next truck coming straight at us inevitably appeared, I think our driver actually accelerated. The truck helpfully flashed its lights at us, which our driver just took as a sign of weakness. He had remarkable faith in the braking system of our bus, which indeed did not fail when he decided to use them about ten feet away from the bumper of the other truck. As you might expect, the truck was the one who ended up backing up.
Day 1 of the hike was probably the best, in terms of weather. The rain stopped, the sun came out, and the clouds cleared for most of the day. I put up a scant few pictures on my flickr account, and in one of them you can see the peak of a mountain off in the distance. Pretty stunning. The one downside to the day - to the whole hike, actually - was that I was apparently the only one who had to haul just about all of his belongings himself. Nearly everyone else carried day packs, as they had hired porters ahead of time. The option of hiring a porter was not one offered to me by the company through which I booked the trip, and I get the sense that a great deal does depend on which agency you choose.
But the views were amazing, and while the hike was pretty rigorous on the first day, it was manageable. We stopped around 1pm for lunch, which, in a pattern that was to be repeated for the next few days, was better than just about anything I've eaten for weeks here. And not just because I was hungry. The rain started up again around lunch time, then slacked off immediately after - the timing couldn't have been much better.
We reached the campsite about three or four hours after lunch. The nights get pretty cold here, but my sleeping bag was up to it. The night sky was mind-blowing, as there was no artificial light for miles around. The Milky Way looked like very finely spread dust; it was possible to pick out even the dimmest stars within it.
I'm going to cut this short for the moment. More later, probably - the music in this internet cafe is getting to be a bit much.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Light posting
Apologies for the lack of content in the blog over the past few days. Unfortunately, this state of affairs will continue at least until this coming weekend, as I head off to Macchu Picchu tomorrow, most likely in the rain. Hopefully it'll build character, or something.
Be well, everyone.
Be well, everyone.
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