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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.