Author: blogministrator

My Peruvian adventure has been both fascinating and – strangely enough – restful. A change is as good as a rest, so they say, and I have to say that perutourism.com have really done well in escorting me around the country – meeting me everywhere and ensuring I get the buses, trains and planes in my itinerary, picking me up from hotels to take me to train stations, bus stations, and airports, and collecting me from them to transfer me to my new hotel, each time. It has meant the entire holiday has been stress free, as far as making arrangements is concerned – all of that is taken care of. The fact that the vast majority of the time I have had ‘private service’ – a driver, a guide, and me, either in a small minivan or private car – has meant that I’ve had a more personal experience than the description ‘guided tour’ usually implies, able to have a one-to-one with each guide, getting the most out of each place I have visited. Worth every penny – and the exchange rate has really been in my favour: Peru is cheap. And, of course, as my conversations with fellow travellers in the Cusco restaurant and at Intipunku proved, this is the surest way to insulate oneself from the potential downsides of being in a very poor country.

Highlights

The highlights of the trip include, of course, the Lords of Sipan
Museum, which was an extremely well thought out, brilliantly executed,
and fascinating museum, which taught me more about the Moche people than
any other visit; and Machu Picchu, the deserved crown of Peruvian
ancient architecture, unmolested by anything but the jungle for 500
years since it was abandoned, an absolute jewel set in some of the most
stunning scenery I have been fortunate enough to discover. These two
really stand out as the most amazing visits of my trip. But also of
course Huaca de la Luna was an eye-opening masterpiece, too, showing
that the Moche produced all the stunning artwork known so well from
their ceramics, in relief on the walls of their temples, too. I really
enjoyed the extensive collection of Moche ceramics at the Casinelli
Museum, and the Lady of Cao pyramid and museum at El Brujo proved the
Moche had great Queens as well as Kings. I was suitably awe-struck by
the megalithic scale of the Inca architecture at Saqsaywaman, despite
only the foundations remaining, and only 20% of the site open to
tourists, and I really enjoyed the stunning Inca palace at
Ollantaytambo, with its technical wizardry, wonderful location, and
still living streets and squares.

Lowpoints

Lowpoints, if there were any, were principally Nazca – I’d say ‘not to
be recommended’, in the end: the discomfort of the experience outweighs
the opportunity to take poorer photographs than one is able to google at
a moment’s notice.

Perhaps to be considered a lowpoint, but also a welcome rest, was my day in bed in Puno trying to breathe at 13000ft!

But probably the only real ‘lowpoint’ as such, was, certainly during my
first few days, that my hip was still giving me grief, and the
associated inability to do much walking, or, later, any serious climbs.
The damage done to my hip through compensation issues related to my
congenital back problem, came about as a result of my ThomasCook
sardine-can trip to Vancouver and back, in June. [KLM to Lima were much
better, and I paid extra for a good seat.] Having been using a stick
as recently as days before departure, and wearing a strap daily right
through the holiday, I am nonetheless grateful that, in the end, this
really did not overly impact upon my Peruvian trip. I was restrained,
cautious, and careful, and it paid off. Only on a couple of occasions
(including the walk to Intipunku) did I really feel I was pushing it,
and, towards the end of this three week adventure (especially on the
walk to Intipunku) my general caution and care seemed to have nurtured
enough healing for me to achieve the things I really wanted. All I
would say that it has cost me (apart from the nuisances associated with
the strap) were: I didn’t climb the pyramid at Tucume; not wanting to
climb Amantani contributed to my decision to stay in bed on my first day
in Puno; and of course Wayna Pichu, the mountain peak overlooking Machu
Picchu, was out of the question, even though, by that point, I was
actually feeling not bad. But only 400 people are allowed up it each
day, and it’s apparently a seriously taxing climb, an absolute no-no for
anyone in my condition. But going to Intipunku, the Sun Gate, instead,
was lovely! The Inca Trail, four days for 20 year olds on gap years or
Uni summer breaks, was clearly exhausting even for those I saw arriving
at Machu Picchu for the dawn, and it’s more than 20 years since I last
walked a long distance for several days in a row.

Irrelevancies

On my New Zealand holiday in 2007 there were quite a few stops arranged
by my travel agent that I really found superfluous (at best) or simply
spurious. I think I had greater control over this tour, with
PeruTourism.com, and managed to keep silly stuff to a minimum.
Nonetheless there were a few things I could’ve foregone on a tour of
ancient Peru: the horse show was definitely the most irrelevant – even
tiresome – hence this being its only mention; the brief stop at the Inca
Bar to drink Chicha was charming but unnecessary; and the half dozen or
so churches I visited that I haven’t even mentioned in this blog. Most
were actually ok, even quite interesting, but only for the syncretistic
incorporation of pre-Columbian symbols and motifs into Peru’s unique
brand of Baroque Catholicism. I have to say that I concur with the
long-held English tradition of anti-papism, and have been struck more
than ever before by how (to use one of their favourite words) ‘evil’ an
institution the Catholic Church is. [Do see Stephen Fry’s wonderful critique of the Catholic Church.]
OK, so the British (with help from the Germans, Irish, French, Belgians
and Dutch) exterminated much of the indigenous population of North
America, and left a poisonous legacy in Africa, the Middle East, and
elsewhere. But the surviving First Nations, in Canada at least, have
managed to keep an unbroken line of tradition going, there; Africa is
proudly reasserting its own culture, and flexing its muscle in the
Anglican family. India is returning to her former glory after the brief
period of colonial nuisance. Here, in South America, following the
vile practices of the Inquisition, 90% of the people are still Catholic,
speak Spanish, and view the darker skinned, more purely indigenous
people who still speak Runisamy (the Quechua language) or Aymara, with
distaste. I knew the British had a lot to answer for around the world.
Now I have seen how much the Spanish have to answer for, too.

Final Thoughts

Finally, in a sort of sad, geeky kind of way, for a solo traveller in a
foreign country, I have to say that my Mac is my friend. It has given
me Facebook; enabled me to do all this blogging; iPhoto and access to
Flickr have enabled me to process and display all my holiday pics as I
go along; and Hoyles games has wiled away the odd hour of an evening in a
hotel room before sleep. The iPhone of course is the compliment – and I
am very glad of the new EU cap on data roaming charges introduced in
July: I have spent more than in the past, it’s true, because I simply
didn’t do data roaming in the past. But the cap means I now know what
the max cost will be, and I have spent that: ergo the new rules are good
for the telecomms companies. Foursquare
I have to say has been lots of fun, on my iPhone, and I have become
Mayor of two hotels in Peru, and, amazingly, became Mayor of Machu
Picchu, on Foursquare, too! How cool is that?!

Machu Picchu. Superlatives fail me. Just the train journey (much better than the famous Inca Trail, which is a four-to-six-day walk) was fairly spectacular, bringing home how deep and winding the gorge is here. It is made by a river that almost completely encloses the mountain upon the top of which the sanctuary of Macchu Picchu was built. The town was constructed from the huge rocks that were already there, some of which are still scattered about the summit in the few areas that have not been built on. Here and there the huge stones have been left in place, and the houses and temples built around them, using them as platforms.

The place was started probably around 1400CE, and was still ongoing and unfinished in parts, when it was mysteriously abandoned around 1500CE, abandoned to such an extent that later Incas – including the one overthrown by the Spanish, did not even know of its existence. Which of course means that neither did the Spanish. Of all the Inca ruins, this one is untouched, untainted by the Spanish. This site was not destroyed by them, there is no church built on top of it. It was lost to the jungle before Pisaro even set foot in South America, in 1533. The Quechua people, and their king, the Inca, the Son of the Sun, had abandoned this place long before.

The mountain territory, and the fact that here, at 2400m above sea
level, and towards the east of Cuzco, we are almost in the Amazonian
jungle – at its gate, in fact – all make this already an incredibly
special place, the awesome beauty of the natural surroundings surely a
big part of why it was chosen as a royal sanctuary. The town is built
on the summit, and surrounded by a wall, and includes, typical of other
Inca settlements, especially of the high empire period, a ritual sector
with temples and astronomical stone artefacts, a royal compound where
the royal family and probably the main priests lived or stayed, a
‘commons’ sector where the people who built and maintained the town
lived, and an agricultural area of terraces.

The Temple of the Sun here, as Hiram Bingham called it (most of the
names of the buildings came from him, and his guesswork, as he cut back
the jungle from this place in the years following his discovery of it in
1911), is perhaps the most interesting, to me. There are two main
windows in this semi-circular temple. One faces the point on the
horizon where the Winter Solstice, on June 21st, rises, the other the
point where the Summer Solstice, on December 22nd, rises, over a small
temple on the top of an overlooking mountain called, Intipunku – ‘The
Sun Gate’.

On these Solstice mornings, the first rays of the sun shine into the
temple through these windows and light up the altar stone in its heart.
The masonry – especially of the royal compound and the temples – is
simply awesome. This place seems in many ways, certainly as it has come
down to us molested not by the Spanish, but only by time, bushes, and
trees, perhaps the finest example of Inca High Empire architecture,
hydraulic mastery and urban planning. Almost in the jungle here,
drainage of the buildings and the terraces is of paramount importance,
and provision of fresh spring water for the populace without the need to
climb down the mountain to the river, absolutely essential. The
drainage remains perfect. To this day, a fresh spring from a mountain
on the other side of the river runs through complex buried channels down
to the bottom of the valley, the pressure making it rise again up to
the summit of Machu Picchu where it flows gently, unceasingly, with
unchanging flow and temperature, all year round, still to this day, five
hundred years after it was built.
The place is simply amazing.

At the highest point of the main area of the town is the astronomical
observatory, a carved rock with its corners pointing North, South, East,
and West, and to the four mountain peaks around Machu Picchu, crowned
with a sundial obtrusion that casts its shadows with precision around
the year, allowing precise calculations of Solstices and Equinoxes. It
is famed to have power within it, and all the tourists hold their hands
an inch above it, trying to feel the power. I’m sure if that were
possible it would have been sucked dry long ago by now – there are only
1000 tourists here today: it’s a quiet day.

To the west, in the distance, is Llactapata – another Inca temple that
is aligned to the East and where the Sun can be seen rising over Machu
Picchu at one of the Solstices, precisely over where, here at Machu
Picchu, there is a viewing tower overlooking Llactapata.

My guide takes several good pics of me here, and I am grateful. He is
knowlegeable, polite, friendly – as they have all been – and my morning
tour is a great introduction to the place. After another big tourist
buffet lunch at the Sanctuary Lodge, I return alone to take a few more
pics of the Temple of the Sun, and make a last climb to the astronomical
observatory, and then head down on the bus to the delightful El Mapi
hotel, for a shower, and a dry Martini, and a light supper. First thing
in the morning, I am on the 5.30am bus to see the dawn rise over Machu
Picchu. And what an experience this is!

I have ‘seen in the dawn’ on a number of occasions, and got up for the
dawn as often, but this has to be one of the finest of them all.
Climbing to the highest point of Machu Picchu where the ‘watchman’s
house,’ as it is known, looks out over the summit town, one gets an
amazing view of the moment of sunrise, as it crests the tops of the
mountains surrounding the site. Some short distance on its journey from
the the Winter Solstice point, in June, towards the Summer Solstice
point, at Intipunku (Sun Gate), in December, the appearance of the sun’s
orb above the mountain peaks is an awesome sight.

From the watchman’s house I went down to where the first fountain
produces the flow of spring water that runs in its channels and from
other fountains down through the centre of the royal compound and into
the commons sector. Here, where the royals themselves would have got
their water, I washed the silver, serpentine, smokey quartz and obsidian
jewelry I had bought in Pisak, in the hope that I might take some of
the blessing of Pacha Mama and Pacha Tata back to my home land.

Then the walk up to Intipunku. It’s about an hour each way, said the
guide, but I managed it a little quicker on the way down. On the way up
it was a good 50 minutes, and a hot and sweaty journey with frequent
panting stops. Glad of the strap around my hips, I took it easy, but I
am definitely on the mend, it seems, and the walk was worth the risk!
The reward was absolutely fantastic. Gobsmacking is about the best word
I can think of. From Intipunku the view over Machu Picchu is
incredible. I sat there for over an hour, just drinking in the view. I
met an English girl doing a good bit more of South America, there, and
we agreed on many things. I recommended the Lords of Sipan museum and
Huaca de la Luna to her. It was so peaceful, sitting up at Intipunku –
about five of us at one point, three Dutch half asleep on the terraces,
and us two English types. Absolutely peaceful, at the Gate of the Sun,
with the great orb high in the sky behind us, shining down over one of
the most amazing views I have ever seen in my life, bathing perhaps one
of the greatest pre-Christian temple complexes in the world.

And then, from the wall of the terrace at Intipunku where I sat, I stood
up to begin my journey home. It will take me three days – journeying
this afternoon to Cusco, overnight there at the Don Carlos again,
collecting my suitcase, then flying Monday to Lima, overnight there
before finally the intercontinental flight on Tuesday back to Amsterdam.
I will bring home with me some incredible memories. And I will be
back.

So last night I decided to throw caution to the wind and try out one of the posh restaurants of Cusco – with my credit card. Bistrot was recommended by my Cusco tour guide so I got the hotel to book me a table, and went up for dinner there at 8pm. The food was excellent – clearly a properly trained, imaginative chef. The service was worse than amateur – embarrassing. Once I had got past the language difficulty of wanting a decent bottle from the reasonably good list, rather than just a glass of the local Peruvian Tacama white wine – not bad, but not appropriate for a posh dinner – I had to offer to take over opening the expensive bottle of wine, wincing as the waitress struggled with it, with all the promise of bits of cork ending up in the wine. A nice enough girl, friendly, willing, but with barely any English and barely any training as a waitress. My Jumbo River Prawns were cooked to perfection in a delicious sauce, but again I had quite a struggle (and an empty side plate delivered) before managing to get a small bowl of warm water to wash my fingers. Hopefully they’ll serve one with the prawns to future guests. I realised this was quite a new venture, only open a short time, with much to learn. The best thing about the dining experience, however, was the other two diners in the restaurant, a couple from London in their ‘gap year’ between work and retirement, touring the world. Had a really nice chat with them. Bolivia, they say, is even cheaper than Peru, Argentina about the same, but Brazil as expensive as Europe. Like me, they have found everyone they’ve met to be very friendly, and felt no threat at all, despite all the warnings. We conclude that it must be backpacking poor student travellers in cheap hostels that tend to experience the underside we have been warned of, and that we are cushioned by the reach of our wallets. Having to buy a bottle to get a nice wine with my delicious River and ShellFish ‘Parihuela,’ which came with the lovely Peruvian garlic rice I already enjoyed in the north, I of course was pretty happy by the end of the meal, chatting with the other diners. It was a shame that the service was so poor, and that, in the end, despite the signs, they seemed incapable of making their EFTPOS handheld work, either with MasterCard or VISA, and I had to part with half of my remaining cash for this lovely dinner – money well spent, but which I had wanted to put on the credit card to pay later, not pay for out of the rest of my holiday cash. I made no bones about ensuring they knew my displeasure. My fellow guests were equally put out by this, though perhaps less surprised than I that the signs turned out to be misleading, at best. I still made sure they complimented the chef though !

So this morning I awoke somewhat hungover – from wine rather than
altitude, for a change – and was treated as a first stop to an animal
rescue centre, caring for exotic Andean creatures with injuries, or
saved from the black market, and returning them, when ready, to the
wild. I met three condors – huge carrion birds – a couple of pumas, and
some large parrots. On the road away from here, the devastation caused
by the flooding in the last rainy season becomes all too apparent, with
the road washed away in places down to a single carriageway. Six months
ago, this area experienced twice the normal rainfall and, among other
things, the railway up to Macchu Picchu was severely damaged (and
repaired by June, thankfully!) The next stop was a traditional Inca bar,
a homely pub where they make their own ‘chicha’ – a maize corn beer,
served straight to the men and brewed with strawberries and served with a
sprinkling of herbs on top to the women. Very nice, I’d say!

Third was Pisak, and its famous market, where I was able to use the
credit card to stock up on Peruvian silver (95% alloy with copper, like
Britannia Silver, better than Sterling Silver which is only 92.5%)
beautifully worked by local craftsmen, with the famous Macchu Picchu
serpentine (flecked with iron-pyrites and haematite), Peruvian smokey
quartz, local obsidian, and a particularly lovely skyblue local
sodalite, worked into the silver casings with local tree resin for glue.
Very lovely. I also parted with some dollars for the rug I have been
looking for ever since I arrived in Peru, and had a sneaking suspicion I
might find here. Natural dyes and hand-woven, I got one with the Inca
calendar in red, black, and blue. Very nice. I feel like a good
tourist now, with my souvenirs and gifts for friends back home.

So the main event of the morning, and I am thankfully quite awake by now
(parting with money often has that effect). Ollantaytambo sits at the
junction of three valleys, including the Cusco valley, and the Sacred
Valley where Macchu Picchu lies. The winds combine here and the Incas,
great technicians that they were, built their storage houses just where
the winds meet and keep the temperature a good 3-4deg lower than on the
valley floor. Either side of the river in the middle of the valley they
built houses for the common people on one side, and the royal compound
on the other. A tambo is literally that – a staging post for the royal
household on its journeys around the empire.

The terraces here are extremely cleverly formed, with different clays
and soils and at different altitudes to create a series of
micro-climates perfect for potatoes, beans, fruits, and coca leaves –
yes jungle coca leaves growing in the corner of the Sacred Valley,
rather than imported like pretty much everywhere else.

The mountain with the cold storage houses also sports a carved human
profile near its peak, as viewed from the Temple of the Sun at the top
of the terraces behind the royal compound. On the winter solstice on
June 21st the sun rises over distant mountains right at the third eye of
this profile, and shines directly across the valley hitting the Temple
of the Sun first before anywhere else. Coming from sources unknown,
pure mountain spring water at constant temperature and flow appears from
spouts into channels to snake around the terraces as irrigation, and –
most beautifully of all – to create a series of pleasure garden channels
through the royal compound. One wonders if they maybe even had
fountains, after the moorish fashion of contemporary buildings across
the Atlantic like the Alhambra. The whole place is like a holiday
resort in that sense, with the old Inca town square with its flowing
water channel today’s tourist market at the entrance to the
archaeological site: the royal compound, terraces, and what remains of
the Temples the Spanish left behind, when they broke them down to use
the stone to build their churches. The common people’s side of town is
still lived in, Inca streets running up the hills from the main street
into town.

Last stop is at Tunupa, a fantastic buffet restaurant for tourist buses,
with excellent food, and a delightful riverside garden, where I eat
heartily before being dropped at my hotel prior to tomorrow’s early
morning trip to Macchu Picchu.

Well, the Incas were truly extraordinary masons. For all that this was – in European chronology – a medieval culture, in the 15th and 16th centuries CE, it was a megalithic culture. Not the megalithic culture of thousands of years BCE, on the Atlantic fringe of Europe and the Mediterranean, but a megalithic culture that had mastered building with stone in an extraordinary way. There are mortice and tendon joints, and metallic rings sunk into carved grooves between stones, inside these huge walls, and carefully graded horizontals that incorporate subtle ratchets at strategic points. The basic shape is trapezoidal: walls and doorways and niches that stand with legs apart. All this makes Inca buildings effectively earthquake proof – both supremely stable and protected from horizontal movement.

Churches built by the Spanish on top of Inca temples (Christianity,
after all, built on top of pagan sites the world over, to cancel out the
old gods with their new religion) fell in the earthquakes of 1650 and
1950 and 1986. The Inca temples are only ruined by deliberate Spanish
destruction, and by having been treated as quarries right up until legal
protection in 1936. Cusco city is an image of the Puma, with the
Temple of the Sun at its phallus, and the complex of Saqsaywaman at its
head (the name Saqsaywaman literally means, Puma’s head).

The zigzag construction is the hair on the lower jaw of the Puma, the
three tiers the three levels of the cosmos – underworld (snake), earth
(puma), and sky (condor). All that is left now is the foundations – you
can see the drainage holes that kept the place dry during the rainy
season. There were three towers on top of Saqsaywaman – one 160km
square, and one circular with three concentric rings of stone, that was
an enormous water tank. The hydraulic mastery of these genius
stonemasons, furthermore, continues to work perfectly where these
temples still stand, serving water at constant temperature and flow
regardless of season, from sources modern archaeologists have simply not
found.

There is ample evidence of how they were able to take water from high
places, channel it through carefully carved stones down into valleys and
back up to high places on the other side of valleys, using the pressure
created by shrinking the bore of the grooves they forced the water
through. These technologies, moreover, were sacred – stone and water,
and the knowledge of their manipulation, were pure. There is no mortar
holding any of these stones together. The water flows through holes
bored through stone, along channels paved with stone tiles, never
through clay pipes. Sand, clay and ramps were used, but only to
transport the stone: the quarry for the main temples at Cuzco is 17km
away, and it is estimated that it took 20,000 people working every day
77 years to build just the one large temple as Saqsaywaman on the hill
overlooking the city. They did not have the wheel. Yep, that’s right,
they did all this without using wheels. The Incas were truly
extraordinary masons.