Category: Archaeology

It’s turning out to be quite a month for megalithic tourism!

I am blogging today from Corsica, that island in the Mediterranean to the north of Sardinia, with Italy to the east (to which Sardinia belongs) and France to the north, (to which Corsica belongs.) Both islands have indigenous languages older than Italian and French, and the road signs in both are bilingual. But the Sardinians speak several languages, and here in Corsica French is definitely uppermost.  The islands were of course one large island, until the retreat of the last ice age and rise of sea level circa 8000 BC.

Anyway – before I tell you about my (solo) travels in Corsica, I must tell you what I was up to last weekend! For the May full-moon weekend, I drove to Orkney. [I’ll post some more pics here soon – WordPress is having trouble with pictures at present – a problem with the new server, I’m sorry to say – so these links to Flickr will have to suffice for now : Orkney Pics on Flickr]

It’s a nine-and-a-half hour drive from Manchester to Thurso, the little town on the very north coast of Scotland from where one takes the ferry to Orkney. Fortunately, after a busy week, I had with me trusted old friend and fellow traveller on various megalithic excursions (including the Isles of Scilly), Alan Slee, to share the driving. Leaving central Manchester at 7.30am, stopping for coffee once late morning and for lunch at the House of Bruar (an excellent and recommended stopover), we arrived in Thurso at about 6pm and stayed over at the Royal Hotel. It can’t be said that Thurso is a particularly thriving town, or that its 3* hotel was especially well appointed. The Station Hotel offered the better menu, and we supped there – the Cullen Skink being particularly good!

The 8.45am ferry from Stromness Harbour to Scrabster on mainland Orkney rolled rather threateningly in high seas for the first 30 of the 90 minute journey, but was soon in more settled waters and landed us safely where we could at last drive out of the ro-ro and onto the island, and head for our cottage for the weekend. I have rented a good number of self-catering cottages in the UK, some old, some new, some large, some small, but I have to say this one was one of the very best, ever: warm, cosy, a superbly well kitted out kitchen, lovely bathrooms – all in all an excellent place: Unigar cottages – highly recommended. Exhausted from our epic journey of Thursday, we achieved little more than shopping on Friday, stopping off at Rennibister Earth House on the way – appropriately enough a neolithic store house – and scrumping for mussels and limpets on a beach of the Bay of Firth to soak in salt water overnight for a seafood soup the following day.

The truly ‘epic’ day, however, was Saturday, when we took in the Heart of the Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site, comprising the Ring of Brodgar, the Stones of Stenness, Maeshowe Burial Chamber, and the neolithic village of Skara Brae. We rose early and went straight to the Ring of the Brodgar, arriving first before any other tourists, and were fortunate enough to have the site to ourselves. Once sporting 60 stones, this is quite simply one of the most impressive stone circles I have ever seen (and I’ve seen a few!) The central area is covered in heather and the signs clearly require visitors to keep to the path around the perimeter within the circle of stones. But the stones themselves are all so individual, so fascinating, that there is plenty to immerse oneself in without the desire to venture into the centre. The weathering of thousands of years is all too apparent on many of the stones, but the sense of mystery and awe seemed accentuated by the inclement weather that soon blew in from the Atlantic, bringing at one point a shower of hail to cloud up the lenses on our cameras. We completed the circuit just in time before the next tourists arrived at the circle, and as we left, gathered a few marsh marigolds to add to our lunchtime salad – a foraging delicacy plentiful in these parts.

From the Ring it is but a few moments drive down the Ness of Brodgar, past the site of the excavations where a Neolithic Temple – some say a kind of Neolithic Hogwarts – is being unearthed. The archaeological site is only open for tours during digging, for six weeks each summer, so all we could glimpse was the black plastic sheeting covering proceedings. What may have transpired in this temple, further excavation may yet give tantalising hints at. Leaving it for another year, we continued across the Ness to the Watchstone, and on across the bridge (reputedly in place for thousands of years) to the Stones of Stenness.

The Stones of Stenness is an amazing circle. Once twelve stones – (one has to wonder whether there might be some sexagesimal significance to the 60 stones of the Ring of the Brodgar and the 12 of the later Stones of Stenness?) – there is an aura of majesty around the tall and imposing stones that the Ring, with its smaller and more weathered stones, somehow lacked. The Stones of Stenness feels more like a grand chapel for the mighty, compared to the cathedral-for-all at the Ring of Brodgar. Behind it, at the Barnhouse ‘village’ site, one feels rather in the lodgings of a priesthood that ministered at Stenness, like the cells of an abbey, and one can almost envisage grand ceremonies undertaken by the elect at Stenness for vast geo-political strategems, by the monkish inhabitants of Barnhouse, alongside more prosaic public ceremonials for the masses undertaken at the Ring of Brodgar. In between, secret preparations and initiations in the Temple of the Ness prepared the priesthood for their labours.

Such imaginings are perhaps merely fanciful, yet in truth even the interpretations of the most knowledgeable of archaeologists are often little better. I rely a great deal upon the careful work of archaeologists but confess I rarely take their ideas of what life and ritual were like thousands of years ago without a good helping of salt. It is only a decade or so since even the idea of archaeo-astronomy – the alignment of Neolithic sites with solar and lunar risings and settings at various times of the year – became anything less than New Age rubbish as far as professional archaeologists were concerned. It is now broadly accepted orthodoxy across Europe. Stellar alignments of course remain very hard to gauge, as the night sky moves inexorably with the precession of the equinoxes, and what may have been true in 1500BC is yards off today. But – complex though their movements are – the sun and moon rise and set today pretty much exactly where they did 5000 years ago – give or take a few inches – and at Maeshowe, in particular, the Winter Solstice still lights up the inside of the chamber with startling accuracy. This chamber, built with four standing stones at its corners, and three more, shorter, stubby ones each immediately below the openings in the sides of the chamber allowing access to sub chambers, and all completed with the most amazing and enduring masonry in between, is quite literally the most accomplished feat of Neolithic masonry I have ever seen. Certainly more accomplished than Newgrange, for all the marvels of its corbelled roof, which I visited in 1996. Certainly more accomplished than the temples of Malta, where I visited in 2008, for all their gigantic size. Certainly squarer and more precise than the chambered tombs of Jersey (Apr 2009) and of the Isles of Scilly (Aug 2009). I was really quite stunned. This was masonry on a par with the Egyptians (March 2007): and they were later. And there is no evidence of any burial in this chambered cairn – only some tale of human and horse bones that were mysteriously ‘lost’ by the Victorian antiquarian who ‘found’ them in the cairn. The mystery of what this place was really for, remains.

Finally then, to cap an already amazing day, to the village where the people who worshipped at these great temples actually lived: Skara Brae. The wonder of this place is not so much in the finery of its furnishings, the layout of its dwellings…. all these seem, somehow, so natural, so thoroughly familiar. The wonder is that they have been dated to 3100BC. That’s contemporary with the temples on Malta – complete with strikingly similar stone dressers! The wonder is that they have survived at all. The reason? On Orkney, already by the time of the Neolithic people who began farming here in the late 4th millenium BCE, there were no trees here. Mesolithic man had long ago cut them all down. So the village – like the temples – was made out of stone.

Yesterday, in Corsica, at Filitosa, [see the pics on Flickr here Corsica pics on Flickr] I discovered another of these extraordinary archaeological/environmental cross-overs. Remember the Bronze Age warriors of the 2nd millenium BCE whose little metal statuettes are so common on Sardinia (Apr 2011), the island to the south where the Nuraghe were built? Well it seems that here on Corsica, where not only the absence of any obsidian meant it had to have been imported from the southern island, (from where most of Europe’s Neolithic obsidian haled) but also the lack of any metal ores, meant that the statuary of Corsica had to be in done not in bronze, like their southern cousins did, but in stone. So here, in Corsica, almost unique in all of Europe, one can witness the phenomenon of the statue-menhir – megalithic menhirs that, in the Bronze Age, were carved in the likeness of fierce warriors, brandishing swords and daggers – the latter undoubtedly imported from the neighbouring island to the south.

The weekend in Orkney ended on the Sunday, with a visit to the southernmost island of the Orkney archipelago (all one great island in Neolithic times, as were the Isles of Scilly, and islands of Corsica and Sardinia), South Ronaldsay, accessible over a series of causeways that link it, via a couple of small islets, to the mainland of Orkney, and, on its southernmost coast, the Tomb of the Eagles – a chambered cairn entered through a very low passage on a large skateboard. The roof was completely new, concrete, yet the aura of the place didn’t suffer too much from this reconstruction, and the skulls in one of the chambers set the place off as a truly eerie burial chamber, quite unlike the experience at Maeshowe. It must be said, however, that the private management of this site was not a patch on the professionalism of Historic Scotland at the World Heritage Site. Monday, all day, I drove, and drove, and drove….

Then on the following Sunday, an aeroplane, landing at Ajaccio, and a hire car down to a little gite near Sartene – not a patch on Unigar but sufficient for my needs, and Monday, the crown-jewel of Corsica’s prehistoric monuments, Filitosa – an extraordinary experience indeed.

Filitosa is a large and fascinating complex. There is evidence of several thousand years of occupation here, from the Mesolithic, through the Neolithic and Megalithic, and on into the Bronze Age. The rough-hewn menhirs familiar to the rest of Europe, and contemporary with the megalithic era in Malta (Mar 2008), and Portugal (July 2007), are in evidence, but much more striking are the later, Bronze Age statue-menhirs, carved menhirs that resemble both huge stone phalli and statues of warriors. To my eye both are implied by the artists who created these amazing works of prehistoric art, between three and four thousand years ago. The warriors they represent, resplendent in their armour, with their daggers and swords, wear helmets every bit as phallic as they look, and the statues are monuments to the virility of the warriors and to the fertility of their power. There is only oblique mention of the phallic symbology in the guidebook, in this Catholic country, but reference is inescapable.

The interpretive work undertaken by the landowner and the Corsican authorities has resulted in some slightly deceptive placements. The six small statue-menhirs on the central monument are the broken upper-halves of once taller statues-menhirs that were incorporated into the spherical dome-like structure built over the top of the end of the spur by Nuraghic-era people occupying the site later than the creators of the statue-menhirs. The Western monument, below the Central Monument, is very Nuraghic indeed, bringing my trip last year to Sardinia strongly to mind. The grouping of the five tall statue-menhirs by the tree below the spur is clearly recent rather than historic. In truth what is visible now is (necessarily) a melange of several different periods of occupation overlain with late-20th century interpretation and reconstruction. By far the worst part of this muddle, however, is the placement of small plastic installations emitting quite horrid ‘mood-music’ here and there around the bluff, in between narrative descriptions. These, along with the regular, taller, metallic ‘interpretation stations’ with buttons for different languages – which unfortunately do not offer an ‘off’ button – turn this central area of the site into a kind of outdoor museum, neither one nor the other, and the French commentary interspersed with the ‘mood-music’ is the permanent default. This I must say I found most off-putting, and it was only at the platform, under the tree above the group of five tall statue-menhirs, that, hands on the stone, with only the whisper of the gentle breeze in my ears, I could in any sense ‘feel’ any of the majesty of the place.

Climbing further up to what they have termed the Quarry, to my eye the most striking sight was the clear face within the rock – far more interesting than the so called ‘dinosaur’ to the rear of the rock formation. Here, indeed, it seemed the Goddess of Stone and Earth looked out across the entire site, with her eerie headdress and staring eye.

The Bronze Age hut foundations, perhaps the dwellings of the carvers of the statue-menhirs, were fenced off, and hard to see – quite a contrast with the Barnhouse or Skara Brae – and clearly insufficiently ‘mysterious’ for the curators of this tourist attraction. I have to say, in the end, that the overlay of interpretation at this site to a certain extent spoiled the experience, certainly when viewed in contrast to sites elsewhere where the interpretation is strictly separate from the site, and relatively unobtrusive, though the reconstructions undertaken by archaeologists are everywhere evident: even the Stones of Stenness had been re-erected from recumbency within the last hundred years.

Nonetheless, the site is well worth the visit, if only to see, and feel the majesty of the extraordinary art-work of the Bronze Age statuary.

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.

The Inka Express is an extremely long bus ride – usually a 6hr drive – which takes over 9hrs, due to all the stops along the way. But time goes quickly, and it doesn’t seem to drag, as a journey, at all. Leaving Puno, barely having slept, with an altitude headache only partly dulled by 10minutes attached to the oxygen bottle before getting up, jacked up on matte de coca (coca-leaf tea) I half expected the journey to be awful. But I managed to dose during the first part of the journey, awaking to be delighted by the Pukara museum, sporting a whole collection of statuary from the ‘mother culture’ of southern Peru, who lived here around 400BCE. The catfish and the frog turned out to be particularly important animals for these people, but the puma and the snake made early appearances – they both figure heavily in later cultures – and the quality of the carving is really quite special.

Returning to the bus, I am exhausted just by this short tour around the
museum. Our next stop, at 4335m (14,200ft) above sea level, is at Abra
La Raya where the two mountain ranges the girt the Altiplano, where Lake
Titicaca rests, meet and join, and the Sacred Valley down to Cusco
begins. There are snow-capped peaks here, although my Puno guide says
they were much whiter in his youth. The smoke clouds from the 25 fires
burning in Bolivia adds a haze to the sky. The Vilcanota River that
beings in this valley eventually joins the Amazon, and flows out to the
Atlantic Ocean. By this point, my head is hurting, the ibuprofen I
took at breakfast has worn off, and I am just glad that the descent has
at last begun. Over the next 40mins we descend more than 1000m to our
buffet lunch, and the Sacred Valley proper.

Here we find our first proper Inca archaeological complex – Raqchi,
which means ‘ceramic.’ Unusually for Inca architecture, the main temple
is built half in stone, their preferred building material, and half in
adobe – the mud brick of older cultures. The entire complex, moreover,
is completely surrounded by a huge wall. The thinking is that the
Tihuanaco people who were being supplanted by the Inca here were
rebellious, and the complex had to be built quickly, and defended. In
the Temple to Wiracocha, the most important Inca god, there are, also
unusual for Inca buildings, circular columns, which used to hold up the
roof.

By the time we reach Cusco the air is just so much nearer what sea-level
dwelling folks like me are used to, and although a bit thin, (it is
still 11000ft, after all) I can think, I can move around, I have no
headache, and the constant fatigue of the last few days in Puno is
finally wearing off. It’s like getting well again after a massive
hangover. Speaking of which… a glass of wine might now be in order!

Two fascinating trips today: to the floating Uros islands, and to the Aymara/Inca fertility temple at Chucuito. The Uros islanders, although their own language is lost now, and they have absorbed some of the physical characteristics of the Aymara as well as their language, are nonetheless still distinguishable by their short, squat bodies, their barrel chests with powerful hearts and lungs, and their ‘black blood’ – in truth just a little darker, but proven to have a higher haemoglobin content than sea-level dwelling people like me – and probably you. These people have been here a very long time, and have completely adapted to this environment. The Pukara people (more on them tomorrow) were the first recognisable ‘culture’ or ‘civilisation’ here, between 200 and 600CE, and they were gradually displaced by the Tihuanaco, who were then forcibly conquered by the Aymara, who were in their turn
conquered by the Inca, and lastly, in the 1530s, by the Spanish. The
Uros Islanders, therefore, have been there a long time.

 

This was my morning trip, and on my way back I enjoyed the views of the lake, and took a little oxygen on board

The Uros Islanders – only a few hundred of them now live there on the islands still – clearly exist mainly on the income from tourists, above and beyond their traditional subsistence existence making their land, their huts, their fires, and their soup out of the reeds in the lake. My guide was very informative, but it was clear enough to the eye that much of their lives are now geared toward the tourists. It was also clear, during these years of world economic turmoil, that the tourist trade has really suffered. The two arms of the village, north and south, have been taking it in turns, this year, to receive tourists, each
morning. In a normal year, both arms receive tourists all day. So I
decided that if I was going to spend my tourist dollars on textiles and
reed figures anywhere in Peru, then it was going to be here, rather than
a shop in Lima or Cuzco. I spent about £65 and the couple were clearly
delighted – she gave me a hug and kiss in a quite spontaneous gesture.
It was somewhere between gratifying and embarrassing – still not sure
quite where. So now I have a delightful, ‘primitive’ Andean tapestry
depicting Pacha Mama and Pacha Tata (Father Earth), along with a puma, a reed boat, and the ubiquitous Tumi knife with which the sacrifices were
made. This was woven by the woman who kissed me. I also have a small
replica reed boat, made by her husband. Lastly, I have one of those big
seed pod maracas, with a scratchboard, covered with some carving, which
looks to me rather mass produced, but never mind. These items will
retain both a memory of meeting their makers, on their island, and the
sort of charitable glow to make any tourist feel his conscience is
clear.

After some soup and a midday sleep back at the hotel, my guide came to
collect me again and we set off to Chucuito, a tiny but charming village
further down the coast toward Bolivia, where there was an Aymara/Inca
fertility temple. Much of it destroyed by the Spanish, of course, who
used the phallic totems to tie their horses in the yards of their
colonial houses around the lake, until in the last decade or so the
local authorities have gradually repatriated them all and set them up
again inside the temple. There is a strange and imposing looking hotel
in front of the temple, where mystical but infertile tourists come from
all over the world to take part in ceremonies, led by the hotelier, at
the temple, apparently with some success, though my guide reckons its
all psychological. The signs of recent libations on the main phallic
altar are clear enough.

 

Both an eventful and uneventful few days. After a morning reading Mercia
Eliade’s classic text, The Sacred and the Profane, soaking up the
sunshine at Nazca, I took the long bus journey back to Lima – the bus
arrived late and made a number of unscheduled stops (including for the
driver to buy some oranges from a roadside vendor) arriving in Lima
80minutes late. My restaurant of choice was fully booked by then, and
arriving by taxi at the alternative I found it too was fully booked,
despite the Hotel receptionist shrugging that I would not need to book
there. They took pity on me though and put me on a bar stool at the
bar, where I enjoyed a fabulous meal, generosity from the talkative
barman, and a thoroughly good Saturday night out. I can thoroughly
recommend the Brujas de Cachiche to any visitor to Lima.

Sunday was then all about flying up to the mountains – an airbus from
Lima airport at lunchtime stopping over briefly at Cusco, without
disembarking, and then heading on up to Juliaca, the small city on the
plain overlooking Lake Titicaca. From the moment I got off the plane I
could tell we were very high up, and that the air was thin! Walking
suddenly became a struggle, and the effort of any exertion seriously
taxing on one’s reserves of strength. This immediate fatigue receeded
in the car, replaced by consciousness of having to breathe really
quickly – a shortness of breath one would normally associate with the
moments after major exertion, but experienced whilst sitting in the back
seat of the guide’s car. On the way to my hotel in Puno, we stopped to
visit the Silustani Tombs.

This proved to be a fascinating visit, despite the fact that I was only
capable of pigeon-toe progress with frequent rest-stops, and the fatigue
was gradually turning into a dizziness of absolute exhaustion. But the
history of this area, as my guide described it, was fascinating. The
Pucara people were the first known civilisation here, and I will see
more of them on the Inka Express bus journey to Puno later this week.
After this culture had faded, the Tihuanaco came, and populated the
area. At the height of their civilisation here, the Aymara, a warlike
people from the south and east, perhaps Argentina, conquered the area,
forcing the small remnant of surviving Tihuanaco to embark on a long
wandering in the mountains, until they settled north in the sacred
valley, and became the Inca. The Inca, of course, later reconquered
this area, along with the whole of the rest of the Andes, in the largest
empire of all pre-Columbian South America – of which more, of course,
in Cusco and Macchu Picchu. Up here in Juliaca and Puno, despite the
arrival of the Spanish conquerors, who looted the ancient sites and
brought Catholicism to the area, much of the original pre-Christian
religious practice and the two ‘nations’, Aymara and Quechua
(Inca/Tihuanaco people) survive to this day. My guide is Quechua, the
driver Aymara.


The Silustani tombs are mostly Aymara, with some later Inca tombs as
well. Alongside the tombs are three other sections of the site: the
ritual area, the workshop, storage and living area, and the quarry where
the rock was carved out of the mountainside. Like the Moche practice
in the far north, and Egyptian and other practices in other continents,
not only the Lord but his wives, boys, servants, priests – between 30
and 50 bodies – were buried in each of the tombs. All the precious
metal artefacts were looted by the Spanish, but archaeologists have
found ample evidence of human bones, ceramics and other remants to gain
understanding of these monuments.

The largest of them, an Inca one, with exquisite stone work, also had a
relief carving of a lizard on it, pointing in the direction of the
Temple of the Sun, the island on the Bolivian side of the lake where the
Inca absorbed the Tihuanaco origin myth and made it their own, with a
splendid temple.

In the ritual area, I was introduced to a very familiar stone circle.
My guide clearly had real respect for the place: he pointed out on the
horizon to south and east among the mountains where the villages of his
mother and father were located, and spoke with genuine appreciation of
the Quechua Mother Earth ‘Pacha Mama’ and Mother Waters ‘Cucha Mama’
whose spirits were in everything, in every stone. The archaic religious
mind, as described by Mercia Eliade, was here almost in its raw aspect,
for all that this son of tribal people now worked in the tourist
industry, using his excellent English. Having asked permission, I
entered the stone circle, and paid my respects to the Earth Mother of
the Mountain, here at the roof of the world, my body the tree through
which earth and sky communicate and become one, pillar of every house,
tower of every city, altar of every temple.

On the descent from the hill of the tombs, though the thin air was
really starting to get to me by now, (hence the not very good photo) my
guide showed me the guardian stone at the foot of the ancient stairway.
He asked me if I had a compass. A spiral carved on one side of the rock
zeroed in on a particular patch of the stone where the compass on my
iPhone suddenly switched to point west, instead of north, directly at
the centre of the spiral. Yes, indeed they believe there is some
lodestone or other in this rock, and yes, indeed, the Aymara clearly
knew about this. The other side of the rock sported the carved face of a
Puma, facing up to the stones.

But my reaction to the thin air was rapidly turning into full-on Acute Mountain Sickness (AMS),
or altitude sickness, and we headed on to Puno as the sun went down and
the cold wind of the mountain winter began to bring the temperature
down sharply. At the hotel I practically collapsed for an hour or two’s
nap, and then managed to pigeon-toe down to the nearest restaurant, a
couple of doors down from the hotel, for a light supper, and pigeon-toe
it back up to my room, completely exhausted, to sleep again. It was
9pm. I awoke almost hourly, drinking water, feeling exhausted, my pulse
rapid and persistent, breathing short, dizzy and suffering awful
fatigue. Finally, at about 4am, the pulse and shortness of breath had
begun to recede, to be replaced by a headache. I took some ibuprofen at
5am, and finally decided to cancel my tour to the Lake Titicaca
Islands, to stay put and get a day of complete rest. By 9am, worried
for me, the travel agency had called in CondorAssist, the medical
insurance with my fortnight’s tour, and a very nice young Quechua doctor
arrived, with a translator. It was agreed by all that it was altitude
sickness, that the worst was over, that I had done the right thing
cancelling today’s tour, and he sat me with an oxygen mask plugged into
an oxygen bottle that they keep at the hotel, for 20 minutes, which
cleared my headache!

By lunchtime I was able to take a little walk, buy some alpaca socks and
a straw sun hat, and get a bowl of Inca Soup – guinea pig and alpaca
meat and soft cheese cubes in a nourishing soup, which I ate most of
with a large glass of freshly juiced papaya. It is interesting how, up
here in the mountains, many of the local people still maintain the
traditional dress, at the same time as embracing the all-encompassing
information revolution. This excursion, however, was very tiring, and I
returned, again very slowly to the hotel, to sleep for a couple of
hours in the afternoon.

So – not only do I get air-sick on little Cessna’s doing wild
manouevres, I am among those who suffer from altitude sickness, too.