Farewell and thanks

Well, this is it, friends. Now that I have been home nearly three weeks, I am finally drawing this blog to a close. It has been a joy to share my adventures with you, and I thank you for visiting and especially for your comments. I hope that you enjoyed the journey. I sure did. Now, before I officially bid farewell to beee-bo, I want to add one more thing. Some of you know that I am not, in fact, made of money, and that this my first Peruvian experience was made possible by a generous scholarship from Sigma Delta Pi, and that, in turn, was made possible in large part by the instruction, guidance, and recommendations of several truly great teachers. So, if any of you is reading this, here I offer you my thanks. I learned a ton and I had a blast, and I am really grateful to have had the privilege of spending several weeks in the Andes. The only trouble is, far from satisfying my wanderlust, it only intensified it... so, until next time, farewell, dear Qosqo. ¡Viva el Perú!

A collage of Paucartambo

During my last week in Peru I decided to try something a little off the beaten path, so to speak. I had gotten fairly comfortable with Cusco and I wanted to break up the routine a bit, so I took a trip to Paucartambo. The story is long, and I am having trouble getting blogger and my pictures to cooperate with one another in just the way that I want them to, and nobody is visiting this blog anymore anyhow (I kind of want to write that "no more no how"), so just trust me when I say that it was quite the adventure. If you really want the details, ask me another day. For now, here are some of my favorite pictures that I took in and around Paucartambo. While it is not the most beautiful town I have ever seen, I nevertheless found it very picturesque (I guess that's why "some of my favorite pictures" turned into twenty). So here they are, in no particular order. While I did figure out how to upload more than five pictures to one post (and it was real tough, lemme tell ya), I still have not figured out how to get the vertical ones to come out vertical, and I am not including commentary. Sorry. You can make some up of your own if you like. Otherwise, enjoy!

Lima: just one more picture

As the evening approached, we found ourselves searching an outdoor mall for a CD store, only to find that pirating had driven it out of business. As my companion took a restroom break, I noticed this store, selling nothing but a certain line of footwear called "Elévate shoes". It was too amusing not to inconspicuously snap a photo. The slogan on this poster reads: "El secreto de tu éxito puede estar justo debajo de tus pies" (The secret of your success could be right under your feet!) It seems, if you are male and you purchase and wear these platform shoes, not only will you look taller and cooler, you will also get that promotion at work and beautiful women will flock toward you. The funniest thing was, on the outside of the store there were other ads featuring a man and a woman, in a sensual embrace and obviously naked, with a quip something to the effect of "porque ella los prefiere altos" (because she likes them tall). Are we supposed to assume that that guy is wearing Elévate shoes even though the rest of his clothing has been stripped off? Maybe I am being over-analytical, maybe I just revel in and seek out absurdity; whatever the case, I hope somebody else finds it amusing.

Lima: National Museum of Archaelogy

As I mentioned previously, Lima's National Museum of Archaeology has a superb pre-Columbian ceramics collection. Here are some of my favorites:

An afternoon in Lima

Thanks to a ten-hour layover between flights and to my dad's connections in Peru, I got to spend a lovely afternoon in Lima on my way home. Despite having heard and read several less-than-flattering accounts of the nation's capital (two that stick out are my dad's colleague's classifying it as "just another big, ugly city", and Patrick Symmes' nicknaming it "Scorch"), I quite enjoyed my short stay there. Maybe I did not stick around long enough for the place to bother me, or maybe I just really like big, ugly cities. There is something about the energy pulsing through urban centers, ugly or not, that has a way of getting under my skin even when I am exposed to it for just a few hours.

After lunch at a lovely restaurant in Pueblo Libre, I got to visit the Museo Nacional de Arqueología, which was really neat because I had just studied the ancient Peruvian cultures in my class in Cusco, and here I got to see a great collection of artifacts that before I had only read about. From top to bottom: the pretty courtyard; an estela whose origin and significance I forget, but I liked the frog at the top, or I guess at the left, since it came out sideways and I don't feel like trying to fix it; ah, the dioramas of Latin American museums; one of the amazing textiles from the Paracas culture, in a not-so-amazing photo full of glare from the display case; and finally, another legacy of the Paracas: trepanations (or trephinations - we English speakers apparently could not decide how it should be spelled). This is essentially a surgical operation which consists of administering to the patient a serious anesthetic (usually including coca) and proceeding to bore a hole in his or her skull, with a tool made of some hard substance such as obsidian. A great number of skulls with such holes have been found in the Paracas region, leading us to believe that it was quite a common medical procedure. The idea is, it was thought to release pressure and therefore cure serious headaches, like maybe migraines or cluster headaches or some sort of trauma resulting from injury. Also extant was (and, to a certain degree, still is) the belief that insanity or other mental illness was a result of the brain's being too hot, and so, a hole in the skull would ventilate it and help lower the temperature. Who knows? Oh, if you click on the photo to enlarge it, you can see the how-to diagrams on the poster in the back of the display case.

Q'eswachaka: the festival

The day following the completion of the bridge, thousands of folks come from neighboring communities (though they are not particularly close to the place nor to one another) for the festival. Music and dance and food and shopping are the attractions, though the principal event is the dance competition. Dozens of school groups compete, performing traditional folkloric dances to traditional folkloric music provided by their classmates. If you have ever been to a pow-wow in the States, you might have some idea of what it was like, though this seemed somehow more pure (at least compared to the pow-wow they do at BYU) and everyone was really into it. I loved it, and I could not get enough of all those brilliant colors. Again, I apologize for the sideways picture. I came really close to buying a skirt like hers, but I could not afford the price. When I left the booth without it, a little girl of about five or six years began following me, across the fairgrounds, up the hill, and down the road to our van, along the way pointing out all the pretty skirts that the girls around us were wearing, and chatting about other things as well. She was really cute, and her brief companionship left me with a nice memory to take with me from that beautiful place.

Q'eswachaka: the finished product

There it is. Unfortunately you can't really tell from any of my million bajillion pictures of it just how high it is, so you will just have to trust me on this. It is very high. I did not measure just how high. The third picture down was taken from the other side of the bridge, after I had crossed it. It was very sturdy, but they said that after a few days the material would dry out and it probably wouldn't be the best idea to go skipping across it by yourself. Oh, and the bridge in the last picture is not made of straw, just in case you were wondering.

Q'eswachaka: building the bridge

Pretty straightforward and yet pretty darn amazing at the same time. We arrived on the third and final day of construction; I never did find out just how they get those first ropes from one side to the other.

Q'eswachaka: the place

I fell in love with the countryside. That first shot is of a lagoon just a bit south of Cusco, where we stopped for a snack of kiwicha bars and some yummy drinkable vanilla yogurt (does anybody know if Gloria yogurt is sold in this country?) on our way to Yanaoca. Pretty, huh? Then there was a lot of the kind of rough, barren countryside that has always so intrigued me, and finally the river Apurímac. It was beautiful and raw and magical and I loved it.

Q'eswachaka: the Inca straw bridge festival

This was probably the coolest, most interesting trip I took while I was in Peru. We drove about 4-5 hours south of Cusco to a spot pretty much in the middle of nowhere, where every year the "near"by communities gather for the Q'eswachaka festival. The name Q'eswachaka is a name derived from two Quechua words: q'eswa, which either means "to braid" or refers to the material used, a type of straw (I heard both and am not sure which is more authoritative, but for our purposes it doesn't much matter), and chaka, "bridge". In the Inca days, the Quechua communities who lived near the river would build marvelous hanging bridges out of straw, a means of transport for people and animals and goods. Nowadays, the straw bridge there in the Canas province of the department of Cusco, is built just a few meters downstream from the steel bridge used for normal transport. Obviously the contemporary bridge-building is done more out of tradition, celebration of cultural heritage, and religious beliefs than out of practical necessity, but that is not to say that it is a flimsy thing just for show. The process takes three days, with the women braiding the straw into ropes which the men then use to construct the bridge high over the Apurímac river. You will see pictures of this in other posts, I promise; I am sorry that I have not figured out how to post more than four or five pictures in one post. For now, here are some people pictures. From top to bottom: women weaving straw for the bridge; a young boy looking on the bridge-building; one of my friends from the school (he's the tall white one) and various members of our tour guide's family. Throughout the weekend, our base where we ate our meals and stored our backpacks, was the house where she had grown up, in the little town of Yanaoca, about an hour and a half down a bumpy, curvy, dirt road from where the festival took place. On Saturday evening after dinner we gathered in the courtyard around an alcohol-fed fire (it got frigid there at night) with a gaggle of happy children while the radio blared music like this. I loved it. That last picture is of the group I traveled with, plus some random guy who saw us taking pictures and decided to join in and put the Q'eswachaka princess sash on me. Whatever. Oh, that's the bridge behind us, but you can't see it very well in this one. More to come...