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...