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...

Closure

It occurs to me that I have been home from Peru for two weeks, and since by now people have pretty much stopped asking me how the trip was, I can assume that people stopped looking at my blog long ago. Be that the case or not, I am about to overload it with several new posts all at once. There are three episodes that I have been meaning to share but I just have not gotten around to it, and since I am feeling a need for closure on the blog and on the trip too, in a way, I have decided to concentrate them all into one cluttered finale. So here goes. This is the first of many posts. I hope that if anybody bothers to stop by here again, you will enjoy the views and the commentary.

Postscript to Huasao

The day before we went to Huasao to have our fortunes read in coca leaves, we listened to this song, written in the early '90s. Because of the controversial nature of anything related to the coca plant, especially here in the States, the video was censured by MTV. Good thing we have youtube. But be warned: it's catchy, if a bit cheesy, and it will stick in your head like peanut butter to the roof of your mouth, which doesn't really ever happen to me, but I kinda like the expression anyway and nothing better is coming to me at the moment. Enjoy!