Pre-Columbian Stair Master

First of all, thanks to all the lurkers who have come out of hiding to post on the blog. To all of you who posted since last time:

• Kassia, are you married now? Is that why you’re in Massachusetts? Please remember that being away on your honeymoon is no excuse for not keeping up with the blog.
• Fred, no HP spoilers, please! We are reading avidly, but only at the rate of one or two chapters a night. Our efforts to see the HP movie in Lima were frustrated by the plans of our ship’s captain to depart this evening. The matinee hours featured only dubbed versions: one had to wait until the evening for subtitled ones, and we had to be on the ship at 9pm. We chose to postpone our HP movie plans rather than sit through an afternoon of Harry and Co. hablando en español.
• Mami, it’s not a typo. “Turkey jam” is “Turkey ham” if you pronounce it in Spanish. Which reminds me that Zoë and I have failed to report about another favorite English usage, a brochure found at our hotel in Chile which explained that the woven items available from local handicraft merchants were made from “camelidos and sheep woolies.”
• Speaking of camilidos, Katy, your vicuña is snoozing quite comfortably under the bed. We’ve named him “Sparky.” Could you elaborate about the weird priest and the toothpick farm? I had no idea that toothpicks grew on farms.
• José, no we didn’t visit Tadeo Torres because we didn’t know the name of the orphanage. We very much wanted Santiago to see it. We will have restaurant recommendations for you when you go. Cuenca was gorgeous!
• Leslie, we are indeed, as you suggest, laying down the boogie. As long as you mean “going to sleep early and cursing the alarm clock in the morning.”
• Chris, say hello to your mom! Glad to hear you were hippie-free.

Speaking of hippies … Machu Picchu draws them like a magnet. Forget the pictures you’ve seen of the place. Not a single one does them justice. And make your plans to go now. It’s on my short list of truly exceptional places in the world, along with the Sistine Chapel, the Alhambra, and the Yosemite Valley, places that you don’t want to leave because you know the real world is a poorer place. Part of the magic is the ruins themselves, and part of it is the setting. The mountains there are impossibly steep and covered in mist. Not even Stephen Spielberg could have made them more mysterious or enchanting.

We got to them on our third day in Peru, after a day in Lima and a day of travel from Lima to Aguascalientes, the town closest to MP, by way of a place called Ollatantaymbo. Thanks to Ross for talking up Olla with us. It’s called the “last living Inca village” because there are houses there that were built in Inca times and have been continuously inhabited by indigenous people since. Some very cool ruins, too. Lima is not so cool. It’s big, it’s crowded, it’s crime ridden. But it does have some neat things to see, including an impressive cathedral and Franciscan monastery, as well as the oldest house in the Americas, the so-called “Casa Aliaga,” built by one of Francisco Pizarro’s cronies and continuously inhabited by his descendants ever since. Needless to say, the house is quite luxe.

The cathedral in Lima, however, pales by comparison with the one in Cusco. There, the gold and silver abound, as do the masterworks of the colonial “Cusco School” of painting. Everyone’s favorite, including ours, is a massive painting of the Last Supper which features an Andean delicacy, cuy (guinea pig) as the main dish. Many of the folks on S@S, by the way, have sampled cuy, but not us! The Kid has adamantly insisted that none of us should be eating anything as cute as that.

But lets get back to the hippies. Ross, co-author of The Moon Handbook to Peru, which I highly recommend to any and all of you planning a trip to these parts, calls Cusco “the mecca of the Gringo Trail.” And indeed it is. As charming as Cusco is, with its colonial streets, its Spanish buildings piled on top of Inca foundations, its lovely central square, it too is crawling with hippies. They are less noticeable here than in San Pedro de Atacama. Cusco is much bigger, so there are locals to contend with. Many of them were marching around in uniforms of all kinds, celebrating Peruvian Independence Day, an extendo-celebration that begins long before the day itself (today, the 28th) and shows no sign of ending afterwards. There are also plenty of non-hippie tourists, some of which travel to Machu Picchu in style, even on helicopters ($1200 a person). But the hippies are well represented, and can be spotted at Machu Picchu hugging the rocks.

Yes, you read that correctly, “hugging” the rocks. These are not standard hippies, but New Age hippies who come to MP because of its magical power. Unlike me, they do not use the word “magical” in a figurative way. They press up against the rocks, particularly the sacred ones, to absorb their cosmic forces. I overheard one of them saying to another, “Can you feel that feminine energy?”

The primary force experienced by Zoë, the Kid and me was gravity. This is the force that one has to fight to get up the many hills and the endless staircases that make up the lost city of the Incas. Up you go to the guardhouse. Down you go to the gate. Up you go to the pyramid. Down you go to the secret initiation cave. For eight hours (including a break for a fabulously over-priced but delicious buffet lunch) the three of us traipsed around MP, dodging hippies, getting away from Argentinians screaming on their cell phones (¿Lolita? Oye, Lolita, estamos ahora en las ruinas. Sí, están espectaculares. ¿Qué tal si nos encontramos para la cena? ¿En el restaurantcito de la esquina, donde fuimos para el cumpleaños de Estefan? Sí, claro que me acuerdo. ¡Qué bien que lo pasamos! etc.), eavesdropping on New Agers, reading aloud from our guide to MP, avoiding the tour groups, and pinching ourselves to see if we were indeed, actually where we were. Our legs were sore from the climbing, our feet ached, and we kept going. Every time we stopped a new perspective opened up, a new detail revealed itself. We saw eagles. We saw vizcachas (an Andean rabbit that has a squirrel’s tail and that hops like a kangaroo). We watched the mists roll over the city and its mountains, and then clear away, only to return later. We arrived at our crumby over-priced hotel that night exhausted and aching, ready to collapse into our hard beds, incredulous that we had been where we had been, that we had seen what we had seen.

(P.S. I’ve just read this to Zoë, and she tells me she will tell you more about the hotels.)