28th October

It’s quite a climb to the stone fortress that overlooks the city of Cusco. The weather was, as always, superbly sunny though so the climb was worth the effort. Known as Sacsayhuaman, or sexy woman as Jess chooses to call it, this is a “must see” for anyone interested in history. The reason we’re here is to take a look at the superbly carved stones that form the fortress walls. There are similar stones back in Cusco, but these particular stones are quite huge by comparison.

Carved in the time of the Incas, they are very polygonal in nature with lots of odd angles as they join together. These stones don’t just have straight edges either, but sometimes curved ones to make the fitting even more difficult. The joins between these stones are wafer thin too, often with a sheet of paper barely able to fit between them. But the thing that really makes all of this even more exceptional is the sheer size of them, with some weighing in at over fifty tons.

Two questions spring immediately to mind then. Firstly, why would you go to so much trouble to construct a wall in this manner when there are much easier construction techniques available? And secondly, how did the Incas with their primitive technology fashion these huge stones so that they did fit together so accurately and precisely?

Constructing a wall like this today would present some serious technical challenges, so doing this hundreds of years ago seems pretty impossible. However, the Incas accomplished this despite the problems involved, which makes serious inferences about their level of sophistication. How they achieved it though, is still, to us today, a real mystery. Lost ancient technical knowhow must be at work here I think. If so then, how many technical civilisations might there have been before our own where their knowledge has since been lost too? It’s an interesting question, one that certainly makes you think when you’re looking at the walls of Sacsayhuaman.

While sitting down for a while and baking in the sun outside of these walls, we spotted a band of musicians hiking up the hill in front of us. We didn’t think much of it at the time, but guessed that they might be heading up there to play for tourists or something. A little while later when we’d gathered some energy, we made it up there ourselves to see the Cristo Blanco statue. As we neared the statue, who should we see, but that same band recording a video for their music of all things, and using the statue itself as a backdrop. It was surreal.

We’d seen these kinds of videos back in Arequipa. They have a very particular musical style, sounding almost Indian or Tibetan rather than South American. The videos all have a common theme too, with the band playing, singing and dancing gently to some natural backdrop like a stream, lake or forest. It’s traditional music for a traditional audience, filmed using themes that obviously appeal to that kind of audience. As a westerner, they’re not very exciting to watch if I’m honest, but I don’t think people watch them like we might watch MTV. I think they’re more like background TV, something to have on in the corner while they get on with their daily lives. While it might not be electrifying, there is something comforting about it, and I like it. It’s a different world here, and one that’s growing on me more and more as each day passes into the next.

As an end to this particular day, I thought I’d treat myself to a haircut. It occurred to me as I set out how unusual it was to do this in a foreign country. I don’t think I’d ever had need to do it before, but this would be twice now that I’d gone about it while here in South America. It’s a real sign that I’ve been away from home for quite a while, with many more weeks left to go.

I found a barber shop just up the road from our hotel here in Cusco, and as I walked through the open door it was like walking through some kind of time portal. I’m sure the year is 2009, but looking around this shop it could well be 1899. The chair, the cupboards, the mirrors and the cutting implements all looked like they belonged to the Victorian era. As I looked further, it was a spine tingling moment for me, to realise that this shop probably hadn’t changed in any real way for the past hundred years. Passed down from father to son no doubt, this shop was a piece of living history.

The barber himself looked marginally more modern, and his professional-looking waistcoat, along with his matured years, gave me some confidence that he knew what he was doing. And indeed he did, despite not speaking a word of English. Several runs over half an hour with the scissors and the clippers and this guy had it just right. You could see that he was concentrating and focussing with every snip and that it was a matter of pride to him to do his very best. Only when he had inspected every aspect of my hair from every angle did he finally lay his tools to rest.

At that point he declared that the job was done and he awaited my response, his face was that of a poker player. I looked in the mirror for a moment or two and then smiled broadly. I shook his hand while I thanked him with as many affirmative words that I could muster in his Spanish for his most excellent work. His face lit up like a Christmas tree. A foreigner had entered his shop who spoke with a strange tongue, and he wasn't at all sure what was expected of him. Yet the foreigner was very pleased with what he had done, and for that he was over the moon.

The barber couldn’t smile wide enough. And neither could I.

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Part of trip: South America 2009 - Ecuador, Peru & Bolivia

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