Peru - Introduction

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Peru - Introduction

No, please do not misunderstand me. When I am writing about ‘Nasca Peru’ or ‘Cuzco Peru’, I am not writing about a rotten guava. (in Marathi or in Konkani.)

We had taken a tour of Peru in November 2006. Cuzco was the capital of the Inca empire and Nazca (or Nasca, because nowadays, there is a movement in Peru to change the spellings of these words, which were spelled by the Spaniards and in Spanish language, Z is pronounced as S.) is the place where those mysterious ‘Nazca Lines’ are etched into the desert on a very large scale by a bygone civilization.

Peru attracts tourists the way a powerful magnet attracts iron filings. It has everything from a touristy point of view - the ‘Lost city of the Incas’ i.e. Machu Picchu, the highest navigable lake Titicaca with its floating reed islands, coastal desert, the snow-capped Andes panorama, beautiful Arequipa surrounded by volcanoes, the Amazonian jungles and the unfamiliar flora and the fauna of the country as a whole. I mean where else will you come across llamas, alpacas, condors, macaws, alligators, cacao trees etc?

(Please, please, can some authority allow me to change the spelling of cacao/cacoa/cocoa/cocao to simple ‘coco’? This must be the most misspelled word in the English language. A close second misspelling might be ‘Momento’ for memento. Many Sulekha bloggers loosely use the verb ‘loose’ for ‘lose.’)

And GOLD!! Roomfuls of it!! (Alas! In the museum rooms!)

I can assure you that it was the GOLD that attracted the conquistadors, (This word also needs simplifying.) not the Inca Trail. They looted the Incas of the gold and shipped it to Spain. (Sometimes the British looted the ships. Alas! It is the ‘dog eats the dog’ world!)

However, Peru gold mines are still producing gold. Yanacocha is the most productive gold mine in the world. There is hope for the goldless (but not Godless. Goldless and Godless appear to be antonyms.) people like me.

Let me ride my hobby-horse for a while. Notice the word Yanacocha? Does it not sound as if you know it, especially the ‘cocha’ part, which we would normally spell as ‘kosh’? There are many Inca words like Wircocha (Virkosh), Wascar, (Bhaskar), Nazca (Naksha) which look like some corrupted form of Sanskrit/Hindi word. How did these words get here?

In Peru now, there are hardly any pure-blooded Incas. Most of the population is of mixed descent between Spanish and the native Indians, called ‘Mestizo’. The Mestizo girls in the urban centers look alright, I mean they have a narrow waist like girls everywhere, but the rural Mestizo girls do not have a waist. If they have, they hide it very effectively under layers of clothing. Also, you find fair, blonde people in Peru as well as dark-skinned, dark haired ones and all the shades in between. Majority of the people are now nominally Catholic, but there are many who follow both the Inca religion as well as Christianity.

The tourism industry at least, seems to be totally in the hands of the women, who are extremely hard-working, honest and nice, though their English is awful. The lady travel agent WILL receive you at the bus-stop even at 2:00 AM. and protect you from unsavory customers. We have a very high regard for these Peruvian women.

A large amount of information about Inca Empire, Inca history, Inca religion, The Spanish conquest, the struggle for Independence etc. is available on the Net, so I will not repeat it, but I will be writing about my own impressions of Peru.

I suppose, this is enough of an Introduction to Peru.

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