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Tim Version:
* Saw Cusco in both its drab and colourful forms, with its awesome Plaza de Armas and surrounding shops n stuff.
* Saw Ollyantambo and the sacred valley.
* Experienced Ayahuasca, one hell of a trip!
The ahhh too much to have a one liner here version:
Cusco as you enter the town by bus is the same as any other here with sprawling square concrete unfinished houses with the odd splash of colour and a lot of dusty brown dirt everywhere. From the bus terminal though its a quick taxi ride to the central Plaza de Armas and this is where the beauty is at.
As touristy as expected it is full of people selling you anything and everything, and every restaurant has someone standing out front with the menu trying desperately to get you to enter the town. The central plaza is nice and open with manicured green grass, lots of benches to sit on, small plants and trees around and numerous gay pride flags, which are actually the Cusco flag. On 2 sides are large churches among other things, and its very colonial and grand looking. You can see from
the plaza the surrounding houses creeping up the mountainside on all sides.
I avoided the Loki Hostel where the others I arrived with went as I didn't want to end up in a drunken or drug induced hanging around only with gringos mode so instead headed for Pirwa, still large and social but without that side of the vibe. It also happens to be located opposite a very nice little square, Plaza de San Francisco, much quieter and a good place to relax in the sun.
I walked a fair chunk of central Cusco and its a pretty place with everything from the main bustling Ave Del Sol (or some name similar), down to small alleyways still apparently built with the original stonework of the Inca times. The San Blas area is beautiful and much more artistic than the rest and is a good area to find a nice cafe to have something to eat at, though I have to admit that I didn't spend all too much time there. There is something about those who I would stick in the wannabe-hippie category that wander pretending they have no money in the usual colourful low crutch saggy pants,
sandals and some similar shirt selling jewellery they make. Many of those are legitimate, but San Blas had a large proportion that to me were not real, as they tried to sell their jewellery then retired to their 40 or 50soles per night nice hostel then enjoyed a 30soles meal with a whole bunch of beers after - not exactly the pennyless free roaming life that they seem to want to be a part of and represent.
With the upcoming Inti Rami festival there was also processions and shows around Cusco the whole time I was there which were good to watch! Very colourful, lots of dancing and music, but some of the most unpractised stressful looking stuff I've ever seen! As far as Im aware its not meant to just be practise but often thats all it looked like, with members wandering different directions and notes of the music being way off tune, which was amusing to me but a lot of people in the parade got quite publicly castrated for it which I hated and it made me angry, usually by their leaders. Especially the kids parades, it was shocking! Often they were treated with military discipline
and never have I seen so much of what looked to be parents living their dreams through their kids, with the adults ruining the experience telling 4 and 5 year olds off for mucking about a little or perhaps getting part of their dances wrong. It was disgusting and ruined the experience when it happened with the happiest and most entertaining groups being those where the kids had more free roam and just got to be happy and do the amusing random things that kids do. I didn't know if it was just me or not so I asked a bunch of gringos but they all had the same opinion. It got to the point where you might have a parade of kids, and a mother would call one out to the sidelines to tell the child off for getting something wrong, they would then fix the kids uniform, give them a talking to, send them back in the parade and then the kid would cop it all over again from the group leader for leaving the group and for getting it wrong and for now having the uniform adjusted a different way and never once did I see the
interfering parent in trouble for it all. An excellent lesson on how not to be a parent in my book.
While in Cusco I did get to try the Guinea Pig, and I've gotta say that its actually a really rich meat! A bit difficult to pick off the little rib cage but the rest is incredible. I had it on one of my final nights, a once off thing to try as it comes with quite a hefty price tag compared to normal food, but I thoroughly enjoyed it! Heh the conversation from childhood pet to dinner can be a funny one, but no different than rabbit I guess. They brought it out to be in presentation form as can be seen in the photo as the whole bodies animal cooked and stretched out with a little tomato hat and a carrot in its mouth, funny as to look but also keeping you very aware of what you are eating! I took my photo then was about to dig in when the waiter called out that it was actually just like that for presentation and that he needed to take it back to the chef to prepare it
to eat, so they did that and it came back headless and in two pieces but with all feet still attached. Washed down with a Pisco Sour it was a really rich meat, quite gamey and one guinea pig being more than enough for one person, served with some beautiful vegetables and some sort of potato dish. If it were available in Aus I would probably leave it much like duck as only for special occasions and I don't think I could eat too much of it as it is just so rich!
The Sacred Valley was an area I originally planned to spend quite a bit of time in, but the more I saw photos of it and learned about it I found that I didnt really need much time at all. A bus trip through it would really let me see everything I wanted! The Boleto Turistico comes with a ridiculus price tag to allow you entry into the various ruins around Cusco (with the exception of Machu Picchu) so I had no intention of buying that so instead I decided o just view the ruins from the outside. I took a local bus down to Ollyantambo
to check out the town and ruins there and the drive is beautiful! The entry into Urubamba with the much higher mountainous regions behind it is quite spectacular. Ollyantambo itsellf however is way over touristed to me, quite fake until you walk right out of the main area. There you enter small alleyways that are nice with the paths and buildings built with rock that appears to be at least partly original contructions from a long time ago, and there is an aquaduct running through the town adding more life and noise to it. The ruins, well, I only saw them from the outside and while still cool to look at they had nothing on those I have seen in Central America so I felt no loss in not being able to enter. Having the Boleto Turistico is I believe a very bad move by the tourism board of Peru and the price tag is extortion and it locks people into seeing all or nothing. I didn't need much time there and by the time the light was fading I was bus'ing back to Cusco to try and get indoors before the cold of the night descended happy enough with
what I'd seen.
*Ayahuasca
Ayahuasca, the sacred vine and hallucinagen used by many natives of South America is something that I'd heard about by another traveler in Nicaragua and wanted to try ever since. Being hallucinagenic and also one that has a reputation of making you very stationary and not wanting to move or perhaps not able to move much while under the influence, I wanted to try it with a well respected and trustworthy Shaman. I found through research two that seemed to stand out, one in Pisac in the Sacred Valley named Diego and another nicknamed Kush that operated The Shaman Shop in Cusco. I first organised to do one through Diego but couldnt do it unti the end of the week, then instead found I could experience one with Kush the next day so switched to that. After our pickup from his shop, myself and 3 others were driven to his house up in the hills with a commanding view of Cusco where he has a temple, a sweat room thingo (anoter ritual you can partake in if you wish) and his house. Its an excellent setup.
We settled into the temple, lying on layers
of blankets with many blankets behind us at which point he explained about the Ayahuasca and how the night would proceed. The room is filled with various charms and tools and many musical instruments, and as a round room it is very calming as there is no harsh edges or corners. We drank our small cups of the Ayahuasca mixture and then needed to wait 30 to 40 minutes for the drug to kick in. One not particularly pleasant part of the experience is the "purging stage". This stage seems to occur just as the mixture is kicking in and involved you throwing up a good few times quite violently, "purging" the general bad stuff from your body. Our group turned out to be brilliant to me as I wanted to experience and know the affects it could have, and each of us experienced it diifferently. One guy was throwing up for hours, just non stop at some stages, while myself and another guy threw up a couple of times but no more, and one guy didn't throw up at all. I unfortunately had that feeling of wanting to for probably an hour all up while the others mostly had
the feeling arrive quite quickly then it passed after they threw up. The lights went off once it began kicking in and Kush and another Shaman friend of his began their singing and chanting and playing of various musical instruments. The rest of the night we then experienced what it is to be under the influence of Ayahuasca. Many start with something they want healed or a question they want answered and it is a very introspective experience that pits you against yourself and your thoughts for the full length of the experience, most of ours lasting around 4 or 5 hours. While one guy said he was mostly deep in thought and though had his eyes open wasn't really seeing the world but instead was seeing what was in his mind and he entered seemingly with many issues to sort out and said that it helped a lot. Another guy who was least affected by it and took a second glass of the mixture seemed to really not enjoy the first half, but then described the second half as a very trippy experience involving floating and all sorts of things. Those two sat up. Myself and the other guy
felt a deep need to lie down once it had taken affect and didn't get up all night. The other guy lying down was the one who didn't throw up, and entered a state of uncontrollable laughing and smiling that lasted most of the night with him entering and exiting dreaming and often bursting out with laughing that would continue until he would cry. All 3 of them were able to talk and did so during most of the night. My experience however was different. I didn't enter with anything to solve or any questions I wanted answered. I got really cold and spent most of the night huddled under an amount of blankets that normally should have had me sweating up a storm. I had the most incredible visions of snakes and other twisting and turning shapes combined with kalaidescopes of colour and other viewsof nature type scenes of mountains stuff but not usually clearly and often shifting and morphing around. I found that I got waves of heavyness going through me where I felt I couldn't move, though I was totally happy the whole time and never wanted to fight the experience (the only times that was untrue
was when I felt I wanted to throw up more - that I found myself fighting sometimes). I however for most of the night only saw it all when I had my eyes closed or was submerged in the darkness of my blankets, and I also lost the ability to talk for most of the night with the others often thinking I was asleep perhaps asking me if I was or how I was but I couldn't respond (or at least felt I couldn't - in an emergency I'm sure I could but it would have dulled the pleasure of the experience and been a real effort so I never tried). The music and singing has an incredible influence on you, and you can use it as a kind of rope to bring you back to reality should you feel the need. While none of my time entered a nightmarish state as many say they experience, I did enter some unpleasentness occasionally but by concentrating on the music or singing I was able to bring myself straight back into the here and now and then could renter the trippy side of life again. One thing I did find phenomenal was
that during much of the time when I felt I couldn't speak I also heard the voices of those around me as a twisting mess of wavy tones that made no sense and had no clarity, but at no time did this ever happen to the chanting or music of the shamans which stayed crisp and at the normal pace the whole night.
The unpleasant part for me took place after the effects had lifted as due to not eating the day before (you have to fast before the experience) and with the whole purging thing I was hungry enough to eat a whole freakin Lllama in the middle of the night but wasn't able to eat, nor virtually able to move anyway with the physical effects still definitely there after the mental wore off, and so had hunger pains and a slight want to throw up for the rest of the night until the morning came and I got bugger all sleep. Thankfully none of us experienced the possible Diahoria side effects as with my lack of ability to move during the night it could have been a very messy experience, and the same for if anyone else
in the room had of had it then you would have had to have put up with it all night! The breakfast the next morning at a cafe at Jacks where us 4 went and talked about it all felt like one of the best meals I've ever had, with the biggest breakfast on the menu, a milkshake, a juice, a water and me eating and drinking everytype of food I could think of! Feeling normal returned shortly after the feed and looking back on the experience it felt pretty dreamy and hard to think of as real but yeh, really really glad I tried it, and even more glad that I had such an awesome group of people to try it with and that would greatly change the experience were it a bad group. I've also found that due to it being quite a trippy dreamy experience my memory of it changes slightly from time to time, a bit like a memory of a way too drunk night as things come back to you or you realise your memory is playing tricks on you, but because its all in your head its hard to know whether what you first
remembered is true or if what you think is now the truth is really the truth. I do wonder how much will stay in my memory and how much will go or change by the time I get home.
Heh oh yeh, on a sideline for something funny, we asked him how much it takes for it to affect some people as the dosage varies quite a bit. He said that girls often take half a glass, guys usually one glass, but the one country that has people that seem almost immune is Russia and on average they need to take 4 glasses of the stuff! He said it is due to their unwillingness to believe what is happening to them and they fight the experience mentally and physically with all their strength trying to remain under control so it takes a hell of a dose for it to overpower them, then its all fine after. We figured it was just coz they drank so much vodka so their bodies were immune to kinda eveything heh... but yeh, its apparently just their mentality as a people.
That was the end for my Cusco experience, and it was off
to Machu Picchu to see the high up giant itself.
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Chris Dison
non-member comment
Ayahuasca costs?
Hello LinzCrowe- I am a fellow traveler coming to Cusco in 2 weeks and I am interested in trying ayahuasca. How much did it cost to experience it with the shaman? Do you recommend it? On a scale of 1 -10 (1 lowest, 10 highest), how would you rate your experience? If you've done othe rhallucinogenic drugs (mushrooms, LSD, etc.), how did this compare to those experiences? Similar or very different? Thanks a lot for your response and feedback. Sincerely, Chris