Lima, Cuzco, Machu Picchu

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My apologies to my faithful readers (if I have any!) of my travel blog; time to write the depth of entries I’m used to writing (and, on some level, need to write so that I can process what I’ve experienced in each of these ports) is much harder to come by these days, mostly because we have such limited time at sea between these last few ports. Ideally, in our last stretch of sailing (5 days from Puerto Quetzal, Guatemala, to San Diego), I’ll get an entry up about the ship. Sadly, my blog has so far skipped entirely over Ecuador, easily one of my favorite countries I’ve seen on this trip, and something I hope to rectify soon as well. But first, Peru - like Chile, I’m trying for the freshest impressions I can still summon from my trips to Lima and Machu Picchu before our three days sailing to Costa Rica, where I am now. (My setting here is pretty amazing, but I’ll get there in the next blog.)

I was hoping to do one thing in Peru, and that was to see Machu Picchu. The super-famous Inca site was voted among the “New Seven Wonders of the World” while we were all on this trip; without an Internet connection here, I can’t recall which two original Wonders stood the test of time, but Machu Picchu and Chichen Itzá both ended up on the new list. The Peruvians have made sure that even those who have been living under a rock the last twenty years know this fact; they’re justifiably proud of having such a treasure in their country. At the pre-port meeting the night before we arrived in Callao, the port city of Lima, I saw that my name was listed as a trip leader for the Colonial Lima historical tour the next day. I was pretty sure I was going but had forgotten that I was the leader. All this means, really, is that I had to collect people’s tickets, write the names of those who boarded the bus, sell any extra seats to potential takers who came to the bus, and get three participant evaluations afterwards. Because this was a fairly inexpensive day trip, my troubles entitled me to a refund of the trip fee, so I made sure to do everything officially. I had scheduled my “dock time” from the passport fiasco in Chile to start after I had returned from the tour; because passport violations, in the great scheme of things, aren’t all that serious, I was allowed to serve the dock time between 6pm and 6am. I only passed up going out in Lima/Miraflores with some students who stuck around the colonial area after the tour, but the tour itself was pretty sweet, and I had resigned myself to the dock time by that point anyway.

Let me write a little about Callao, the port city, before I get to Lima. In the words of Tom Jelke, our fearless Assistant Dean who makes the proverbial trains run on time, “There is a 12km walk from Callao to Lima….do not attempt to walk it. You won’t make it.” I heard of students whose cabbies told them (when they asked for a ride to the port) “Yes, we go to the port, but we don’t go anywhere else in Callao.” Some taxi driver, according to a student, gestured to a part of Callao off the highway and said “Taxi drivers don’t go there; cops don’t even go there.” Apparently Callao, besides the obvious flaw from a touristic standpoint of having absolutely nothing to see besides 12km worth of concrete buildings, is a huge transit point for drugs, making it a pretty terrible idea to get out of a car at any point between the port and Lima. The powers that be at the port, armed with large guns, don’t let any of these elements in, so the port is probably the one safe thing in the entire city of Callao. Cab rides can take up to an hour in the insufferable Lima traffic, but if you don’t take them (or weren’t on a SAS tour that happened to include bus transit), you didn’t see Lima at all.

Colonial Lima is actually quite cool. Lima’s one of these cities that gets a bad rap - had I seen more of it than a rather pretty colonial section and an extensive series of musical instrument stores, I might agree more with the popular opinion. True, the sun never shines in Lima, at least during its winter - I asked our tour guide if Lima ever got any rays and he said “Four months - our summer - that’s it.” Aside from Quito, my limited experience of South American capitals in wintertime is a rather gray and cold one. But in Lima, I saw the first university in Peru, the Universidad Mayor Nacional de San Marcos (UNMSM, if you’re into the whole brevity thing); now that I’ve seen it, I might be able to put together a better application to go study there than my first attempt last summer. It’s beautiful - though most of its scholastic activity now takes place on a larger campus elsewhere in Lima designed for its full student population of 20,000. Don’t let the brightly painted walls fool you - UNMSM’s original location is quite colonial down to the many plazas surrounded by former academic buildings, and a lovely chapel and some imposing rooms where students defended theses were impressive. From there, we headed to the cathedral, on one side of Lima’s main plaza. Strangely enough, the conquistador Pizarro’s remains are in a section of the cathedral at the very back, across from the entrance. We thought that Peruvians wouldn’t stand for this, but our guide seemed to view the whole thing with a remarkable equanimity, saying simply that he was the father of Peru and while some disagree with the location of his ashes, most of the controversy has died down. The cathedral is expansive yet quite approachable; not breathtaking, but beautiful, as a couple of these pictures here should show. The plaza was in the midst of preparations for a huge indigenous dance festival in honor of Peru’s Independence Day, but it sounded like unless I had gotten there very early the next day, I wouldn’t have seen much of it from a close enough vantage point to make it worth my while.

From there we took a break to eat, and I spent quite a bit of time in a bookstore in search of a couple Spanish books I’ve become interested in reading. Of course, they make for pretty heavy souvenirs, and I can get them when I get back home and not risk having even more luggage to exceed the weight limit when I fly back to Virginia, so I decided to join some students and buy some cheap empanadas before meeting our group to go to the convent and the catacombs. I don’t remember the exact name of the convent, but I’ll check it out when I’m back on the Internet. Besides its beautiful Spanish “azulejos” (glazed tiles - if you’ve been in Sevilla anytime, you’ll know what I’m talking about - elaborate, brilliantly colored tiles that have either patterns or part of a picture on them and form large walls, in this case, surrounding an entire courtyard), the convent is known for its creepy catacombs where bones and skulls, if they’re not in various bins along the walkway through the crypt, have been arranged in concentric circles and all kinds of shapes. Of course, photos are prohibited, so I have no visual record of either the bright tiles or the macabre bone-skull arrangements. There was something resembling a blue sky when we got out, at least for a couple minutes, to go to the convent’s library, where extant books from the colonial era are still sitting on the shelves. A couple illuminated manuscripts were held open on book stands in the front of this skinny but deep library with about 5 sets of shelves going all the way around. Talk about that musty book smell - you could even get it from outside in this case. As a history fan (I won’t say historian - though some might argue I’ve already become one in certain ways), it’s rather unbelievable to me that these colonial books are just sitting on shelves, slowly rotting away. Our guide explained to us that restoring one book can take between $10,000 and $20,000, so the survival of these books (and other invaluable historical resources) depends on the generosity of the Peruvian government and individuals. I could hear Brian Owensby’s voice in the back of my head: he had told me back in Panama that if he were a millionaire, he’d run around saving historical documents and archiving them all over Latin America. In Lima, this comment started to make some sense.

After a highly informative tour of places I would otherwise have not seen, it was back to the ship and dock time for me. Thanks to that dock time, I’m not behind on this blog more than I am; I just wrote my Chile entry and caught up with friends online, cleaned up my cabin, caught up on sleep, and generally enjoyed the mandatory down time. The next day, Peter Rodriguez, one of the econ profs on the ship, told me he and his family were heading in to Lima for the day and invited me along. I said I’d love to go, but would need to go to a neighborhood of music stores I’d seen the day before in search of my ‘charango’, a little Andean guitar that you may have heard accompanying pan pipes in traditional music from the region. Peter agreed (he’s always up for an adventure, and I knew and liked his family from our time together in Quito, riding the TeleferiQo among other things), so off we went. First order of business was lunch. I had forgotten the other thing I gave up in order to serve my dock time was an invitation to a sweet Peruvian traditional restaurant, Huaca Pucullana, by Profs. Padrón and Gies. They came into the Faculty Lounge during my dock time raving about it, so I was pretty happy that Peter had decided to go to that same restaurant for lunch. As we always are, we were somewhat underdressed for the occasion - not many, even among faculty and staff, brought an extensive selection of clothing between ship-casual and the one or two nicer outfits we have. But they didn’t discriminate with their food: I had a fantastic tuna steak with “Andean salad” - some pleasantly bitter greens, from what I could figure out, and tried some of Peter’s ceviche, deliciously tender (uncooked) fish and seafood soaked in lemon juice and I don’t know what all. Our outdoor seats looked out upon a strange reconstruction of some “ruins” - made mostly of brick, with a few authentic-looking (but recently made) large urns and pots in the walkways. We decided these were there for those who couldn’t make it to Machu Picchu from Lima, but really, we had no clue why the restaurant had any link to this odd faux-historical ground next to it.

From Huaca Pucullana, we took one of those looooooong Lima cab rides to the neighborhood of music stores. I had seen a series of them from the bus to the colonial section the day before - about six streets, all fronted by blue buildings, converge on the Plaza 2 de Mayo between colonial Lima and Callao. I poked around a couple stores, told them what I was looking for, and found on my third try a nice Peruvian charango with an indigenous-looking fabric case (I’m sure it’s a pre-sewn pattern, but fairly cool looking nonetheless), and a $1 book of charango chords. I don’t know much more about charango playing than I did before, but it’ll be one of those things I’ll work on over time. I already know a few chords, and at the very least, I have a cool musical souvenir from my time in the Andean countries; it’s in my cabin and tends to be the thing I grab and mess around with while reading the chord charts and trying to play various progressions when I can figure them out. I’ve never seen so many musical instrument dealers in such a close space in my life; blocks and blocks of stores sold charangos, other little guitars, Andean drums, and - I almost bit on this one - ‘cajones’ - yes, look at that first vowel carefully - basically similar to the wooden boxes that flamenco bands use as percussion. They have an incredible range of sounds, but a little voice inside my head asked how I was going to get it home. I hadn’t resigned myself yet to shipping things to myself once I get stateside, but I think I’m at that point now. Sigh - too late for a ‘cajón’; guess I’ll have to get back to the Andes sometime!

After that, Peter, his wife Kathleen, and his kids Gabi and Sam, and I hopped in another cab to Miraflores, the swanky neighborhood of Lima where European and American banks are everywhere, indigenous craft stores, alpaca dealers, and all kinds of fairly un-Peruvian consumer culture. It was fun, though; I had my first Starbucks since leaving home, and noticed that Starbucks’ Peru coffee by the pound costs just the same in Peru as, say, their Sumatra or Guatemala coffee - of course, since it’s been exported and re-imported - not that price is a huge deal for Miraflores residents or the tourists that go there to shop. We poked around some craft markets and headed toward the Marriott to take an official taxi home, with a couple detours to an alpaca wool store and phone cabins so I could call back to the US. The official taxi was quite a trip - $34 (!) from Miraflores to the port of Callao, in a black Mercedes with an impeccably kept interior and a driver wearing (I think) a coat with tails. I guess these official taxis are pretty serious; Peter had taken the warnings at pre-port to heart regarding unofficial taxis in Lima. After too much charango playing for how early the next day had to start (I woke up around 3am), my trip to Machu Picchu was next.

I’ll mostly let the pictures speak for themselves with Cuzco and Machu Picchu, not out of any nefarious desire to deprive my dear readers of text, but because I’m now sitting on the ship waiting to leave Costa Rica and have a ton to say about that country now. We had to be in the faculty lounge at 3:20am the morning we were to leave for Cuzco; our 5:50 flight went without incident, and all of a sudden we were 10,000 feet above sea level, disembarking into an airport unlike any I’ve ever been in - instead of a passenger terminal, we walked down a hallway with signs almost exclusively in English into a random collection of tour agencies arranged in a square. Many had coca leaf tea in an effort to draw you in to their particular hotel/Machu Picchu/whatever package; since our arrangements were already made, most of us looked around bemused at the tourism industry that almost reached to the door of disembarking planes. I bought a couple packets of coca leaves to chew on from an older indigenous woman before boarding the bus to our hotel. They’re perfectly legal, but taste a little like solid green tea - not the most pleasant thing in the world. Apparently they help improve circulation and thus combat altitude sickness. While waiting for our rooms to become available, I downed a couple cups of coca leaf tea. This was a bad idea, since my plan was to take a nap before our tour of Cuzco started at 2, and apparently a high tolerance for caffeine does not translate into one for coca. A group of students and I decided to meet later for ‘cuy’, a distinctly Andean food (guinea pig, prepared in any number of different ways.) Our hotel people directed us to the Inka Grill, which seemed like a reputable enough place, and called ahead to the restaurant to have the cuy ready for seven of us. We didn’t quite allow enough time to get there, and had to make a couple stops on the way to the Inka Grill to get altitude sickness medication for a student, so we showed up a bit late for cuy.

We were a little sticker-shocked, since the per-person price for cuy was about $20. Our waiter graciously took away two plates of cuy, so seven people shared five plates; we decided it was far better to be at a reputable place eating cuy than a cheap one. So, what’s it like? First of all, it was considerably sanitized; we couldn’t readily identify any cuy parts, and it came in rectangular fillets of sorts. With the blend of spices on the cuy, I’d compare it to tandoori chicken - a little thicker texture, but actually quite tasty, even if we were picking little cuy bones out constantly. I had to call the hotel and let our trip leader know that we’d miss the 2:00 tour start time, but that we’d catch them at the cathedral, a couple hundred yards away from the Inka Grill. We did just that; unfortunately, the tour was about to leave from the cathedral when we caught them, so we had to run through an absolutely beautiful Andean church with a fascinating mix of Spanish Catholic and indigenous elements. (Brian later said the cathedral almost made him want to convert. Clearly I need to get back to Cuzco soon and take my time going through.) We were off to Qorikancha, the Inca temple nearby. I don’t remember a lot of specifics about it except it was a perfect introduction to Inca architecture - the rock-solid walls built of trapezoidally cut stones, and one long series of rooms where one can stand on a stone and see through a trapezoidal cutout to the other side. There was a guy selling replicas of pre-Columbian instruments - had I more cash on me at the time, I’d probably be the owner of a fascinating hand-shaped flute as well as a charango from Peru.

But it was time to drive off to Saqsayhuamán, another Inca site only slightly less famous than Machu Picchu. As with its legendary counterpart, the site of Saqs (I’ll call it by this just-invented nickname from now on, but its full name is pronounced socks-ay-wha-mon) is breathtaking, but Machu Picchu’s dramatic mountains are replaced by rolling green hills of Saqs a couple miles outside of Cuzco. Our tour was a bit lacking, if only because we didn’t have nearly enough time to explore the site, and most of us were distracted by what I think were indigenous newlyweds parading around in beautiful native dress and the simple, irrepressible urge to CLIMB and explore the ruins there. We could only marvel, though, at Inca ingenuity in carving L-shaped stones for joints that rendered corners basically impervious to earthquakes, and wonder at how immense stones still lay as stable as ever on top of columns built of neatly sliced boulders. Our day of touring around, as delightful as it was, had left most of us pretty worn out; a drink in the hotel bar with my roommate for the trip, anthropology prof Jeff Blick, and a long hotel-provided meal near a large circular fireplace would be the extent of my activities for the evening. After watching some American TV - satellites reach everywhere! - I began one of the most interrupted nights of sleep in my life. Some strange combination of dehydration and altitude adjustment conspired to wake me up nearly every hour to go drink water, go to the bathroom, wonder why I had just woken up, or who knows what. Fortunately this nonsense stopped about 3 hours before we had to get up to take a combination of buses and a quite nice train to Machu Picchu, but even at breakfast, I wasn’t feeling like eating much. I slept most of the bus ride to the train station and suddenly felt like a million bucks, watching the sun rise over the Andes from my window on the train. (One would have to be feeling pretty nasty to minimize the positive effects of that!)

Machu Picchu is even more spectacular than I thought it would be. We got there around 10am, too late to climb Waynapicchu mountain (this becomes important later) - they only let the first four hundred people per day who state their intent to climb it do so - and we took a tour of the site with a guide who was quite knowledgeable. Were it not for her, I wouldn’t have understood things like the Condor Temple (one looks down, and sees a fairly realistic impression of a condor head - aesthetically nice, but not nearly as impressive as the rest of the site…UNTIL she told us that the condor’s wings were in fact two immense boulders probably the height of 4-5 average humans, if not six.

Anyway - I'm way behind on my blog, and you've got the gist of my time in Peru. Should I have time after returning to the US, I'll write about my last day in Peru spent in Cuzco...for now, stay tuned for Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Guatemala!

Seven days left! See you guys then. Chris

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Photos

Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima
Arches were cooler before McDonald's coopted them...

Lima cathedral
Oddly enough, the cathedral houses the remains of Francisco Pizarro, the rather brutal conquistador and founder of Spanish Peru.

Dining room, Casa Aliaga, 1
Fearless leader Ricardo Padrón too. Note the tiles!

Wax and glaze
Again, the Casa Aliaga - I liked the play of the bright candles and Spanish tiles.

Forgive the cliche
Indigenous Peruvian woman...with llama!

Saqsayhuamán 1
Cuzco's environs have an absolute embarrassment of riches of Inca ruins; among the most famous non-Machu Picchu sites is Saqsayhuamán.

Saqsayhuamán 2
See how that stone in the corner is actually one stone cut in an L-shape? This made Inca architecture extremely sound, at least seismically.

Saqsayhuamán 3
We can only wonder how that boulder got up there...

Indigenous newlyweds, Saqsayhuamán
This beautifully dressed couple seemed to have no issues posing for us lucky tourists!

Cuy!
Or, "guinea pig" in Quechua, a traditional dish of the Andes. Pretty tasty, glad I've tried it, but will probably stick to less bony meats from here on out.

Gold model of Inca ceremonial site
Taken at Qorikancha.

When the earth settles...
...watch out. Inca buildings were basically earthquake-proof but couldn't withstand random settling of the ground.

Machu Picchu
It's huge - this is a different vantage point on a different part of the site.

Stairway to heaven?
Actually, this is from the religious/ceremonial area of Machu Picchu.

Head of the condor
We all thought "that's nice," until we saw the wings... (see next pic)