Some vicuñas.
In the days of the Inca control of the vicuñas was seen as important, as their wool is considered to be very good, and they don't produce very much (much better than alpaca, which in turn is much better than llama, which you don't often see for sale in Peru - it's all alpaca). Every 4 years a shearing, called a chacu, was held. This involved a huge amount of people making a massive circle, and closing it slowly around the animals until they were caught and sheared. Wearing vicuña wool and not being royalty was punishable by death.
When the Spanish arrived, naturally they implemented their God-given right to kill everything they wanted to better utilise whatever resources were available. From a population of hundreds of thousands, the vicuñas were reduced to only a couple of thousand. With careful protective measures and censuses and such, the population is recovering well, but is still very low.
There's still government-organised chacu, where a couple of months beforehand posters go up around Arequipa and other towns calling for volunteers, and the profits go to the locals (wiki says a vicuña scarf in 2007 cost around US$1,500!). They also carefully document the whole thing, tagging each vicuña, and taking care to not shear them too often, or too young, or the pregnant, and so on.
Vicuña chillin by the railway.
We also stopped and saw some llamas/alpacas a couple times.
From one of the highest points we went, where we stopped for coca tea.
At the actual highest point we got to, there was a bunch of difficult-to-line-up signs labeling the surrounding volcanoes.
Assuming this is the thing our guide was talking about, it grows around 1mm/year and makes excellent tinder.
The road down to Chivay.
It's really common in Latin America to see broken bottles in the mortar on top of brick walls (all walls), but this was the first time I'd seen cacti used for the same purpose.
We had a couple hours in Chivay to kill before dinner, so mum and I went for a walk to see what was up. There was a surprisingly large and reasonably nice square:
Then we saw the street of statues of dancers: (if I could be bothered they all have a story attached, but there are many)
There was also cool sombrero-seats.
I'm pretty sure they all represent traditional dances of the regions. I wouldn't wanna be opposite this guy.
Or the dead squirrel...
We went to a kinda-nice (expensive) restaurant for dinner, where there was a band playing glorious Peruvian flute music, and a couple of dancers, which led to this:
After a demonstration of each dance, they invited people up to join in. I had no idea what the point of this at the time was, but apparently the guy eats a poisoned apple or something, and then falls over, then the girl waves her hat in his face, then hits him with something like a bola (thankfully she mostly hit the ground next to me, those motherfuckers'd hurt). I suppose this is some kind of last resort...
We then got up nice and early enough to go down the canyon with a few stops at viewpoints and arrive at the Cruz del Condor (Cross of the Condor - there's a big cross at the top) early enough to see them ride the thermals from their nests to the top to go about their days of scavenging dead shit. Apparently condors don't eat anything living, which was sadly misunderstood, and, again, led to their decimation at the hands of the Spanish.
View from our window in the morning.
Vista of the Colca Valley. In pre-Hispanic times there were no villages or anything in the valley, only families or family groups living near their land and farming it. When the Spanish came they forced all the locals to live in towns so they could be more easily taxed and Evangelised.
The farming terraces have apparently been around since pre-Inca times, an act of early genius (that I'm sure exists in many other parts of the world). The terraces are well-constructed for drainage and retention of the precious topsoil in an essentially tree-less environment. As well, the walls store heat throughout the day which they then release at night, vital during the cold winters when all the crops would otherwise freeze.
Forgot to ask what kind of bird this guy was.
One of the fancy new towns, with the canyon going to the left.
Our guide said it wasn't really guaranteed that we'd see condors, and that we'd wait an hour, and if there weren't many, another half hour, and so on for a while. Turned out to not be necessary, there were a ton.
The Colca Canyon is one of the deepest in the world - twice as deep as the puny Grand Canyon.
Look at his little vulture head...
1. Take blurry photo.
2. Shoop in condor?
After the Cruz del Condor, everyone was tired and hungry and we headed back to Chivay for lunch, with only a stop at a nice little church on the way.
Actually tbh, I've seen better. This one had some claim to fame I can't recall though. Perhaps the carving? I wasn't about to pay to go in properly though...
The next day, we got a rather long bus up to Puno, on the shore of Lake Titicaca, proudly touted as "the highest navigable lake in the world." Pretty sure I could build a wee raft and make some other higher lake be navigable. The evening we arrived we were directed to a street of restaurants, which cost probably 5 times what can be paid. In the end we found a place that cost about $1.50 for a soup and a plate. And it was full of cops, so it must've been good.
In the morning, we visited a market to find some food, and saw a couple of groups of kids with teachers holding up stuff saying "this is heart," "this is lungs," "this is an apple," and so on.
In the afternoon we went to the funerary towers of Sillustani, overlooking the lake near Puno.
Of course there's a little town next to the ruins,
I believe this is technically part of Titicaca, as the towers were on a peninsula.
Pretty sure this one is mostly a reconstruction.
Lightning rods. It rained most of the time we were up there...
Early design.
There's like one family living out there, and it's used as a sanctuary for vicuñas.
Reconstruction of the Egyptian-esque construction method used.
12-sided stone. Apparently the rock was chiseled to a rough shape and then polished with wet sand to perfection. All the towers have a hole like that, and all point east so the dead guy inside can get out to his sun god.
This rock was magnetic. God knows how the Incas knew, I can't think of anything magnetic they might've had.
On the way back to Puno we stopped at a family's house to check it out and try some local food (not alpaca in this case).
There was a couple of little gates between sections of their property with this kind of thing atop.
Dinner (with preggers dinner on the left).
Poor cuyes...
Alpaca got curious.
A couple of different types of quinoa and potatoes (they grow hundreds of types of spud in Peru).
Fried quinoa bread. This stuff was delicious.
From bottom-to-top: cheese, potato, mud, bread. Potato + mud was pretty good, actually.
The next day we went on a tour to the Uros Islands, which're made entirely of reeds, and Taquile, another island with an interesting culture...
Puno sprawling across the coast.
Not sure where those guys were going...
If you live on islands made of reeds, you may as well use your tiny piece of actual land for a football field.
A couple of the 80 or so islands.
The Uros Islands were really well-developed for tourism. Each island houses a few families and has a name and a wee map thing. When we arrived we were shown how the islands are constructed.
The big brown block is the roots of the reeds, the key part of the islands.
The stick with the knife on it on the left (literally a stick with the blade of a kitchen knife attached) is what they use to cut the reeds. The houses as well as the islands are made of reed, so cutting them properly is important. When we were there there were no men on the island as they were out cutting reeds to replace the ground, fortnightly ordeal. They know exactly where to cut the reeds; too high or too low and they'll grow back slowly or not at all. The little ropes on the sides of the roots represent the anchoring that all the islands have. Not sure how they do it in reality.
Then the reeds are stacked on top, obviously.
Dinner came to check out the reed we were given to look at.
The native fish of the lake.
In the past the people of the islands lived by trading fish for whatever they needed from the mainland. These days noone wants to trade crappy little fish like this, and there's bigger operations to catch the introduced trout, so their only source of income is tourism. Lots of people I met complained about how touristy the islands were, but they literally wouldn't exist without income from tourism. It seemed when we arrived that we were directed to a particular island, so the income gets spread fairly among each group of families. Popularity among tourists seems to be a double-edged sword in many poorer communities I've seen. But I can't really see vastly increased income from visitors as being seen as necessarily a bad thing by those that live in the communities, as long as there're reasonable protections for their way of life and the beauty of their homeland...
The completed island.
After being shown how the islands are made, we were invited in small groups into one of the houses each. The one we went into was pretty spartan, with a reed bed, reed bench-type thing, a little chair, a spare roof and some electronics. The roofs need to be replaced every few months, and the houses slightly more often. It must be such a mission rebuilding your entire village a couple of times a year at least (and more for the ground!). At least they don't have to deal with sewage plumbing: to go to the loo the locals go on a little boat ~1km into the reeds.
Our host in front of her house.
Saving the flammable reeds from the stove with some roots.
Traditional reed boats. I don't recall how long they last, but it isn't long.
More modern shop-boat.
After an hour or so on the island, we went on a ride on their reed boat to another island that serves as a kind of community centre (which seemed more like a little restaurant with some handicrafts for sale). There's also a school and a medical centre on the islands somewhere.
Look what happens when you make your house out of not-reeds.
We had a coffee, and optionally got a stamp in our passports saying we'd visited (I didn't have mine on me...), before returning to our slowboat to go to Taquile.
I'll tell ya all about taking panoramas from the back of a moving boat...
On Taquile, we were basically dropped off and told to walk to the top, where the main community is and where we'd meet our guide after he'd sussed where we were eating. Again, all the visitors are allocated around the place to share the wealth. But in the end we ate in the communal restaurant, which families take turns for a week each tending.
More terraces.
Unsure what the rows were...
Black sheep's got no mates.
Main square of the town.
Two locals. Basically all the men were dressed the same. More on the hats later.
Hmm, I don't think Jerusalem and Sydney are in the same direction from anywhere.
Stunning place to live.
Best plate to serve fish on.
So when children are 5 years old they have their first haircut, before that they're distinguished by the hats they wear. At 5, boys begin to learn to knit, and they have to knit their own bi-colour hat (white/red). When they're 16-18 they have to prove that they have mad knitting skillz by taking their bachelor-hat, inverting it, and pouring water in. If the water just runs through, it means they're shit at knitting and they don't get married. If they can knit they'll probably get married, but not until they've co-habitated with their bride-to-be for 3 years. Divorce rates, I'm led to believe, are low. Once married, the man knits himself a new, solid-coloured hat.
The women of the island don't knit, but they do weave. The red thing on the right is a belt that a woman made for her husband, with symbology representing her dreams and such. The black/white/blue thing just to the left is the inside of the belt, and is much more durable. Normally the women put some of their own hair into the inside of the belt too.
Apparently a few years ago a German woman visited Taquile as a tourist, and was so interested in this culture that she stayed a couple of years to study it. Afterwards she traveled the world looking for something similar and couldn't find anything remotely the same. At some point, UNESCO declared it part of humanity's cultural heritage. It's pretty young though; apparently the pre-Hispanic locals did nothing of the sort. How does this start?
After lunch, and the above brief explanation, we headed to the other side of the island and back down to our boat.
One of the islands' docks.
"Firing Order 15486872"
Then back to Puno, city of nothing but its surrounds. We were gonna stay another day, but realised this and got a bus back up to Cusco (3/4 trips through Juliaca, so-called "Jewel of the High Plain." In reality a major crossroads with the worst fucking roads in the country).
We had a couple days to kill in Cusco (/time for mum to make last-minute purchases to fill the rather monstrous bag she brought over for the purpose), so we spent much of the time wandering markets and the centre of the city.
Was also a parade of some sort with yelling of some things I probably wouldn't've understood in English, as I tend not to...
We went to a Japanese restaurant I noticed the first time we were there, to have the last of my favourite cuisines that I hadn't had on the trip so far (and it didn't fucking make me sick, like the Thai did).
Tasty teriyaki chicken, with leftovers of the sushi in the background :D they even had chopsticks!
After Japanese we found a bar overlooking the main plaza to watch it as the sun went down.
Weird tourist trambus thing.
Next day: more markets and wandering.
I like this.
"de puta madre" means something like "fuckin' A!"
fruta = fruit
∴ Fuckin' great fruit/juice place.
We went up to see the "White Christ," which you can see on the left of the photo of the cathedral above. Turned out to be a pretty nice spot.
Also turns out there was a veritable city of ruins behind the hill. I was expecting we'd get a cab up through some slummy neighbourhood and watch our backs the whole time we were there, but there was a pretty nice bit of landscape there.
The next morning I went with mum to the airport so she could get her first flight home. We battled the rather large queue there (the airport staff were totally unprepared, though I assume having 4 flights within half an hour of each other in the morning is reasonably common in Cusco...), and made our goodbyes. A++ would highly recommend going traveling with one's mother if the opportunity presents itself!
I then went to the bus terminal to catch a bus back to Puno to cross into Bolivia, but that's another story...
No comments:
Post a Comment