David Kreps Blog

Peru Trip #12 - Final Thoughts

My Peruvian adventure has been both fascinating and - strangely enough - restful. A change is as good as a rest, so they say, and I have to say that perutourism.com have really done well in escorting me around the country - meeting me everywhere and ensuring I get the buses, trains and planes in my itinerary, picking me up from hotels to take me to train stations, bus stations, and airports, and collecting me from them to transfer me to my new hotel, each time. It has meant the entire holiday has been stress free, as far as making arrangements is concerned - all of that is taken care of. The fact that the vast majority of the time I have had 'private service' - a driver, a guide, and me, either in a small minivan or private car - has meant that I've had a more personal experience than the description 'guided tour' usually implies, able to have a one-to-one with each guide, getting the most out of each place I have visited. Worth every penny - and the exchange rate has really been in my favour: Peru is cheap. And, of course, as my conversations with fellow travellers in the Cusco restaurant and at Intipunku proved, this is the surest way to insulate oneself from the potential downsides of being in a very poor country. (more)

31 08 10 - 16:53 - da5idk - default| No comments No trackbacks - § ¶

Peru Trip #11 - Machu Picchu

Machu Picchu. Superlatives fail me. Just the train journey (much better than the famous Inca Trail, which is a four-to-six-day walk) was fairly spectacular, bringing home how deep and winding the gorge is here. It is made by a river that almost completely encloses the mountain upon the top of which the sanctuary of Macchu Picchu was built. The town was constructed from the huge rocks that were already there, some of which are still scattered about the summit in the few areas that have not been built on. Here and there the huge stones have been left in place, and the houses and temples built around them, using them as platforms.

The place was started probably around 1400CE, and was still ongoing and unfinished in parts, when it was mysteriously abandoned around 1500CE, abandoned to such an extent that later Incas - including the one overthrown by the Spanish, did not even know of its existence. Which of course means that neither did the Spanish. Of all the Inca ruins, this one is untouched, untainted by the Spanish. This site was not destroyed by them, there is no church built on top of it. It was lost to the jungle before Pisaro even set foot in South America, in 1533. The Quechua people, and their king, the Inca, the Son of the Sun, had abandoned this place long before. (more)

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Peru Trip #10 - Cuzco to Ollantaytambo

So last night I decided to throw caution to the wind and try out one of the posh restaurants of Cusco - with my credit card. Bistrot was recommended by my Cusco tour guide so I got the hotel to book me a table, and went up for dinner there at 8pm. The food was excellent - clearly a properly trained, imaginative chef. The service was worse than amateur - embarrassing. Once I had got past the language difficulty of wanting a decent bottle from the reasonably good list, rather than just a glass of the local Peruvian Tacama white wine - not bad, but not appropriate for a posh dinner - I had to offer to take over opening the expensive bottle of wine, wincing as the waitress struggled with it, with all the promise of bits of cork ending up in the wine. A nice enough girl, friendly, willing, but with barely any English and barely any training as a waitress. My Jumbo River Prawns were cooked to perfection in a delicious sauce, but again I had quite a struggle (and an empty side plate delivered) before managing to get a small bowl of warm water to wash my fingers. Hopefully they'll serve one with the prawns to future guests. I realised this was quite a new venture, only open a short time, with much to learn. The best thing about the dining experience, however, was the other two diners in the restaurant, a couple from London in their 'gap year' between work and retirement, touring the world. Had a really nice chat with them. Bolivia, they say, is even cheaper than Peru, Argentina about the same, but Brazil as expensive as Europe. Like me, they have found everyone they've met to be very friendly, and felt no threat at all, despite all the warnings. We conclude that it must be backpacking poor student travellers in cheap hostels that tend to experience the underside we have been warned of, and that we are cushioned by the reach of our wallets. Having to buy a bottle to get a nice wine with my delicious River and ShellFish 'Parihuela,' which came with the lovely Peruvian garlic rice I already enjoyed in the north, I of course was pretty happy by the end of the meal, chatting with the other diners. It was a shame that the service was so poor, and that, in the end, despite the signs, they seemed incapable of making their EFTPOS handheld work, either with MasterCard or VISA, and I had to part with half of my remaining cash for this lovely dinner - money well spent, but which I had wanted to put on the credit card to pay later, not pay for out of the rest of my holiday cash. I made no bones about ensuring they knew my displeasure. My fellow guests were equally put out by this, though perhaps less surprised than I that the signs turned out to be misleading, at best. I still made sure they complimented the chef though ! (more)

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Peru Trip #9 - Saqsaywaman, Cuzco

Well, the Incas were truly extraordinary masons. For all that this was - in European chronology - a medieval culture, in the 15th and 16th centuries CE, it was a megalithic culture. Not the megalithic culture of thousands of years BCE, on the Atlantic fringe of Europe and the Mediterranean, but a megalithic culture that had mastered building with stone in an extraordinary way. There are mortice and tendon joints, and metallic rings sunk into carved grooves between stones, inside these huge walls, and carefully graded horizontals that incorporate subtle ratchets at strategic points. The basic shape is trapezoidal: walls and doorways and niches that stand with legs apart. All this makes Inca buildings effectively earthquake proof - both supremely stable and protected from horizontal movement.

(more)

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Peru Trip #8 - The Inka Express from Puno to Cuzco, stopping at Pukara, La Raya, and Raqchi

The Inka Express is an extremely long bus ride - usually a 6hr drive - which takes over 9hrs, due to all the stops along the way. But time goes quickly, and it doesn't seem to drag, as a journey, at all. Leaving Puno, barely having slept, with an altitude headache only partly dulled by 10minutes attached to the oxygen bottle before getting up, jacked up on matte de coca (coca-leaf tea) I half expected the journey to be awful. But I managed to dose during the first part of the journey, awaking to be delighted by the Pukara museum, sporting a whole collection of statuary from the 'mother culture' of southern Peru, who lived here around 400BCE. The catfish and the frog turned out to be particularly important animals for these people, but the puma and the snake made early appearances - they both figure heavily in later cultures - and the quality of the carving is really quite special. (more)

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Peru Trip #7 - Uros Isles and Chucuito, Lake Titicaca

Two fascinating trips today: to the floating Uros islands, and to the Aymara/Inca fertility temple at Chucuito. The Uros islanders, although their own language is lost now, and they have absorbed some of the physical characteristics of the Aymara as well as their language, are nonetheless still distinguishable by their short, squat bodies, their barrel chests with powerful hearts and lungs, and their 'black blood' - in truth just a little darker, but proven to have a higher haemoglobin content than sea-level dwelling people like me - and probably you. These people have been here a very long time, and have completely adapted to this environment. The Pukara people (more on them tomorrow) were the first recognisable 'culture' or 'civilisation' here, between 200 and 600CE, and they were gradually displaced by the Tihuanaco, who were then forcibly conquered by the Aymara, who were in their turn conquered by the Inca, and lastly, in the 1530s, by the Spanish. The Uros Islanders, therefore, have been there a long time. (more)

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Peru Trip #6 - Arrival at Lake Titicaca

Both an eventful and uneventful few days. After a morning reading Mercia Eliade's classic text, The Sacred and the Profane, soaking up the sunshine at Nazca, I took the long bus journey back to Lima - the bus arrived late and made a number of unscheduled stops (including for the driver to buy some oranges from a roadside vendor) arriving in Lima 80minutes late. My restaurant of choice was fully booked by then, and arriving by taxi at the alternative I found it too was fully booked, despite the Hotel receptionist shrugging that I would not need to book there. They took pity on me though and put me on a bar stool at the bar, where I enjoyed a fabulous meal, generosity from the talkative barman, and a thoroughly good Saturday night out. I can thoroughly recommend the Brujas de Cachiche to any visitor to Lima.


Sunday was then all about flying up to the mountains - an airbus from Lima airport at lunchtime stopping over briefly at Cusco, without disembarking, and then heading on up to Juliaca, the small city on the plain overlooking Lake Titicaca. From the moment I got off the plane I could tell we were very high up, and that the air was thin! Walking suddenly became a struggle, and the effort of any exertion seriously taxing on one's reserves of strength. This immediate fatigue receeded in the car, replaced by consciousness of having to breathe really quickly - a shortness of breath one would normally associate with the moments after major exertion, but experienced whilst sitting in the back seat of the guide's car. On the way to my hotel in Puno, we stopped to visit the Silustani Tombs.

This proved to be a fascinating visit, despite the fact that I was only capable of pigeon-toe progress with frequent rest-stops, and the fatigue was gradually turning into a dizziness of absolute exhaustion. But the history of this area, as my guide described it, was fascinating. The Pucara people were the first known civilisation here, and I will see more of them on the Inka Express bus journey to Puno later this week. After this culture had faded, the Tihuanaco came, and populated the area. At the height of their civilisation here, the Aymara, a warlike people from the south and east, perhaps Argentina, conquered the area, forcing the small remnant of surviving Tihuanaco to embark on a long wandering in the mountains, until they settled north in the sacred valley, and became the Inca. The Inca, of course, later reconquered this area, along with the whole of the rest of the Andes, in the largest empire of all pre-Columbian South America - of which more, of course, in Cusco and Macchu Picchu. Up here in Juliaca and Puno, despite the arrival of the Spanish conquerors, who looted the ancient sites and brought Catholicism to the area, much of the original pre-Christian religious practice and the two 'nations', Aymara and Quechua (Inca/Tihuanaco people) survive to this day. My guide is Quechua, the driver Aymara. (more)

23 08 10 - 22:47 - da5idk - default| No comments No trackbacks - § ¶