South to Salta

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Fun with Google Maps! They have a new API that allows you to embed them in all their interactive glory on your site. Go ahead click, grab and shake the continent around, you know you want to. OK enough geek speak though.

I left Bolivia on Thursday evening. As the rickety Aerosur 737 warbled with endless turbulence we passed by a lightning storm that was a little to close for my tastes. It's a bit unnerving to be up in the Troposphere in a metal tube during an electrical storm. The tarmac in Salta was met with an overwhelming sense of relief. Deep breaths.

The night before my Bolivian friends Julien and Maya whom I met in BA back in July took us out to show us what Santa Cruz had to offer in terms of entertainment. It was a fun albeit late night, a proper send-off at any rate. Gracious hosts indeed.

Anyway it is good to be back in Europe ... I mean Argentina, ha ha. Seriously though after nearly five weeks of almost exclusive Nescafe instant coffee it is nice to be back in a place with cafe culture, cafe con leches and great Italian food.

It is Oliver's birthday tomorrow and I am meeting up with he and Gladys in Buenos Aires. I heard there might even be cake.

Fly low and beat the radar
Clifford

Monkey Business In Shangri-La

Semiapata is time in a sieve. A week goes by in the span of a full-bodied yawn. At The Posado Inn there is always strong coffee, fresh fruit, granola, homemade honey and yogurt for breakfast. The woman at the edge of town who rents the horses has a zoo in her back yard. A handful of Capuchins, two howlers and a spider monkey might quickly become afternoon friends. At some point you realize the sound of the wind is something you can take for granted. Then it's time to go.

As you can see Cheetah the howler monkey really took a shine to Oliver as did many of Lisa Marie's animals. I think it has to do with the hat. Guess who's who in the pic above.

PICTURES HERE

Everyone Knows This is Nowhere

Seeking out the rarefied air of eastern Bolivia brought me to Santa Cruz. While the country may posses two seats of government the cultural capitol is undoubtedly the city of Santa Cruz. It is a classic east/west dichotomy. Geographically it´s close to sea level, the Cruceños seem closer to Brazilian than they do their Andean compatriots of the Altiplano. Santa Cruz espouses capitalism and if the graffiti is any indication they appear to be very concerned with the socialist policies of the government in the east. There is a sense of Gastronomy as the food is good here. The dialect is also different, the Cruceños Spanish called "Camba" which to my ears sounds like some form of exotic mumbling. The weather is semi-tropical and the city of Santa Cruz itself feels equal parts modern and banana republic.

Retreat from the tropical heat of the city can be found 2 hours south west of Santa Cruz in the Pueblo of Samaipata. It is a dusty, sleepy place blessed with beautiful weather all year round. The mercury rarely leaves the 70 degree zone. There are few cars on narrow cobble stone streets and the only thing above two stories is the steeple of the church in the plaza. The landscape is alive with colors of ferns flowers, fronds, birds, blossoms and bougainvillea. There is never not a gentle breeze blowing. Samaipata inspires if not demands laziness. Two curious phenomenon here are the round prickly cactus that adorn the phone lines like some dessert Christmas ornament. The other is the what is known as "El Chacqueo" which occurs when the prevailing winds come from the south. This phenomenon occurs during September when the farmers on the Amazon Basin begin the burn part of their slash and burn agricultural technique. With millions of fires burning at the same time the smoke forms a canopy all over Santa Cruz that looks like haze or a marine layer.

So far the one thing I have to add to my almost non-existent list of accomplishments in Samaipata is a long drive to the village of Villegrande. Villegrande is not far La Higuera where Che Guevara made his final stand. Here he was captured by the CIA trained Bolivian task force, taken to a small yellow school house and executed. His body was then taken to a laundry room at the Knights of Malta Hospital and put on display for the world press. Not far from the hospital next to a now defunct air strip is a small memorial paid for by the Cuban government. It is in this spot that the bodies of Che and his comrades were placed in an unmarked grave under the airport's tarmac. The bodies would remain here until a Bolivian General who participated in the original military operation revealed the location of the grave in 1995. A year later Ernetso Guevara´s remains would be moved to Cuba.


Bolivia is a strange, beautiful and fascinating place.

High in La Paz

The city of La Paz is a large hole in the ground. The city is hemmed in by the snow-capped peaks of the Cordillera Real above. At the top of the bowl is the Antiplano shanntytown of El Alto which rings the city. This is the area where the majority of the population lives. The sides that slope down from here are full of commerce - market stalls, cafes, tourist ghettos and restaurants. At the bottom of the slope is a very narrow band of four commerical streets before the terrain ascends back upwards towards El Alto. La Paz has the typical class structure/real estate paradigm inverted. Whereas normaly the more affluent live higher up the hill, here the wealthy live at the bottom and the poor live at the top. Huffing and puffing your way around you slowly realize that you are almost always walking some form of an incline. The vertical nature of the city combined with its altitude which is somewhere between 10K and 12K feet above sea level, ensures that you are almost always out of breath.

The city is choked with traffic. The majority of traffic are the local shared taxis which are mini-vans where the side door never closes from where a tout yells out to nobody in particular what stops they are making. It appears that anybody with access to a mini-van can go into business as such. Competition between the taxis is fierce. If you are not being beeped at chances are you are being yelled it. Independant commerce is almost exclusively conducted by the Andean women who come down from El Alto. Their prescense is everywhere, the tilted bowler hat(the direction of which denotes a marital status), the brightly colored woven shall, full length embroidered skirt and acute scoliosis. Andean women carry everything on their backs. it seems fairly uncommon to see them walking in a perpendicular fashion. It all makes for an interesting contrast against the well oiled ubanity of their surroundings. For sure there are many other contrasts to be found. The military prescense in La Paz is a heavy one. Officers draped in olive drap stand beside the ATM machines and goverment buildings brandishing sub machine guns. However, the traffic police on the main thorough fares dress in Zebra costumes and hold a rope taut between them. Continuing with the uniformed observations, there are almost as many shoe shine boys as there are people wearing shoes. The shoe shiners dress in a blue outfit similar not unlike a gas station attendant and wear baclavas or ski masks to hide their faces. The position of shoe shiner is considered so lowly that nobody wants have their face visible for fear of recognition and embarrasment.

There is much modern infrastructure here especially in the commercial district in the center. Modern is of course a relative term. Although they were much more modern than the Colonial structures it appeared as if the last bit of construction took place in the early 1970s. The socialist goverment has provided well for basic health care however most people still prefer natural treatments. Most of these natural remedies are found at the "Mercado de Hechiceria" or Witches Market. There is an herb, root or powder for almost every ailment from sports injuries to trouble in the bedroom. Some of the more exotic items are dried llama fetuses, monkey skulls, dried frogs and soap stone offerings to Pachamama. Idolatry was everywhere.

Although La Paz is the Administrative capitol of Bolivia, the constitutional capitol is the city of Sucre. These two cities are not in immediate proximity to eachother. One has to wonder how anything gets done here, perhaps it doesn´t. Fascinating place.

The name is Bolivar ... Simon Bolivar

We left Cuzco behind on Friday morning with a quick flight to Juliaca in the deep south of Peru. I don't much about Juliaca other than it has an airport. Our destination was Puno some 45 minutes further south on the shore of Lake Titicaca. Lake Titicaca besides possessing an overly potty mouth name is the highest navigable lake in the world.

Puno was to be little more than a wait station before crossing the border to Bolivia the following morning. However Puno proved to be quite festive. We spent a large portion of the night in front of the Cathedral in the Plaza de Armas. It was the festival of the Virgin of Copacabana. There was a giant bonfire, puneno music, some traditional circle dance and lots of corn liquor being passed around. These religious folks know how to have a good time.

Saturday after a 3 hour bus ride we reached the Bolivian border. Most border towns are decidedly manic but this was one was closer to a a free form circus. There was nothing you couldn't buy - desk and chair set, blankets, car parts, pork, bootleg movies, it was all here in make shift stalls on both sides of a single lane dusty road. The road itself was an amalgam of tourist coaches, beeping mini-vans with sheep strapped to the roof, stray dogs, dirty faced kids and Andean women prodding pigs and donkeys. How anyone manages to get anything done in this environment is a source of mystery.

After a lunch of quality lake trout we climbed onto a boat and sped out towards Isla Del Sol. If it weren't for the lack of tidal activity you could easily mistake Lake Titicaca for the open sea. It appears almost boundless. The prevailing view is that it was once part of the Pacific and became hemmed in after the first ice age. Isla Del Sol and it sibling Isla del Luna are about an hour and a half boat ride from the shore. Isla Del Sol holds a significant place in Incan history. This is were the Sun as well as Manco Capac, the first Inca were born. It is also home to the Aymara, a pre Incan people of the Andean altiplano. After a half hour hike up from the playa, we checked into the first hostal we came to. With lungs and legs burning it was a difficult proposition not to accept the first lodging you happened upon. The residents of the island are almost exclusively of Aymara blood. There are no cars, no bank, no internet and almost no change for a 100 dollar Bolivian note. There is not much to do on the island except to relax, hike and take it all in. Late afternoon found us hiking up to the cupola, the highest point on the island to watch the sunset. From the top you have an uncompromised panaroma of Lake Titicaca with its' eerily still water. Having the place to ourselves it was an empty theater and every rock was free for sitting. Shortly after selecting my primitive barcolounger the show began. To the west the sun back lighted the clouds, the cloud cover in the center was straight out of a Raphael painting and the east was reminiscent of Sedona Arizona. For the next hour my eyes triangulated between these three until the sky had nothing left to give. Genius, Zen, God-like, insert your favorite superlative here and you get the idea.

The weather in the altiplano turns on a dime. It is not uncommon to alternate between shorts, t-shirt and hat and gloves in the same hour. On the way back I lost sight of Oliver ahead and became lost in inky blackness and a hail storm ensued. It was not long after that I discovered the iPod also works as a flash light and that perhaps it made good sense to never leave home again without a head lamp.

I think everyone except for those with Amayra blood froze that night. If the cold didn't interrupt your sleep the rolling thunder and lighting storm saw to it. Waking up to an early morning hail storm we headed towards the playa for the first boat off the island.

Next up La Paz.

Head in the Clouds, Machu Picchu

Oliver and I left Lima on Monday afternoon and headed south to Cuzco, the cradle of the Inca empire. The flight was just inside of an hour. By my accounting seven tracks of The Who on the iPod and a quick pass of the snack cart. The alternative to a flying to Cuzco was a 12 hour bus ride. The option of flying also afforded a bird's eye view of the Andean Cordillera below.

Cuzco is a charming little city. The layout is the traditional Spanish form arranged in a checker board pattern with the Cathedral in the center. This is actually superimposed over the shape of the sacred Puma which was the original Incan layout. The first thing you notice about Cuzco is what it lacks, namely oxygen. At a little over 11,000 feet above sea level the air is quite thin. We checked into the lovely Royal Inka Hotel overlooking the Plaza Regocijo and headed out for a late afternoon reconnaissance mission. It wasn't long before it became evident that we were suffering from "Sorojche" or altitude sickness. This was manifest by incessant yawning, mild headache, burning lungs, rubbery legs and a bit of short term memory loss. To put it mildly "two fries short of a Happy Meal." After navigating what seemed to be an endless series of narrow cobble stone streets and steps we reached San Blass a small neighborhood dug in to the hills. We stopped at a promontory with an impressive view of the city. In the company of a pack mule a Eucalyptus tree and a stray dog we relished a hard won cerveza before heading back and turning in. If it was to take 24 hours to acclimate to the altitude it was best to have the majority of it occur while sleeping.

Tuesday morning after breakfast we hired a taxi for the day with the objective being to take in some ruins in the mountains above Cuzco. The first stop was Sacsayhuaman. This is th head of the puma in the outline of the city. The ruins consit of limestone blocks that form zig-zagging walls that form the base of concentric terraces. This was the site of a protracted battle between Manco Inca and Pizzaro. We all know the outcome of that though. The engineering aspect of Sacsayhuaman is curious. How tens of thousands of hundred ton stones were harvested from the mountains and polished to fit together like giant puzzle pieces is something to marvel. One is overcome with a certain sense of deja vu when walking this site and for good reason. These same stones form many of the foundations of the churches in the city below. The Spanish being ever so resourceful simply appropriated the stones of another's empire for use in their own. Oh you Conquistadores!

After deferring to several forms of livestock on the road we stopped at Tombo Machay. A site of ceremonial baths and spring water fountains, remnants of the Inca Cult of Water. The ruins were scant but it was beautiful farmland. After a bit of hiking I joined up with a herd of sheep who were getting on with their never ending lunch. There were maybe 20 adults and 4 baby ewes. The babies not yet capable of producing the adult "BAH" sounds issued more of a flimsy "YAY" sound. Following the herd I alternated between vocalizing various "Yays" and "Bahs" in a never ending game of call and recall. I found this endlessly entertaining but then I am easily amused. On the trek back I met a leather skinned man with gold capped teeth. We exchanged pleasantries and he informed me that it was his farm and asked if I had seen his bulls. A possession he was clearly proud of. I replied that I was on speaking terms with his sheep but hadn't yet had the opportunity to meet the bulls. I declined an offer to see the rest of his land solely on account of time constraints. He pointed to the pair of sunglasses tucked into the neck of my shirt and laughed.

Our next stop was the Valle Sacrado or Sacred Valley citadel of Inca Pisac perched high above the Urubabamba River. The site is a prime example of Incan agricultural terracing that traces its way up the mountain. The ruins consist of a military garrison, several ceremonial areas, foot paths, carved door ways and houses. The back side of Inca Pisac is gorge. The hills on the far side of the gorge are pock marked with holes that were tombs long since pilfered by the "huanacas" or grave robbers. After a leisurely descent we climbed back in the cab and due to a day of hiking, rapidly changing weather patterns and the aforementioned altitude adjustment we beat a hasty retreat back to the hotel.

The center piece of a trip to Cuzco is of course Machu Picchu. There are of course many ways to "do" Machu Picchu. There is the 4 hour train, the 4 day hike and the two day hike along the Inka Trail as well as some less publicised routes. Our plan consisted of hiring a car to take us to Ollyantatumbo the half way point between Cuzco and Machu Pichu. From here we would take the train 2 hours to Aquas Calientes, spend the night there and get the first bus to Machu Pichu at 5:30 the following morning. The plan fell together rather effortlessly and Wednesday afternoon we found ourselves in Ollaytaytambo with a whole afternoon to explore before our train left. We fancied ourselves smart for our unorthodox and efficient plan. We appeared to be but a handful of tourists in the town with a time dividend on our hands. We crossed the river and hiked for a couple of hours on the Inka trail, meandering off the path through terraced farm land full of donkeys, cows, sheep and pigs. We passed only one other person, a boy carrying a thin tree trunk over his shoulders who was able to tell us where the next river crossing lay. The afternoon was pure magic. It was equal parts the first day of spring and the first day of fall. An afternoon of Peruvian Tom Sawer/Huck Finn. About the time the sun began to set we sat down for dinner only to discover that from every shadowy corner and crevices were hordes of back packers. These were other people who fancied themselves as being smart about their route to Machu Pichu. As 8:00 approached it was like the lemmings of the sea heading towards the train station.

Aguas Calientes is little more than a tourist ghetto. A no stop light town full of 6 dollar a night hotels serving Nescafe instant coffee. It was a stop gap between the bed and the bus. The next morning, heads still thick with sleep we found ourselves on the 5:30AM bus chugging up the mountain bus along a series dirt road switchbacks. A few minutes walk from the entrance we found ourselves at the Care Taker of the Funerary's Hut. This is the classic view of Machu Pichu seen on the postcards. In fact it's like stepping into a post card. There was little or no talking to be heard except maybe for own bombastic internal dialogue. Gradually the Sun poked holes into the cloud line and early morning gave way to day light minute by minute and frame by frame. There was little to do except stare. The mist cleared but not the feeling of being mystified. I sought out a remote terrace, using back pack as an ersatz pillow I settled down for an early morning nap.

Shaking off the sleep I headed up a trail towards the Inkan Drawbridge. From my understanding there were two ways into Machu Picchu the draw bridge being one. After a half hour hike I came to a lime stone wall a few thousand meters in length. Chiseled into the face of the limestone wall was a catwalk with rough-hewn planks of wood in the middle. Below the catwalk was nothing more than a deathly descent. Primitive security detail at its' finest.

After working my way back I ate all of the food I had taken with me and set out toward Intipunku - The Gate of the Sun. This from what I know was the primary entrance. This was to prove an hour and a half hike winding every so slowly around the "old peak." From the gate you can look down on the lost city and try to contemplate what it must have looked entering the site 500 or so years ago.

From there it was a matter of touring around the ruins themselves - the Temple of the Sun, The Sepent Window, The Temple of the Three Windows, The House of the High Priest, The Sacricity et al. The whole day was unobtrusively exhausting. After another nap it was back to the bus and back to civilization.

I burned through almost a Gig of memory in my camera here but I pared it down to the following for this post. Click HERE

Shapes and Lines of Grand Designs

I was fairly immobile for the first part of the week. As luck would have it I caught a touch of “la gripe” in the jungle. This was compounded by the fact that insect bites had left me looking like someone stricken with a case of chicken pocks. On this note let’s just say that applying DEET in the Amazon was ineffectual at best. In fact the running joke was that “it DEET nothing at all.” So here I was back in the city sneezing, hacking, coughing and itching. It was nothing a few days of bad TV and movies couldn’t cure though. This is not to say that I did nothing but rather I limited myself to armchair anthropology to in and around Lima. I decided to do a tour of the cevicherias and find out who had the best ceviche here in Lima. This proved a harder task than I had imagined namely because all of the seafood here is equally fresh. Using that as a first line barometer proved pointless. I ended up looking for who had the best hot and sour balance. Ceviche here is as simple as it gets – lemon, red pepper, red onion and sole scallops. The winner was a place in Miraflores called Pescado Capitales. The runner up was a place called Tanta. Ceviche is only served from noon until 5:00PM so the sampling window was reduced to lunchtime only. The other problem that I ran into was that after the first ceviche I would invariably move on to either the wood grilled baby octopus and spicy river shrimp. Eventually I would lose focus and the idea of disciplined taste testing would break down completely. I stand or rather sit by decision though. Hands down Pescado Capitalies.

I managed to get out to the ruins of Pachacamac, which is the closest archeological site to the city. Pachacamac dates back to 200 AD, well over a thousand years before the Incan Empire. It was basically a religious center devoted to venerating the “creator-god” known as Pacha Kamaq. It was comprised of temples and pyramids. The only residents were the priests and the young virgins. I know what you are thinking – ‘this is a bad combination’ but this was not Catholicism and anyway the virgins happened to be girls. The House of the Chosen where the sacrificial virgins lived has been well excavated and part reconstructed. Interestingly enough the girls who were chosen from the most prominent families remained in the house until age 16 at which point they would decide to commit to the consecration or else wonder back home somewhat disgraced. The Templo Del Sol was an impressive part of the site offering sweeping views of the Pacific from the top. Unfortunately the entire site suffered major damage during the last earthquake and funding of the excavation has long since stopped.

Thursday I headed down the south coast to the city of Nazca. The drive down was a sobering view of the wake left behind by the 8.0 earthquake that struck three weeks ago. Villages with block after block of rock after rock. Everywhere were the remains of structures that were systematically dismantled during two plus minutes of seismic activity. Homes that looked as if they were buzz- sawed down the middle with billowing plastic now covering exposed sections of the home. There were the occasional civil service tents the government had handed out as interim shelter but these were far and few between. I had the suspicion that you hqe to be a perwon or inrluence to be the lucky recipient of one of these tents. It hurt to look out the window. Having experienced the Northridge quake of 1994 which was a 6.7 on the Richter Scale that lasted less than 15 seconds I simply couldn’t even entertain what an 8.0 which lasted over 2 minutes must be like. This quake was more than 30 times as powerful. Entertaining the thought of experiencing such magnitude and duration of force just blows the mind.

There were elements of the drive that stood in contrast to the destruction though. Around Ica where hundreds of oasises dotting the parched earth. It was also interesting that in this low land area the desert ended where the Pacific Ocean began.

After nearly 7 hours we arrived in Nazca. “The Lines” are what Nazca is known for. These are hundreds of geoglyphs that exist out in the middle of the desert. The original crop circles. They include everything from a monkey, an astronaut, a spider, a pair of hands and a condor. They are of an unknown origin with as many theories and plausible dates as there are lines. The theories range anything from a plea to the Sun God during a protracted period of drought to contact with the extraterrestrial, take your pick. The lines themselves were only discovered in the 1940s at the beginning of commercial flight over the area. The geoglyphs can only be seen from above. They are truly spectacular. The over-flights only take place between 8:00 and 10:00AM due to flying conditions. So at 9:00 we squeezed into single-engine 6 seat Cessna and climbed up to 3,000 feet for some of the best window gazing to be had on the continent. It was a 40-minute flight, which consisted of a level fly-over followed by a sharp tuck to the left and then right for equal viewing on both sides of the aircraft. It was an archeological roller coaster ride that made me appreciate skipping my breakfast. I was equally excited by the etchings in the dessert floor below as I was by the constant twisting and turning of the light aircraft. We all sat wearing headphones over which the pilot would make announcements such as “we are now in the whale”, “we are over the monkey” and “we are approaching the astronaut” all of which lent a surreal quality to the whole thing. Before I knew it and certainly before I had found the right settings on my camera we were back down on the ground. Such a good way to the start the day.

For more information and some pics you can look HERE

Oliver is flying in tonight from LA and we are off to Cuzco and then Bolivia on Monday. I will keep you posted.

Thank you to the person who posted the picture without a watermark that appears at the top of this post. Whomever you are, you take a mean picture. My consumer camera was rendered useless.

C.