Remar

Tomorrow being Friday, my time as a volunteer will soon be over, and my trip will be beginning its last phase.  These past two weeks, I have been spending my afternoons at a local orphanage for boys called Remar not far from my house.  The time spent at Remar has allowed me to get to know that children better than at the school, but as you can imagine, the whole atmosphere has a depressing cloud over it.  I wanted to wait awhile before writing anything about the place because it was pretty easy to form some very strong opinions early on and I needed to see if time would validate what I was afraid was true.

I had never been in an orphanage before my first day at Remar, and to some degree wondered if it would resemble a movie with a long hallways full of beds and patrolling nuns threatening kids with swinging rulers.  Instead, Remar turned out to be something much more threadbare.  The place is a two-story house much too small for the fifteen or so kids that live there.  The children sleep in two rooms, one with a single bunkbed and the other with four or five.  There are three very young girls that live in the orphanage with the boys, but once they get a little older, they will have to move to the girls’ orphanage.  I don’t know why they live at Remar to begin with.  The boys range in age from one in diapers (I don’t know what that translates into years.  3?  4?) to a seventeen year old.  Not every child is an orphan in the traditional sense.  Some have living parents, but have either been abandoned, or their parents cannot afford to raise them at home.  The mother and brother of one boy, Carlos, came to visit him yesterday, actually.  Given that all of the stories are likely heartbreaking and hard for the boys to tell, I don’t dare ask them about their families.  It seems best just to accept that they are there because of some very unfortunate things, which they were helplessly affected by.

One of the sadder storylines relates to three mentally disabled boys at Remar that obviously do not receive the kind of help they need.  The least severe case is Christian, an eight year old who suffers from some sort of learning disability.  One of the previous volunteers thought, that like the other two boys, Christian has some level of autism, but I don’t know enough about autism to really have a clue.  For the most part, he is completely fine interacting socially with the other children.  His problem manifest itself most notably, though, when we play word games in Spanish or English and he has difficulty visually matching two cards with the same word on them.  The next boy is César, who I believe is also eight.  César has as much energy as any of them, and my first day was spent as his personal human jungle gym.  He can be a handful on his bad days though, as he requires constant one-on-one attention.  He uses his time on the dirty playground next door to scavange for trash, which he usually then puts in his mouth.  The first day, he came up to me with a straw from Lord knows where and began pouring some white powder out of it into his mouth, and earlier this week I spent the time trying to get him to spit things out that he found in a trash bag that he had ripped open.  César has the same problems as Christian learning, but also seems to need help socially.  He is always in the process of hitting or being hit by one of the other kids.  The most disheartening case, however, is David.  David is seventeen, and very clearly needs a lot of help that he’s not getting.  Most of the time that I am there he sits on the couch silently with his head turned to the wall.  It takes a lot of effort to get him to interact somewhat, but it soon becomes clear that he loves it when you can get him to.

The thing about the orphanage that is most frustrating is the woman who lives and cares for the kids, Roxanna.  I can imagine that living in a house full of fifteen boys would drive someone to wits’ end in moments, but at the same time, it’s unfair to the kids to let that be an excuse for how she acts.  Roxanna is probably in her mid to late twenties and lives in the house with her kids and husband, although the husband is never around when I’m there.  She seems to spend most of her time screaming at the kids throughout the house.  The purpose of volunteers coming to Remar is to give the boys someone to play with and interact with for a few hours each day to break up the monotony of their day.  Yet, many days Roxanna won’t allow them out of the house to do anything, and my second day I actually spent sitting on a couch watching cartoons for over two hours because she had decided that she didn’t want to unlock the front door so they could go to the playground next to the house.  Luckily, I since have brought the other half of the games and books that my mom and sister donated to the house, and have been able to get some games going with the kids on the days Roxanna refuses to let them out.  The most infuriating moment happened this past Monday.  A bunch of the boys were begging me to ask Roxanna to let them go to the playground.  When I asked her, she snapped that it was too cold outside.  It was the exact same temperature that it is every afternoon in Cusco.  Instead she said that they should watch TV or do chores.  Well the chores take place outside in the backyard, and the TV room is in a partially enclosed room in the back yard, as well.  She followed all of the this up by grabbing the Bingo game that I brought and shoving in my chest.  These boys have a pretty rough life, and her terrible attitude doesn’t do much to make it any easier for them.

Last week, there were two other volunteers from Utah at the orphanage in the afternoons with me.  They had been there a few weeks, and it helped to have someone show me the ropes.  They left for home last weekend, though, and this week I am on my own.  Despite Roxanna and the pitiful state that the house is in, working at the orphanage has been a positive experience.  The boys are full of energy, and it’s obvious that they enjoy having someone there to play with and give them attention.  A couple of the boys actually were students of mine at the school a couple of weeks ago, so I’ve tried to keep quizzing them on their English.

With my volunteer work finishing up this week, the less altruistic part of my trip starts this weekend.  I will have ten more days in Peru before flying home, and will be kicking that off at 4:00 A.M. on Saturday morning.  I will be hiking and camping for four days and three nights on the Inca Trail, waking up Tuesday morning to watch the sunrise over Machu Picchu.  Then I come back to Cusco for a couple days, before heading to Lima for three days.  After that, I’ll just be a couple of flights away from a long-awaited reunion with BBQ, fajitas, and bone-thawing Texas heat.

Scott

Weekend at the Lake

This past weekend was my first long distance trip away from Cusco.  About seven to ten hours, depending on what bus you take, southeast from Cusco is the highest commercially navigable lake in the world, Lake Titicaca (pronounced exactly how you think).  The lake sits at 12,500 feet above sea level on the border of Peru and Bolivia, is the largest lake in South America, and has a series of islands that are well worth visiting.  Early Friday morning, I took the all day Inka Express tourist bus from Cusco to Puno, the main city on the Peruvian side of the lake.

The bus ride was about as comfortable as a ten hour bus ride could be, and being that it was the tourist bus, it stopped at four different sites and one buffet lunch.  The sites included the church at Andahuaylillas, considered the Sistine Chapel of the Andes, the Incan temple and town of Raqchi, a roadside stop at La Raya at over 14,200 feet, and the small town of Pukara.  The highlight was clearly the all you can eat buffet, however, which offered my first taste of Alpaca meat.  One of the more interesting parts of the trip was seeing the landscape change as we passed over of the tree line at 12,500 feet.  For the second half of the trip, we barely saw a single tree.

About forty five minutes before we arrived in Puno, we passed through the largest city in the lake region, Juliaca.  This city has over 380,000 inhabitants, and because of a tax loophole that allows people to pay lower property taxes so long as their house is still being built, houses stay under perpetual construction lasting generations.  The town was frankly the most miserable place I have ever seen.  It looked like an atomic bomb had gone off there fifteen years ago and the inhabitants had only recently climbed out of their fallout shelters.

That night, I stayed at a hostel in Puno because my trip out to the lake did not begin until Saturday morning, and being the way my trips have generally gone, I had a fairly interesting encounter that evening.  The hostel had three guests staying in it, myself included, but I didn’t see the other two until check out the next morning.  Faced with the option of sitting in a hostel by myself for the evening, I decided to go grab a beer at a local bar and kill a couple hours before bedtime.  Down on the main street in Puno, I found a place, went in and ordered a drink.  After sitting at a table alone for about five or ten minutes, a lady at a nearby table waived me over to join here and her daughter.  They said they were from Pittsburgh, and the two of them were celebrating the daughter´s high school graduation.  Coincidentally, they had recently finished the Inca Trail trek to Machu Picchu, which I am starting next Saturday, and we talked for a bit about what to expect.  The conversation started to take a turn towards weird when they described their return from Machu Picchu, however, and were very forthcoming about some of their mother-daughter activities.  Apparently, at some point they decided to spend a few days in Ollantaytambo, which included an all night ¨medicinal¨ spiritual trek to various Incan temple ruins with a local shaman named Wow.  Shortly after admitting this, the mother pointed to her tie-dye t-shirt and told me that in addition to being some kind of computer programmer by day, she was a ¨transformational tie-dye artist¨ by night.   I thought that was some kind of odd joke until she explained that she designs tie-dye shirts based on the customer for the purpose of spiritually transforming them.  She learned this while apprenticing for some Pittsburgh lady from a small Peruvian town.  There are only so many ways to respond to off the wall comments like this, and four weeks into this trip, I´ve become rather adept at doing so.  I soon finished by beer and headed back to the hostel, chalking this up to just another friendly encounter in South America.

The next morning, I was picked up by my tour group and taken down to the docks with a few other families.  We were split up and put of various boats that were chaotically collecting tourists.  I didn’t see my tour company again for the rest of the trip.  I guess they sold me off to another group.  The boat that I ended up on became my de facto tour group for the rest of the trip and included a pretty diverse group of people: two families from Peru, a family from France, a couple from Germany, a couple from Brazil, two British dental students, and a girl from The Netherlands.  Our first stop was the Uros Islands an hour from the shore.

The floating Uros Islands are the most famous attraction on the lake, and originally were created when the inhabitants around the lake were trying to avoid the Incan conquest in the 13^th century.  They used naturally formed floating bricks of soil and reeds to create islands that float on the lake.  The islands are about six feet thick, and each only last thirty years.  After thirty years, the island degrades, and a new one has to be built.  There are sixty islands in the group presently, and each houses five to seven families.  In total, the chain has about 2,000 inhabitants.  Each tour group is sent to a separate island, and is given a routine demonstration of how the islands are made and what life is like on the islands.  Almost everything on the island is constructed out of reeds, the most notably exception being the solar panels that power the TVs in these anachronistic communities.

After leaving the Uros, we set off for the island of Amantaní, where we were to spend the afternoon and night.  Amantaní was a three hour boat ride, or two hour swim, from the Uros, and once we arrived, it was clear that tourism was a very new visitor to the island.  As part of the community’s effort to control the effects of tourism, instead of constructing hotels on the island, tourists are assigned hosts families to stay with for the night.  I was put in a house with the two Brits from the group.  Now the island has very little electricity, and the candle and matchbox waiting in my room was a very clear reminder that my house was no different.

Each host family is responsible for feeding their guest lunch, dinner, and breakfast while there, and we had lunch as soon as we arrived.  Peru is the land of the potato.  Peruvians claim to have invented the potato, and their cuisine certainly supports the claim.  Over 3,000 types of potato are grown in Peru, and rarely do you have a meal without at least one type of potato in it.  White rice is also a favorite addition to Peruvian cuisine.  Thus far, seeing something green on my plate begs me to wonder what the special occasion is.  The other main staple of Peruvian cuisine is some sort of broth soup served before the main course.  The weirdest part of dining in Peru, however, has to be how no one drinks anything while they eat.  If you look around a restaurant, you will barely see a single local with water or tea in front of their meal.  In fact, if you order a drink in a restaurant, it is best to let the waiter know that you like water as a compliment to your meal, and not as a dessert.  Eating a plate full of rice and potatoes without something to wash it down is a minor challenge.

The food on Amantaní shared the rest of Peru’s love affair with rice and potatoes but to the nth degree.  My dinner, for instance, was potato soup followed by a plate of white rice and potatoes.  The third, fourth, and fifth vegetarian meals of my life all occurred while I was with the host family.  Meat is considered a luxury only served for special occasions on the level of family weddings.  That was fairly understandable given the altitude, and lack of livestock on Amantaní.  What was less intuitive, though, was how fish is served no more than twice a week on a meat-less island in the middle of one of the largest lakes in the world.  As lunch on Taquile the next day would prove, other islands seemed to have no problem taking advantage of the abundance of fish in the lake, but the people of Amantaní preferred the backbreaking work of potato farming.

While on the island, we hiked to the temple ruins on top of one of the hills on the island to watch the sunset, putting us huffing and puffing 13,700 feet above sea level.  From that vantage point, the lake was beautiful, and it was possible to take in the sheer size of it.  Lake Titicaca has the aesthetic advantage of being massive enough to be dramatic and majestic, but also small enough that the high peaks across the lake in Bolivia provide a faint backdrop to the seemingly endless water.

For our tourists’ hearts delight, the entertainment that night was a staged dance at the local community center.  All of the women were put into the elaborate dress of the local ladies, while all of us men were given a less intricate poncho to wear.  The dances basically consisted of people casually walking in a large circle while swinging joined hands back and forth.  It was fun, but I doubt it will impress if I bust out the move on a dance floor back in Dallas.

The next morning, we left for the island of Taquile about an hour from Amantaní.  Taquile has an incredibly strong and unique traditional heritage, which can still be seen in the customs of the locals.  Like the other islands of the lake, the people on Taquile are primarily farmers, and the island is very rural.  Also like Amantaní, the residents responded to the peaking interests of tourists by heavily regulating and controlling the tourist experience on the island.  This has left the island´s tradition and way of life very much still intact.  The people of Taquile are renowned for their weaving and knitting, and as you walk around the island, you see many of the men standing around knitting.  Each man knits a Santa-shaped hat that signifies their corresponding Facebook relationship status.  An all red hat means the man is married.  A red and white one flopped over to the side signifies single and on the prowl for a wife.  A red and white one flopped to the back means single and not quite ready to mingle.  Additionally, men weave belts that double as back supports for working in the fields that are full of traditional symbols often signifying the local monthly calendar.

After eating lunch on the Taquile, we boarded the boat once more and headed back to Puno.  The trip took about three hours, and like our trip to the islands the day before, was interspersed with moments of our engine dying and the captain having to roll up his sleeves and play amateur mechanic.  I had about six hours to kill in Puno—about five more than anyone ever needs in Puno—and then hopped aboard an overnight bus back to Cusco.  After getting back and sleeping in all morning, I can say that the trip was well worth it.  Since first planning my Peru tripped, I had hoped that I would be able to fit in a weekend on the lake at some point, and I don’t think the whole experience could have gone much better.

Scott

School's Out for the Summer

Over the past few weeks, I haven’t posted very much about the volunteer projects.  Since that is the whole purpose of the trip, I think it’s time to write an update.  Last Friday was my last day teaching English at the school, and these last two weeks, I am working at an orphanage for boys called Remar.

After just three short weeks teaching, I have to give a tip of my hat to every teacher.  Yes, it is very rewarding, but teaching is also mentally and physically exhausting, and at times can be disconcerting.  During the three weeks at the school, we taught three to four classes a day with between thirty and forty student in each, four days a week.  In total, that meant we taught the few hundred students that made up the entire school.  Fortunately, we were able to get to know a few of the students somewhat well during the daily recess, but for the most part, classrooms were full of nameless faces.

The time at the school was full of a lot of memories, most positive and a few frustrating.  We did finally get to teach them the formal rules to baseball, which was a lot of fun for the children and resulted in a resounding win for the boys’ team and their brilliant coach.  (In all fairness, I gave the girls’ pitchers a strike zone large enough to drive a small car through.)  Unfortunately, I never had the chance to teach the formal rules to fútbol norteamericano, although we did spend a few recesses firing the pigskin.  We also ended up teaching everything from the months and days of the week to the youngest kids to directional prepositions to the oldest class.

I can gladly say that my teaching skills greatly improved from that disaster of the first class, but it is hard to tell exactly how much help our being there did.  Learning is a two way process, and with the exception of handful of students in each class, many of the students seemed disinterested in learning English.  I kept in mind that although I took Spanish from kindergarten on, I didn’t really appreciate the importance of what I was learning until high school.  Even with that in mind, the low point came one day with one of our older classes, probably late middle school or early high school by U.S. standards.  Each student had been assigned one irregular verb to learn in the present and past tense—two words in total each.  They had had a week to learn them, and when we had the class go through it, almost no one could pronounce their words, and many did not even know what their verb meant.

The other frustrating experience was not so much related to learning English, but rather the quality of education that the students were receiving in general.  In our younger classes of twelve year olds, we tried to teaching how to ask for and tell the time in English.  For the exercise, we came up with a game that involved them reading a drawn analog clock, and writing a sentence with the time.  In a couple of the classes, it quickly became apparent that the problem was not just their understanding of English, but rather that the children had never learned how to read an analog clock at all.

In total, the experience at the school was a wonderful experience, even with the occasional frustration.  I hope that at least a few of the children will have found some inspiration or motivation in what we taught them.  Before I left for the trip, my mom and sister did an incredible job of donating a suitcase full of games, children’s books, and Spanish-English dictionaries for me to bring.  I left about half of the things with the school, and can happily say that the teacher, Manuel, seemed very grateful for the donation.  The other half of the stuff I have been distributing to the orphanage of the course of a few days.  I will have a more thorough post about the orphanage next week.  It’s probably best that I give myself a week there before I jump to conclusions about the situation.  In the meantime, this weekend will be my first long distance excursion from Cusco, as I will be spending my weekend on various islands in Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world.

Scott

Diatribe.

I have mentioned in previous posts that the traffic system in Cusco is chaotic at best.  According to those who have visited, Lima is even worse.  Over the course of the past three weeks, the erratic driving and lack of traffic law enforcement has floated between amusing and annoying, depending on how tightly I am smashed against a bus window at the time.  Since posting about a week ago that I have yet to see a single accident, I have seen two.

The first barely even counts as an accident.  One bus hit the bus on which I was riding.  The collision was so soft that I did not even know that anything had happened until the driver jumped out to confront the other bus driver.  The second happened today, and for a lot of reasons has left a very strong and angry impression on me.

Put simply, pedestrians do not have a right away here.  A glowing walk sign at a crosswalk during a red light means next to nothing to the cars that are turing through the lane.  What is worse is when people cross the main street in town, Avenida de la Cultura.  Regardless of whether a pedestrian is crossing in the crosswalk or running across the middle of the street, drivers show absolutely no restraint or caution for the people.  If they are feeling considerate, a driver will honk his horn as he blows past those crossing, sometimes only missing them by a step or two.

It is watching the drivers do this time and again, sometimes with police officers standing by idly, that makes today so exasperating.  Certainly, there is always something upsetting about seeing someone who has been hit by a car, but looking out the bus window to see a girl, not older than fourteen, dressed in her school uniform and on her way home for the day, lying motionless on the asphault in front of a stopped car is infuriating.  When I told my host family about seeing it, the reaction was centered around how the girl must not have been being careful, and undoubtedly, at some point she made a poor decision.  But that in no way excuses what assuredly was a driver that never let his foot of the gas.

The reaction of the people on the bus was one of shock and surprise too, as if this was not an entirely foreseeable and preventable accident.  It blows my mind that even if there is not an enforced legal right of way for pedestrians that drivers do not feel some level of moral and conscientious responsibility to show some negible amount of care in the way they are driving here.  It would take such a minuscule amount of awareness and respect for those driving and crossing the street to prevent some little girl from ending up helpless on the street during her walk home from school.

I do not know what became of the girl, but I pray that she was ok.  The was no blood on the pavement, so hopefully by some miracle, she survived and is alright.  As we were pulling off, a group of men was lifting her into the back of a car, presumably and hopefully to head to the hospital.  I understand their panic and desire to help, but I could not help but think how dangerous it was to be lifting someone who could easily have suffered a head or neck injury like that.  I guess when you act that selfishly behind the wheel, it does not cross your mind to call for an ambulance after you've hurt someone.

-Scott

Cultural Oddities

Moving in with a host family for a few weeks naturally comes with the expectation that there will be cultural differences to which one will have to adapt.  That´s part of the fun in visiting a new place.  After about two and a half weeks here, I think it is about time to highlight some of those differences.  This is not about deep-rooted cultural differences that may manifest themselves in the way a nation is run or the collective world view a population takes.  Rather this is about the even more important differences that become woven into daily life.

Public Transportation:
You know when you are on the highway and you see some guy on a motorcycle zip in between SUVs and 18-wheelers, and you think how that guy shouldn´t be allowed to have a license?  Now imagine that the SUVs and 18-wheelers are buses and vans, and the road is full of countless motorcycle drivers doing this.  But the motorcycles are actually hatchback Daewoo sedans from the past century.  Welcome to the fast and furious streets of Cusco.

Public transportation in Cusco takes two classic forms: taxis and buses (which are often vans).  Taxis in Cusco do not have meters, or set rates, or coordinated signage or colors.  Instead, if you want a cab, you stand on the street corner and wave at any four-door sedan that looks like it was built between 1985 and 1995.  If you see this: http://www.delange.org/CuscoToPuno/Dsc01131.jpg then you´ve found a winner.  It is a safe bet that at least 90% of that model of Daewoo hatchback is currently in use as a Peruvian cab.  Since there are no meters or set rates, the next step is to haggle a price for where you want to go.  If you get in without settling on a price, you are going to get hosed at the end.

The buses are the main transportation method, and can take the form of an actual bus or a converted van.  There are set bus lines, but it´s not you would expect.  A few of the bus lines have names that suggest where they head, but there are also quite a few whose names give less guidance: the ¨Zorro¨ bus line and the ¨Batman¨ bus line.  Every bus is operated by two people.  One drives and the other collects money and leans out the door yelling to people where that particular bus would take them.  Now with each passenger paying the equivalent of less than 50 cents U.S. and gas incredibly expensive, the buses rely primarily on their ability to move as many people as possible in order to make a profit.  Combine this with little-to-no traffic laws nor public transportation safety regulations and you can expect a 16-passenger van to hold 30 people.  If it is scientifically possible to fit another human being into a space on a bus, during rush hour, it will be done.  Sometimes the door cannot even be shut.

The craziest thing about Cusco traffic, however, is that I still have yet to see a single wreck.

Music:
Music in this city is ever-present.  From the background music in a store to the guy on the bus who thinks it´s appropriate to play the music on his phone without headphones, Peruanos love their music.  I´ve realized that the songs you hear can be overly simplified into three categories, not necessarily proportionate in their frequency:  (1) Peruvian pop music; (2) shameful American top-40 hits; and (3) Foster the People.

As open-minded as I attempt to be about music, Peruvian pop music is pretty inexplicably bad.  Most songs center around an overly simplistic and repetitious melody played on what could best be described as an electronic synthesized harpsichord while a man casually talks.  Often this man is accompanied by a female singer/speaker, and the pair alternates listing random locations in Peru.  One popular version actually includes a collection of the 50 states: ¨Nueva York, West Virginia, Washington . . . .¨

The second category comprises some of our proudest musical ambassadors, such as the Black Eyed Peas and Pitbull.  Not knowing Peru´s passion and love for the Black Eyed Peas, when I was asked by a class on the first day of school whether I liked them, I very adamantly said no.  In hindsight, that was probably a pretty crushing blow to the class´s morale.  It also would explain why they gave me the ¨you just said you hate puppies¨ kind of stare afterward.  Surprisingly, this category is also heavily populated with 1990s, female, alternative rock classics.  If 4 Non Blondes opened for Alanis Morissette, the line out the stadium and around the block would be fanatical.

Foster the People comprises a smaller, but distinguishable category in and of themselves.  I think they deserve not to be lumped in the same category as Pitbull.

Dogs:
The last thing I will mention today are the dogs.  I have mentioned previously about the sheer number of stray dogs in Cusco, but I think it deserves a few more comments.  Even with the large number of stray dogs, many families still have pet dogs that run the streets during the day with the strays.  The easiest way to identify a pet from a stray is to look for a sweater.  Many of the families put doggy sweaters on their pets.

For the most part, the dogs mind their own business and do not seem too unfriendly.  There are a few exceptions however.  The first is my family´s dog, Rabito.  Coming in at an intimidating 15 to 20 pounds, it might be the meanest dog in the city.  It hates me with an innate passion and follows me down our alley barking every day.  His Napoleon complex´s ferocity is pretty impressive, even if his bark isn´t.  The other exception varies from night to night and takes the form of three, 50 pound stray black dogs that also live in my alley.  Sometimes when I come home at night, they will lie peacefully on the ground, other times, they will try to corner me and block the alley, snarling and barking until someone from one of the houses comes out to run them off.  I´ve actually checked a couple of grocery stores for dog treats, hoping that I could use them to build some goodwill with Rabito and the other three, but have yet to find any.  The final exception is when you attempt to go on a jog.  After waiting a week to acclimate, I finally tried to go on a run a few days ago.  It didn´t go very well.  I tried running through the fields up the hill from my house, but the moment I accelerated from a walk to a jog, seemingly every stray dog in the area went crazy.  About four or five of them tried to chase me through one of the recently harvested corn fields, until I jumped about 5 feet down an embankment, leaving the dogs stranded and barking at the top.

These are just a few of the everyday things that come with being in Cusco.  I´m sure I´ll have a list of a few more in a couple more weeks, including how food and beverage are not contemporaneously served during a meal.  Most of the time these things provide a pretty comical touch to the experience of being down here—even when that means being in a small van with 25 other people, while ¨You Oughta Know¨ is blaring on the radio.

-Scott

The Sacred Valley

Last Friday, school was cancelled for some reason, and as a result, I had another free day.  I decided that it was time to start exploring the Incan ruins in the area, and the first place to start was the ruins closest to Cusco, Sacsayhuaman.  After purchasing my 10-day tourist ticket that gets you into all of the ruins in Cusco and the nearby Sacred Valley, I headed towards the San Blas neighborhood to hike the mile up from the Plaza de Armas.  The hike was steep, but nice.  The panoramic views of the city could not be beat, and it felt great to get away from the car exhaust and dust of Cusco.

When I got to the top, I had my first encounters with Incan construction.  It was incredible.  I decided at first to go without a guide and walked around admiring everything.  The sheer size of the stones and precision of their cuts was astounding.  After 45 minutes of walking around aimlessly, I realized that I had very little idea of what I was looking at and I headed back to the entrance to hire a guide.

For the next hour or so, I had a personal tour of the ruins.  My guide, Edwin, explained how the main structure was both a fortress and the outdoor Temple of the Sun.  The temple, like many Incan structures, was built with three levels, each representing something.  The bottom level represented the snake (knowledge).  The middle level was the puma (strength), and the top level was the condor (peace).

In addition to the sun temple, there was the giant water reservoir and its corresponding temple to the god of water.  There was, also, a graveyard where the nobles´ mummies were placed, when they were not being paraded around town for ceremonial use in festivals, and the corresponding temple to the god of death.  After the tour, I spent around two hours hiking around the ruins and the nearby ¨Christo Blanco¨ statute of Jesus that overlooks the city.

The next morning, Saturday, Nina, Alex, Marcia and I met at the Urubamba bus stop to go on a weekend trip the various ruins in the Sacred Valley, which lies between Cusco and the Machu Picchu region.  Alex is from outside of New York City, graduated from the University of Wisconsin this past Spring, and in the Fall will be moving to work in San Diego.  Marcia is an elementary school teacher in her late twenties from New Brunswick, Canada.  Both Alex and Marcia are volunteers with my program but work at other sites.

The four of us hopped on the bus and headed off for our weekend in the mountains.  On the bus, we ran into a group of college-aged volunteers from a different program that I had met the first Monday night here.  The group is here for three months, working for the Center for Traditional Textiles of Cusco, which is an organization that promotes traditional fair trade textile weaving in the region.  We had been planning on going straight to the town of Moray, but the other group convinced us to come see one of the center´s operations in the town of Chinchero on the way to Moray.  At the center in Chinchero, we got to watch the indigenous women hand make the various blankets, purses, scarfs, etc., and also how they made the different color dyes for the fabric.  (Red comes from a certain type of small beetle that they crush.)  The whole operation was fascinating and each lady sold the products that she made.

Chinchero also had some ruins to see, and after the textile center, we headed up to the park entrance.  At the entrance, we were surprised by another volunteer, Ariel.  Ariel is from Los Angeles, graduated from UC Berkley a year ago, and just finished his first year of medical school at an American program in Tel Aviv, Israel.  I had briefly talked to him when we first met on July 4^th about doing this weekend trip to the valley, but without a local cell phone, I had not talked to him since.  On Thursday, however, I emailed one of the program advisors to ask them to tell anyone that might be interested that we were taking this trip.  Apparently, Ariel had gotten the message, and head to Chinchero in hopes of finding us.  Our chance encounter with the textile group volunteers on the bus led to our chance encounter with Ariel at the ruins.

Chinchero was a breath of fresh air, literally.  The ruins consisted of agricultural terraces along the hillsides of a valley, and the five of us spent all morning hiking and enjoying the clean, exhaust-free, mountain air.  Once we got back into the town, we grabbed lunch and then caught a bus/van to the stopping point for Moray and Las Salineras.  I knew nothing about Las Salineras, but Alex and Marcia had heard they were worth a visit.  After a cliff-hugging, overloaded cab ride, Las Salineras came into view.

Las Salineras are pools constructed by the Incas to collect the salty spring water that bubbles up from the mountain.  The water sits in the pools until it evaporates, leaving the salt behind.  Peruvian families to this day still harvest the salt out of the pools.  The process is simple, but the scene is surreal.  As you pull into view of the side of the cliff, you see hundreds of symmetrical pools hugging the steep side of the mountain.  The pools are crusted over with bright white salt deposits that even from up close look like snow.  The whole sight is completely out of place in the landscape, but incredibly beautiful.

Part of the deal with the cab driver to fit five passengers in his small four passenger car for a bargain rate was that at both Las Salineras and Moray, we would only have 30 minutes site.  If we were late, he threatened to the jacked the rate back up to the pre-bargaining amount.  This was not much of a hindrance at Las Salineras because it is really just a stop-and-marvel kind of place, not somewhere you would need a tour.  Moray was too in a sense, except that it sits 200 hundred or so feet down the hill from the cab drop off spot.  Moray is a set of agricultural terraces formed in massive rings in the valley between some hills.  Although there is not much else at Moray in the way of houses or temples, the rings are so large and so perfectly circular that it is an amazing sight.

After racing down and back up the rings in the 30 minutes, we got back into the cab and headed back to the bus stop on the main highway.  From there we headed to Urubamba, the de facto crossroads town in the Sacred Valley.  We had originally planned on going on to the ruins at Ollantaytambo, but with it quickly growing dark and still twenty miles from there, the question was now where to spend the night.  With the group torn between getting the cab ride to Ollantaytambo out of the way or making the most of Urubamba, we decided to get out and walk around for a little while and get a better feel for the town.

A few blocks from the plaza, we found a quiet bar and tucked inside to relax for a bit.  There was only one other customer in the bar, a man named Patrick who appeared to be in his mid-30s.  Patrick was a former high school teacher in Phoenix, who decided to move to Urubamba, Peru a couple of years ago.  Now he works for a group called Pro-Peru that builds projects like clean water systems and cleaner emitting stoves for the small, rural villages in the valley.  Meeting him turned out to be a stroke of luck.  He walked us to the best hostel in town (a place that finally had steaming hot showers), pointed out a close bar to go for the night with some sort of fashion show going on, and told us about the best Sunday breakfast in town.

After shamelessly devouring a really-was-meant-to-be-shared sized pizza at a pizza place, we headed to the bar that Patrick had pointed out.  The place was pretty interesting, almost all outdoors with a campfire burning in the back.  We huddled around the fire and somehow missed the inconspicuous fashion show, but still managed to meet a couple of very weird interesting characters.

Although the bar owner had a facisnating background (born in Russia to a Peruvian dad and Romanian mom, lived in Canada for five years, spoke perfect English in a very heavy British accent, and in his 20s owning a bar in rural Peru), the ¨Most Interesting Person at the Party¨ award was actually split between two other people.  A former child psychologist from California (that I would never allow within a 100 yards of children), probably in her 30s, and her 18 year old or so sidekick from Maryland won that award handedly.  Around the campfire, the lady told us how she recently opened a bed and breakfast in the valley, which the 18 year old girl from Maryland worked with her at, and at which their customer promotion method was based more on divine providence than actually advertising its existence.  While the lady was telling us all of this, the girl from Maryland, who refused to speak to any of us in English, was running all over the place, chain smoking, and on and off again talking to someone on the phone.  It turns out it was her husband, who was home with her two year old child, and, to her astonishment, was pretty upset that he was doing that while she was out at the bars.  I guess the baby-husband thing was cramping her style.

Outside of that, the owner of the bed and breakfast was acting pretty normal, if you ignored her attempt to finish a carton of cigarettes in a single evening as well.  But then, out of nowhere, she took a hard turn towards crazy.  Somehow the conversation turned to U.S. politics.  For the most part it was a pretty educated and elevated discussion.  That is until the lady added her two cents.  She began by declaring that she is an excellent researcher, so as to try and add some minuscule validity to what was about to follow.  Due to her ¨excellent research skills,¨ she explained how she had learned of U.S. government cover ups.  Cover ups of what, we asked.  Cover ups of how every planet in our solar system had life on it, but that the life on each planet had been destroyed during separate civil wars, all of which ended in a nuclear apocalypse . . . .  The lady countered our blank and incredulous stares with authoritative support like ¨trust me,¨ ¨I´m telling you, I´ve done the research,¨ and of course ¨no really, trust me.¨  She cited no facts, nor provided any information that could be considered the foundation of rationale and logical thought.  That was our cue to go, and shortly after, we headed back home.

The next morning after breakfast, we headed to Ollantaytambo.  The plan was to try and see that in the morning and then head to the village of Pisac in the afternoon to see its ruins and popular Sunday market.  Ollantaytambo is the furthest town in the valley, and it was one of the primary fortresses used by the Incas when they rebelled against the Spanish.  The area was gorgeous and the ruins were breathtaking.  Perched on the side of steep mountains with the snow covered Andes in the background, the elaborate ruins were overlooked the picturesque village below.  The ability of the Incas to carry such massive stones up to those heights, and without the invention of the wheel, really is astounding.

As we climbed up the ruins, we came across a trail on the backside of the mountain.  It was steep and took a little while, but a group coming down from it promised that it was worth the hike.  At the top of the trail, sat the ruins of the Incan jail, and with it, one of the most incredible views that I have ever seen.  We stood on the edge of a nearly sheer cliff hundreds of feet from the town below.  Looking into the valley, you could see for miles.  It was one of those views that a photograph cannot do justice.

We sat up there for probably a half hour, and in the process, decided that Pisac could wait for another day.  There was no way we wanted to rush through something like Ollantaytambo.  After taking our time all morning in the ruins and grabbing lunch, Ariel split off from the rest of us.  He was headed to Machu Picchu a couple days later, and it was further past the Sacred Valley.

Since we missed out on Pisac, we decided to go to the Qosqo (Cusco) Center of Native Art Sunday night when we returned.  The center holds a show every night of traditional native dances and songs.  It was a very touristy show, but still interesting to see.  That was the end of our weekend.  Alex, Nina, and I did make it to the Pisac ruins a couple days later on Tuesday.  They were quite impressive.  Larger than Ollantaytambo and Mach Picchu, visiting the ruins proved to be quite the hike.  If anyone is considering ever visiting Cusco, the Sacred Valley, and Machu Picchu (which I would very highly recommend), be prepared for the hiking.  Whether you decide to backpack it or take a five star bus tour, you´re not going to see much of anything unless you are willing to put some steep miles on your legs.

Scott