Huarez
3 June 05
Watch a small child beg for money in a restaurant then get chased out by one of the staff only to come back in to scrap the leftovers off of the finished plates of customers to eat and drink...this never gets any easier to observe.
4 June 05
Bus to Callejon de Huaylas and Luguna de Llanganuco running on Peruvian time...once I do get on it though I am treated to the A Team in Spanish.
Santini sat with me and chatted me up. He is from the travel agency that I booked this trip through. He tells me about three hikers that had recently undertaken a trek up Cordillera Blanca...they have been missing now for three or four days which doesn't sound very good when I look up at the highest elevations in South America and their snow capped peaks. I hope they are okay.
Alrighty then...Santini just shook my hand and hopped off of the bus...guess that is Spanish for your on your own sister...best way anyways, now I can get into some trouble.
The trip begins with a stop in Los Pueblos de Carhuaz where I spent the majority of my time chatting with a gent named Lucas, a jewelery maker selling his work on the Plaza de Armas. Aaaahhh...yet another beautiful Peruvian man. He gave me a few suggestions as to where I might find a lovely beach or two en route to Lima once again.
We then drove on to Monterey, a small village known for its chocolate coloured natural hot springs...then on to Campo Santo de Yungay.
Yungay is the site of the single worst natural disaster in the Andes due to a monster earthquake that took place in 1970 that let 15 million cubic meters of granite and ice loose from the west wall of Huascaran.
The aluvion that resulted reached 300 kilometers an hour and dropped over three vertical kilometers on its way to Yungay. The town and all of its inhabitants were buried. Close to 70,000 people died. You can still see the path that the aluvion took, all that is to be seen in what used to be the Plaza de Armas is the very top of the cathedral tower and a few palm tree trunks.
I stop to sample a local treat of beans, sliced red onions, aji and red peppers, and cilantro, mixed on the spot with fresh lime juice, salt and roasted choclo, served in a small plastic bag and best of all...you get to eat it with your fingers...Rebecca's favorite way!
We drive on through red fields of quinua and piles of choclo "con cob" drying in the sun on rooftops and "sin cob" drying on the roadside on top of tarps and tapestries.
Afterwards we travel on to Laguna de Llanganuco, two stunning lakes east of Yongay with killer views of Huascaran (6768m), Chopicalqui (6354m), and Huandoy (6395m).
The colour of the lakes was absolutely amazing, a piercing blue turquoise colour surrounded by snow capped peaks reaching well over 6000 meters. I took a hike up and around the lakes with a nice Australian gent, Richard, that I had met on the bus. The landscape is lovely with sun bleached rocks, lupines, cactus, palms and sappatos, a bright yellow flower that smells like sweet tarts.
On the bus ride and during our hike I spoke of the work that I was doing for Project Peru and Richard ended up giving me cash over lunch to purchase art supplies for the children...This isn't the first time this has happened though each time I am overwhelmed with the kindness of strangers.
Whenever I am in Lima or Puente Piedre purchasing supplies for the refuge, people will ask me what I am doing in Peru and after explaining, they will nine times out of ten, cut me a discount of some kind on what I am buying. Even the other day while boarding the bus to Huarez, the guy selling the tickets asked me for information on the refuge so that he could send gifts over to the children. People can be so kind and it warms my heart fully each time I experience it.
Ran into my new friend Lucas on my way back to my hostal after dinner...and my friend Lucas was a bit fucked up, begging me to talk to him tomorrow night instead of tonight as he couldn´t carry on a proper conversation with me at that point. He wants to paint me, says I am beautiful, and adds please don´t think less of him in his current state of craziness...very sweet, but very wasted! I loved his brutal honesty!
5 June 05
Headed to Chavin de Huantar and Laguna de Querococha this morning. Chavin de Huantar is the best preserved site from the Chavin Culture. The most interesting parts of the site were built underground and in 1945 the whole area was covered by a huge landslide.
The Chavin culture is the oldest major culture of Peru. They existed from about 1000 to 300 BC and predated the Incas by two millennia. The Chavin culture was unique in that its people didn´t conquer by warfare but rather influenced the artistic and cultural development of all of northern Peru by example. They were lovers not fighters!
Much to my pleasure their main deity was feline, Jaguar or Puma, as well as a snake, Anaconda, deity....these are carved into all of the Chavin sites.
The Chavin de Huantar site has a huge central courtyard with a central staircase that leads up to the castillo with walls that at one time were embellished with tenons, keystones of huge projecting blocks of stone carved into heads, only one remains intact today.
There is a series of underground tunnels that are so well designed that the air smells fresh even within the heart of the underground complex. At the intersection of four of the underground passageways there is a four meter high rock stuck into the ground called the Lanzon de Chavin, which is beautifully carved with Chavin deities.
En route to the site, the taxi dodged large boulders that peppered the dirt road, which were cast down from the surrounding mountain sides as a result of an earthquake that took place in the north of Peru yesterday morning at five am.
We drive past a landscape painted in the colours of all the local minerals, rich reds of ferrous and slate black-blue of carbon and peppered with San Pedro Cactus...aka...Peyote.
My guide is a fascinating old gent that tells all of these wild stories of how there is no way that the Chavin site was built without the help of an alien life form...there seems to be an overall trend here in Peru!
He talks of the perfection of each cut in the huge stones used to build the ruins and how it is quite possible that they were formed by some molecular change caused by the pouring of a liquid produced from Amazonian plants. Apparently this liquid made the granite pliable...like spaghetti is what he used as an exact reference. Fascinating guy but he may have been nibbling on a bit of the San Pedro Cactus....
He goes on to back his theory with a tale about a scientist who took the eggs from a birds nest, boiled them and then replaced them unknown to the poor momma bird...now, the momma bird knows that it takes approximately 12 to 14 days for her eggs to hatch and when that doesn´t happen she leaves her nest for one months time, flying to the Amazon and brings back a small plant in her beak to place in the center of her eggs...at this point they miraculously hatch. I want that plant.
Aside from the incredible subterranean world they created, the Chavin people also constructed this incredible acoustic water organ within the earth. From what I gathered, its tones caused by the water rushing through it pay homage to a water deity.
And then, of course, all of this lunacy could be due to my poor Spanish translation and overactive imagination....
Watch a small child beg for money in a restaurant then get chased out by one of the staff only to come back in to scrap the leftovers off of the finished plates of customers to eat and drink...this never gets any easier to observe.
4 June 05
Bus to Callejon de Huaylas and Luguna de Llanganuco running on Peruvian time...once I do get on it though I am treated to the A Team in Spanish.
Santini sat with me and chatted me up. He is from the travel agency that I booked this trip through. He tells me about three hikers that had recently undertaken a trek up Cordillera Blanca...they have been missing now for three or four days which doesn't sound very good when I look up at the highest elevations in South America and their snow capped peaks. I hope they are okay.
Alrighty then...Santini just shook my hand and hopped off of the bus...guess that is Spanish for your on your own sister...best way anyways, now I can get into some trouble.
The trip begins with a stop in Los Pueblos de Carhuaz where I spent the majority of my time chatting with a gent named Lucas, a jewelery maker selling his work on the Plaza de Armas. Aaaahhh...yet another beautiful Peruvian man. He gave me a few suggestions as to where I might find a lovely beach or two en route to Lima once again.
We then drove on to Monterey, a small village known for its chocolate coloured natural hot springs...then on to Campo Santo de Yungay.
Yungay is the site of the single worst natural disaster in the Andes due to a monster earthquake that took place in 1970 that let 15 million cubic meters of granite and ice loose from the west wall of Huascaran.
The aluvion that resulted reached 300 kilometers an hour and dropped over three vertical kilometers on its way to Yungay. The town and all of its inhabitants were buried. Close to 70,000 people died. You can still see the path that the aluvion took, all that is to be seen in what used to be the Plaza de Armas is the very top of the cathedral tower and a few palm tree trunks.
I stop to sample a local treat of beans, sliced red onions, aji and red peppers, and cilantro, mixed on the spot with fresh lime juice, salt and roasted choclo, served in a small plastic bag and best of all...you get to eat it with your fingers...Rebecca's favorite way!
We drive on through red fields of quinua and piles of choclo "con cob" drying in the sun on rooftops and "sin cob" drying on the roadside on top of tarps and tapestries.
Afterwards we travel on to Laguna de Llanganuco, two stunning lakes east of Yongay with killer views of Huascaran (6768m), Chopicalqui (6354m), and Huandoy (6395m).
The colour of the lakes was absolutely amazing, a piercing blue turquoise colour surrounded by snow capped peaks reaching well over 6000 meters. I took a hike up and around the lakes with a nice Australian gent, Richard, that I had met on the bus. The landscape is lovely with sun bleached rocks, lupines, cactus, palms and sappatos, a bright yellow flower that smells like sweet tarts.
On the bus ride and during our hike I spoke of the work that I was doing for Project Peru and Richard ended up giving me cash over lunch to purchase art supplies for the children...This isn't the first time this has happened though each time I am overwhelmed with the kindness of strangers.
Whenever I am in Lima or Puente Piedre purchasing supplies for the refuge, people will ask me what I am doing in Peru and after explaining, they will nine times out of ten, cut me a discount of some kind on what I am buying. Even the other day while boarding the bus to Huarez, the guy selling the tickets asked me for information on the refuge so that he could send gifts over to the children. People can be so kind and it warms my heart fully each time I experience it.
Ran into my new friend Lucas on my way back to my hostal after dinner...and my friend Lucas was a bit fucked up, begging me to talk to him tomorrow night instead of tonight as he couldn´t carry on a proper conversation with me at that point. He wants to paint me, says I am beautiful, and adds please don´t think less of him in his current state of craziness...very sweet, but very wasted! I loved his brutal honesty!
5 June 05
Headed to Chavin de Huantar and Laguna de Querococha this morning. Chavin de Huantar is the best preserved site from the Chavin Culture. The most interesting parts of the site were built underground and in 1945 the whole area was covered by a huge landslide.
The Chavin culture is the oldest major culture of Peru. They existed from about 1000 to 300 BC and predated the Incas by two millennia. The Chavin culture was unique in that its people didn´t conquer by warfare but rather influenced the artistic and cultural development of all of northern Peru by example. They were lovers not fighters!
Much to my pleasure their main deity was feline, Jaguar or Puma, as well as a snake, Anaconda, deity....these are carved into all of the Chavin sites.
The Chavin de Huantar site has a huge central courtyard with a central staircase that leads up to the castillo with walls that at one time were embellished with tenons, keystones of huge projecting blocks of stone carved into heads, only one remains intact today.
There is a series of underground tunnels that are so well designed that the air smells fresh even within the heart of the underground complex. At the intersection of four of the underground passageways there is a four meter high rock stuck into the ground called the Lanzon de Chavin, which is beautifully carved with Chavin deities.
En route to the site, the taxi dodged large boulders that peppered the dirt road, which were cast down from the surrounding mountain sides as a result of an earthquake that took place in the north of Peru yesterday morning at five am.
We drive past a landscape painted in the colours of all the local minerals, rich reds of ferrous and slate black-blue of carbon and peppered with San Pedro Cactus...aka...Peyote.
My guide is a fascinating old gent that tells all of these wild stories of how there is no way that the Chavin site was built without the help of an alien life form...there seems to be an overall trend here in Peru!
He talks of the perfection of each cut in the huge stones used to build the ruins and how it is quite possible that they were formed by some molecular change caused by the pouring of a liquid produced from Amazonian plants. Apparently this liquid made the granite pliable...like spaghetti is what he used as an exact reference. Fascinating guy but he may have been nibbling on a bit of the San Pedro Cactus....
He goes on to back his theory with a tale about a scientist who took the eggs from a birds nest, boiled them and then replaced them unknown to the poor momma bird...now, the momma bird knows that it takes approximately 12 to 14 days for her eggs to hatch and when that doesn´t happen she leaves her nest for one months time, flying to the Amazon and brings back a small plant in her beak to place in the center of her eggs...at this point they miraculously hatch. I want that plant.
Aside from the incredible subterranean world they created, the Chavin people also constructed this incredible acoustic water organ within the earth. From what I gathered, its tones caused by the water rushing through it pay homage to a water deity.
And then, of course, all of this lunacy could be due to my poor Spanish translation and overactive imagination....
posted by Rebel at 8:28 PM
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