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Moray, Maras, and Chinchero Village
I report, with some bittersweetness, that this is my last day in the Andes. Tomorrow morning it’s back to Lima, where we’re hanging out for a bit before flying home at Horrible O’Clock.
Today we drove to some of the rural areas outside of Cuzco to experience the living indigenous tradition. Our guide was pretty candid about the problems facing the communities out there; climate change is literally starving the people and animals in subsistence farms in the mountains, public school is compulsory only until the end of elementary school and there is only one of them—if students want to continue to secondary or university, they have to move—and there aren’t enough hospitals. This said, the culture and communities are incredibly resilient. They still live in communal cooperatives and most use traditional farming and weaving methods. There are animals everywhere, but hardly any are used for food, apparently—meat is a delicacy that the peasants only eat on Catholic holidays, otherwise they’re mainly vegetarian. I did see some guinea pigs, though I suspect those are mainly eaten by tourists as pretty much everyone has said that guinea pig is a sometimes food for Peruvians.
Our first stop was Maras, where there are salt flats that date to pre-Incan times. They’re still in use, those these days it’s more of a tourist attraction than a useful way to gather salt when the Pacific Ocean exists. From there, we went to Moray to see the ruins of what was essentially an Incan agricultural laboratory. It’s very beautiful but also ingenious; the walls of the terraces are tilted to reflect the sun, so the bottom of the pit is warmer and each progressive layer of the terrace towards the top is cooler, with a difference of about 15°C. This allowed the Incas to experiment with domesticating and creating varieties of crops to make them more productive or more resilient, leading to the gazillion varieties of potatoes that now exist. So thank you, Incas. I like potatoes a lot.
Then we went to Chinchero Village. This is a traditional Incan village where several families create and sell alpaca wool products. The women gave us a demonstration of spinning, dyeing, and weaving techniques. It was cool af though I can’t help but wonder if this is somewhat of a Potemkin village. But their work is beautiful and I contributed to the local economy, so there’s that.
All of this, as you well might imagine, is exceedingly photogenic, so here you go. Pictures!
Today we drove to some of the rural areas outside of Cuzco to experience the living indigenous tradition. Our guide was pretty candid about the problems facing the communities out there; climate change is literally starving the people and animals in subsistence farms in the mountains, public school is compulsory only until the end of elementary school and there is only one of them—if students want to continue to secondary or university, they have to move—and there aren’t enough hospitals. This said, the culture and communities are incredibly resilient. They still live in communal cooperatives and most use traditional farming and weaving methods. There are animals everywhere, but hardly any are used for food, apparently—meat is a delicacy that the peasants only eat on Catholic holidays, otherwise they’re mainly vegetarian. I did see some guinea pigs, though I suspect those are mainly eaten by tourists as pretty much everyone has said that guinea pig is a sometimes food for Peruvians.
Our first stop was Maras, where there are salt flats that date to pre-Incan times. They’re still in use, those these days it’s more of a tourist attraction than a useful way to gather salt when the Pacific Ocean exists. From there, we went to Moray to see the ruins of what was essentially an Incan agricultural laboratory. It’s very beautiful but also ingenious; the walls of the terraces are tilted to reflect the sun, so the bottom of the pit is warmer and each progressive layer of the terrace towards the top is cooler, with a difference of about 15°C. This allowed the Incas to experiment with domesticating and creating varieties of crops to make them more productive or more resilient, leading to the gazillion varieties of potatoes that now exist. So thank you, Incas. I like potatoes a lot.
Then we went to Chinchero Village. This is a traditional Incan village where several families create and sell alpaca wool products. The women gave us a demonstration of spinning, dyeing, and weaving techniques. It was cool af though I can’t help but wonder if this is somewhat of a Potemkin village. But their work is beautiful and I contributed to the local economy, so there’s that.
All of this, as you well might imagine, is exceedingly photogenic, so here you go. Pictures!
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ANYWAY, I did get to meet their founder when she visited Australia in 2011, and she said that the economy in rural Peru has three tiers, that all support local people, which are: agriculture, crafts, and tourism.
So even if they have this all set up just for the tourists, it's still helping, and it also helps keep the traditional crafts alive because people will learn them to show and sell to the tourists.
I love this set of photos, especially the women with spindles.
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Vegan Peruvian is a thing, so I'm happy that I never have to even think about eating a cute guinea pig who would rather live.
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So thank you, Incas. I like potatoes a lot.
Potatoes are AWESOME.
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