The Antisocial Socialist

In an effort to get back into some semblance of a routine and strike something off my to-do list, I'm going to finish posting the photos from Peru. Today's instalment is Chinchero Village, where families in a cooperative keep the traditional techniques of dyeing and weaving alpaca wool alive, to some degree for the entertainment of tourists, but also because it's the thing that keeps the economy alive.

All pictures of people were taken with their permission.


I think this is my favourite picture that I took in Peru and I'm probably unreasonably proud of it.

( photogenic people and animals )

There will be four of these in total, for those who just want to get back to hearing me scream about politics.

This is my miscellaneous photo dump.


Llamas grazing at Sacsayhuamán.

( more )

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!

I came, I saw, I managed not to fall off!

Seriously, this is one of those things that I’ve wanted to for ages and that Anya has wanted to do for ages and that we’ve been talking about doing for at least a decade. And we got to do it. And it was every bit as amaze balls as I’d hoped.

So to get to Machu Picchu, you need to take a train, either from Cuzco or the Sacred Valley, which was where we were. The train is probably the loveliest train in all of existence. It has little tables with alpaca wool placemats and two sets of windows so that you can see the landscape as you pass, and they describe the interesting features in English and Spanish. The rest of the time, they’re playing Peruvian flute music. All transit should be more like this.

Then you reach the town, which is actually called Hot Springs but no one calls it that, on account of it being at the foot of one of the icon of the Incan Empire.

(Note that Machu Picchu was not actually that important a city. Cuzco was the capital of the empire; Machu Picchu was a city of about 700-800 people. But unlike other Incan cities, the Spanish never got to trash it (it was abandoned before the invasion and wasn’t discovered by Westerners until 1911), so it’s largely intact, and where it’s not, there was enough of it to reconstruct). There is something to be said for building your city on top of a really inaccessible mountain.)

Anyway, from the town, assuming that you’re not one of those hardcore types who hikes the whole way up or worse, takes the Incan Trail for four days, you can catch a bus to take you halfway up to where the interesting stuff is. It’s still a fairly intense hike, though not as steep as yesterday’s. Actually, the bus is scarier. I’m not afraid of heights per se, but I do have one particularly intense phobia, and it has to do with narrow, winding roads where you have a sheer cliff on one side and the edge on the other. So I spent the 20 minute drive up convinced that I was going to die.

It was, however, entirely worth it. I can’t do it justice in pictures let alone words. It’s breathtaking. Not literally, it’s actually below Cuzco and Sacred Valley, altitude-wise. But if you can imagine being in a place that’s so beautiful you could cry—well, it’s like that.

We spent a few hours hiking around and seeing the ruins. You can basically swing a camera around and it’ll catch something wonderful. Or it will hit a tourist. Or a llama.

One of the guys in our tour group, in what was simultaneously the cheesiest and most romantic gesture I have ever seen, proposed to his girlfriend at the top. She said yes.

Now we’re back at the hotel, full of food and alcohol, and the room is cute and there are bathrobes and fuzzy blankets and I feel as though I have accomplished a serious life goal.

A thousand years later, the photos finally uploaded. Enjoy!

We did a half-day of archaeology today, visiting Sacsayhuamán, the historical centre of the Incan Empire, Q’Enqo, another Incan sacred site, the White Christ, a statue donated in the 1940s by Palestinian Christians that overlooks the city, and the cathedral that used to be an Incan temple before the Spanish fuckered it up.

The latter just really drove home the historical tragedy of Latin America that yes, I’ve read about in graphic detail, but you experience viscerally when you see the marvels of Incan engineering that built temples that could withstand earthquakes, gigantic puma statues, observatories that tracked the seasons, and then you see where the Spanish defaced the statues, melted the intricate golden artwork for plunder, and dug up the stones to build near-exact replicas of Every Church In Europe Ever.

This said, there were some neat tidbits to be seen in the Catholic art; Incan artists were invited to create paintings and sculptures in the cathedral, but were forbidden from using any of their religious symbols: Mother Earth, the Sun, mountains, rainbows, serpents, condors, pumas, etc. So when the Incan converts painted religious scenes, they made the Virgin Mary’s dress look like a mountain, turned her halo into a sun, hid zigzags in her dress to look like snakes and rivers, and so on. One artist traded favours with the bishop when painting the Last Supper; he was allowed to put in the traditional bread and guinea pig on the table, in exchange for giving Judas the dark skin of a local, but he had the last laugh by painting Judas’s face as the conquistador Pizarro. Another sculptor, after asking why the crucified Jesus looked up and to the left and receiving the answer that he was looking towards his father, sculpted him looking down and to the right, at Mother Earth, a tradition that continues in Andean Catholic art to this day.

On to the photos. Obviously you want to see llamas. I will show you llamas. Note that while they look cute and fluffy and soft, you should not pet them, because they spit. I know this due to my dubious lineage but poor Anya did not.

Also pictured is the ridonkulous dessert we had at a place that the tour guide recommended. It’s called “mango ravioli” and I must try to make it at home. It’s very thin slices of mango wrapped around apples baked with cinnamon and drizzled with a passionfruit and vanilla compote. Possibly among the best desserts I have eaten ever.

Cuzco is very beautiful so this is me showing restraint.

Tomorrow, off to the Sacred Valley.

It’s beautiful. Haven’t seen much of the city yet beyond the drive from the airport and the view from the hotel; we’ve been told to not do anything for a few hours while we acclimatize to the altitude. You can see my view here, though.

So far, either the altitude pills and the coca tea work splendidly or I was born to live in the mountains, because besides fatigue (which is probably more the result of waking up at 5 am than anything to do with the height), I’m not doing too badly. Still, the last thing I want is to be sick for the massive hike tomorrow, hence a blogging break.

A few things about Peru:

• Despite being one of the world’s major coffee producers, most of the coffee is either for export or tourists. The locals prefer a drink called Inca Cola, which is approximately the colour of yellow Gatorade and tastes like bubblegum. I made it through half a glass and gave up in disgust.
• The food here is awesome, however. Very vegan friendly, surprisingly; probably even more so if I spoke more Spanish and was able to ask if things like hot sauce contain egg (sadly, many do). Our most interesting discovery so far was Japanese Peruvian fusion food, which is amazing.
• The sad looking stray dogs are apparently mostly not strays. They have homes and people just let them wander around.
• There’s a municipal election going on. I have no idea about any of the parties, but I’m told politics is fairly corruption riddled. You know, like it is nowhere else in the world.
• There are more female cops in Cuzco than male, at least traffic cops. This is reportedly because they’re less likely to take bribes.
• There’s a big Pride flag when you fly into the Cuzco airport. ETA: it’s the Incan flag. But still very welcoming.
• I am definitely a fan of coca tea and I’m trying to figure out exactly how much I can fit in my suitcase.

 Very brief post as I need to get up at 3:30 am tomorrow for penguin-related reasons. Y’all are going to have to wait for my photos, as I always forget my Flickr password and I’m out of storage space on DW. Lima’s not very photogenic anyway for the most part; the coolest thing we saw were 16th century catacombs that because of tourists’ previous bad behaviour, you’re not allowed to take pictures of. But take it from me that it was goth af. We also hit the Huaca Huallamarca archaeological site, and the pre-invasion archaeology Larco museum.