Huaraz

I arrived in Huaraz at five in the morning after a bumpy ride from Lima. Before the bus departed a police officer boarded and photographed everyone on the bus in case it was hijacked, giving me a thumbs up as he pointed the camera at me. The attendant gave me an extra plastic cup of coke with a wink and a smile, which I sipped as the weight of Lima was left behind. The road was like a mini-golf course, with sand traps, hills, valleys, and colorful, inexplicable obstacles. We climbed ten thousand feet into the night.
I got about two hours of sleep that night, and despite the weariness I felt upon arriving I only had to look at the encircling Andes like the teeth of Pachamama and I knew I wouldn’t be able to rest just yet. Met up with some other folks at the hostel and we set out on an uninformed trek to a distant alpine lake, which we never reached. We wandered up a mule track further into the range, finding a distant goal in a sheer faced rock canyon carved out by some long-slid glacier. The mountain slopes surrounding us were patched into uneven fields of brown and green, rimmed with trees and studded with livestock and children wielding worn tools. Whenever we came close they asked us first for caramel, then chocolate, and finally money for one of the two. Their smiles were hard to resist, though I had nothing too give.
We continued towards the canyon along a ridge framed by villages in the valleys below, following a path that mirrored a canal that looked as old as the land. Sometimes clouds parted above and beyond, allowing us to grasp the height of the place we were heading.
After a few hours we reached the mouth of the canyon. We sat with the chill wind to our backs, eating avocado and banana sandwiches in the yard of a lone farmer who seemed delighted to share the majesty of his everyday with us. Before us was an endless span of lowland shadowed by the vaulting rock on either side, with clouds hanging in the snags of the face like the froth of a magic potion, or the entrance to a different world.
It is hard hiking miles up at ten thousand feet. I slept like a happy rock.
I awoke today at six well rested, and joined a pure dude from California and a kiwi for the long trek to laguna 69. After a three hour ride in a combi with twenty people sharing small space, we happily attacked the 6 miles up and in, letting the morning mist chill our sweat, following a meandering stream through a lush valley of wind-stunted trees and complacent cattle. The place was too beautiful, to full, for me to put it into words just yet. Mountains sixteen thousand feet high peaked from behind clouds. Rocks carried to perfect spots by floods since dried stood and watched as we passed.
The trek was truly grueling. By the last leg we were all struggling, and I was setting the pace so I felt an obligation to continue onwards despite the clumsy weights my feet had become. We cut back and forth along the switchbacks up the mountain, following a trail that was also a stream in the constant rain. The landscape continued to take our breath away, what was left after the altitude had its piece. Waterfalls fell hundreds of feet around us, a distant din mixing with the wind. At about forty-three hundred meters the hail began to fall at an angle that was hard to deny. We passed small lakes, unique flowering cactus balls and dilapidated refuges for stranded backpackers, and after one last push up a cattle trail replete with silent, watchful animals we reached the laguna.
The blue was deep and eternal like the eyes of some of the people I love. Two little ducks seemed impossible in the biting cold, shaking their little bodies as if it were the best of times. A glacier a thousand feet above us. Two Germans eating snitzel in the rain with loud words. The feeling of accomplishment was extraordinary, as we had completed the three and a half hour ascent in just over two hours, and thus had leisure time to spend watching the wind whip the surreal waters into millions of tiny crests that batted against the immovable mountains surrounding us.
Slept hard and woke sore and early for the long ordeal of a trip to Chavin de Huantar. Boarded a bus with a smiling guide who talked in blistering Spanish for much of the ride. As we left Huaraz behind the only evidence of human habitation was the road and the lone shepherd’s refuge, amidst great open spaces stretching away in endless green, dotted with moss covered rocks and hung low with clouds. The place is one in which the earth is passionate in its expression. We climbed thousands of feet through gorges and valleys untouched but for single tracks across there sides, coming to a deep lake in a cleft between three mountains. I drank mate with honey bought from a young Quechua girl who’s father sat shivering in a boat on the lake, waiting for the unlikely tourist to brave the foot high waves. Her mother had their family’s llamas kneeling between the road and the lake for picture ops, and she was having luck with some of the people from my bus. I walked down to the lake and let the wind coming off the water sweep me awake.
We climbed further into the mountains, which seem to go on forever, and came to Colina. Here I ordered the Parilla mixta, an inexpressibly large plate of food. Climbing another 1000 feet brought us to the Chavin de Huantar.
The Chavin culture was the first civilization of the Andes and thus the Americas, with its origins at about 3300 years ago. They knew the paths of Orion and the Southern Cross, organized by the number seven and the cardinal directions, created intricate stone carvings and pottery, and took San Pedro cactus before walking into their temple and meeting their god, Lanzon, whom I saw today.
A boomerang shaped stone carved into a fearsome anthropomorphic deity that smiles down a passageway beneath the earth, it was easy to imagine the Chavin experience whenever they were called on to visit their god. Dim light, hallucinations, the sound of the elders chanting from the circular plaza behind, and then the passageway and at its end, initiation into the secrets of the Chavin. The cactus was supposed to aid in the Chavin’s transformation from human to feline, which they represented on their temple by successive stone heads that morph from human to semi-human to feline. I’m definitely going to have to follow up on this culture, as it is one of the most fascinating I’ve encountered in a long time.
The ruin itself is set amidst the type of Andean countryside that is almost impossible to describe. Great changes in elevation, thousands of shades of green, waterfalls plummeting, wind whipping the short grasses. The indigenous Quechua walk slowly along small paths on the sides of enormous mountains, infants swaddled in multicolored blankets tied around their shoulders, baskets of produce held in their arms. The color of the people is such a stark contrast to the landscape that they can be spotted from miles away.
The hours of driving through the countryside to and from the ruin were as good as the ruin itself. The land lets your mind stretch in ways that only these sacred, desolate spaces allow. It was ever so easy to be present.
Just back in the hostel from a long ride through the shadowing Andes. Shepherds and there flocks waver in and out of existence in the dancing light of fires. The clouds descend and cover everything in a white vastness. A statue of a cross bearing native tops a mountain in bright white. Next to me sits an old couple from Trindad. After talking all day, the smiling man with a bright white beard asks “What does a rich man put in his pocket that a poor man throws away?”
“What?” I ask.
“:Snot!” He says and imitates a farmer‘s blow, and he and his wife start laughing hysterically.
When the bus got back to town I walked through the busy, brightly lit streets to the hostel, crossing through alleys with roving dogs yapping at each other and small children selling two-packs of toilet paper. The chifa restaurants were packed with Peruvians laughing and talking. Three wheeled vehicles putted through the night illuminated by blue, green, and red lights. Quechua closed up there street stands and began the long walk home.
I got back to the hostel and everyone was in an uproar. The election of 2008 was being reported, and Obama was winning.