The last ten days

Haven't had much time to write since Megan came down, as we bussed through the desert, mountains, and pampas of the rocky south. We left Lima for Arequipa, an ancient Incan city built on the lands of the Collagua natives, constructed of white volcanic rock that formed from the tempermental eruptions of the Misti, Pichu Pichu, and Chachani volcanoes that ring the city like an unkept Andean mouth.
After the Incans came the conquistadors, followed by the missionaries, who planted a cross in the dirt and built the modern city around it. The Inca left mummies on the peaks around the city as offerings to their mountain gods. Juanita, the ice maiden, was one such offering: a thirteen year old girl who walked from Cusco with priests and load-bearers, climbed Mount Ampano, was given intoxicants and was killed by a blow to the head while kneeling in prayer. It is thought she knew of her fate long before she left for the journey to the mountain. The museum housing her body holds relics from her tomb, woven shawls and cloaks, quippus, ceramic and cloth implements for the afterlife, and gold and silver offerings. Her body itself is like a monument to a civilization, their ideals and beliefs, frozen in supplication and in rigor mortis before her blood and skin could begin to decompose. She is a window into this other world, offering such a richness of understanding that a good long look at her, with the knowledge of her accepted fate and the forces of the society that brought it on, allows one to transport oneself far away from the morality of our western world and into a relationship with natural divinity and the forces of human existence. It is a brief and powerful experience. Looking at her face from straight on is arresting, hollow eyes and parchment skin, framed in hair frozen solid, with teeth made large by withering lips, one can still imagine her devotion.

We left from Arequipa to go to Colca Canyon, driving through desert up through the Pampas, peppered with llamas and alpacas, with condors circling overhead so large that they seem much closer than they are. We stayed in Chivay that night, and saw a folk music and dance show with beautiful Andean pan pipes, flutes, and small guitars accompanied by hauntingly hollow voices echoing through the cavernous room. I ate alpaca steak as the man and woman danced traditional dances of the Collagua, sometimes getting the audience involved. In one fertility dance the man put the woman on the floor and whipped her briskly with a riding crop, after which the woman did the same to the man, punctuating each series of whippings by straddling his face and shaking her skirt over his head suggestively. When an old gringo was led into the center of the room for his turn at the dance, he uncertainly began to whip the woman lightly, then, encouraged by the audience and the woman herself, he quickly became enthusiastic and raised and lowered his arm with repressed urgency. After awhile he was forced to stop, though only after a hilarious chase around the woman on the ground, during which he didn't stop whipping her for an instant.

The next day Megan and I took a bus with a group of Peruvians out into Colca Canyon, one of the most beautiful places in the world, and one of the world's deepest canyons. Riding with us were two Peruvian boys of about eight who were products of such spoiling that they had to be spoon fed when we stopped to eat, and whined like infants. It was ridiculous, and I tried not to listen to them as they acted half their age, focusing instead on the terraced fields of a thousand shades of green climbing the walls of the mountains on either side of the river that, farther on, had cut the canyon for thousands of years.

It is hard to describe the beauty of Colca Canyon. Suffice it to say you can see the largeness of the world from a perch atop its steep walls, you can understand the magnificence of earth by feeling the presence of that space between those walls of rock. I would say more but I'm running out of time.

After Colca we bussed to nazca and took in a few of the lines. The were interesting, smaller than I expected, and in the middle of a giant desert that slopes slightly towards the sea under a sky of fantastic blues. A german woman named Maria Reiche spent forty years studying them only to conclude that her best guess was that they were some kind of astrological crop calendar. I intend to study her life in-depth. The hostel we stayed at had the funny people that I'm by now used to meeting traveling in this country. The owners of the place seemd content to share a Peruvian woman who wore short skirts and went off in the middle of the day with first one then another of them. They also liked to complain about the locals, Nazca, tourist traps in general, and offer friendly advice. Taken as a whole, they were eccentric, lost old Dutchmen. Also in the hostel were another Irish couple who were a blast: we watched episodes of family guy late into the night and were invited to Dublin at least ten times.

Following Nazca we traveled through the desert, not the rocky kind of the interior but the pure white sand desert of the coast, with almost no vegetation and strange little shacks of palm fronds with unguessable purpose. We arrived in Huacachina, an oasis of resorts and green outside of Ica, surrounded by massive dunes on all sides, and walked to the top of the biggest one and watched the sunset. It was an amazing experience, one of the most beautiful sunsets of my life, watching the shadows of the contours of the desert morph with the changing angle of the light as the sky overhead went through a spectrum of reds and oranges and blues. The wind covered us in sand as we watched the red fade from the sky.

I wish I had more time to write, but I've got stuff to do and places to go...and i'm coming home day after tomorrow. But the pictures speak for themselves.

Love you guys.