Bonus: At The Sore Thumb Dance

The first sunrise of the year was bright and clear, full of lucky yellows and reds climbing high above Cuzco. I didn't see the dawn - for the first time since Thursday - but Jeff did, inexplicably flying back to Lima at seven on the first, leaving Sarah and I to dawdle away the day looking for souvenirs and vegan lunches. Then came the night and, somehow, everything came together to make my trip.

It all started with Andrew Pastor, that transplanted Angeleno, suggesting we all go crosstown to some sort of concert; "one with dancing." I was suspicious, having avoided most gringo-y things, but without a better plan I trusted Andrew to lead us well. After a brief dinner, we headed to the outskirts of the city.

As we stepped out of the cab, I quickly realized this would be no Andean minstrel show: this was a serious locals-only event, and we weren't locals. Outside a high-walled concert ground, several thousand people milled about, pushing towards the door, hawking sodas and candy, and generally not moving much at all. On the other side of the wall, the top peaks of a great white tent could be seen, and through that tent and over that wall came the muffled and distorted sound of music: what kind of music, I couldn't say.

We didn't have tickets, and the line at the booth stretched around the block. Andrew suggested we scalp some tickets, which I wasn't initially thrilled about since I didn't want to pay that much money at the end of my trip. As it turned out, the scalper value of a ticket was still two times the face value...but that face value was only ten soles, so we did the deal, turned 180 degrees, and gave our ticket to the man at the door.

The venue was an open-air field, like a fairground, dominated by an enormous dancefloor beneath a tattered, greying white tent. A stage had a strange faux-Incan stone backdrop, a few laser lights, a struggling fog machine, and a blaring 'Cusquena' sign. But the real show was on the floor, with several thousand drunken Peruvians boogying down to the strange exotic sounds of huayno, the Andean pop that is both ubiquitous and incomprehensible.

I've never seen so many people, such a variety of people, so happy in one location. Whole families, grandparents, toddlers, were lifting their feet, arranged in loose circles, some around babies wrapped in blankets lying on the ground. The huayno beat is a galloping tinging rhythm of harps and drums, chanting and rechanting, a genre that is basically unheard outside the Andes, and thus exerts almost no cultural pressure on music around the world. Like much of Cuzco, huayno exists, to a certain degree, a world apart. If you can find me a London grime DJ spinning Anita Santivanez, color me impressed.

Anita herself was on stage, and the crowd was going wild. Men and women and children moved in the particular Andean dance for the huayno, a sort of manic shuffle between feet with a light bounce of the knees, girls holding both their hands out for boys to hold and sway. Thousands of people danced this way, boys spinning girls, girls spinning boys, whole masses of people swirling around each other and the runners holding Cusquena making their way through the crowd. Andrew, Andrew's Peruvian friend, Sarah, and I worked our way towards the center of the tent and started to dance.

At this point, I should mention that we were, without question or exaggeration, the only white people in the crowd. [Also, for the first time, I had a completely unobstructed view of a concert. Where's the Peruvian Paul McLaughlin?] There, standing in the center of the floor in two sweaters and coat, awkwardly shimmying, holding hands with a red-head, people looked at us like we were, well, the only white people in the room. I've never felt so out of place, but I felt completely welcomed, as everyone was too amazed by the spectacle - or too drunk - to care. Two girls even stole Andrew and I away for a few dances. "Otis, my man!"

Anita, one of two headliners in the daylong festival, wore a beautiful but bizarre dress, a sort of colonial Spanish outfit with every detail stretched into caricature. The skirt didn't just fall away from the body, or sit on some sort of hoopskirt, but formed a rigid shelf extending from her hips then down in a bell to her knees. This is, apparently, the costume of the huayno singer, and is meant to be especially flashy.

The backing band is a show unto itself, encompassing an unimaginable assortment of traditional and modern instruments: at least two Andean harps, one European harp, an electric bass guitar, a set of congas, a couple other percussionists, and a set of ultra-cheesy 80s drum synth pads. A couple guys just dance around stage, and there may have been superfluous girls in bikinis too. Huayno performance has a set pattern, with a male singer pumping up the crowd, egging the female singer on, shouting random words, etc. The song often ends in the female singer giving shout-outs to the various districts of whatever city she's in. The band, depending on its mood, then continues the song on indefinitely, jam-band style, so that nothing really ends or begins at all. Nevertheless, the crowd moved more furiously every time the song seemed to change, or applauded wildly when Anita called out their neighborhood.

And so it was. I was there, in that crowd of drunk Peruvians, dancing for hours upon hours, being looked at and looking back, stripped to a single shirt, thinking about the last four days and everything it brought and everything it took. Life can be a grind, a little machine that takes minutes and hours and crushes them into a fine sand that just, well, blows away. But sometimes, and not usually, life can be a something singularly wonderful.

To understand this fully, here's Sonia Morales (the other headliner) singing her heart out. Note the Lima district shout-outs towards the end.


Also, there's a Carl Sandburg poem I read once that expresses something similar:

Happiness (1916)
I asked the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell me what is happiness.
And I went to famous executives who boss the work of thousands of men.
They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though I was trying to fool with them
And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along the Desplaines river
And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their women and children and a keg of beer and an accordion.

End of the Year: Pt. 4 - Alone, Forgotten, and Out of Time

And as the last hour of the year crept across the clock face of the Cuzco Cathedral, the steady movement of the minute hand drove the crowd into a state of celebratory inhumanity, each tick unleashing waves of cheers and counter-cheers from the bundled masses in the church's shadow. Jeff had pushed his way into the closest market, and as he jockeyed for the last box of Gato Negro, Sarah and I watched the growing madness in the plaza; nearly ten thousand people jumbled and swayed, setting off firecrackers, throwing confetti, drinking, yelling, all at once but never at the same time. It was 11.20 when we broke open the wine and, dodging the endless taxis around the corner, slipped into the plaza.
Cuzco, despite being in a tropical summer, is still two miles high, and I wore a hat, a sweater and a jacket, but not yellow underwear. Andrew had explained to us that wearing yellow underwear, specifically panties, brings prosperity - at least in Cuzco. There are other traditions with less clear meanings: walking outside at midnight carrying a briefcase of fake money, lighting piles of garbage on fire, candlelit family conferences, etc. As of late, I'm still unsure what my green boxers will bring me.
Making slow, single-file progress through the crowd, we attempted to reach the fountain opposite the cathedral in the center of the plaza. What had been a largely empty park in the afternoon, filled with a few ambulantes and tired tourists, now pulsed with bodies packed too tightly, facing no particular direction, crowded around bottles and cans or waving across the plaza, each carrying massive fireworks of every size and volume. Holding each other's hand in the crowd, we tried to get to the center, only to be repulsed by immovable groups, or redirected by the waves of people turning away from a mis-thrown firecracker. Roman candles haphazardly flew through the air, over our heads, into the crowd, bursting and burning on the ground. It was like a party and a war zone had merged into one swirling, exploding, drunken mass and we were heading for the flickering heart of it.

At one point we reached the edge of a large circle of people, each tossing fireworks into their center; some would explode and rattle windows, some would just shoot flames or smoke or sparkle, others would hiss past people's legs. We turned to go around, towards the fountain, but I was stopped by a kindly old Andean woman, who just smiled and tossed firecrackers at my feet. We retreated back across the plaza and turned towards the cathedral. It was 11.59.
At the same time, somewhere in the north, Diego sat sixty seconds from glory on the beach, Alex counted down with a rediscovered twang, the cat pounced on a piece of paper in our empty Lima apartment, and my camera was stolen. Ten seconds to midnight, memories taken from me with a supple wrist.

I knew it happened. I saw who did it. I don't think I've ever been the victim of a crime before, except when someone took my coat at Smith and wandered into the Northampton night, and even then some woman found everything on her lawn the next day. My grief lasted until 2006 had burned its last second, for then the great hands of the cathedral hugged, and the Cuzco sky erupted in flame, a streaking, whizzing, bursting fire for 2007.
After the initial shocks had reverberated through the city, a police cruiser started making its way around one side of the plaza, directing great groups of people around its path. I thought the party was over, or at least being contained, but the masses began trailing the cruiser, soon forming a great swirl of humanity around the plaza, with people running in staggered lines, or linking arms to rapidly skip down the street. The police were acting as a pace car of sorts, and, having nothing better to do, we all joined in.

As we walked, fireworks rained down from balconies, and drunken Brits with yellow underwear on their heads darted in indecipherable circles. As we passed by the cathedral, where the more reasonable Cusquenos had gathered with their families, many sharply dressed men and women frowned at the spectacle before them, of the morose American sipping wine with a gringa and chino. They may have frowned, but I didn't mind. After all, it was 2007, and I had nothing left to lose.

End of the Year: Pt. 3 - In the Dense Shadow

As we head north, the valley closes around us, surrounding our train with dark cliffs streaked with jagged lines of rough, sloughing stone. Sarah is asleep, or half-asleep, in the seat next to me as we slowly wind our way up the Urubamba, past rows of corn, past unknown villages, past everything I've left behind in Cuzco on the last day of the year. For a third day we were up at dawn, this time to catch the train to Aguas Calientes, the gateway city to Machu Picchu and, despite Sarah's example, the first switchbacks leading out of town do little to calm my restless left foot, tap-tapping away in harmony with the quiet monotony of the clickety-clack.

The color palette in the Urubamba is limited but by no means muted: rich jungle hues of every shade of green, thin wispy whites and greys in the clouds, and the roiling browns rushing over the gravel in the river. A bright fog covers the tops of the mountains, extending over the entire valley, reaching down in little tentacles of mist wherever a small stream has carved a notch in the hillside. The high forest trees - great, thin trunks with barely perceptible cones - give way at a train's pace to the lush complicated shapes of the cloud-covered jungle. The walls are closer now (it's becoming darker) and nothing reflects in the forest.
The ridgeline, the river, the sloping canyon - these things give form to the forest, but they are only the outlines of a great green organism devoid of order. The jungle is an incomprehensible landscape, a complete quiet world living by hidden rules. It is a tangled mass of lines and swirls, hanging vines and colored curling leaves, purple-petaled budding blooms. Trunks of trees are interrupted by the branches of another, an intertwined conversation in damp green wood. And everywhere, life - living things, breathing, absorbing, eating, dying, reaching towards the sky, snaking across the ground, doing as Nature in all her providence provides. It all cannot be appreciated or understood, only accepted. No matter what you tell me, what books you buy, what sites you show me, there is nothing that will make sense of that place, nothing in this world, and maybe nothing in the next.
I fell asleep, I believe, but by eleven, we stepped off the train into a light drizzle, into Aguas Calientes.

The city, even more so than Cuzco, exists solely for tourists to eat, sleep, and shop in, so I braced for the worst. But the market stalls are orderly, the streets largely quiet, the hostels freshly painted. Spurious claims of "sabor andino" aside, there isn't much to Aguas Calientes except for the queues and desires of the tourists, and even these come and go with the trains. I pretended to be a student at the information booth - a minor coup - and bought us tickets to the park. Soon we were climbing the hillside, heading up the mountain, straight up the Hiram Bingham Highway.
Machu Picchu disappeared from the world five hundred years ago, retreating back into the mists, each new vine a piece in an endless procession against remembrance. The Spanish never found it, never bothered in fact, as the Incans had already retreated into the high jungle at Vitcos and Vilcabamba to wage their futile wars. In the meantime, the jungle, held back only so well as a force can be repelled, brought Machu Picchu under its eternal anonymity. And so it was, or so it wasn't.

That is, until a blue-blood Bingham followed rumors of wonderful things deeper still. In a light rain he climbed a desolate path through the forest, upwards, to the silent splendor of a lost city - one that had never been lost and never been a city. Hiram Bingham had found it - even if he didn't know what he had found. In typical fashion, a Yale professorship awaited his return.
A harder rain fell on me as I climbed the first steps past the entrance into Machu Picchu. The narrow path is filled with tourists: scruffy backpackers, pressed khaki Kansans, Japanese tours marching in lockstep with their guide, a pair of aimless hippies. It's a sad irony I suppose, that a place famous for being remote can be so accessible to so many people. But what reality can tourism replicate? Should Bingham's tropical solitude be preserved, a city out of time, or is it better to resurrect hundreds of Incan courtesans with poncho-clad Germans clicking away on their Nikons, here and forever? Something about the place, something fundamental to its existence and history is lost with every pair of hopeful eyes, each taking a little more from the landscape.
Machu Picchu's location and architecture, its very concept is impressive in every way possible. The idea that a large mass of people could put so much brute force into a place, a single stone and the way of life it represents, is as astounding and as troubling as it is impressive. Did an Andean peasant ever take a break? And if he did, as he stood there, staring over the edge of the trail leading to the ultimate project of a society on an edge, did he wonder why he bothered at all? But what are we pushing for? What is our collective labor doing if not constructing impermanent monuments to our own acquiescence? Our greatest works will some day be swallowed by a digital jungle, our mummies long since placed in a museum, our loves waiting to be misconstrued by another blue-blood Bingham in over his head. None of these questions are particularly compelling, but in the rain, at 8000 feet, surrounded by an ever-dwindling number of wet tourists, they'll have to do.

By the late afternoon, the rain cleared just enough to let a downpour in. The quiet vistas of mountains and ruins gave way to a melancholy smear of grey and green, my dollar rain jacket started to fail, and Sarah and I left the park.
Three hours of train. Three hours of passing trees, briefly stated villages, failing light. We dipped down from the cloud forest to the humid land below, then onward through dry forest, sparse desert with shrubs like little explosions, straight rows of sweet corn. At dusk most of the tourist got off at some suburb to take the four sol buses back into town. I stayed on, and as the train went up and back through the darkness above Cuzco, past New Year's fires lit too early, I opened the window and just leaned out of it, the toasted blues of early night leading me back to Cuzco, back to everything I left behind on the last day of the year.

End of the Year: Pt. 2 - Up the Urubamba

Dawn, again, in Cuzco. Up at five am, out by six, Sarah, Andrew, and I set out on the grand tour of all the major Incan sites outside of town, up the Sacred Valley, almost all the way to Macchu Picchu. In the ensuing twelve hours, I saw so many rocks, so precisely stacked, so artfully engineered, it is almost inconceivable. Grabbing my rain slicker and my camera, we stumbled out the door.

Our tour guide was a very pleasant woman named Katie (?) who was the cousin of Andrew's roommate Jose. Her driver - and I didn't learn this until much later - was also Jose's cousin, but that he had never met Katie. [Such are the demographics of the Andes.] A simple, quiet man, he napped in his taxi while we walked around.

We were up early enough to arrive at Sacsaywaman before the control agents did, so we got in for free. In many ways, Sacsaywaman (go ahead, pronounce it like a gringo: "sexy woman") is just as impressive as anything else the Incans built; the stones here are larger, expertly joined, and perfectly finished. The imposing temple fortress of the city of Cuzco, Sacsaywaman towers over the valley as the 'head' on Cuzco's puma cityplan. As was explained to me repeatedly, the Incas had symbols for their three worlds: the condor (for the world of the gods) the puma (for the earth where we live) and the serpent (for the underworld of the soul.) Cuzco, as the center of the world, was designed - literally - to resemble a puma. To be fair, Modernism's response, on the other side of the continent, was to shape Brasilia like a jet airplane.
From the top of the mountain, Cuzco looks lost in time. No building is more than four stories, billboards are discouraged, and all foreign chains have been banned. Every roof shares a ubiquitous red tile - if they have a proper roof at all - and a dirtying attempt at whitewash. As much as I dislike the forces of capitalistic change, of creative destruction, there is something melancholy in a stagnant landscape, in a living museum that's already dead.

{Interesting side note about preservation: Sacsaywaman has a huge Incan festival in late June featuring thousands of dancers and such dancing and such. All the gringos pay big money to sit on the main field, while Peruvians used to be able to picnic on the temples themselves, looking down on the festivities. About five years ago, after years of Peruvians leaving all sorts of Coca-Cola bottles and sandwich wrappers, the park got fed up with cleaning up all the litter, and banned everyone from the temples. Such a globalist irony: tourists enraptured with native ritual, while actual natives are banned for their tourist behavior. Take that, Thomas Friedman!}

Heading up the mountains, we stopped at a holy fountain of Tambomachay. Pretty much everything in Incan architecture is made up of twos and threes. The dualities of the universe are, in order, man/woman, black/white, and convex/concave. Anything in three means the condor/puma/serpent are coming for you. Anyway, girls: if you drink the water you'll have twins. One will probably be convex.
After a little trip around a bend, we came upon the vast and lush Sacred Valley, a fraying green checkered tie around the otherwise rock-strewn Andes. A huge variety of corns and potatoes grow in the shadow of the valley, varying plot to plot, up the hillside, onward past ruins, to the edge of the jungle itself. We stopped at a curve in the mountain road; on the other side of the valley, dozens of abandoned Incan terraces cling to the cliffside, disused for whatever reason, certainly not by law.

We descended the mountain to reach the village of Pisac, the local market town, before venturing up the other side to the archeological park, also known as Pisac, home to more Incan cleverness. We hiked around, across parts of the Inca Trail, over some rocks, around some terraces, up a hill, down a hill, past a throne, and generally without direction. It was bright and clear, and I was carrying my rain jacket. Pisac is very impressive, like a miniature version of Machu Picchu, but by the time we left the tourists had started arriving. Many of them (Italians mostly, though with a blonde in Viking braids) were not happy hiking up the hill. I wasn't happy, Andrew wasn't happy and Sarah dragged behind us all. We roused our driver and headed back to Pisac.

I should mention a typical exchange in the Pisac market:
Obvious tourist to a Peruvian giving her a necklace and change: Gracias, es muy bonita.....hey, wait, I gave you a hundred! Hey!
We just kept walking. Typical.
After a trucha menu and an afternoon rainstorm, we were on the move again, up the valley to Ollantaytambo, high water mark of the Conquista. Only reachable by hundreds of stairs, Ollantaytambo is an imposing mountain fortress with clear views all across the valley; not surprisingly, it was taken without a fight. Manco Inca had retreated from the Sacred Valley to Vilcabamba in the jungle to wage his futile guerrilla war, leaving Ollantaytambo for Pizarro and his armies. Pizarro, content enough with his success, never pursued past Ollanataytambo leaving the other sites to get covered by the jungle. But more on the Indiana Jones stuff later.
If Machu Picchu is a condor, and Cuzco is a puma, then Ollantaytambo is a llama, complete with nuzzling baby llama, set onto the mountainside. The site overlooks a sacred mountain, so sacred the Incas dragged two-ton stones across the valley to construct the buildings, or at least half-complete them. On our way out of town, Andrew and I debated how much it would cost to buy every building in the village.
As the sun began to set we arrived in Chinchero, a middle-of-nowhere town perched on the far side of the mountains at the beginning of the great high desert plains. Though very small, the city boasts an unbelievable church and altar, even as opulent churches and altars go. The entire wood roof of the building, as well as the supporting columns, are covered in intricate Arabesque flowers and vines, painted in natural dyes in the 1600s. The altar, which protects one of four Black Jesus relics in Peru, is all glittering with silver and gold, done in the style of the Cuzco school, the blend of indigenous and European art from the Peruvian Andes of the 17th Century. (No cameras allowed.)

We also encountered our favorite ambulante, a sweet little girl hawking hats:

Girl: Miss, Miss, hats one sol!
Sarah: One sol! Really!
Girl: Yes...one sol...noooo, and four more.
Sarah: No gracias.

Three hours later, Andrew, Sarah, and I meet up with Jeff at a Bolivian empenada stand in el centro. They are delicious, better than those of other South American nations, because the empenada is filled with such juiciness, it just runs down your chin. I fall asleep almost immediately, preparing myself for another 5am wakeup call. Macchu Picchu awaits, on the last day of the year.
(They were singing. Look at me, I'm a Let's Go photographer.)

End of the Year: Pt. 1 - Cuzco, Puma City

Another 5am taxi to the airport. The drive to the airport alternates between light and dark, speed-bump side streets and neon boulevards, toll booths and the shining teeth of incandescent billboards; nothing in Lima is regularized. The airport wait and the flight were thankfully short. By 7am, we were walking out into the mountain morning.

Andrew Pastor (SM 05) met us at the airport. The man who used to live across the hall from me has been living the dream in Cuzco on Uncle Sam's dime for the last month, having spent his time since August toiling in a village three hours outside of town. A much more adventurous man than I, and not just for eating the dubiously priced lunch menus. Weeks of potatoes and chicha will make a man of anyone, even the only gay Jew in all of Peru.

A little about Cuzco: located deep in the Andes at almost 10,000 feet, Cuzco is the oldest continually occupied city in the Americas, stretching back several thousand years before Christ, (the love/hate symbol of the city's destruction.) It's a strange place, nestled between steep mountains and jagged valleys, but by the mid-1400, Cuzco was the center of the Andean world, the capital of the vast Inkan Empire, and home to several hundred thousand people. Of course, then came the conquistadores conquistadoring across the landscape, imperial buildings were dismantled to make churches, and Lima replaced Cuzco as the capital of the new Viceroyalty of Peru. A bunch of history happened after that, whatever.
But then, they came. First the adventurous, then the wealthy, and finally anyone with enough time and money to find their way south. Cuzco depends on tourism for an unbelievable amount of its economy; one woman said 90% of all jobs in the city are directly or indirectly related to the tourist trade since the small industrial sector collapsed. Hell, even Cusquena beer is made in Arequipa. While a boon to the population in general, tourism brings mixed blessings, as it attracts ambulantes, thieves, and everyone else trying to pry another dollar from your hand. More on this later.
I remember being especially exhausted from being up so early in so high a place. Despite a short jaunt to the main square, I was content to nap for much of the day in Andrew's cold bedroom. Ah, but dinner, glorious dinner! Though a generally mediocre meal, I finally broke through the last barrier to my Peruvian heritage - I ate cuy al horno. And alpaca. In the same meal. Alpaca was pretty delicious, very steak like; I could taste the cuteness. Guinea pig is a whole different experience. First, you're not eating an abstract animal; you're literally eating a small beastie and you know it. Because cuy is a complete guinea pig cut lengthwise, boiled, and roasted in an oven, many details remain: eyes, teeth, a nub of a tail, paws. You can even see the defiant sneer on its little guinea pig face. And, to be honest, it wasn't very good. Maybe I just got a dud, but the meat is a little greasy, very tender, and difficult to obtain.
More important than anything, I added another two meats to my life's rich pageant. No bets on what will be next, but penguins, watch your back.

A New Home for the Holidays

After returning from Buenos Aires and the sun-drenched pampas, I needed to slow down my personal pace, reflect on five months in Peru, and enjoy the simple pleasure of living in a hand-built home built by my own hand. By then it was mid-December, and Christmas was about to come to Lima.

Christmastime in Lima: what a joy! The radio stations played no carols, I didn't have to look at cartons of eggnog, and the ambulantes on the street switched from cigarettes to wrapping paper. Even the weather cooperated, breaking the last vestiges of spring in a scorching summer. In the meantime, a new plan came together: a year-end trip to Machu Picchu, with the Plaza de Armas in Cuzco my Times Square. Two weeks on vacation, two weeks back preparing for another. December proved to be a disjointed month, split by trips to and from the airport.

Suddenly, the organized little world we have in Lima collapsed. Alex White went home to Atlanta by way of Los Angeles to see his family and have a beer; thousands of gallons of jet fuel to get that first, hoppy drop. In his place, Argenta Price (MC 06) flew to Peru to renew her Argentinian visa. Yes, yes, Argenta is in Argentina. We talked about Reno, Nevada.

Christmas Eve, all of us tucked in our shirts and set off to the other side of Miraflores to Diego's grandmother's house for dinner. (Apparently, grandparents' decor has an international standard.) The Rotaldes are a hilarious bunch, his father making jokes in English, his mother passing me rice, his younger sister acting like a teenager should, and everywhere, more food. First came the turkey, great gobbling beast. I gobbled him, then eyed the yams. At about ten, after I saw evidence of the Rotalde's fine naval tradition, we set off across the town to Christmas dinner number two.

More turkey and rice, and the Garrido Lecca's did their best to be inviting. And then, midnight! Fireworks erupted across the city, the small square of linen came off the baby Jesus, and the entire family tore through various packaging. Diego's grandmother even gave Jeff and me woolly hats, probably just to keep us busy. All the better though; I needed a hat.

The next day, because a tall Nevadan isn't nearly enough to replace Alexander T. White, my old friend Sarah Boughey arrived, bringing good tidings, my copy of A Confederacy of Dunces, and a Nutrageous. Oh, the simple joys.

After a few days of assorted Lima nonsense, with the year winding down, Jeff, Sarah, and I woke up early and flew to Cuzco, city of the Inkas.