off again

on the other side

Oxapampa is a town in the part of Amazonia which is most easily accessible from Lima, so it's a vacay spot for Peruvians but not really international visitors. It's kind of a cutesy tourist town, but not that cutesy. Its big claim to fame is the wooden houses which are built (sort of) northern european style, here because at the end of the 19th century this was a settlement of German immigrants to Peru, brought in as part of a big racist plan to improve the country. There are still German Peruvians living here, but it seems like more of a kitschy thing now - postcards of folk dancers in leiderhosen and shit like that. The idea is like a little alpine village in the rainforest. 

 

The official story is that the Germans came in and got along great with the Amuesha who were the indigenous people here. Yeah...maybe. There's an Amuesha tourist center place outside of town, but I didn't go because I thought it was going to be a super uncomfortable ethnic performance thing which gives me the fucking creeps. 

    

The best thing about these wooden houses is the empty frame upper stories, like they were half hollowed out, or half-built and abandoned. They're actually made that way on purpose, of course, as a way to deal with the serious heat this place gets in the summer. But to me it looked like they were disappearing from the inside out, like a ghost story, which I love. And through the empty upper stories you can see the big green mountains all around fade into the mist.

     

Other parts of town are maybe less picturesque, but also amazing, boardwalks through this amazing colorful vegetation. After the mountains it seems unreal how alive everything is here - plants growing up through everything and animals of all kinds rooming around in the streets and yards and buildings. A lot of the plants look seriously invented by Dr. Seuss.

     

 

Apparently it is considered weird to take pictures of outhouses. I don't know why.

Up in the high places you see a lot of dogs, but no cats. My dad said they can't reproduce at those altitudes. It was nice to see cats again. In particular, this skinny little kitten became our new best friend and shared a late-night coffee with us (well actually he had milk) at a little family cafe while the teenage daughters working there told us all about the area attractions. 

Very sadly we didn't have time to go see the huge national park near here - there's never enough time! If I actually went back to all of the places I've traveled and want to go back to, it would take more than my life. But Oxapampa was great, really, chill and little and interesting - I spent a lot of the day just walking around by myself and enjoying being alone and taking pictures and being in a small place and not being stared at.

   

At this juice stand we had some delicious drinks (I am now obsessed with tropical fruit juice and depressed at the prospect of going back to wisconsin and not having any anymore ever again, sob. Hey all of you foodie/agricultural people, why haven't you figured out how to grow pineapples in Dane County yet? You're all fired.) The juice lady thought it was the most hilarious thing in the world that my dad speaks Quechua so they had a long conversation and she got her laughs.

At night there was a big celebration of the holiday in the main square with lots of fun spiny glowy toys and kids having fun with them. 

UPDATE FROM MADISON

I was having my own celebration that night, because I managed to purchase the most amazing present in all of history in a little tchachke store off the square. It is a shiny plastic ship clock lamp with a genius work of great literature written on the box in bad translation from chinese. I saw this and had to have it despite the difficulty in transportation. I carried this ship lamp clock from Oxapampa, over the Andes, back to Lima, and then on planes and buses back to Wisconsin - and I do mean carried - I was afraid it would break if I put it in checked luggage. It is now displayed in a place of honor in my mom's living room were you may see it TO THIS DAY.

  

3600 meters up, 3700 meters down

So I just realized that what I should really do is make a map of the places I´m going on this trip because no one has any idea where they are. (This might seem obvious but apparently it isn´t because it took me a week to think of it.) I will try to do this to post soon.

 

The basic idea, though, is that Lima is in central Peru on the Pacific coast. First we traveled north and east to get into the Andes (that was La Union and Huanuco Pampa), then down into a central valley in the middle of the Andes (Huanuco and Tomayquichua), then yesterday, back up the inner ridge of the mountains to Cerro de Pasco and then over the other side down to Amazonia (La Merced and Oxapampa.) Tomorrow we´re going back West over the mountains again to Lima.

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So yesterday morning we left Huanuco and took the scenic backwoods route to Cerro de Pasco because both paved roads were closed for construction. Cerro de Pasco is the highest city of its size on Earth at around 4500 meters above sea level, and is close by to the highest documented human habitation anywhere on the planet.

At that altitude, nothing grows, and I mean literally nothing. There are no pigeons or weeds or flowers or bugs. The only living things are humans and dogs and pigs who eat trash. The reason for this horrible place´s existence is mining – way up on the tops of mountains is where minerals can be mined, and this is a major economic center in Peru. Everything is built around this gigantic hole in the ground which is the mine. All of the houses are basically rectangular piles of unpainted cement blocks. The city has a little plaza dedicated to mining, with shelters in the form of mining helmets, a heroic statue of a miner, and the saddest brown skinny tree I´ve ever seen, on a platform, in a cage.

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All of the pictures I´m putting up of Cerro de Pasco were taken by my dad, because I was doing this the whole time we were there:

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(Altitude sickness – you only get about 50% as much air up there as usual and it made me woozy and dizzy and sick.)

The main form of “decoration” in Cerro is the same thing that´s painted on every other available vertical surface everywhere we´ve been so far – political ads for candidates in the upcoming elections. This is a huge presence all over, since voting is mandatory in Peru and there are elections from very local up through national levels. I am truly impressed by the thoroughness of the army of sign painters who put these up on just about every single building or wall in even the most remote places.

 

After we left Cerro de Pasco we drove over some very high grazing land, where I finally saw some Alpacas. This is very good because up until now on this entire trip I had not seen a single llama or alpaca and I was really afraid I wasn´t going to get my passport stamp and they´d never let me leave the country, so whew.

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Then we started driving steeply down, through high mountain vegetation, then mountain forests, then semi-tropical forest and then jungle. The whole ecology seemed to change completely about every 5 minutes. During this stretch, we literally went 3700 meters down in a matter of hours – from 4500 meters above sea level to 800. Not just the species & variety of plants were different, but also the whole attitude of them. Up in the high places there´s only a kind of grass which grows in small stiff vertical tufts feet apart from each other, and then as you go down towards sea level the plants start tangling and draping and hanging all over each other. The flowers even hang down instead of facing up.

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During this whole car trip we were mostly on dirt roads with the windows open, and between the wind and the dust, something amazingly terrible happened to my hair. By mid afternoon what was on my head was a matted clump of 75% dust and 25% hair. It was so disgusting. The other major problem was that as ever on this trip we were being stalked by these evil road constructors in bright orange vests, who were determined to close every single road in the country at the same time, as far as I could tell.

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 Around the city of La Merced, the road flattens out and it starts to really just feel like jungle. Even in the midafternoon it was a little spooky and dark going through these long pitch black pure rock tunnels and then back out into thick vegetation. There are a million fruit stands along the highway and I took pictures of I think all of them (apparently I have an uncontrollable impulse to hit the shutter button every time I see some oranges.)

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My dad said La Merced is the ugliest, but I thought it was kind of amazing and beautiful in a strange way. It looks like the jungle and the city are eating each other. 

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In La Merced we went to this bus-slash-taxi terminal to find some transportation a little farther up the road north to the smaller city of Oxapampa, where we met a German Peruvian lady (this is an area where tons of Germans settled) who took charge of us and put us in a colectivo taxi and then found us a place to stay, at the rooming house run by this lady Gladys. Basically it´s just a family house where they have people stay in extra bedrooms and an adorable little girl in pajamas serves you breakfast while Dora the Explorer plays in the background.

 

On the road to Oxapampa it got dark really fast, and it started to feel kind of like a ghost jungle with all of the plants crowding near the road white from being covered in road dust. It felt like we were winding back and forth through this for hours. About halfway there the driver pulled over in a roadside town and three women came to each car window and sold everyone in the car except for me chicken tamales for kind of a fast food drive thru dinner. (It was a little bit like the bars in Chicago except for instead of hunting for the elusive tamale guy, you are surrounded by tamale ladies instead.)

 

Then around 8 pm we finally pulled into Oxapampa, in the pitch black with the radio playing a spanish versión of Battle Hymn of the Republic. I took a long cold shower at Gladys´s and collapsed into bed. It was a hell of a long (but always interesting) day. I think when I get back home I will never ride in a car or bus again. Also, after about 12 hours of jolting over rocks up and down mountains, I will never again take I-90 for granted….

 

Today we´re hanging around Oxapampa and then back to Lima tomorrow. Not sure when my next internet access will be but I´ll post again as soon as I can.

One Day in Huanuco

[I actually wrote this entry on Sunday night but then wasn´t able to post because Huanuco was having a blackout which interrupted internet access the rest of the time we were there. I´m in an internet cafe in Oxapampa now - more on all of that in the next post.]

So my dad read through the blog about yesterday and liked it except for the tragic omission of, in his opinion, the most important event of the day: the drama of the pants. I promised that I was just saving this for today's blog, so here goes.

 

The Pants

 

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As previously mentioned, yesterday we walked through several miles of fresh hot liquid tar, and we did not escape unscathed. Both of our shoes got a good coating, but more problematically, my dad's pants got tar all over the hem. Since these were the only pants he brought, early this morning I had to run them down to the front desk and beg for speedy laundry service. Meanwhile, my dad was stuck in the room and not able to go anywhere. First they told me that the laundry could be done by later this afternoon, then I got them down to noon, then 11 am, and finally we agreed on "immediately."

 

At the time this seemed like a major problem because one of the tasks he had to do today was figure out how the hell we were going to get to wherever we're going tomorrow, and since this has to be done in person, it didn't seem like this was the kind of errand that could be easily done in underwear. However it turned out that by the time the staff brought the laundry up to the room, he was enjoying himself very well reading his book and thinking and not having to/being able to go anywhere or do anything else. Now he says that it was so relaxing that instead of being a monotheist he's going to be a monopantsist from now on.  

 

If you're going to be a monopantsist this is probably as good a place to do it as anywhere. The hotel we're staying in is super nice, built in the 50's as part of a government effort to make Peru a tourist destination by building fancy chandelier-filled hotels in all of the major cities. The staff are also extremely nice even though I am constantly harrassing them with my bizarre habits of not speaking Spanish and not eating meat.

 

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It's right on the main plaza, which is currently covered in red & white because of the national patriotic holiday coming up on Wednesday. Last night there was an extremely loud political rally there but it's all calm today.

 

 

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So after everybody had clothes on again, this afternoon we took a small side trip to Tomayquichua, a town about half an hour outside of Huanuco. Tomayquichua's claim to fame is that it is the birthplace of la Perricholi, who is a national heroine, sort of, for being the famous girlfriend of the last viceroy of Peru. They met when she was an 18 year old actress and he was a nasty old man, and lived together for 15 years before he went back to Spain.

 

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We visited the house where she grew up, which is basically two rooms and a beautiful view. In the bedroom is one of the three remaining objects which actually belonged to la Perricholi: this armoire with a very distorted mirror.

 

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In ye olde kitchenette is object number two: the tea kettle.

 

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And in the yard number three: the wheels on this carriage. 

 

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La Perricholi is actually a nasty nickname which the haters in Lima gave her, but now it's been reclaimed and the town hall of Tomayquichua is decorated as a fake 19th century mansion dedicated to her with a big fiberglass statue in front.

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 The other famous lady of Tomayquichua is Jesus's mom who has a shrine there. It was built by a local priest who started an orphanage for children whose parents were killed in the war with Shining Path twenty years ago, and is now kept up & funded by those orphans as adults so is kind of a memorial for all of the people who were killed in those years.

 Because of the lighting it was impossible to take pictures of the mural along the wall, but it illustrated the good kind of happiness which gets you to heaven (reading, hanging out with your happy family, playing soccer, wearing modest clothes, praying) andthe bad kind of happiness that gets you to hell (drinking, having sex, dancing in a dress that doesn't cover your legs, stabbing people, and shooting people.) So now you know.

 After that we went back to Huanuco and walked along the river a bit. This whole valley is really green and beautiful, with dramatic mountains all around. The view is especially good outside of the city, but in town too.Tomorrow morning the plan is to find a ride south and then east, to go through more high mountains and mining country and get to the edge of Amazonia tomorrow night - maybe as far as La Merced or Oxapampa, or maybe only to La Oroya or maybe Huancayo, depending on the transport situation. The area we're aiming for is actually a coffee growing region so I have high hopes for that, but I guess we'll see what happens...*

 

*Note: in order to break up all of my usual bitching about not being able to get vegetarian food while traveling, I've decided to focus on bitching about not getting real coffee instead for a while. You know, for variety. 

old cities & new roads

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Morning in La Union - and the tragic discovery that everyone here gets up at 5 am but there is no coffee in this entire town except for truly disgusting instant. SOB. If I ever come again I will know to bring some.

So then it was up to Huanuco Pampa, the best preserved Inca city, and also a totally unknown tourist destination. We were the only people there except the crew working on protecting & conserving some of the structures, one of whom gave us a tour of the place.

The black bird with white legs and a red beak is a kind of hawk which doesn't fly up high but stays along the ground looking for plowed areas of ground to dig worms out of, so they tend to hang out where farmers are.

The carved stone is a kind of logo of a cat with a curved tail, all over the buildings here. 

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Huanuco Viejo is a city that was built by the Incas and never really inhabited during other times, so it shows kind of the pure idea of an Inca city. Some of the buildings were burned, others had stones taken off site to be reused by later builders, but many of the structures are preserved pretty completely. During its time this was a major city, with tens of thousands of residents and kind of a gated community for nobles only. Off in the distance you can see the stone road which passes through here and goes all the way across the empire.

The reason this is all still here is that unlike other Inca cities, when the Spanish got here, they didn't like it at all and left to start a new Huanuco at a lower altitude instead of occupying & rebuilding. But it was actually super nice up there - a high, flat plane with sun and breeze and tons of animals grazing everywhere.
 

After this we were planning to get a ride straight to the modern city of Huanuco, which is supposedly three hours away. (It's actually very close if you just look at a map, but everything takes 10 times as long when you have to use these super windey one-lane roads up and down the sides of mountains.) Unfortunately, we encountered a problem at the town of Chavinillo: about a three-mile stretch of road was being repaved, and no cars could pass until they finished, which would be hours and hours. And of course there's no alternate route or possible way around. So a line of cars and buses were just parked on either side of the construction, everyone sitting by the side of the road or edge of the cliff and hanging out.

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While wandering through Chavinillo looking for some food, we ran into a miner who said he was stuck at the other end, but wanted to turn around and go back to Huanuco if we wanted a ride with him. This seemed like a better idea than waiting til whenever this road crew decided to be done, so we went back to the car and started hauling luggage three miles up the side of a mountain over freshly-tarred and still half-liquid road. It was very hot. I got a ridiculous sunburn.

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When we finally reached the other line of cars on the opposite end of the roadwork, the guy we had talked to before was gone, but another guy said he'd make a U turn and drive us & other passengers to Huanuco.So that's how we spend the rest of the afternoon squished in a small car with seven people, all of their luggage, and a dog, winding our way down into a valley to Huanuco. At one point the driver actually wanted to add an eighth person but fortunately this was vetoed.

All of this road construction is part of major improvements that Peru is making in infrastructure - really recently this was all dirt roads, now there are guard rails on the most dangerous turns and seatbelts on buses and everything. However, with a driver who likes to take curves fast and then slam on the brakes at the last minute, it is still terrifying.

Huanuco is a real city with hot showers and coffee and internet, thank god. So that's the update up through yesterday - more to come tonight!

Lima to La Union

I finally have internet again and there's so much to cover from the last two days, I'm going to split it into separate posts. First up: Friday.

We got up bright and early to catch a bus to La Union, a town in the Andes which is the nearest place to the archaeological site Huanuco Pampa or Huanuco Viejo. The bus ride was 13.5 hours long, with one half hour stop for lunch. So I had a lot of time to look out the window and play with my camera. Like...a lot of time.

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A funny thing about Lima architecture is that tons of buildings are completely covered in bathroom tiles because this makes them easy to clean.

It was interesting to get the bus-window view of different parts of the city, from 19th century art palace to regular working class neighborhood to scary slums. The bus started in central Lima and over the course of many hours drove all the way out through the endless sprawl of newer neighborhoods and edge cities and can't-even-really-call-them-cities-because-there-are-no-actual-buildings-but-people-live-there places.

It's just unbelievable how far this goes on and on and on. All of these neighborhoods started as crowds of country people just came and squatted on tiny plots of empty land, then started building little houses made basically of plywood, then more solid & larger structures until it resembled a real neighborhood and the government started actually paving roads and dealing with it as a part of Lima.
 

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All along the highway for miles and miles there are these businesses which sell building supplies - wood and woven mats and prefab walls for cheap which people use to make these houses. Because it never rains in Lima, the construction can be extremely flimsy and still work OK. So the city gets bigger and bigger and bigger, creeping up the sides of the mountains...

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After we finally left the Lima metro area, the bus went up the coast for a few hours - beautiful empty cliffs and beaches and the sea, with lines of fishing birds and tiny boats of fishing humans floating near the coast every once in a while. It's all desert except for places where a river runs from the mountains down to the sea, creating a little triangular valley oasis where everything is green & growing.

Around one of these areas the bus made a right and started heading to, and then up, the Andes. This is where we stopped for lunch, at a huge round restaurant with a woven roof and very tasty (although not very vegetarian-friendly) food. The place was really peaceful and beautiful, wide open and cool and breezy and flat but surrounded by mountains.

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The only stressful part of this lunch stop was my attempt to go to the bathroom - there was a huge crowd of women waiting and even when I got up to the front I kept getting shoved out of the way by old ladies who pushed their way into the stall while there was still someone else in it. Eeek.

Also, at this point I realized I had been on the bus for 6.5 hours and had traveled, according to the map of central Peru, one inch. Very demoralizing. Part of the reason that it all took so long is that the bus line wasn't just a passenger business but also carried freight for delivery, so every so often we'd pull over at some empty stretch of highway in the middle of nowhere to drop of a package to some guy waiting there by the side of the road.

After that the bus started climbing up the mountains, first through a green valley of farms, then up through sparser scrubby small mountains, then way up and winding through the empty high elevations. We some beautiful glimpses of the big snowcaps, like Yerupaja, the second-biggest mountain in Peru.

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Then of course it got dark, and the bus was lurching along the sides of mountains, and I started remembering why I hate riding buses (motion sickness.) At one point the bus driver misunderestimated the width of the road and smashed the side of the bus right into the corner of a drugstore sign, breaking a window right over the heads of two passengers.

Finally, in the middle of the night, we pulled into La Union - the last stop - and got off onto unsteady feet. Then came the fun game of dragging our luggage through the town where no one was awake and nothing was open, to bang on the doors of hostals trying to get someone to let us in. Fortunately the nice ex-cop guy at Hostal Picaflor got out of bed to answer the door and give us rooms, though there was no hot water to be had. I slept like a rock.

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purple fish

This morning: visited the archaeological museum to look at lots of ceramics and some other stuff, along with hordes of school kids in uniform. Because my dad knows a curator at the museum, we even got in to see the new Amazonia exhibit which was in the last stages of installation before opening tonight.

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In addition to these featherwork bags, the new exhibit also has big dioramas and tiny shrunken heads.

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The kids apparently had some assignment to make these motivational peru-maps-on-popsicle-sticks and give them out to strangers, because we amassed a small collection:

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In back of the museum exhibits is a courtyard where the staff offices are, as well as the rather strange tomb of the founder of the museum.

Then lunch with more old family friends, Rabbi Bronstein and his family.

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Part of lunch was this amazing stripy fish dish, followed by three other kinds of fish, all of which were delicious:

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In the afternoon I did some shopping and logistical stuff and repacking to get ready to leave Lima tomorrow. We're getting on a bus in the morning and hopefully ending up at La Union before too late at night, where we'll be staying before going to see the Huanuco Pampa archaeological site the next day. If all goes according to plan. And now I think I need to get some sleep before an early start tomorrow - hopefully I will have internet access in La Union to post again, if not...I will when I can!

going back

I spent Monday in a haze of panic saying goodbye to relatives and running around Madison trying to check everything on my list off before departure. It was probably some of the speediest & most ridiculous shopping I've ever done in my life - at one point I ran into Fontana, told the salesman I was leaving for the Andes in two hours and needed a backpack, then grabbed the first one he showed me and said "OK GREAT FINE I'M BUYING IT" before he had a chance to get the first sentence of his shpiel out. (He was extremely startled.)

Before I left, the two major feelings I had about the trip were stress and fear. This is normal for me before traveling, though exacerbated by crazy circumstances and my lack of time for preparation. I was also nervous for more complicated reasons about going to Peru, specifically. Because I lived in Lima as a little kid, but had not been back in more than 15 years, it has always been a place I remember with extreme vividness in a childish way, very colorful and magical, and in my memories it's difficult to separate out fact from imagination. There is a big piece of me that is afraid of seeing these places again as an adult and writing over those memories.

I didn't start to actually get excited until we were on the way to Chicago, when I started thinking about Peruvian fruit, trees, weather, and smells - the physical & aesthetic things which seemed both exciting and nostalgic.

I have a particular memory of a moment here, almost exactly 20 years ago, when as a little girl I was trying to imagine how I would later remember my time in Peru as an adult. Since I was too young to have any memories more than a few years old, I didn't have any experience then to know how really old memories work. I wondered if I would remember every minute of my life here, or if I wouldn't remember that I was ever here at all. Coming back 20 years later is strange in that it seems almost like a direct response to that question.

Anyway, back to the trip. We were flying on Spirit airlines, which had very cheap tickets. It was totally fine and easy, but these guys were not joking about being a no-frills airline. A list of things that the Spirit gates did not have:

- chairs or any other furniture
- monitors with flight information, or actually any information posted anywhere
- staff

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excellent, without all those chairs in the way there's even more room for milling around!

We arrived in Lima late last night and on the cab ride to the hotel passed right by the place where the house we used to live in stood before it was torn down. I recognized the place even though it looked completely different; at the same moment I also suddenly felt really sick to my stomach, which was either FEELINGS or the natural result of a bumpy cab ride, I'm not sure.

This morning I had breakfast in the hotel courtyard where there is free food, free coffee and free wifi, so in other words is paradise.

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After that dad and I wandered around Miraflores (the neighborhood where the hotel is, and also my old neighborhood) doing errands & poking around.

We visited the synagogue, which is basically a secret concrete bunker with intense security, but very nice people inside, and also a wall of important jews, some of whom are bright green.

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Another important landmark: this shop with amazing illustrations of the power of shoe repair.

After that we had lunch with some friends, Martin and Liduvina, in a highrise apartment with paragliders swinging by right outside the window, but then had to run out of there quickly in order to make an appointment to visit the Museo Amano, which is a small private textile and ceramic museum with amazing old stuff which you are not allowed to take pictures of. But extremely interesting and worthwhile nonetheless.

Then more coffee and lucuma pastries.

Then a walk along the Pacific Ocean as the sun set. This mall is all new and built into the cliff so that from the street, it doesn't interrupt the view of the sea.

It seems bizarre that I've only been here less than 24 hours now. It feels like weeks already.

Upcoming attractions on this blog: more Lima, then a trip up in the mountains to see archaeological sites that no one's ever heard of and horrible mining towns that no one wants to hear of, and then the edge of Amazonia, and then back to Lima.

in Lima

Just a quick post to say that I have arrived with my dad in Lima, after a long but uneventful day of travel, gotten some sleep, and am now having a quick cup of coffee before we head out to do a bunch of errands and visit friends today. More interesting updates and photos to come tonight!