Inkaland Trailer

A first attempt:

http://www.vimeo.com/343066

mucho gusto, peru

Arequipa, Barranco and then NYC

Arequipa rocked, the highlight of the trip for sure. It was a real city, without a culture of people trying to cater to outsiders, even though there were endless tour companies offering trips to Colca Canyon, the deepest canyon in the world, and the two volcanoes, Misti and Chachani. We got there Monday morning at 1am and on the cab ride from the bus station felt the energy of the city, people outside, bars and discos rolling, couples making out. Tuesday we went to the old nunnery, Santa Catalina, about 400 years old, a small city in itself, lots of beautiful narrow brightly painted streets and open air courtyards and quarters. We then saw the famous ice princess mummy, Juanita, who has her own museum - she was found about ten years ago after a volcano melted some ice on top of a 6500 meter mountain, perfectly preserved, and the museum was dedicated to the sacrificial act during which she was killed and buried and the many artifacts that were found with her. Yeah we saw her - she was small and brown and very dried out - pretty eerie.

Tuesday afternoon there was the parade for the anniversary of the town, and then the all night festivities - I've never seen anything like that, every citizen of the town on the streets, in the plaza de armas and all around it, until about 3 or 4 am, and a huge number of them until 7 or so. All were friends, lots of sharing bottles in the street, straight up citywide revelry all night long.

The earthquake wasn't cause for any real anxiety in Arequipa, but we of course realized it was much bigger on the coast, and had our families and friends asking about our safety the next couple days. I went on a two-day trek to the volcano Chachani, which was cold and pretty hard, but beautiful - we were at 19,500 feet, I've definitely never been that high. I went with three Irish folks, a married couple and another girl who's staying in Peru til November, and who might work at the Museo - I was lucky to be with them, they were great people and perfect to trudge through the altitude and strenuous climbs with. We met up later with Maya for dinnner at Johnny Coyote's, a knockoff Johnny Rocket's, red circle logo and all.

We flew out the next morning to Lima, stored our bags and went to meet Tammy Leyland of the tour agency Crooked Trails (www.crookedtrails.com) at her apartment in Barranca. Louisa had recommended that we speak to her - she had been involved in a similar doc on responsible tourism. We talked for awhile about our experiences, our respective docs, her agency and its goals - then we interviewed her for about an hour. She was perfect, a great way to end our filming - she clearly distinguished between community-based and eco tourism, and had a great perspective on tourism in Peru, with lots of specific stories of impact and responses.

We then went to an outdoor food and artesenal market in Barranco, the coolest hood in Lima - had one last plate of ceviche (raw fish much fresher and tastier than sushi) and one last drink of two kinds of chicha, one purple, one beige - bought souvenirs, took some more pictures, reminisced, then got a taxi to the airport for the huge hassle of flying home. We got to NYC, sans mochillas, at around 11 am and booked it home. Now we log the tapes and find a Spanish speaking editor. Buen Viaje.

tremors

we were enjoying the first tv we´ve seen in over a month in our hostal in arequipa last night (not only do we have a tv, but we have a tv with cable) and about halfway in to the cheesy american horror movie we were watching on cinemax, chris said ¨do you feel that? my bed is moving.¨ thinking he was teasing me after my admission that i´m a wuss when it comes to horror movies, i laughed. and then i felt my bed move. we sat still for about half a minute and felt our beds shaking slightly. ¨earthquake. cool,¨ we said and went back to watching the movie. arequipa has its share of earthquakes, some big, some small, and so we assumed this was normal. a couple hours later at an internet cafe we learned it was not normal and not really cool. there was a 7.9 earthquake off the coast near picso, south of lima. the woman running the cafe got a call about it and quickly switched over the tv to the news. as we were watching live coverage from lima, we saw a live aftershock. as i watch the news and as i read more about it, i´m very glad we decided to spend the remainder of the trip in arequipa and not on the coast as we had considered...

peru is large and after leaving ollantaytambo, we decided not to cover too much ground in our last week here. sunday we travelled to puno, a city on lake titicaca. on monday we headed out onto to the lake to visit the floating reed island of uros qhantati where we were to meet victor and cristina who are a part of toursim cooperative on the small island that is part of the network of communities that are working to manage tourism that klever is a part of: (http://www.chaskiventura.com/cuscoperu-es/c1-5-isla-titicaca-flotante.html).

the uros islands are almost beyond explanation. they are small anchored islands built with layers and layers of reeds on which a small number of families live and welcome tourists with handicrafts and a brief and unique experience. you have to arrange a visit to the island of qhantati in advance. the boats don´t stop there, so they don´t have people showing up on their doorstep at all hours of the day. we settled into the reeds and interviewed victor and cristina with the help of a woman named andrea from seattle that we fortunately met on the boat on the way over who spoke fluent spanish and who fortunately agreed to be our translator. cristina makes the best trucha (trout, which they raise in a small pool in the center of the small island) in all of peru and we ate an amazing meal of it, quinoa, and fruit salad before victor and cristina kindly rowed us back to shore so we could catch our evening bus to arequipa.

we arrived in arequipa to find out it was the beginning of the annual celebration of the founding of the city. on tuesday during the day, the streets were filled with marching bands and parades. after visiting the large and beautiful monastary of santa catalina (http://www.santacatalina.org.pe), we stopped to watch a parade. a man came down from one of the floats to offer us some chicha, which provided a great distraction as we were attacked from behind with confetti and colored powder and pulled into the parade to dance with our hair and faces now pink and purple. as soon as the sunset, the street were filled with revelers who celebrated until dawn. at about 9am the next morning, the only person on the street was a garbage man pushing a cart filled with empty wine bottles.

arequipa is an amazing city and a great place to spend the last few days of our trip. chris went this morning to climb the nearby mountain chanchani and he is very excited to be stapping some crampons to his boots and climbing to the snowy 6000 meter peak. in the meantime, i´m happily going to be exercising my sorely under-used city legs and exploring the streets of arequipa. tommorrow we will celebrate our last night in peru. saturday morning we fly back to lima, conduct one last quick interview for the film and then catch our plane back the states.

Patacancha

Our original production plan relied heavily on getting to know a lady from the museum´s collective in Huilloc, spending a few days with her in her home and letting her become one of three or four major characters in the film. Our first day of filming was at the Huilloc school that the museum built, with about 30 women from the collective present, sort of a casting session for us, and after the President spoke, another lady asked to speak - she was animated and interesting, and we figured she´d be perfect.

We translated the footage from Quechua with Miguel, and after this session, we asked if it was possible to stay with this lady for a couple nights in Huilloc. He said sure, and we arranged to go a week later. Whe we got there, however, we had been placed with a guy named Gabriel, who we talked about in another entry. He was cool, but wasn´t our character. We had her name written down, and walked around town trying to find her. We were sent to her house, but she was in Cusco for the week. We got to know her family though, and learned a lot from them about satellite TV and the informal people´s court in the area, Rondos Campesinos. We left Huilloc with some great interviews, but not a real portrait of somebody like we had wanted.

Our schedule filled up, and we decided we had enough characters for the film - Klever, Sonia, Miguel, Joaquin, and about 20 others who we had spent a few hours with. But the last week, we decided we really needed a portrait of a lady from Huilloc or Patacancha who was involved in a weaving collective - a lot of our film focuses on these, and we still didn´t have any personalities to represent it. We were talking with Louisa about this, and she recommended a friend of her´s named Elena from Patacancha - she had her husband had just started a ´tourism vivencial´- a room in their house for tourists - and we would be the first to stay there. She was also a great weaver, but not a part of the museum´s collective - there´s some issues with the musuem in Patacancha among some people, and there´s another separate collective that has formed. While we were talking with Louisa about contacting them, Elena and her husband stopped by her home - a great coincidence, one of many many many that have happened. We arranged to stay with them Wednesday night, and meet them at 3 that day at the cancha, the football field in the middle of town.

Albizu Maya and I left Cusco Wed morning and Albizu and I got a taxi to Patacancha - it was our last week, so Maya stayed with the little camera to get some ´tourist camera´ shots of OTT. We got to the field on a very small path hanging on the side of a mountain, and Elena was there waiting for us. We walked up the hill to her house and into our room on the first floor - extremely nice, brand new beds still in the plastic, a table and chairs, some symbols and such painted in a line along the wall - and a brand new bathroom with a toilet, sink and hot shower. Much much nicer than Huilloc, and even my place in OTT. Their room was on the second floor, separated from ours by logs with cracks in them, and accessed by a ladder and a ghetto platform. The house was beautiful though, painted yellow, with arched roofs made of the same red tiles you find in OTT and Cusco, not tin like most of the other houses. Her husband Juan was working on the Inka Trail, so she was there alone with her three kids. Better for us, bc before, when we´d asked her questions, Juan answered.

Albizu and I first went down to the high school, just below the field, which had been built 5 years ago by an NGO from Holland that has a hotel in Cusco. It´s by far the nicest school around, probably in the whole of the Sacred Valley - they have 16 teachers, the rooms all have computers, they have a video program, and they buildings are beautiful, yellow, about ten of them in a sort of semicircle. They have environmental education with a big field for planting. We met the principal, sat down with him in his office, told him we were with the museum, and asked for an interview. He was a very intense, interesting guy, shook your hand with his other arm on your forearm for extra emphasis - but he had some beef with the museum. That didn´t help us. I told him ´soy no el museó´and tried to get around it, but it was kind of impossible. He asked what the ´condition´for the interview was, if he was going to get paid, so we just left. Disappointing, bc he was definitely a character, but one less to edit.

We went back up to the house, past a campsite with 11 tents for a group doing the Lares trek thru the town - in the summer months, there´s usually at least one group camping in the town everynight. We sat with Elena in her kitchen, a very dark sooty room with a huge brick and mud stove fire and no chimney, kind of like a cave. There was a black plastic sheet hanging in the middle, and behind there were lots of guinea pigs squeaking and popping. We sat on small stools and rolled the camera for about three hours - Albizu led a conversation with her about lots and lots of things, the history of the town, her marriage, weaving techniques, where to sell, what get the best price, tourism in the town of course, her parents, her school, her kids. Her husband´s brother came in for dinner - some soup with potatoes and carrots, then more potatoes, different kinds, really fresh and flavorful, but still, potatoes. We had a lot of tea, got very cold even with the fire, and finally went to our room. She followed with all of her weavings and displayed them for us. I bought a scarf for my dad that she had made last week, it took her two days.

The next morning, she and her friend constructed a loom in front of the house, which they do everyday, and they started weaving. We filmed all this for about an hour, then said goodbye and hitched back to OTT. We filmed more of Lucho in his studio, the firing of the pieces he had made, the final touches and paints. We hung out with Luis all afternoon, played chess and watched The Incredibles. I took him around the alleys, into some places I had never been, including a really nice hostel with movies and huge couches called Chaski Wasi. I took the camera and filmed as it got dark in the alleys, then we met Bill and Michelle at the nicest restaurant in town, Mayupata, with candles and a fire and pretentiously decorated plates of food. Louisa met us there with her daughter, Nina, one and a half. After, we went to Chaski Wasi, Louisa and Lucho came along, they both knew the owner, Cati. We had Pisco with orange juice and grenadine and got really tired - went home around 10.

The next morning, Maya and I went to Macchu Picchu. Huge money for the train, huge money for the entrance tickets, big money for the bus to the site from Aguas Calientes. We had issues getting our camera in, it looked too professional, but I showed them my student card and they just made us leave the tripod. We stayed for five hours, wandering around the city, filming tour groups as they explained things. The most interesting part for me were the rooms to the right of Wayna Picchu, with rocks piled in the courtyards, lots of unfinished bedrooms.

We got back around dark and packed and said goodbye to our families. We left early the next morning, after saying goodbye to Sonia and the Hearts Cafe, our meeting point almost every morning.

We got to Cusco, found a hostel for the night and went to the Plaza de Armas, where the anti-protest protest was just starting. Hundreds of people were there, lots in their traditional clothes, the others in their maitre´d or hotel uniforms, there was a parade of dancers, lots of signs and posters, Keep the Peace, Don´t Mess with the Tourists - then about an hour of speeches from people from all different sectors of tourism, lots of different towns. Really really perfect for our film, it was great to hear all this. Klever was supposed to speak, but he and his folks from Cachiccata arrived late - disappointing. After the speeches, we met up with him, interviewed two presidents from other towns in the network, some volunteers from Lima who were working in Chilca teaching English, and a lawyer for the network, who gave a great interview about how the network benefits everyone in the towns. We went to Jack´s Cafe, the model for Sonia´s Hearts Cafe, had really great food, then met Fiona at her office for another interview and laid out our itinerary for our week of travel. We went to El Molino for more tapes - we´ve shot over 50 hours now - and then went to Rafo´s house, where we hung out with he and Angel and Albizu all night, watched Borat which we bought at El Molino and they had never heard of. The next morning, we took the bus to Puno, where we are now. Maya´s feeling really ill with stomach problems, she´s cracked open the antibiotics she brought in anticipation, and hopefully we´ll make it to Arequipa tomorrow.

mucho trabajo

let´s catch you up to speed on this week which is essentially our last week of production: today is our last offical day at the musuem and we´ve spent most of this week shooting around ollantatambo, conducting final interviews and getting lots of shots of activity and locations around town. we spent some time with a scottish woman named louisa who has lived in town for several years and has started a group called ¨leap local¨(http://www.leaplocal.org/) that helps travelers connect to guides, housing, etc themseleves instead of going through a travel agency. we also spent some more time with joaquin randall at the albergue, the hotel that his parents opened when they settled in ollantaytambo (http://www.elalbergue.com/en/). we talked about the history of the place, his own history, and his run on the mayoral ticket in the last election. we´ve also continued our filming of lucho at the musuem and his peruvian pottery process.

we´ve done a bit of traveling as well. on sunday we went with albizu and the other CATCCO volunetters, bill and michelle, to a festivasl in moray celebrating the inka new year. albizu´s family lives in the neighboring town of maras and we stopped by their house, had some tea and met his grandfather. at moray we watched what must have been a four hour ceremony in the round inka terraces that have made moray famous.

after moray, we headed to salineras, a site of active salt mining. needless to say it was like another world with its salt pools terraced in a narrow valley. albizu found a long salt pipe-like tube, broke off a piece for himself which he held in his mouth like a cigarette and gave the rest to me. it´s good luck to receive one of them, he told me. i thanked him. it broke a few minutes later.
tuesday afternoon we headed to cuzco and met with klever at his office. we talked a bit there and found out that there is going to be an anti-protest protest in cuzco on saturday to make the protesting teachers and their supporters aware of the effects of their methods of protesting on the economy and on the tourism industry in particular. afterwards we met up with albizu and another scottish woman, fiona, who has a travel agency in cuzco, which klever´s brother just happens to work for (http://ecotrekperu.com/index.html), and who also does a bit of work with sonia from hearts cafe. we treated ourselves to a fancy dinner at an italian restaurant right off the plaza de armas that raphael had recommended to us. we had salad with arugula (which i have missed very much) and some of the best pasta ever.

it was back to ollantaytambo yesterday with albizu in tow. chris and albizu headed straight to patacancha and huiloc for one last visit and will be returning this afternoon. we´ll then finish up our filming and our work at the museum and probably begin saying our goodbyes.

tomorrow we will (finally) be going to machu picchu, saturday to cuzco and then sunday we will begin some serious (but fun) traveling. first stop: lake titicaca.

more photos up: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mayamumma/sets/72157601044243609/

mi familia

every night when i come home with the camera bag on my back, my backpack on my front, my camera over one shoulder and the tripod over the other, alicia (the mother in the family i am staying with) groans: ¨mucho trabajo, maya. too much, too much.¨ one night at dinner last week, alicia and her husband reynaldo insisted that i have a day without work. we agreed on saturday. reynaldo had to work that day. from what i understood, he was going with a bunch of men to work on an irigation system on someone´s farmland.

alicia and reynaldo had referred repeatedly to ¨la chakra.¨ reaynaldo often goes there to work. up until recently i had thought this was a name of town, but recently came to understand that ¨la chakra¨is a plot of farm land. the family has a plot about an hour´s walk from ollantaytambo, near huiloc, and on saturday, alicia, gaby, conrado, lorenzo and i piled into a taxi with bunch of bags for a day of libertad on la chakra.

(and guess i should explain a bit about my family before i go any furthur. alicia is 33 and her husband reynaldo is 66. he lived in america for about 12 years, most of them in new york. he learned english while he was there, but has forgotten most of it. our dinners are usually spent talking about ny, which he loves to tell animated stories about, and reminding him of english words for things. alicia and reynaldo have 2 children, gaby is 5 and conrado is 10. gaby and i communicate mostly by making funny faces at each other over the dinner table. they have a 14 year old boy named lorenzo living with them as well. he is from a town a day´s walk away and is living with the family so he can go to school in ollantaytambo.)

as soon as we got to la chakra, alicia put conrado and lorenzo to work gathering rocks to make a horno (oven). a cousin of reynaldo´s and 2 kids who lived nearby came over to help. they built an amazing small round domed oven out of the rocks, first letting a fire burn in it for about an hour and then collapsing it and placing all the food on the hot rocks to cook for another hour, covering it with paper sacks and dirt to keep the heat in.


while we were waiting for the food to cook, gaby went and picked some purple flowers and brought them over to me. she carefully peeled away the purple petals to reveal a tiny white flower in the center attached to a sharp little stemen. she pushed my hair away and put the flowers in my ears for earrings and i did the same for her. we then brushed away the dirt and peeled back the paper from the horno and ate a large lunch of chicken, yams and plantaines. it was a good day off.

hitch

when there´s no collectivo in sight:

by the way, some new pics are up:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mayamumma/sets/72157601044243609/

Cachiccata

Miguel asked Maya and I about a week ago if we wanted to take some horses up to Inti Punko, the Inka gate that frames Mt Veronica, to take some pictures and film for the museum - so we made plans for Sunday morning. Saturday night, Miguel met us at the museum to make plans, and we walked through the narrow alleys going from house to house trying to find someone who could rent us some horses.

The last place, the successful one, was a big courtyard with 4 houses, and we into one of the homes to meet a caballero. His house was incredible - really high ceilings, black sooty stones, a loft built on the far side for the beds, and a large altar on the other with Inka weapons and artifacts, three skulls, some carcasses of various animals birds and fish, and several other obscure bizarre things. There were at least fifty guinea pigs scurrying around, making strange popping noises and squeaks. They had two kids, a boy and a girl, eating cena at a table under the loft, looking really small.

It was also a tourist shop - they had the familiar racks of purses and hats and scarves, all ´hand-made´ and ´typical´, and they make their living from tourist purchases and tips for getting to see this authentic Inka house. Aside from the commodity aspect, it was definitely authentic - it, along with the other homes in the narrow alleys, has been continuously occupied since the 14th century. He hooked us up with 4 caballos for S/30 each.

Sat night was like daylight, the night before the full moon, so Albizu Maya and I got some music and canyaso and hit the sneak-around path to the ruins, over a bridge outside of town, through some farm land and up to the base. It was our first trip to the ruins that we looked at everyday, and that every tourist who comes through treks over with their boleta turista, the tourist ticket that gets you into all the major ruins, about 18 in all, scattered around the valley. About 500 a day, most all of whom leave on huge buses or the 8 oclock train.

It was straight up mystical - a lot more than the terraces we could see from below. Hundreds of little rooms and narrow passageways, tiny quarters with slots, little square ledges, in the walls everywhere for their cards and knives and candles and things, lots and lots of farmland, and at the top, a big temple of the sun, with 4 huge stone monoliths attached to each other with some indecipherable inscriptions. Wandering around there alone at night was special. We hung out on one of the terraces with some music and a random nursing dog that followed us and fell asleep for awhile, then staggered down to bed.

The next morning, we met at the sooty house at 7 and mounted up - but we took lots of footage of the inside first, and had the weapons and carcasses and artifacts properly explained. When we asked how long it had been occupied, he just said siempre, always.

We were guided by Juan Carlos, a teenager that runs the youth group at the museum and had taken me up to Pumamarka last week, another impressive random huge ruin outside of town.

We clopped out of town over the awkward cobblestones, and crossed the Inka bridge to the trail. It was a long day for us and the horses - the path was steep, and the saddles were small. We passed the stone quarries the Inkas had used to build all the structures and terraces of OTT, along with lots of stones on the path they had left bc they were lazy. There were some tombs, some mummies, some old ruins of homes, and terraces the whole way. We had lunch on a little plateau surrounded by toros and their waste at various stages of decomposition.

We had been in touch with Klever and had arranged to meet him at the campsite in Cachiccata around 4. But we crossed paths with him on the mountain - his group, about 18 high schoolers and 10 chefs and porters, had camped up there the night before. There are no trees anywhere, which is odd - it used to be covered with them. Impossible to get lost, but pretty brown and barren.

We passed on and up, to the Inka Gate that we could see from below, but soon lost sight of. We would head a little ways, hear a whistle from Klever´s group, a yell of Izquierda! or Derecha!, left and right, guiding us up to it. We finally reached it, after four hours, and it was surely impressive - a big staircase leading to the frame, ruins of a temple, and the whole valley below us on all sides - we were up high. Facing OTT, you could see that the farmland, the canchas, were all shaped like pyramids, three of them interlocking. We took our footage and headed back down to meet Klever.

Maya and I split ways with Albizu and Juan Carlos just above the campsite - Albizu headed back to Cusco that night for classes on Monday. We again passed Klever with 6 of the kids and followed him down to the campsite that he had built with volunteers and locals on old ancient terraces. It had two showers and two bathrooms, structures made of stone and straw, and two large buildings below, an impressive dining room and a big kitchen. He gave us a tent and sleeping bags and we camped there for the night. We got lots of footage of the kitchen, Klever with the porters and some local families there for the night talking about the community project. He was kind of hard with them, berating them for not working hard enough on the projects, saying if they didn´t get their acts together he would lose his faith in them. We had no idea what was being said as we filmed, it was all in Quechua - we just focused on faces and actions and lots of frames of Klever. We filmed some of the dining hall - the group was from Wilderness Excursions, or something, from Jackson Hole, WY, with kids from all over the states. They had a very distinct culture, lots of loving hugging circles with postive comments about each other. We filmed some of the bonfire and then crashed.

The next morning, we met Klever at Hearts Cafe back in OTT at 9, hitching rides with supply trucks and rickshaws to make it. I helped him post his projects on Idealist.org to try to get more volunteers, and we got a taxi, with lots of waiting and bargaining, to Cachicatta, which no one wanted to drive to bc the roads are basically hiking paths. We saw the botanical park that Klever is building with funds from the World Bank, a good overlook of the campsite, the local school that had closed recently bc the teacher randomly showed and the parents took their kids to OTT; the greenhouse with lots of trees donated by volunteers, waiting for advice by a specialist about where to plant; and the Restaurant by the river where almost all the rafting groups, about 5 a day, stopped in to eat and drink. The campsite, the park, the restaurant, all the projects built there are collectively maintained and owned by the whole town, and no other group is allowed to build there without permission from, basically, Klever. He has been asked by the State to be a kind of consultant for other villages to construct facilities for tourists with a similar, collectively-owned model - he is currently working with 6 other villages to do this. It´s really admirable what he´s accomplished there.

We headed back to town and the comforts of home, and this week, we´ve been working with Lucho on a video about his ceramics and the traditions he is trying to maintain. I met with Sonia at Hearts Cafe today for an update - she fractured her shoulder last week, and was back for the first time today. They have received approval for funding for the NGO, but were forbidden by the men of the hacienda to build the HQ there like they had planned - they want to save the land for possible tourist facilities. We got a great interview with Joaquin at the museum on Tuesday, and we´re meeting with him again today to get more political commentary on OTT and tourism and culture erosion. We´re also meeting a lady named Luisa from Scotland who´s been here working in OTT for about 4 years, mostly with porters and guides on improving their pay and working conditions. Albizu has been translating all the Quechua footage from Huilloc and Klever´s camp into Spanish. We´re starting to feel the time pressure, and we´re also anxious to travel and be tourists ourselves. Sprite tastes so much better here.

translation

spent some downtime in huiloc translating footage with albizu. it was cold.

Courtyard Interviews and Trucha Farms

We left for Huilloc Thursday morning, in a little rain storm, the first rain we´ve seen since we´ve been here. Kennedy said rain in July here is like snow in July in the U.S., very bizarre. We drove up in the back of Miguel´s yellow Nissan, about a 45 minute ride, with two Austrian tourists; the new volunteers at the museum, Bill and Michelle, a couple from Boston; and Kennedy. We met our host, Gabriel, and walked through his store to the courtyard behind his house, and stashed our things in a room there with three beds. The rest of the group went down to the school where we filmed on the first day for a weaving demonstration, of which we´ve seen and filmed plenty by now, and we went up to a construction site to interview the workers.

We got there as they were eating lunch, and Albizu led a good conversation with them about tourism, their work as porters, the changes in the town, their lives, why they drank Sprite now instead of chicha during lunch breaks, all this - about seven guys, laying around in a circle, with mud covering their feet from the work. They said they every single person in the town works in tourism, and the first tourists only came about fifteen years ago. We watched them building a house for a new couple with mud and stone bricks that they got from a huge pile outside of town, fashioned for this purpose. A really good scene.

We had some lunch, then walked around with a list that Kennedy and Miguel had given us of people to talk to - we found a few, usually in a courtyard weaving, and Albizu asked them about the collective and the management of tourism in the town. We got really lucky and came across the mayor of OTT district, in town to visit the construction of a new textile market for tourists. He put on a poncho being sold by a lady, grabbed a couple kids and talked about the benefits of tourism for the town, and how these people were living in poverty but the travel agencies hogged all the money from tourism, at their expense - very good interview.

We spent the afternoon watching and translating footage to find out what we had, and where to go from there. We had dinner with our family, cooked over a fire stove, but with combustion gas available - eggs and rice and french fries - we´ve had french fries with almost every meal here. No shortage of potatoes. We watched a video of an unattractive Peruvian lady singing at lots of ruins on their tv, and then the kids watched Son of the Mask.

We got a good interview after dinner with Gabriel about the history of the town, his role as a shaman, which Miguel said was an exagerration, and how tourism has been great for the development of the town. He talked about past NGOs working here in the 80´s and the impact they had - the chimneys in the kitchens, the eucalyptus trees for construction, which we found out were actually very bad for the soil, soaked up all the water. He said farming was great when he was growing up, and now it´s a lot worse. We then tried to sleep under lots of wool blankets in the freezing cold on unforgiving beds, with some wooden slats and a hole cut into it for a toilet out back. Good times.

The next morning we went to the escuela to watch a group of tourists get the weaving spiel. Kennedy and Miguel came with them, and another Peruvian lady as their guide - they wore panchos and Macchu Piccu floppy hats and owned the part, very good. We got a good scene of Gabriel´s daughter preparing to go in the courtyard and in the store, gathering her weavings and dolls and purses into a large manta, or textile, to carry on her back, and meet some girls to walk down to the school. We also finally interviewed Miguel about the town, tourism, the collective, management, all this - he´s a star also. A great set up, with tourists browsing the huge display of mantas in the background, at the school that he helped to build.

We followed them all back to Huilloc to a real kid´s school and watched the Independence Day march with a bunch of kids in the courtyard, goosestepping to some drums in ponchos and little red and white Peruvian flags and chanting Viva Peru!

They left after that, and we wandered around doing more courtyard interviews with people. We found out that most of the town are Evangelistas or Mormons because of missionaries in the area, and that this is good bc they don´t drink and follow strict rules, which is better for tourism. We also heard about an organization that covers most of the surrounding towns called Rondas Campesinos, basically a community court that punishes people for crimes, then hands them over to the police. If you steal a bull, you have to return three bulls and get a healthy beating. There was a big problem with thefts, and now, there´s almost none.

Last night we sat with Gabriel as he made chicha for his son´s 18th birthday over a fire and talked about how changing from a barter system to money affected the town, and made everyone recover their old Inka identities for tourism. We even discovered that a lot of people had resisted modernizing their homes, at least on the outside, bc the tourists like traditional stone and straw homes better.

This morning we went with Gabriel to his trucha, or trout, farm, just off the main road. He has about ten little ponds, each with about fifty trout swimming around. We had a few of them for dinner the night before, served whole. He also has an impressive greenhouse with lots of fruit trees and plants. All of this is his, he says - we found out he is by far the richest man there, bc he married a rich woman from another village. We kind of wished we´d stayed with some of the Mormons. He was good to us, but the town and the surrounding areas have about 2,000 people, and most of them are living hand to mouth - he has more than plenty.

Miguel picked us up this morning and we drove up to Patacancha, another village that the museum works with, recovering the tradition of natural dyes and weaving. It was another thirty minute drive up the mountain, even colder - but it is the center of all the other towns in the area, including Huilloc. All the major meetings are held there, and they have the best school with the best teachers. There are several other villages higher up. The women in the weaving school gathered when they saw Miguel´s yellow truck, and they set up in a courtyard by the river for the show. We interviewed a couple of them, while an alpaca, like a llama but with more expensive wool, roamed around headbutting things. We talked with them for about an hour and got back in the truck to OTT, picking up people along the way, including a group of about 10 or 12 schoolgirls that Miguel kept pulling away from, making them run to catch up. Tonight we´re going to rest, and tomorrow we´re going on horseback to Antipunco, the ´hitching post of the sun´.

fotos

i´ve finally gotten some photos up. there are too many for the internet in OTT to handle right now, so i´ve just put up some favorites.

to see them go to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mayamumma/sets/72157601044243609/

Albizu

We spent Monday doing our museum duties, working in the store and at the front desk. Some high schoolers from a group called Where there be dragons were at the museum doing a ceramics workshop with Lucho, and one of their leaders was a girl I went on the Tibetan Studies program with in 2001, Park - bizarre to see her there.

We finally heard from Albizu, the assistant that Rafael recommended to us. He called us at the museum Monday night, and came Tuesday morning at 10. He is a student at the university in Cusco studying anthropology and tourism, and he´s worked on some films with Rafael and his friend Angel. His English is not great, but he can manage, and we have a book, and most importantly, he knows Spanish and Quechua. We sat down with him and brought him up to speed with what we are doing, and what we have shot so far. He´s into it, which is big, we want him to be a partner in the project and to be interested in the interviews and places we go. We showed him the footage of the women in Huiloc, their interviews in Quechua, which we translated into English with Miguel and Kennedy on Saturday morning. He´s really sharp, is very comfortable with meeting people, puts them at ease and manages to sound intelligent. The last day with him in production has been great - language is a huge barrier, and so trust is too - so our interviews and interactions are much better, much more in depth with him there.

We had planned to go to Cachiqata Tuesday to meet with Klever, the leader, or alcalde, of the town, but he emailed us Monday night asking us to meet him at his office in Cusco at 4:30... so Albizu had to make the trip twice in one day. After we did some translations and had lunch, we took the collectivo to Cusco, a two hour trip. It was great to be back there, we saw it much differently this time. It was much more crowded, people everywhere - when we were there before the strike kept people away. It´s also Independence Day on Saturday, with festivities all week, so lots of people from other towns are in Cusco now. We went straight to Klever´s office, with the mindset that this was an introductory meeting, we probably wouldn´t film - we were hoping to set up a meeting with him in Cachiqata to get a tour of the town and hear about his plans to build a community reserve.

Klever is a superstar. He´s a ridiculously pretty man, like an action figure or some such thing. I guess he´s in his early 30´s, and he´s been the leader of the town for only two months, replacing his father. He has a trekking company with three other people, very successful, leading tours around the Sacred Valley. We sat with him and he described with some gravitas his ideas for the community reserve in Cachiqata, and when we arrived, he had been meeting with a man from another town, one of six that are setting up similar reserves with his guidance. His idea is to have one hotel, one tourist company, one campsite, one of everything so that all traffic and money and activities in the town are regulated, and the rules are set by the people there. He got money from the World Bank to build a botanical park there, which will start construction in two months. We could do probably do the whole film on him and his projects. We also learned that another documentary crew from the U.S. had just spent two months filming every day of his dad´s life in Cachiqata. We have to find out who they are - Klever will forward us an email from them. So we´re meeting with him on Monday in Cachiqata, in the middle of a trek he his leading through there with 18 tourists. We´re also spending Wednesday with him there. Hopefully that will be enough.

After the meeting, we filmed some night scenes of Cusco and did an interview with the head of a trekking company, a friend of Albizu´s. We ran into Angel, Rafo´s partner, in the square, and went to Rafo´s house with them and caught up - a great night with them. We watched some of their videos on youtube, really impressive. We stayed at some random place Albizu knew and came back to OTT this morning. Al and I spent the afternoon with my family, learning about their business, the loans they got to set it up, which were all materials, pretty lousy ones actall, and no money. I found out they´re very upset with how they were treated by the municipality, lots of broken promises about promotion. It was also good to finally speak to them casually with a translator, they´re great people, esp Matiaza.

As Maya mentioned, tomorrow we go to Huiloc for three days. It´s gonna be rough there I think, nothing at all modern about it, but we´re hoping Gabriella, the lady we interviewed before, will be a major character. There´s a big group of tourists coming on Friday to the market, and we´ll see their prep for that with Miguel. We have a list of people to speak to from Kennedy and Miguel, and we´re just hoping to film the whole time, get to know Gabriella well. Sunday we go to Antipulco on horses with Miguel, and Monday we meet Klever. We put Al up at the Tambo, a hostel where most museum people stay if they´re not with a family, and put him on a pension at the restaurant next door for three meals a day while he´s here - he´ll be with us from now on.

huiloc

tomorrow we will be traveling to the nearby town of huiloc where the museum has worked to create a textile cooperative. we will be spending three days there and meeting with:



and:

and:

(hooray for pictures! more to come!)

la luna

when we first arrived in ollantaytambo, the moon was somewhere close to being new. on one of my first nights here, i went for a walk after dinner to the main plaza. the street that my house is on is long and dark, bordered by houses on one side and overlooking the urubamaba river on the other. i stopped and noticed for the first time how many stars there actually are. the stars didn´t cover the entire sky though. if i looked up, they were everywhere, but if i looked out, it was just black. i stood there in the dark trying to figure out why until i remembered that we are in the mountains. they are a beautiful presence in the day, surrounding the town, standing out against the blue, blue sky and now i recognized them in the dark.

we are now approaching a full moon and the mountains are not quite so black at night. i can make out their peaks and folds. last night the moon made the clouds that were hovering low over the inca ruins that overlook the town glow a pale green-blue.

we are planning a night of camping on sunday at pumamarka when the moon will be full. i wonder what we will be able to see then.

collectivo misterioso

one of the easiest and actually one of the few ways to quickly get around this country is the collectivo taxi. they are white toyota vans (usually) that have had everything stripped out of them and small cushioned benches put in, as many as they can possibly fit in all sorts of configurations. you catch these ¨taxis¨ at various locations in towns along the andean highway or on the highway itself. the seats can accommodate maybe 12 people. i think there were 25 people in our collectivo the other day. just when you think it´s full, the van pulls over and a few more people squeeze in. people shift their knees, pull their bags closer in to them, turn their head to accommodate a stranger´s backside . it´s kind of like the L train at rush hour...

for S/1 (that´s peruvian shorthand for 1 sole, their currency, which is about $0.33 in US dollars) you can ride the 20 or so miles from ollantaytambo to urubamba. another S/2 will take you another 20 or so miles to the town of chinchero, which is where we went today (for the second time).

we first went there last thursday with the name of a textile cooperative and the name of the woman who runs it. this particular cooperative has been around for a long time and has been a model for many of the newer cooperatives, including the ones that the museum here in ollantaytambo works with. long story short, we ended up at the wrong cooperative. it turns out there are 15 of them in chinchero. we got the full tourist treatment there and then got down to business and conducted some interviews with members of the cooperative. after asking around, we finally found the cooperative that had been our original goal only to find out that the woman we were sent to talk to was out of town for the day.

so, a solid appointment with the head of the cooperative and 2 more collectivo rides took us back to chinchero today and to the center for traditional textiles of cusco. this time we filmed other people getting the full tourist treatment, ate our second guinea pig of the trip and interviewed the head of the cooperative.

with 2 tapes of good material and 2 stomachs full of papas and cuy, we headed back to the highway to find a collectivo to take us home. many other people were there to do the same thing and there was nothing in sight. there´s a lot of dust in this country. there´s a fine layer of it on everything. it lines your nose and coats your mouth. it gets kicked up by buses and so we sat there gathering dust and the sun began toasting the tops of our heads and still nothing was coming along the road. finally a bus pulled up and there were already people pressed against the window, yet 15 or more piled on before we even walked over to it. we flopped down on the dusty roadside again.

about 20 minutes later a nearly empty collectivo pulled up. ¨Ürubamba? Urubamba?¨ a young boy hanging out of the window asked us. ¨Si, si!¨we said as we jumped on. The collectivo began to pull away leaving behind the others who had been waiting along with us. We tried to ask them why they only picked us up and not the others, but i don´t think we got a clear answer. ¨Ollanta?¨they asked us. ¨Si,¨ i said with some surprise. Not only were we in an empty collectivo with seats to ourselves, but they were going all they way to Ollantaytambo. I kept waiting for a catch. Apparently there wasn´t one. They picked up a person here, a few people there, didn´t seem to be in a rush, didn´t seem to mind passing 15 people on the highway who needed a ride. so we had one of the most pleasant rides of the trip so far (save for the johnny cash soundtracked taxi ride we took on out first attempt to get to ollantaytambo before the rocks and protests put an end to it).

7/19

This week was kind of downtime - we learned to open and work the museum store yesterday, where they sell handmade textiles and food products and books and things. A bunch of tourists come in and browse, kind of uncomfortably, and wander out. Sold a couple textiles.

Last night the kids from Seattle had a farewell party at the museum - I took Sebastian. Also, yesterday during lunch we played frisbee in the farm fields across from our house - some former students had left the bee, and they had used it as a plate. We also played one on one soccer on the concrete field. A good day with him. He´s a little slow, also extremely under-educated, but still, a bit thick - but always smiling, a really good kid. There´s two kids that hang out at the museum, Patricia and Luis, about ten, who after a day mastered our cell phones and were manipulating the picture functions, and filled our cards with photos of tourists. I don´t see Sebastian rolling with that too well. He´s very small for his age, he looks like he´s ten. He´s been working w his dad Eduardo on the farm since he was 9, so five years - he´s a pro, I watched him with the pigs and chickens, working the handplow, climbing up and down the rock wall to and from our house, which takes agility - he´s got the farm thing down. So who needs to know geography and stuff?

My madre runs a school for Quechua women in their 40s and 50s to learn Spanish. So the dining room is also a school, with posters and vocab on the wall, and their names written on the board. One bizarre thing - in the courtyard, outside the dining room, where the ducks are, they have a calendar nailed to the stone crumbling wall, 2007, of a bare breasted blond woman with a perm, clearly taken in 1982, carrying a golf bag, w the crotch torn out. Sebastian reinforced it with some nails yesterday, pointing and giggling the whole time. Disturbing. Their storage room has old calendars, also with nude women.

Last night at dinner, to avoid the awkward broken Spanish conversation, I brought in my Ipod and speakers and played dj for Sebastian. He liked The Ramones. Me Gusta! He was also incapable of pronouncing 'ipod'. He managed Rolling Stones after awhile. 'Rrroo...rrrooo....llling... that´s right!' He can´t do the v sound either. But Quechua´s worse than German for harsh gutteral noises - he's got different habits.

Today we went to Calca for the textile market - we were going to go early with David but he never showed, so we got there at noon, and it was over. So we walked around the town looking for stuff to fix the museum computer, which malfunctioned on our first day and has resisted all attempts to revive it.

We also went to Urubamba, where we found more electronics, bought speakers for the movie theater. It´s actually a nice town, much more than the one street we saw when we crashed there during the strike. There´s a beautiful plaza with an old church that they´re restoring and trees brought in from the Canary Islands by the Spanish.

We´re showing The Big Lebowski at the museum Saturday night for 10 soles - the exchange is 3.2 soles to the dollar. They have a nice film screen and projector there. We made posters and put them all around town today - checked the Spanish with folks in the internet store, it checked out, then tonight we were told that most of it was grammatically awful.

Tomorrow we´re going to the village of Chinchera to interview a lady who´s run a textile cooperative there for years, and she speaks English thank God. Their organization is the model for the museum´s cooperative.

We also got in touch with a leader of the town of Cachiqata - his dad´s the real leader, and is the oldest porter on the Inca Trail. The son´s name is Klever. My first born son´s name. He´s starting a collective, or community reserve, there to control ecotourism´s encroachment - they´ll build one hotel, have one tour service, a few restaurants, all owned collectively by the town. They´re basically trying their hardest to ensure that no outside company will profit from their town´s culture or resources or take over their land. That´s unfortunately what´s happened to almost every other town in Peru that has any kind of indigenous 'authentic' culture or old ruins to see - industry finds legal loopholes to expropriate the land and they usually convince the state and local governments to sell. So the citizens are kind of bullrushed, and the towns, like this town, become totally reliant on tourism, and a lot of people kind of become caricatures of themselves to make money. A bit soul killing, and that´s definitely everyday life here. So what he´s doing is very admirable and a nice model for towns to follow, if it works. Lots of people to meet and interview - we just need more everyday life scenes.

Food´s great, no stomach problems, weather´s good, people are friendly, internet´s slow - all´s well.

you buy a hacienda for a few soles down

7/17

The song Managua Nicaragua has been in my head since or visit to the hacienda. We went down to the village of Huaran, actually through it to the smaller town of Cancha Cancha (awesome to hear that said by Mrs. Paddington) with Sonia and two of her volunteers from Florida, David and Elwood, both white beard seasoned travellers in their fifties, and met the leaders of the cooperative that runs the town. They change presidents every year. We interviewed the president, past president and manager of the massive construction project.

Sonia´s lived there for two years and has tried to convince them to start all these programs, some to bring in tourists, others to provide medicines, educational materials, etc - most of the time the men have refused her help or sold the medicines, like I mentioned. Yesterday they were very eager to talk about their collaboration with her, but she´s ready to leave. Two sides - who is she to tell them how to run their town? or - why can´t they accept her help when it´s clear all the people there need it?

There are women there with cancer and no medicines, women having babies with no help, the water´s been shut off for two weeks bc of a pipe being built - they´re converting the hacienda into a big hotel. Sonia hopes to buy a plot of land there to build her NGO headquarters on. It´s a beautiful spot, where two valleys meet.

We then went to the town of Calca where we met a lady named Rita, a doctor working to educate women about contraception and sexual issues - there´s a big AIDS problem, and in the late 90´s, the former president Fujimori had over 200,000 Quechuan women sterilized to reduce the burden on the state - so they´re wary of any kind of contraception. He´s been accused of genocide and is in exile in Chile - but he´s running for Senate in Japan. He has dual citizenship. He was president for 10 years, the whole 90´s decade, and most people love him bc he got rid of the Shining Path, the Maoists who completely terrorized the Andes in the late 80´s and early 90´s, and made tourism and foreign investment possible. But he also did things like that.

After Rita´s interview, we met the other Sonia, who sells textiles at a shop outside Cancha Cancha. She showed us two movies on how the textiles were made, all the natural dying processes, and then unfortunately we had to leave, so no interview - but we´ll see her again Thursday, when there´s a big textile market in Calca.

We also went to a small school run by the cooperative and delivered educational materials - that was really cool, the kids and teacher loved it, and we saw a charged confrontation bw Sonia and the men - she was trying to talk to them about water and management issues, and they stared at her blankly and were ultimately dismissive - then David, the volunteer, brought up the same issues and they had a great conversation about it - and she yelled at them for only talking to men and stormed out of the courtyard. We filmed the whole day, about three tapes worth. Excited to log it and translate the Spanish.

Today we were at the museum all day, reading the books they have on OTT and Peru, and reading a book I got from NYU called Is the Sacred for Sale? Tourism and Indigenous Peoples. They quote The Corporation a lot. We also interviewed a few tourists that came in. Tomorrow we learn to work the museum store down the road, all free-traded out, and translate footage with Kennedy´s sister Joanie. Very busy, but it´s all a nice headrush - definitely going better than expected.

Cooperativas

We´ve started working at the museum and meeting folks in the town. Things are going very quickly, and our film is coming together well. We´ve got a reallly good story here and some great people to profile. Kennedy, the woman that runs the museum, is great and is connecting us with lots of good people. She´s 26, from Seattle, and originally came here as a high school student. Lakeside HS in Seattle, Bill Gates alma mater, sends kids to programs all over the world, and each summer, they send about 12 kids down to work at the museum. They´re here now, and they´re leaving in a week, which is a good thing - I had my fill of highschoolers the last few months. But Kennedy came back a lot, and in May was hired to run it - she´s here til next May.

But the museum is really run by a guy named Joaquin, an American who was born and raised in OTT, his family runs a hotel here, the first one in town. His mother´s name is Wendy Weeks, she´s very famous here and her artwork is all around town. Their hotel is the Albergue, and is literally right on the train platform. I read a book called The White Rock which Kennedy recommended before we came about this part of Peru, one guy's story of exploring around the towns and ruins and explaining things, written in ´01 - but Joaquin and his family are in it, the author stayed with them and got to know them well. He´s connected with everyone, is very much into our doc, he´s about 28, he ran for mayor and has lots of gripes and thoughts about the way the town and tourism money is managed.

Yesterday we went up to a textile cooperative run by the museum that they built with and for ladies from a village above the town called Huilloc - it´s a ridiculously idyllic setting, three little huts made of stones and straw by a river in a huge valley. The ladies came down from the town, decked out in their colorful red Inca ´costumes´, many with babies on their backs wrapped in their clothes, lots of safety pins on their black wide brimmed hats for securing things to take back - and we and the high schoolers formed a big line to move rocks from a quarry to finish a wall surrounding it so animals wouldn´t come in. Lots of passing rocks. All day. But beautiful footage and interviews.

When we were done, Joaquin and Miguel, who speaks Quechua, gathered all the women into a semicircle, curling around a rock wall with the village in the background, and they just straight up weaved some textiles. We interviewed the president of the cooperative about the group, how they formed, how they combatted and tried to manage the influx of tourists wanting to see their town and their ways, how thankful they were to the museum for training them in the techniques for weaving and natural dyes, how the town had totally changed in the last ten years after not really changing for centuries. We interviewed one other lady, who was more charismatic and insisted on speaking, which is always good, about the work and the town. Each town has their own colors and patterns, and each person kind of communicates who they are with their ponchos that they weave. There´s a stark difference bw this and the ones made for tourism - authenticity comes in here. But it was a great day, way beyond our expectations.

This part of Peru, and most of the rest of the mountains, are pretty much socialist. Each town has a cooperativa, run by the men mostly, and the farms are owned and operated collectively. The family I´m living with, the dad, Eduardo, and his son, Sebastian, work on the farm everyday, growing potatoes and maize and managing cattle and llamas, along with most of the other men in San Isidro - ten families total. The family received a microloan a few years ago, part of a regional plan to help families convert their homes in tourist hostels - they´re called hospedajes - but the ones built outside of the main two streets never see any action really. Most of the families lost money, including mine.

In ´75 there was a change, a non-violent revolution, where the military govt stripped the hacienda owners of their land and gave it all to the people. Tomorrow, we´re going to a village called Huaran, formerly a huge estate, to meet the leaders of the cooperativa there and talk about that transition and how things are going now. The lady who runs the Hearts Cafe in OTT, an old British Mrs. Paddington kind of lady named Sonia, who by coincidence stays at the same house as Maya, but lives full time in the village - she´s delivering donated educational items and baby clothes to a nursery school there. We´re also meeting another Sonia, a lady who has a textile market outside the village and is an expert on weaving and ponchos, who will explain all the intricacies of meaning. And Sonia´s neighbor in Huaran, Justina, who lives in a stable and just had twins. Sonia feels that the men who run the cooperativa can´t be trusted with medicine and resources - they just sell them. Even the materials at the school have to be signed off on by the teacher or the parents would sell them.

So that´s a lot. We´ve got a large picture of the impact of tourism here, the state of the valley and how outsiders are changing it and how local officials are managing it. Everyone we´ve met is enthusiastic about helping us portray it. Rafael just connected us with an assistant, an anthropologist who speaks fluent Quechua, Engish and Spanish, who´s going to come up and help us out.

We got in touch with the School for International Training, the school I did a Tibetan Studies program with - their rural tourism expert is available for interviews and advice in Arequipa, about ten hours south by bus. We´ve got a good opportunity here. I think the title will be Inkaland. This is a beautiful place, the footage can never not be gorgeous, Inca ruins and terracing everywhere, everybody trying to picture what it was like back then. It gets about 1 million tourists a year - everyone that goes to Macchu Piccu, one of the most popular destinations in the world, increasing rapidly every year, esp now that´s it´s a 7 wonder - huge celebrations here when that happened, a very big campaign, billboards and posters everywhere telling people to vote - everyone is funneled through here and stops in for a few hours to walk around. Huge tour buses, trains, taxis, thru the main square and one narrow cobblestone street. Desperate street sellers, parading in Inca costumes, some will make a months income with one sell, most go home every week with nothing. Lots of cooperativas and farmers. The town has 3,000 people. It´s unrecognizable to people who were here five years ago, and it changes faster and faster. So we´re kind of preservationists.

Cusco to OTT

7/13

There´s been some turmoil here the last few days. There´s a teachers´ strike, which doesn´t sound very intimidating, but these maestros mean business. The taxis and public transport struck in solidarity with them on Wed, so when we flew into Cusco, there was no taxi-to-the-bus-to-OTT like we planned - we had to just stay in Cusco for the night and hope the next day was better. We sat in our rooms mostly, cause we´d just climbed up to 12,000 feet and our heads were light.

We had some good pizza and watched Sicko at a cinema cafe run by a Danish lady. We also got in touch with the guy Stefan had mentioned, a tv producer named Rafael, and had breakfast with him the next day. He gave us some great contacts and advice, and was just generally very easy to be with and generous. He took us to a huge market called El Molino where we bought lots of pirated dvds. I got Transformers and all the Six Feet Under episodes.

He put us into a taxi to OTT with a guy who had a nice floppy hat, and we set off - a beautiful ride down the mountain, we stopped at a few places to shoot, our first shots for the film, and really our first real shots with our new camera - a Panasonic DVX 100B. Roadside blankets with women selling textiles and snowy glaciers behind them.

The road was full of huge rocks set up as roadblocks by the striking teachers - but we maneuvered around them. We got to just above Urubamba, a town about 20 minutes east of OTT, and all the cars had stopped at an overlook - no one could get by bc of all the roadblocks. So we sat there for four hours, waiting on 5 oclock to arrive when they would all go home and we could start clearing the roads. We got hungry and went back to a house and had guinea pig and potatoes with some green sauce with a family, then back to waiting. We just watched the roads, there were about three groups of 20 or so strikers, meandering around, blocking everyone, and about 50 people parked up there watching them. We could have taken them. We were overlooking the entire town and the mountains, great view, but very frustrating. Every town creates huge inscriptions on the side of the mountains overlooking them - theirs says 711.

Finally, around 530, we all decided to make a go for it and went down... some of the teachers had started for home. We got down about two bends and everyone stopped again - more rocks and people there putting them back as we moved them, with bullhorns, telling us to go back to Cusco, the gas prices were too high their salaries were too low and they were angry. The police came, we waited some more, it got dark, and they finally moved and we crossed the bridge into the town. Our driver called ahead to OTT to see if we could get there, and the road was still blocked, so we stayed in Urubamba for the night. We got up at 5 to beat the strikers and took a taxi collectivo, a big van with about 20 people, to OTT for 50 cents, and arrived in the square about 7 oclock - our new hometown.

The whole place is rocks and cobblestones, no cars on any of the sidestreets, definitely lots of tourists but they´re mostly confined to the center. It´s totally surrounded by mountains and Inca ruins, they´re everywhere. It´s extremely tranquil, it reminds me a lot of Mcleod Ganj in India - mules cows and goats roam freely, lots of dogs that like to fight each other, a town of farmers with terraced plots up the mountains.

The square was full when we arrived - tourists and taxi drivers and locals and people dressed in costumes covered in trinkets to sell. We went to the Hearts Cafe, a non-profit wholefoods granola bar type of place we´d read about on Idealist, the same place I found the museum. We had breakfast and coffee and called Kennedy, our supervisor at CATCCO, who was in Cusco. She sent her assistant Miguel to meet us, we went to the museum and had a look around - he speaks only Spanish, but I´m learning, it´s coming back, and I´m starting to understand and speak in complete sentences - I hope to be semi competent when I leave. We´re gonna take lessons. He took us to our respective homestays.

So I´m settled in now, unpacked, in a house just outside of town in San Isidro, a ten minute walk from the museum past wheat fields and soccer pitches and an arena for bull fighting and performances, through narrow rocky alleys and across the way from a cow pasture. I have a big room to myself, three beds and a table and chair, blue walls, I can touch the ceilings if I stretch, a bathroom with a shower just outside, and a courtyard full of ducks and ducklings and a garden with a cactus and eucalyptus leaves. I´m staying with a woman, about 50 or so, very nice, who will cook for me everyday and insists on washing my clothes. She has a husband and a 14 year old son who work the farm all day. I walked across the valley to the edge of the mountains, following the canal built to irrigate all the fields, down the stream where people get their water in buckets, lots of cows and manure and horses and llamas - rural.

Lima

We arrived in Lima late in the evening on July 8th and taxied ourselves to the Inka Lodge in the neighborhood of Miraflores on the Pacific Coast. Central time zone, gray skies like the Pacific Northwest, and cold. We spent the next day rolling around the city looking for the last few pieces of video equipment we´d need. We were directed to one block with about ten tiny little electronics shops, one of which had every little connector and cable we needed.

The next day, we met with the director of a filmmaking collective called Grupo Chaski that Maya had heard about through working with Women Make Movies - they had distributed a film of theirs called Miss Universe 1982, which we watched before we left - kind of unintentionally hilarious, lots of melodramatic shots of Quechua women face-on watching the beautiful women while they sat there quietly suffering. The collective was in a house in a neighborhood called Chorillos, the nicest place we saw in Lima, a huge beachfront with the city in view through lots of haze and smog, and nowhere in our Lonely Planet. He set us up with a guy in Cusco who will provide us with a production assistant who speaks Spanish and Quechua. He sets up ´microcinemas´ all around Peru, and we are going to try to help him set one up in OTT (Ollantaytambo for short), where they screen films, mostly documentaries, shot in and about local towns. They´ve made several that include OTT.

He was an amazing guy - named ´Stefan´, with long white hair and a slick vest. He used beautiful old pens and all his notebooks were bound in thick leather. We left and wandered around Chorillos, our first real taste of aimless travelling - we had a huge meal of steak and chicken, served to us on a platter over hot coals, at what was basically a chain fast food place in Chorillos - and had our first Inka Cola, a flourescent lime drink made by Coke that´s supposedly bad for you like Mountain Dew.