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.