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.