Trails & Techno_text_december 24

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martes 24 de diciembre

Objetivo: Valle Sagrado Tour

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Modo: Micro Distancia: 95 kilómetros

Cusco a Valle Sagrado a Cusco, Perú On Christmas Eve we were up by 8:00 for a quick breakfast in Lida’s dining room. At the table, we struck up a conversation with a young couple from Sydney, Australia. They encouraged us to take a scenic tour of the Valle Sagrado with a local travel operator known as Jaguar. We polished off our pancakes and left the hostel around 9:00. I had no cash and made a dash to the only ATM in Cusco on Avenida del Sol which, like the bathroom in the Tacna café, deserves its own chapter in our ongoing travelogue. With all of the surrounding street vendors and potential pickpockets, you had to move fast. Unfortunately, as this cajero automático: ATM, was the oldest known ATM in the Western literally automatic cashier. Hemisphere, that was nearly impossible. I was Quechua: the official language of the Incas. tempted to peer through the money slot to see agenica de viajes: travel if a tiny Cusco merchant were actually inside agency the cajero counting the local currency. I halfway expected the machine to ask me to select my language of choice, Spanish or Quechua, when my ducats finally came creeping out of the metal box. Five minutes and two-hundred crisp nuevos soles later, I ran to the Jaguar agencia de viajes, caught up with Andy and paid twenty soles for a Valle Sagrado tour ticket. We were quickly escorted to a waiting van parked one block west of the Plaza de Armas. Andy and I were the last two passengers to climb aboard the twenty-seat Isuzu van that was packed to the rafters with European trekkers and tourists. Our tour guide, Martín Martinez, a native of the town of Chinchero, addressed his captive audience in a mixture of Spanish, perfect English and some occasional Quechua for good measure. Martín Martinez 147

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As we taxied down Avenida del Sol, Martín gave us a brief overview of the trip and said that we would be back in Cusco around 19:00. A mere twenty soles for ten hours of sightseeing was hard to pass up. The first leg of our ten-hour journey took us northeast of Cusco. It was one of the highest points in the region at 3,500 meters. After a thirty-minute drive, we officially entered the Sacred Valley of the Incas: home to an impressive collection of Inca ruins and agricultural terraces, 16:50

14:05

12:30

11:00

Ollantaytambo Fortress

Roadside lunch in Calca

“Saque mi foto”

Pisaq Agricultural terraces

18:30

19:35

9:15

10:28

Chinchero Cathedral

Plaza de Armas

Entering Valle Sagrado

Mantas by the Pound

18:05

Fútbol & Future Stars

start finish most notably in the cities of Pisaq and Ollantaytambo. Legend has it that the fertile soil in this temperate valley yields close to two-hundred fifty different varieties of choclo. We motored down Main Street Pisaq and the van came to a stop in a gravel lot just outside that city’s archaeological remains. The ruins themselves were modest, yet intact-enough for Martín to teach us a lesson in architecture. Our guide pointed out the three main characteristics of 148

Inca design evident in the Valle Sagrado ruins: 1) non-vertical walls, 2) mortar-free dry construction, and 3) trapezoidal windows and doorways. After thirty minutes, as we walked back to the van along the same path, we came across a precious pair of young village girls waiting for us. Dressed in white blouses, black vests, brown and gold alpaca sweaters and caps, they would plead “Saque mi foto” and implore with their big brown eyes. Someone in the group would inevitably break down and start snapping away. Seeing these five year-olds practically begging to the point of tears, one realizes just how dependent inhabitants of the Valle Sagrado are on tourism revenue. We returned to the market in Pisaq for twenty minutes of shopping before heading an hour west to a small roadside eatery in the town of Yucay. The ten soles meal was served buffet style and included a random mixture of cuy (it’s everywhere), trucha, and fettucini. Andy and I talked briefly with a few of the folks seated at our table: a retired Canadian literature professor, a Swedish guy and his Brazilian girlfriend, an Italian drifter who was heading to Machu Picchu for “at least a month” and an Australian who was spending five weeks in Perú. The next stop on our journey was Ollantaytambo: one of the first Inca settlements and the site of a bloody yearlong battle between the Spanish and the Incas during the Conquest of the 1530s. That the Incas emerged victorious from that conflict is living testament to the quality of the fortress that they constructed at choclo: corn Saque mi foto: Take my picture. Ollantaytambo. Unlike the Spaniards After doing so, your subject will centuries before us, we climbed easily to the expect a tip. trucha: trout sacred altar atop the fortress ruins. We strained our eyes in search of the various figures that Martín was describing. Apparently, the Incas had carved assorted animal figures in the surrounding mountain faces. Even the town below us was supposedly laid out in the shape of an ear of corn. And while we could discern something oblong, Martín, like his Inca ancestors, seemed to have a fairly active imagination. Upon departure, the parking lot in which our Isuzu was resting was

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engulfed in a sea of vendors selling everything from steaming ears of choclo to warm Inka Kola to rain ponchos. Always running low on caffeine, I opted for my third Coca-Cola of the trip. Back in the van, we drove another twenty minutes over to Chinchero, our final stop and Martín’s hometown. We arrived at the base of Chinchero at 18:00, where we were greeted by stiff breezes and overcast skies. Some local schoolchildren were playing fútbol at dusk on a grassy plateau adjacent to the village square in a sport scene worthy of a Nike commercial. Up in the main square, girls sat patiently with their mothers selling traditional garments and blankets to the passing tourists. We visited the beautiful sixteenth-century cathedral that was the centerpiece of the town. The carved twenty-eight karat gold altar, handbuen precio: a good price painted ceiling and ornate rafters were turístico: tourist (adjective) most impressive. Miraculously, it Telefonica de Perú: Perú’s national phone monopoly. appeared that all of the cathedral’s cabana: phone booth paintings and statues were still intact. papelitos: little piece of paper sixty soles: about US$24. Thanks In recent years, roving bands of thieves to privatization efforts, long had broken into many of the country’s distance rates in Perú have been halved in recent years. oldest cathedrals, stolen priceless works of art and sold them on the black market in the capital city of Lima. Martín enthusiastically explained to our group that a special Christmas Eve midnight ceremony would be held in the cathedral in just a few short hours. He added that the participants, including himself, would be in full Inca combat dress for the ceremony that would be delivered entirely in Quechua. On our way out, Andy and I both put a sol in the collection plate before taking one last stroll through the marketplace. I spotted some nice blankets and haggled with a young girl and her mother for what we both agreed was a “buen precio.” After selecting three blankets for twenty soles, I walked down to the van for the short trip home. It appeared that his brief sojourn home had recharged Martín’s batteries. Even though he had been talking virtually nonstop for the past nine hours, he continued his bilingual narration the second that his foot hit the Isuzu’s steps. He prefaced his remarks by saying that our shuttle turístico would roll into Cusco from the west side of town. This approach provided the most spectacular view of the day: the Plaza 150

de Armas bathed in white light on Christmas Eve. The van was back in town at 19:45, only 45 minutes later than expected. We thanked and tipped Martín before returning to Avenida del Sol for some cash and Christmas Eve phone calls. Unfortunately, cash was unobtainable (all of the local banks had reached their daily withdrawal limits), and the telephone situation was unbelievable. The scene inside the Telefonica de Peru office on Christmas Eve was a sight that I will not soon forget. My subsequent purchase of a few shares of Telefonica de Peru stock may have been partially motivated by that evening’s simple demonstration of supply and demand. After a twenty-minute wait, we finally made it through the sea of locals and tourists that were falling all over each other trying to secure a vacant cabana. We told the operator that we wanted to make a couple of long distance calls to the States and her eyes widened...Not exactly the body language that we were hoping for. She asked us to fill-out two papelitos with the datos that she needed in order to put the call through. Long distance access was not available inside any of the dozen crammed phone booths. We each had to stand in the noisy lobby and make our respective calls via the combination phone/fax machine line at the front desk. After slowly dialing the literally twenty plus digits necessary to access an outside line, the operator smiled and passed the plastic handset to me over the counter. Together, we had just made telecommunications history: the first successfully-manned Cusco to Florida phone call ever placed on Christmas Eve. I could not believe my ears when I heard the familiar single ring of a phone in the States. Although I was anxious for someone to pick up the phone, it was the sheer anticipation and the long-awaited chance to listen to a dial tone bouncing around satellites hovering over the Western Hemisphere that had my adrenaline going. Andy left his family a long message on their home answering machine, while I spoke briefly with my family back in South Florida. Unfortunately, the popular five-cents-a-minute long distance rates that we enjoy in the U.S. have yet to catch on in the Apurimac Valley of Perú. The two phone calls, lasting a combined four minutes, set us back a whopping sixty soles. 151

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I had given my parents the phone number at the hostel, because incoming calls from the U.S. cost a fraction of the outgoing variety. Andy decided to go to dinner with some friends that we had met on our Valle Sagrado excursion, and I ran back to Residencia Los Marqueses to receive a return call from my family. I waited anxiously standing next to the 1950’s Ericsson rotary-dial phone in the Marqueses courtyard. After a fifteen-minute wait staring at the black rotary dial, I feared that I had perhaps missed my call. I asked one of Lida’s adopted sons if there were a trick to operating the phone. He responded by nodding politely, lowering his shoulders and trudging off into a back room. I was afraid that I had somehow said something to offend him, but he emerged a minute later and said, “Listo!” Sure enough, I picked up the handset and got a dial tone. I could only assume that he had flipped the phone’s on/off switch tucked somewhere in the Marqueses’ wings. Seconds later, the phone rang and I had a long-overdue forty-five minute talk with my padres. Keeping in mind the cost per minute, I spoke the entire time about our travels thus far: snow-capped mountains, long treks and new friends at every stop, national parks, flat tires, mystery trains, late nights in Chile and an unfolding adventure in Perú. The three of us would eventually look back on it as one of our most memorable phone conversations ever. Afterward, alone and content on Christmas Eve, I walked by myself down Avenida Santa Clara Marqués to a small restaurant facing the Plaza listo: ready. Can also mean “OK.” de San Francisco for a fine holiday General indication of agreement. dinner of fettucini alfredo and a warm padres: parents vino fino tinto: fine red wine. There are glass of Tacama vino fino tinto. The a few good Peruvian vineyards waiter was very kind and, perhaps including Tacama and Vista Alegre. propina: tip feeling sorry for the restaurant’s only cusqueña: a resident of Cusco single patron on Christmas Eve, he Papá Noel: Santa Claus Nochebuena: Christmas Eve brought me a complimentary Pisco Sour nightcap. I thanked him sincerely for the gesture, left a decent propina and made my way outside. Unlike the previous night, the marketplace was not brimming with vendors. Most Cusqueñas were at home with their families or huddled in one of the city’s many cathedrals for Mass. Back up on Avenida Graciloso, I popped into the kiosko next door for another liter of agua sin gas and a huge piece of German chocolate cake for only two soles. 152

Once back in the room, I ate my cake alone and contemplated writing a few postcards to take my mind off the sudden wave of holiday loneliness that had washed over me. I glanced at our travel itinerary for Christmas Day that was sketched on the back of an envelope. 5:00 Wake-up call... 6:00 Train to Machu Picchu. I opted to skip the writing and just turn in. Besides, I decided that being in bed before midnight could pay big dividends. If Papa Noel happened to make an overnight stop in Cusco, I just might wake up with something I really needed at the foot of the tiny bed. Like Gore-tex. Or a pair of dry boots. Or a nice pint of Guinness. Or eggs benedict for breakfast. Or french toast. Or just enough nuevos soles to get me back home to Argentina. Or at least a zero balance on my Visa card. Or maybe just some more time. More time to stay in South America. More time to travel. Time and money; at this point, both commodities were in very short supply. I turned off the bedside lamp and gave thanks for the chance to be in Southern Perú on this most amazing and unforgettable Nochebuena.

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