SEIS Ruinas

Normally people pay some 30 soles for a day tour of four ruins near Qosqo. In just 3 or 4 hours, people are taken to one after another by bus or van, receive some info at the sites, and get back into town. Instead of doing that, Julian suggested that we take a kombi to a certain stop, then another up the mountains, for a total of 1.60 soles. It dropped us off at the highest of those ruins, Tambomachay, where we bought the needed Boleto Turistico (most of the profits of which go to Lima instead of staying here, sadly...). Those are small ruins with interesting stories, which we were able to catch from a few of the different guides other people paid ;) Climbing above the ruins you can reach a small indigenous community, which is as worthwhile to visit as the ruins themselves. From there you can climb down the other side straight towards the next ruins, Poca Pocara, and then you notice you could have probably walked across the community towards Tambomachay and seen those ruins without passing through the front gate and having to buy the Boleto... (but you should buy the Boleto anyway, more on that below).

Poca Pocara is more interesting than the first, and there too a guide offered us a free preamble to the ruins, a good 5 minute teaser, for further information he would charge for later. The pramble was very very informative, but the further guidance seemed more speculative, and we did not feel bad missing out on it. These ruins are very good to walk through and envision the activities there... From there you can also glimpse the old Quechua road that has fallen into disuse above the asphalt highway.

Continuing walking down from those ruins, you pass through another community along the side of the road. There are a few places there when you could eat. But we packed a picnic instead. Along the road there we met up with a Canadian who was coming down alone from a mountain hike. We offered her company down towards the city so she didnt have to go alone, and she came with us for some of the way.

We reached a point where the highway curves around a long way, but where our kombi driver pointed out a footpath that shortcuts and passes through another set of ruins not on the traditional tour. The woman who sold us the Boleto told us not to take such a route, since it is less safe to be away from the road, but there was a group going through that path on horses right in front of us, and we felt secure to follow them, so we did. We got to see the extra ruins, much of it still under excavation, which where said to be a temple to the moon. There, above a large rocky cliff, overlooking shepherd boys with their sheep and women washing their clothes by a creek, we took our picnic. It was quite wonderful to rest, on our own, behind a rocky edge, laying down in the sun, shielded from the wind... A peaceful silence that no tour could ever provide.

From there we kept along the path towards the ruins of Qenqo, where we again got some free info from other people`s guides. The amazing thing about that place is the work on bare rocks inside caves which were used to embalm mummies. There were also smaller, less excavated ruins nearby, which the locals called Qenqo Chico, which are also not on the traditional tours. The wonderful thing there was to find a carved altar on the bare rock where the Quechua still make offerings of coca leavest o Pachamama. There was also an amazing large rock shaped like a doorway, which in an Indiana Jones movie or Tolkien novel would surely open into a secret passage. There was a hole on the rock the size of a tennis ball, which I poked into looking for a trigger or other way to open the passage, and tons of huge black ants came out all about! That was where they nested their young, and they were desperately trying to fend off the invader and rescue their larvae. If the passage required one to continue proding her fingers there, it would surely require alot of strength of spirit to withstand the pain. I guess I didn`t believe in Indiana Jones and Tolkien stories enough to risk it...

From Qenqo we continue past other small food and craft stores to the largest and most amazing ruins around Qosqo, the grand complex of Saqsayhuama. There, another kind soul showed up and began giving us information about himself and the place. He is a teacher of Quechua at a small community up those mountains, and he comes down to the ruins in the afternoons after classes to give information to tourists and raise money for the school. He taught us about the ritual significance of that place, about the Quechua religion, and walked us through a ritual of offering to Pachamama and Apu. He gave us far more information than I could convey here, and without experiencing the place it would not have the same impact anyway... Above the ruins, where the towers used to stand with the altars, he crossed the security lines with us to show us the base of the towers, how it is a calendar, and how we can experience the echo of the Earth all around us from where the tower of the sun used to rise. We gave him 20 soles at the end, which is about how much we saw guides requesting at the entrance to those ruins, but we felt a bit heart crushed for giving so little to someone who gave us so much. Oxalá we can return more to his Quechua people whom he loves in the more valuable goods of the spirit than what we were able to give in lowly-but-necessary material goods...

Afterwards we completed our descent back into Qosqo, which seemed so noisy and busy with taxis and tourons all around... It was as though returning to a different realm after experiencing something higher. From the Condor to the Puma. Or even from the Puma, its head, through its heart, down towards the Serpent world below...

To walk through these places on our own, open to those who God trances their paths alongside ours even for a few hours, open to the experiences that befall us like the rain that comes with the unpredictable mountain weather, to experience on ones own feet the walk that the Quechua would take between their own places... that is how to experience this place - despite what the tour buses and the foreign cameras do to this place. It is still nothing compared to what it must have been like to live here before the invasion and occupation, what it must have been like to visit it even fifty years ago when the ruins were neglected to those who wished to trample or dismantle them, but it is still a blessing and a rarity compared to what it will be like soon when a Hyatt and a Marriot twist this place even more like the McDonalds that already encroached, below a marquee and without a big arch, at the heart of the Puma city... The new cathedrals that dismantle the Quechua people, but while I can feel the sour pain of the churches built from temple stones, the genocide-that-continues is even more painful. From the past, I feel but a pain of my history, but for now, I feel the pangs that torture me each time an old Quechua lady stretches out her strong scrawny hands from the ground up towards me asking for coins that I spend with much less care than she would...

It is beautiful...
...and it is painful
to be here