Machu Picchu 2

Machu Picchu, for those of you who can't understand the languages of my continent, was a wonderful experience. It is an ancient ruin perched between two mountains at the curve of a deep river... A old sacred city to which the Quechua people took refuge during the Spanish onslaught, and which was left to forgetfullness untill Yale took it over... What is to be described, how can it be told, what it is like to be at such a place¿ A gringo could go there and appreciate the stones, the mountains, the mistique of the place.... but only a south american, even if adopted as I am, an truly take in the burning emptiness of the ''what we could have been'' and the values that built that place. Let no romanticism whitewash the imperialism that built it, the newness that contrasts with the millenarian Tiwanaku and Guarani peoples, and the painfulness of a classist religious exclusivity... but, still, it is not like the ongoing genocide, like the capitalist imperialism that places gringos there with their mcdonalds and pasty-fleshed women posters... what is to be done¿ to acknowledge it, even, is to go out of one's way in that international but not internationalist play ground. a pluricultural country, even, would negate Collantisuyu, in which I now write... Waikis, learn our world. Learn this in the pain in which it is deserved. That is the hammer that harshens the glow of the past glories that linger in the mountain forests mists of Machu Picchu. Friends gave me prayer flags to flutter on trees of a mountain.... may those prayers incarnate loving karma to that place, to our world, to the passing flourishing decay of the cultures that trample each other on the thin mountain air, of the jungle moisture below raining all about the jagged mountains all about.

Machu Picchu

Aventuras aventuras, como näo! Estive em Machu Picchu ontem, que tinha outro nome em seu tempo... Há um encanto com o que fomos (me fazendo agora de filho adotivo de nossa América) e oque poderiamos vir a ser, mas ao mesmo tempo uma estranheza no compreendimento que os povos que construiram aquelas lindas cidades e templos também o fizeram sobre os templos de outros povos, que seu império expandiu como os árabes em realezas polígamas que transformavam outras culturas em suas próprias, que todo imperio é imperialista... aí, perde-se todo o romanticismo sobre aquela gente e seus Incas... mas ganha-se, ou digo somente pessoalmente, ganhei uma visäo comparativa de civilizaçöes: se ambos impérios Inca e espanhol fizeram genocídios, pode-se comparar a medida de adaptaçäo dos outros povos à cultura ''vencedora'', e ví mais vestígios dos outros povos pré Incas em suas ruinas que vejo agora destes todos em nossas igrejas católicas... vejo a melhoria de esgotos e eletrecidade (para alguns) que vieram com a contínua colonizaçäo européia, mas vejo agora a morte das centenas de espécies de milhos e batatas e outras plantas que os povos dos Incas criaram e recriaram em seus terraços. Aonde cheguei? Aonde estou chegando? Nesse vai e vem de histórias sobre histórias, de impérios sobre impérios, de culturas sobre culturas, fico até tonto como os que caminham sobre essas montanhas sem se adaptar ao ar fino... mas me encontro cada vez mas. Fui até um pouco mais irmäo latino dos portadores Peruano-Quechua naquela trilha classista de turistas romanticos... Aprendi mais sobre eles e sobre mim mesmo. E assim vou... Por el suelo agora, cada vez mais, e mesmo ciego, sigo. Seguirei. Estou contente.

Valle Sagrado

We visited the Valle Sagrado for a day... A few notes: tour agencies never fill a bus, so they subcontract a bus and guide, who actually set the tour. You can get an idea of the tour from the agency, but never be too sure of details... Ideally, if possible, book it straight with the guide. We also found that you can get a single-language tour, with, possibly, more information than splitting the time into two languages. Costs a little, more, but still, off season, no more than 30 soles.

The tour is a mix of craft markets and ruins. The markets aren`t too different than in town, so it would be best to just spend time visiting the ruins. We only saw, really, Pisaq and Ollataytambo. The first is much larger than we could visit in such a short tour... The guide information is good, but it would be good too to return another day on our own to actually see the rest of the place. If one has got enough plata, you can spend a whole morning there, and a whole afternoon at Ollataytambo. Better that way...

With enough time, but not enough plata, bus your way to Pisaq for a day, try to find an improvised guide in town... They may or may not know much, but if you get a good improvised guide, twould be ideal. Same at Ollataytambo.

Lunch stops at either Urubamba or Calca. They said the former at the agency, but the tour actually went to the latter. Eliza and I packed sandwiches and granola, so instead of having a 20 soles lunch, we took a motor-shaw (a motorized rickshaw hehehe) around town and stopped out at their market. Unlike tourist markets, here they dont sell traditional trinkets and clothes, but clothes that say Adidas n such crap on it instead, cheap food and stuff the locals want. A very good experience to see the way people really live around here. Cheap fruit too, but don´t recommend any other food you can wash... There I bought some nice wool longjohns for 10 soles. A good deal too.

Tomorrow we leave for the Inca Trail. Excited. News from Machu Picchu next week.

Love.

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

Couchsurfing

Couchsurfing is the way to travel. Eliza and I are staying with Juan Carlos and Julian in San Sebastian, an actually Peruvian neighborhood of Qosqo, we experience Peru for real and we can cook our own meals and get reliable information about how to move around town for 60 centavos instead of 6 soles, and to visit the ruins for the price of two micro rides instead of a 35 soles tour.... so much more to come on the actually city of Qosqo and the nearby ruins soon soon soon!

Llegando dolorasa y cansativamente hasta Cusco...

I got sick just before leaving on my trip to Peru and Bolivia... Xiao Ta was taking care of me, with teas and other chinese medicine, that was wonderful and I miss it now.... I got sick, I think, with the stress of graduate school applications and the impending travel, and wanting to spend time with Xiao Ta, I overlooked the date of my flight, and left a day late! Had to reschedule some flights and dar um jeitinho, and a jeitinho was figured out, and I am now in Cusco. But still with a sore throat, and sometimes a little fever... I flew from Brasilia to Sao Paulo, rested some three hours, flew through Campo Grande, landed in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, where I went to a hotel (thanks to Aerosur) for four hours, then continued on a flight to La Paz, then finally, to Cusco.

Arrived tired, but I´ve also been taking (western) medicine, and now lots of mate de coca, and joined a Swiss backpacker named Simon to split a cab to downtown, and finding a hostel. After a light lunch, I briefly visited my tour agency where I booked my visit to Machu Picchu hiking the Inca trail, and came back to the hostel, drank more tea and slept the rest of the day... Only went out again for dinner with Simon, at a balcony overlooking the Plaza de Armas, gorgeous at night, with the rain, sparkling and sprinkling on the broad slabby stones of the square. The city lights also climb up the mountain sides all around. The earth colored buildings that seem so plain at night gain a colonial air in the evening, and the mixture of Inca walls and colonial ´superstructure´ (in both the literal architectonic and more abstract sense) make this a truly wondrous place.

Tomorrow I might visit the Inca museum here in town, and meet with Eliza at the bus station in the afternoon (she flew in through Lima and is currenlty taking a bus over here). Afterwards we will go find a couch on which to surf, she may need food and rest, and we will make our plans for visiting the region. There are many ruins all around, small towns with traditional markets, and many other good things to do and see. Hopefully, my illness will soon pass and I will soon get used to the altitude (we are even higher than Boulder, I am quite sure, perhaps as high as Eldora).

As my mind settles and my body heals, I hope to find here, in the very heart of my continent, a peace which has been lacking and a rooting which has been left hanging while I bounced around Brasilia and sought more education down north again...

The Chinese

Despite my disappointment with academia and the situation in Brazil, other things did fill out my days for the past month in Brazil: helping to host three chinese visitors, who are spending one year with the MST in Brazil. They arrived through Sao Paulo but came to Brasilia soon to learn Portuguese at the Catholic Church´s Missionary Cultural Center, where they are used to giving crash courses in Portuguese to foreigners who need to quickly engage with Brazilian society. This was arranged by Paulinho, who straddles both Church and Movement, but since he was in Europe for the first month the chinese were here, he asked me to help translate and take care of them. I agreed with much excitement.

We showed them around town, they were hosted at Paulinho´s house by the rest of his family of friends, who are also my closest friends in Brasilia now, and they were taken to visit camps and settlements around the Federal District and surrounding region. I also brought them over to my house sometimes to see a different class neighborhood, experience, etc. There were many things we did together, many great conversations, about the land issue in Brazil, China, Taiwan, the rest of Asia, Latin America and the world, other political issues, many other social and cultural issues, religion, food, music, history.... So much that, unlike my previous blog entry, on this one I must admit I didnt not write much because I was too ´busy´ with my activities in Brasilia to make time to sit and write. Unfortunately, it is also too much now to ´catch up´ in any significant way, so I will only highlight a few events and a little something about each of the three.

They have Portuguese classes during the mornings, and most afternoons free, which they end up studying language, watching Brazilian movies, or sometimes going on some outings or just resting. They visited Pipiripau twice, at first more officially, going around to a few families and seeing a formal meeting, the second time we went there to work on the land of our friends who will be living in nucleus 16 (Luiz and others from Paulinho´s family, and other organizers from the national office), and ended up having lunch with the community and taking our siesta at Netinha´s house. They also visited a settlement on its two-year anniversary, Eldorado, and a few others on the region. That was a great visit because of the celebratory situation, and also because a UN/FAO delegation was going through the settlement as part of a weeklong visit to Brazil to report on the right to food to the commission on human rights. They made a very short visit, clearly, and although their work is similarly superficial, they seem to be providing, at least, generally positive reports on the situation in Brazil - that is, condemning what is to be condemned and praising what is to be praised, generally, with some complications.

The best times and experiences I had with the chinese, however, were in more personal interactions during our field visits, translating for them, and also there in town, going out for food, drinks, film, meeting university professors, or just spending good quality friend times at my house, at our friends´ house in Sobradinho, or at their school (where they also reside).

Sit Tsui is the only ´real´ chinese of the three, and even then, she is actually from Hong Kong, but taught at Shanghai and currently at the Univeristy of Beijing. She teaches cultural studies and rural sociology, and works with peasant women in organizing themselves through handcrafts and such work. She is very involved in the research and process of ´a new socialism for the countryside´, a policy of CCP since 2004, in addition to having done work elsewhere in Asia, such as India. She is the most ´academic´ of the three, which sometimes raises discomfort on the other two, but I can relate with her as well because of this... her questions, which I´ve had to translate many, are the most systematic and structured ones. She really does field work. After all, she is doing a post-doc in social movements and the agrarian question in Latin America! She, as with the others, is being funded by the HaoRan Foundation, a make-me-look-good institution for a fucked up construction development corporation in Taiwan... They hosted, however, the Via Campesina to talk about the current economic crisis last year, where Latin American peasant movement people made the contacts that is resulting in their visit now to us. Sit Tsui will return to Sao Paulo after Brasilia to do some more research and work with the MST´s national college, named after Florestan Fernandes, and from there she is still to decide where to go.

Ming Hsien is Taiwanese, very Taiwanese, and also the only one who has any peasant background. The oldest son of a peasant family from northeast Taiwan, he went to college in Taipei and stayed there working with labor movements, to which he is still attached. He is also the oldest of the three, the one with most language difficulties, but also the one who is most excited about children and most adventurous to deal with Brazilians and make his way around. He even prefered to move out of the Missionary Cultural Center to go live on his own at the Movement´s lodging in a satelite city of Brasilia! Being a social movement organizer and not an academic, as well as a pro-independence Taiwanese (still of Han ethnicity, but Taiwanese for a few centuries already), he is often at odds with Sit Tsui. After November, however, they are going separate ways, as he is going to Belo Horizonte in Minas Gerais, where the MST has a strong urban presence and where new labor movements are gaining strength. Hopefully he will learn more Portuguese now that I am gone and he can no longer get English (or often, English-with-Mandarin) translation.

Xiao Ta is the youngest of the three, and one that goes between them in many ways. She is Taiwanese, but her mother´s family emigrated only recently, with the Guomindang occupation during the 50´s, so she speaks more Mandarin than Taiwanese at home. Also, her father is a prominent labor movement organizer, while her mother is a prominent university professor. Both are very politically engaged, and she was raised in the struggle all along. But, being this new, apathetic generation of ours, she has always had to play mediation roles between generations within the movements, as well as in other ways (as between Sit Tsui and Ming Hsien, since she, after all, speaks both Taiwanese and Mandarin, identifies as being from Taiwan but culturally chinese, etc.). She graduated with a history degree, but went on to work with labor movements in many ways... played and sang in a workers´ band known in such circles, helped found and organize a documentary film directors union (since she also makes documentaries herself), and was a major force in the sex workers´ movement in Taiwan, serving as secretary of their union until she came to Brazil this year. Unlike the other two, who have clear interests in rural sociology and land issues and fomrs of social movement organization (Tsui and Ming Hsien), Xiao Ta is currently with less specific goals and broader horizons... In a way, she needed to get out of Taiwan for some time, but, given who she is, she doesnt just go on vacation backpacking... she writes grand proposals and takes on a project like this one of working for international solidarity! Just before, for example, she undertook a similar, but shorter project investigating community currencies and barter systems in Mexico and Argentina, and since she had also lived in Guatemala for six months working with sex workers, she speaks relatively good Spanish and has far greater ease speaking Portuguese than the other two.

It also turned out that Xiao Ta and started liking each other a lot....

...but soon I had to leave for Peru and Bolivia. When I come back to Brazil, however, I will do some more traveling, and she will likely be in Paraná, so I might go see her there, and travel some with her. That would be good.