Following my first day in the sun I have managed to get sunburned on the inside of my arms, though everywhere else is relatively OK. The cause, I believe, was insufficently enthusiastic application of sunscreen. It looks as though I put my arms together and managed to pour a glass of boiling water down the channel in the centre with my teeth. I was just not built for sun.
We’re going to Cusco today, where temperatures will be lower and we’re more likely to be too cold than too hot. I’m writing this at the airport in Lima as we wait for the flight. It’s not yet quite seven am, but I am still jetlagged enough that my body is not entirely sure what is going on so I’m relatively awake, an unusual state for me in the early AM.
Yesterday was our full introduction to South America, and we could chart our progress through the success of our negotiations with taxi drivers. The guidebook says taxis should not be hailed on the street and ‘cannot be trusted’, but we cheerfully ignored that and got along fine. There are no meters so you negotiate the price beforehand, a slightly tricky endeavour when you don’t know all the numbers from one to ten in Spanish with any reliability. There are loads of taxis around, so to get anywhere you just stick out your hand and one stops, and then you try and say the name of where you want to go. If the driver doesn’t understand – and they generally don’t; perhaps they are not used to hearing Spanish names with a Sligo accent – then you point at a spot on the map or show them a picture in the guidebook, and once the destination is clear you start into the price negotiations.
We had an enjoyable moment yesterday after taking enough taxis that we had a rough understanding of how much things should cost. We were talking to a group of drivers who seemed to know each other, and we offered ten soles for the journey. The guy who was going to drive us there said it would be 25. Another of the drivers looked at him and then also said 10 should be fine, which rather undermined our guy’s position. He agreed to 10 somewhat sulkily. As we were taking off, he leaned out the window and shouted something back to the other driver, and I realised that I remember more of the Spanish swear words Kristian taught me back in the day than I had realised.
Anyway, we saw some wonderful stuff yesterday. Our first stop was a pyramid from the 400AD region. It’s nothing like its namesakes in Egypt, but rather a very broad and relatively shallow construction, topping out around 25 metres. There are no chambers or tunnels within – the idea was to get above the ground as a demonstration of power. It predates Inca culture by a thousand years or so. It’s constructed using millions (presumably) of bricks made out of clay, held together with an early cement made of seashells among other things. The bricks are arranged side by side not entirely dissimilar to the books in a library, with cement in between, and the technique is referred to as the library method. One of the advantages is the resistance to earthquakes, as the system allows the building to move about with the shaking.
The primary god of the people who built it was the sea, though they were also partial to the moon and had an understanding of the movement of tides and the relationship between the two. The sea, though, provided fish and sustenance and life, and therefore was female. And therefore when they practiced human sacrifice, only women were killed. It’s a rather strange experience to stand there on the ancient ground surrounded by the modern city and wonder about the screams of those tormented so long ago.
From the pyramid we caught the first of our many taxis to the monastery of San Francisco, way in the north of the city, getting there with the aggressive pace provided by a driver who is paid by destination rather than time or distance. It was a peaceful place, built around a two-story cloister, cool and shaded in the midday sun. There was a library there not unlike the sadly-overlooked Marsh’s Library in Dublin, long and thin and filled with books going back hundreds of years. Here, though, they were decaying and crumbling – some of them looked like they would fall apart entirely if you were to cross the velvet rope and pick them up.
Underneath the monastery are catacombs, where the tour finished. There are an unknown number of tunnels and crypts down there – excavation is rather hampered by the desire not to undermine the foundations of the church above and spend a lot more time with the bones than intended. There may be tunnels to nearby notable places, but no-one knows for sure. What they do know is that there are hundreds of thousands or even millions of bones, some of which are now piled into narrow, high pits of a sort, open at the top. If you were buried down there, they put lime on your body to hasten the process of decomposition, but it also destroyed the smaller bones entirely, so mostly what’s left are the arm and leg bones and the skulls. The pits with thousands of those are unsettling enough, but you need to the see the grave full of hundreds of skulls to get the full chill.
In one central chamber, an excavator in the 1940s arranged a circular pattern of bones and skulls, which is hypnotically grotesque. Doing all that must have been an intersting day or two in flickering lamplight deep underground.
We walked from San Francisco to a place recommended by the guidebook for lunch. It’s run by nuns from a French order, who wear multi-coloured African-style clothes and seem very happy with their lot in life. Between our few words of Spanish and French and theirs of English we muddled through.
From there we went to a place that turned out to be closed unfortunately, but is a mansion with over sixty rooms. There’s a very impressive closed wooden balcony outside it, the only hint that splendours lie within.
We wandered on randomly past it and entered a more local-dominated area of the city. Built up the hill across the river were flat-rooved multi-coloured houses, my stereotypical image of what the edges of a South American city would look like. The president was nearby and there were loads of police and soldiers about, and army vehicles with machine guns on the top. I wonder in what set of events they would choose to use those as an improvement to the situation.
We walked back the way we had came to Palaza San Martin and sat for a while in the sun watching the people, an endlessly interesting diversion, and then went for more of the same in Bosque el Olivar, where there are olive trees dating from the 1500s. We watched the sun set from there; at these latitudes it drops from the sky rapidly, and the temperature falls a few degrees.
We got a taxi back to Kennedy Park, where we had been the previous night. In the spirit of hard-core South American exploration we had a Starbucks, which cost not much less than the equivalent in Dublin. Then back to the hostel for a bit and finally out for dinner. We found a lovely place just far enough off the tourist streets to be interesting, and sat outside. Opposite us there are were permanent tables with chessboards carved into them, and there were lots of people playing, almost all of them men. Some of them were very good. I was tempted to walk by and exclaim ‘Ah the Hungarian gambit!’ but figured it probably wouldn’t translate.
Since I started writing this we have transferred ourselves to Cusco, which will be the subject of the next entry. I imagine that will be shorter – right now we have the collision between lots of things happening, lots of free time, and my ability to type relatively quickly. It has been a wonderful start to the trip. Home and work and Ireland seem distant, not forgotten but not ‘active’ in some sense, as though things could not possibly be continuing in my absence. The Irish Times tells me the weather did not get the memo, though, and I hope all of you reading this have running water and are not too cold.
Anyway, until next time.
