Wednesday, February 29, 2012

"If you want to get ahead in life, get yourself a hat".


Cuzco was underwhelming, and its outskirts are dispiriting. And yet, the women walk proud in their dayglo colours and hats! 


I did some digging about the origins of this Peruvian tradition in headgear, and what I found was mostly vague. It seems every married woman has one. Trilbys and Bowler hats and Panamas, as well as the occasional Peruvian fantasia. 


A surplus of imported colonists' hats that first started an accidental fashion? An appropriation and subversion of the gringos' sign of authority? I'm not sure that anyone knows for sure. 


But I love the self-reliance and strength that these hats and braids braids project in the women that wear them. For it's only the women. And they're not just tourist-trap attire, or the carnival gaiety we saw in Lima, which was just for show. This is the look, day to day. 




In the streets and in the marketplaces, it's still mud and dirt among the green peaks of the Andes, but still what a distinctive splash of colour in the gloom.



As we depart Cuzco (the road is downhill to Machu Picchu), I'm glad to be in the countryside. The vistas here cannot have not changed much since the photographs below were taken in the 40's and 50s, a random find on the web. Another find was the splendid photos of Martin Chambi from the 20's and 30's. A world away from Lima, in time and tradition. 







Monday, February 27, 2012

Cuzco: Altitude Sickness

For the 24hrs that we are in Cuzco, I can't shake the impression that we're inhabiting a Heironymous Bosch painting. We're here along with the throng of visitors in transit to Machu Pichu, which practically speaking is reachable only by train or trail from this point of departure. Cuzco is a pretty sorry town. It has the decrepit look of a forlorn Soviet provincial capital, large and sprawling but unloved. 

The skies are threatening as we land. Maybe it's the altitude, or after-effects of gastric imbalance, but the place seems to me like a demented carnival. The shops we enter in search of snacks and socks to fend of the promised cold and rain atop Machu Pichu tomorrow all smell to me of formaldehyde or mothballs. 
We have a good meal at Cicciolina (!), but I can't shake the sensation that my lamb tastes like the leather binding of a Bible from the Middle Ages, all frankinsence and myhrr. Exhausted and short of breath at 3300m, we go back to a hotel room on our first night that smells like a latrine. 
Simon & Garfunkel killed that folksong about the Condor long ago, but it's exhumed and piped interminably through the night in the street below, in the restaurant above. The headache that comes with the altitude is skull-crushing. One can't sleep for the dreams of smothering and strangulation. 


Fittingly, here the religious iconography is one of gilded splendour and gruesome suffering. Christ looks like a goul, and but for the relief of modern-day cherubs depicted in Iglesia San Domingo, this is a world of pain, of the sudden and arbitrary rertribution of catastrophic earthquakes and fires ("Sito Seguro en Caso de Sismo" read the signs in some of the less dog-eared buildings).





Maybe we got Cuzco, "the Magnificent Capital of the Sacred Valley" on a bad day. Or maybe it's just me having a bad day. It's raining, cold, the streets are dirt and mud, the air is acrid with exhaust fumes of the car-clogged center. 




After progressive Lima, I was expecting something a bit more contemporary and wholesome for the antechamber to this Wonder of the World. Has none of the tourist wealth rubbed off, left traces of improvement? Granted, there are rich churches and impressive ruins to visit. But they feel obscured by the tacky tourist stuff. There's the uneasy atmosphere of mutual suspicion between tourists and touts, all the worst tat and rent-seeking of a tourist town, and so little of the charm (San Pedro de Atacama, I was too harsh with you!) 


The shabby, dirt poor settlements that lead out of town are further reminder of the grinding poverty in this part of the country, dogs competing for their dinner in the dumpsters outside the makeshift marketplace. But the road leads us closer to Machu Picchu... Another overnight stop along the way in Urubamba, and we'll be there the following day. The forecast is for dark skies and cold wind. 






Sunday, February 26, 2012

Magic & Reality: the Road to Machu Picchu

Until we hit the departure gates of Lima airport, Santiago was probably the most modern of the South American airports we'd visited, but also the most chaotic. Lima's by contrast was an oasis of calm on the day we left for Cuzco. I was lucky to find ind "One Hundred Years of Solitude" in the bookstore, and we sourced some excellent chocolate covered coffee beans and cashews for the trip. Before departing, I took no books but loaded up my Kindle, intent on travelling light over two months. It's been handy for digital versions of bulky Lonely Planet guides, a voyage worth of bed-time stories and travel tales. 

However, I also left plenty of space for the Latin American novels I planned to download, hopping from one WiFi spot to another, as soon as Joseph Conrad's "Nostromo" was behind me. 

It's been a disappointment to learn that practically none of the South American greats are available electronically, save for original language versions of certain titles. Forget about anything vagely obscure. 




 So I was thrilled to find "The Insufferable Gaucho" in the library of Tierra Patagonia, a collection of stories and articles by Chilean Roberto Bolano. And on this occasion Gabriel Garcia Marquez' masterwork, a fine prelude to our visit his native Colombia. Like Conrad's Sulaco, Marquez' Macondo is an entirely fictional place. The first few pages are evidence enough of Marquez' magic realism, to contrast the very historical realism that Conrad aims at in his book. 




But enough of fiction, back to reality... The transition from Lima's coastal plain to the Andean heights is rapid. The approach to Cuzco is remarkably green, but rough and rugged and vertical. Here rivers have carved ravines, and not the flood pains that became a familiar sight (duly flooded) around Cachi, in the Valle de los Calchaquies. No wonder the native Quechua managed to hide the existence of Machu Pichu from Spanish Conquistadores, and for it to remain "forgotten" into the 20th century. 


Already at school I'd identified more with Indians than Cowboys in the inevitable schoolyard games (do kids in the States still play at that? Or is it all re-enactments Halo and GTA these days?). What with their dazzling head-dresses, their warpaint, hunting prowess and decorated horses. Why would anyone want to dress in the drab costume of cowboys, whatever the firepower of their Colt 45's? But my first notion of injustice came with the stark illustrations in a childhood issue of National Geographic that chronicled the demise of the Incan empire. The pictures are still vivid in my mind. Pizzaro and his small band of well-armed men banishing Atuahalpa and his Inca warriors to slavery and stealing their gold. 


It's an episode related on several dimensions by Jared Diamond in his excellent "Guns, Germs, and Steel". Just the way of the world, one might say. But somehow remarkable that indigenous people and mestizos alike should have reconciled themselves to an historic calamity of such proportions. The Inca trail, the extent of the political and economic organization, of a staggering scope and advancement... That said, can Machu Pichu possibly live up to all the hype of being one of the Seven Wonders of the World? 




Laid Low in Lovely Lima


Ironic, almost tragic, that my plumbing should fail the evening we arrive in Lima, capital to South America's culinary awakening. No awakening for me, however. I, by contrast, sleep for 36hrs almost straight, getting up a couple times for a banana or a rice cake. 




When I'm finally back on my feet, we hit a few of the sites, watch the changing of the guard, an Andean carnival procession, take the shade of ancient olive trees.  




In my state, early impressions of this town are muted, but Flo is smitten. More on return to Lima from Cuzco. Next stop Machu Picchu. 










Chingado, Hechizado

"Argentina's like a novel, he said, a lie, or make-believe at best. Buenos Aires is full of crooks and loudmouths, a hellish place, with nothing to recommend it except the women, and some of the writers, but only a few. Ah, but the pampas - the pampas are eternal." 


- The Insufferable Gaucho, Roberto Bolano  


Our time in the Southern Cone of South America draws to a close. It's been a rich and varied experience in Argentina and Chile, but as we travel North we're expecting a change in temperature, and a change in tempo. 


From Salta we fly via Santa Cruz in Bolivia to Lima, Peru. Ever closer to the Equator, back into the heat, the chaos and colors of more tropical latitudes, which we haven't tasted since Rio. 





Friday, February 24, 2012

Salta: Soldiers, Saints and Sacrifices

Downtime in Salta is great for Dolce Far Niente, but nevertheless gives us the opportunity to add depth of color to our recent travels, as if to illustrate points on the map with historical detail. 
  





The Historical Museum of the North in Salta has the full rogues gallery of protagonists from Nostromo. Here, the blow-by-blow account of Argentine history follows a similar arc to the trials and tribulations of fictional Costaguana and Sulaco, a rousing tale echoing the nationalist uprising across other parts of the world in the C19th, colourful and chaotic, full of uniformed heroes and polychromatic saints.



Plenty of polychromatic saints in Salta's churches, too. Salta is probably our first proper cultural stop since Rio and Buenos Aires, after the wilds of Patagonia and the desert. We did catch a few charmingly provincial churches in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile, and Molinos, with their cactus-wood doors and fairground saints. 

Here in Salta you feel the influence of the Spanish crown in the religious architecture and iconography. It's a different register to what I'd seen in Southern Italy, though a similar dedication to graphic and literal depictions of saints and their martyrdom.

We also happen upon a super exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art by children, "Con Su Permesso, Pintores!", which Flo and the Girls absolutely relate to and love. Charming, and a dramatic counterpoint to another exhibit about children just across the central square. 


"Los Ninos de Llullaillaco" were children sacrificed by Incas, their mummified bodies almost perfectly preserved for some 500yrs in the dry, cold air of their Andean tomb, 6700m altitude, where they were buried alive to be reunited with the gods in the sky. It's a tricky one to explain to Jas and Iris, or even to make sense of oneself. But the gold trinkets, clothes and devotional objects they were buried with are dazzling for their immediacy, color and preservation.





Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Cities of Brotherly Love: Jesuits in South America

I went to a Jesuit school for a year. St. Joseph's Preparatory High School, in Philadelphia, otherwise known as St. Joe's Prep. The only school I've attended that had a separate post for Disciplinarian, second only to the Principal. He administered detention, which was called J.U.G., short for "justice under God". Typical tasks during detention involved impossibly long Long Division, reminiscent of the Chilean border control ledgers I'd seen on this trip. 


Or if you really crossed the line, you'd be sent to work evenings as janitor at the local inner city Philadelphia hospital. Keith, the senior who I'd car-pool with to school on frigid winter mornings, when it was too cold to wait for the public bus, was a careless pot-head. He spent a lot of time in the hospital. My friend Joe, a handsome and athletic fella, also spent time in the same hospital. But that's because some local kids broke his face with a plumbing pipe. They didn't like his school tie. It was a rough neighbourhood. 

The Jesuits had been offered more commodious sites in the suburbs, on more than one occasion. Our arch-rivals, the lightweights at La Salle - a countryclub masquerading as a prep school - occupied a grassy knoll in a leafy, wealthy Philly suburb. I think they were Dominicans. The Jesuits were having none of it. The inner city, not green pastures, was their pasture. If the students occasionally had trouble with the locals, that was firmly part of the curriculum. They're not called God's Marines for nothing. 



All that J.U.G. and urban crossfire may seem a bit extreme, but I always admired these priests, and especially appreciated the Latin (which wasn't available to study when I moved from Philly to Rome!), the rowing and the discipline. Perhaps there's more than a hint of the Prussian in me that values a hardline approach. 


The reason I mention this is that the Jesuits are everywhere in evidence in South America. We encounter traces of their work in every country we visit. OK, Franciscans and Dominicans ("domini canus", the dogs of God, I discover) and other orders have also made their mark, but the Marines made some serious inroads down here. 


Jesuits were to "strive especially for the propagation and defense of the faith and progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine." They also pledged a solemn vow of perpetual chastity, poverty and obedience. But they weren't merely into self-abnegation and religious domination. Jesuits have a claim to having founded Rio and Sao Paolo. In the depths of the jungle, their civilizing and prosthelytizing missions in South America were positively humanitarian by early modern standards, havens with no capital punishment or torture. We learned this from "Les Trains Pas Comme Les Autres", a great French documentary, dedicates an entire chapter to Jesuits in Paraguay, where they built utopian settlements in the jungle. These were veritable cities, entirely self-sufficient, with more than a hint of Marxist communal ownership. History is rarely if ever black and white, and the whole Christianizing project was anyway deeply suspect, but these ruins are quite a legacy. It seems that indigenous people were seduced by the promise of security in the Hobbesian wilderness, crawling with rival tribes and Slave hunters, but especially it seems by the songs introduced by these austere Europeans, which must have seemed ethereal in the jungle. 


I hadn't realized on seeing it on its release in 1986 that the plot of The Mission revolves around precisely this historical episode, with Jeremy Irons the Jesuit Missionary and Robert De Niro a repentant Portuguese slave hunter. Their good work is upended when the Church succumbs to realpoplitik and shuts down the Jesuit order. Having blazed a trail through the jungle and elsewhere, their idealist vision ran counter to the commercial interests of Portuguese and Spanish colonists and mercantilists. Scarface put it most succinctly: "you got the money, you got the power".   


Ennio Morricone goes a little overboard with the score (advancing age by this point?), but the cinematography, costumes and setting are terrific. De Niro and Irons make quite a duo on screen, entirely convincing in their predations and their piety, respectively. I download it for Flo, who has never seen it, but I'm glad to take it in again. It's rich viewing on this side of the Equator. 


And like the history of horseback, the Jesuits will command greater study in due course. They taught me many good things, but I still know relatively little about them.