Fiestas and Incas

Buen Dia!

It’s been fiesta madness for the past two weeks. We arrived in Copacabana on the Bolivian side of Lake Titicaca to the discordant sounds of many bands playing at the same time and dancers thronging the streets in sparkling costumes. The bands started up at 5am and wound their way through the narrow streets followed by groups of dancing girls in twirling skirts and men with bells around their ankles until late at night, gradually getting drunker and drunker and more and more out of time and tune! This lasted about a week. Thankfully we escaped to tranquil Isla del Sol and hiked across the island visiting Inca ruins and camped on a beautiful beach with only some donkeys and cows for neighbours.

Here in rainy Cuzco they are celebrating The Cross with delightful dawn fireworks. In Aguas Calientes (the tourist town at the base of Machu Picchu) contemporary bands wearing silver outfits were loudly crooning in the main square and in Ollantaytambo (a beautiful Inca town between Cuzco and Aguas Calientes) we enjoyed a troop of dancers wearing grotesque masks with extremely long noses hip checking, bottom bumping and leg humping each other! Other acts included the ankle whipping dance and plenty of live music and loud fireworks rousing the town yet again at 5am. The hangovers must last a week!

Between fiestas we’ve visited plenty of Inca sites all of which are characterised by perfectly cut stones that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle making cement unnecessary. Machu Picchu was incredible, in cost as well as in location. After spending around $120 each to visit the ruins (train and entrance fee) we were astonished to discover that we also had to pay for the pleasure of using the seatless and soapless toilet! We spent a full day exploring the ruins by ourselves, enjoying the mountain views and eaves-dropping on tour guides who appeared to be inventing explanations about various important stones, buildings and temples. According to one guide a particular stone was placed in a certain position because it resembled the shape of the mountain behind the site while according to another guide the stone was a sort of compass …. one temple was described as the Temple of the Sun by one and the Temple of the Puma by another! Of course it is all speculation since no one knows the function of Machu Picchu. We contented ourselves with our own imaginative ideas and munched on our sandwiches that we had to smuggle into the site.

Now we’re killing time in Cuzco before travelling on to Huaraz and the Cordilleras Blanca and Huayhuash. Cuzco is a beautiful city and we’re staying in the artist district of San Blas with it’s distinctive smell of cannabis and dog poop in a very hippy hostel complete with a cross-eyed cat, colourful rooms, a constantly stoned Dutch man who holds your hand for a little too long and tours to the mountains for private Shamanic ceremonies or to partake of the self-healing, self-finding, soul-cleansing, cancer-curing hallucinogenic local cacti, San Pedro. It does have a nice kitchen. Despite the picturesque narrow cobbled streets and jumble of terracotta roofs that are reminiscent of Florence we find ourselves constantly at war with the city with it’s overpriced attractions and hostels and the inescapable women in traditional dress with their eye-rolling llamas wanting their photos taken for a price, kids selling postcards or finger puppets, women offering discounted massages and aggressive restaurant and nightclub touts insisting that you eat, drink or dance in their business. We’re looking forward to spending a peaceful week camping in the mountains near Huaraz.