the last few days have been really amazing. after spending two days in the beautiful little mountain town of huancavelica we decided to head for ayacucho. unfortunatley, i got an email from the orphanage in ayacucho the afternoon before we left saying that they wouldn´t have room for any volunteers until september. unfortunate because we were both very excited about the place but nice to hear that they have all the help they need for the time being. we decided to come to ayacucho anyway and have a look around and then most likely cruise on to cuzco.
we woke up at dawn in huancavelica and took a trip to mineral spring on the edge of town. it was a pretty cool place with the water coming from mountain seeps and piped into two pretty big public pools and quite a few private bathing rooms with pools big enough for at least five people inside. i was a little dissapointed because it was a chilly morning and although all the water was staeming it turned out to only be room temperature, not even warm. now, this water supposedly has curative properties but i still couldn´t get into the idea of taking a cold bath so i´ll be cured up to my shins i guess. rosa thought i was reall wimp and maybe i´ll kick myself later when she´s all cured up (from what i don´t know) and i´ll be left with only healthy feet.
later that morning we took a collectivo taxi to lircay and while we waited for it to fill up i had an amusing interaction with an indigenous campesino to the great pleasure of all the taxi drivers hanging around. it will be hard to do this gentleman justice with a description but he was quite a site and i´m sure he though the same of me. he was somewhere in his sixties i guess, and had the traditional qechua farmer outfit with a tattered brimmed hat worn over a colorful knit scull cap, a black button up shirt, black pants and some amazing homemade shoes. the shoes were thick wool sock like things woven to leather soles. they were falling apart and incorporated a pink plastic bag in some fashion that i couldn´t quite understand. the man´s face was really what stuck in the mind though, wrinkly as can be with scrappy, haphazard whiskers strewn about in a wily manner. he had a big smile that showed a mouthfull of nubby little gap filled teeth. these gnarly little chompers were absolutely swimming in a soup of saliva turned green by the coca leafs he was habitually transferring from a little bag into his cheeks. it was this guy´s great pleasure to come up and shake my hand and ask if i wanted to trade shoes. it took a couple of trys for me to understand his slurry speech but i eventually did and told him that although his shoes were very nice, i´d have to pass. if it were only later in the trip he would have had a deal! he thought that was hillarious and so did the taxi drivers. he then went through the same thing for my pants and jacket. i did offer to trade hats but he wouldn´t hear of that. right before our car filled up with passengers i rolled him a cigarette since i saw him smoking earlier and after i smoked a little he took it with a little fear and we hopped in the taxi, bidding farewell to the old man and the most beautiful little town we have yet to visit.
that morning´s ride from huancavelica to lircay took about three hours and was a constant flow of absolutely amazing scenery. up and down we cruised through the andes popping in and out of lush green valleys filled with huge herds of llamas and sheep grazing freely with no fence in site. they all had different colored cloth hanging from there ears, sometimes with little pom-pom like tassels on the end, presumably denoting ownership. every now and then you would see someone, old lady sitting in a field with no other signs of humans in sight, knitting and keeping an eye on a herd. a small group of children, maybe three, walking along the road trailing a mess of pigs, sheeps and llamas back toward a little group of four or five stone houses with thatched roofs way off in the distance. rosa and i agreed that all in all it was one of the most beautiful landscapes we had ever seen.
the only downside to the trip was the ever impatient driver who would always drive up close behind people adn their animals if they were walking on the road and lay on the horn until the peole got the animals out of the way. it came to a head when, as we approached a couple of people walkinf with a few cows, three dogs jumped out of nowhere and started running with the car and barking their heads off. this guy just mashed the horn and floored the accelerator, nailing one of the dogs with the right side of the front bumper. the car hit the dog really hard and it rolled off squeeling as we just kept right on. i´m sure that dog is dead by know but i know if someone didn´t put it out of it´s misery that it took a while. luckily, that was toward the end of our time with that jerk and we soon found ourselves in lircay, the halfway point to ayacucho.
lircay is a small town and we were dropped off at the bus station although there are no busses to ayacucho and the only way to get there is by collectivo taxi. there were plenty of taxis hanging around but when we asked a group of drivers about getting to ayacucho they all agreed that it would cost a whopping 300 soles! that´s about 100 dollars and we were only three or four hours away. the other option was 150 soles to get to julcamarca wich is less than half way. this was obviously the special gringo rate but these folks wouldn´t budge even after we made it quite clear that we wouldn´t pay anywhere near that much. ahter asking around a bit we found a different place where taxis going to julcamarca wait for passengers and within an hour we were off for 15 soles a piece. i was glad we found a reasonable price and although i totally understand trying to squeeze more money out of tourists, that was enough to make me mad. they were so insistent that it was a fair price and were so clearly trying to rip us off that i was harboring a little resentment as we left the town.
luckily, our new driver was patient with both pedestrians and livestock alike and we had more amazing scenery to take in. right before we left lircay the driver said something about julcamarca and getting to ayacucho from there. i couldn´t understand him well at all but gathered that he didn´t really want to go all the way to julcamarca and perhaps thought that we wouldn´t be able to get to ayacucho that day anyway. we couldn´t really care as long as he was going to take us to julcamarca which he had already said he would. well, about three quarters into the trip he spotted a van bouncing along up ahead and got really excited, saying that was going to ayacucho. he slammed on the gas, started honking and waving a blue rag out the window in an attempt to get them to stop. they eventually did and when we pulled up beside them the driver of the packed van said they were only going to julcamarca but our driver talked him into taking us the rest of the way. when we climbed into the van and took the last two empty seats in the very back we could tell that everyone was pretty interested in these two random, scruffy looking gringos with heavy packs. they all seemed to know each other well and after getting past the "where are you from?" "where are you going?" "how do you like peru?" questions with those right beside us, they all started talking over each other excitedly in qechua. of course we couldn´t understand one single word of what they were saying but whatever it was was extremely funny and as they kept looking back at us and going on, we got the impression they were making fun of us but in good way. just really getting a kick out of us. they seemed like genuinly kind and happy people and we couldn´t help but shrug, get infected by the mood and laugh along. when we arrived to the tiny town of julcamarca one of the men closest to us said that there would be no rides to ayacucho until the morning but that there was a hotel where we could stay (that he owned) but first we were going to "eat with the family". we weren´t exactly sure what that meant but it sounded cool and the events that ensued were some of the most amazing of my life.
the driver pulled the van up to two giant wooden doors that opened to a dirt floored courtyard behind someone´s house. everyone piled out and we were ushered into the courtyard where three or four older women greeted us as if they had known us from birth, offered us seats on a bench and went back to preparing the meal. we now sat back and watched as everyone flowed in and greeted eachother with warm affection and the women that were already there tended three of the biggest pots i´ve ever seen. i could easily climb into the biggest two and they were full of mysterious food that we could see clearly from where we sat and they had open fires burning under each one. a couple of groups of children materialized in no time and surrounded and bombarded us with questions saying a word or two they knew in english until they were shoed away by an old man. this old man was on the van with us and after whispering something about his mother told us to sit down. i couldn´t understand much of what he said but rosa was pretty sure that his mother had died and this was a feast for that occasion. it made sense in one way since apparently something of importance was going on but a funeral? why were we there if it was a funeral? and everyone seemed so cheerful. when we had first arrived i saw a woman walk by with two raw pig legs in her hand, whole legs, hooves and all, and as we sat talking about this funeral theory, rosa saw the lady plop the legs into one of the big pots ............................................
TO BE CONTINUED.................................................................................................................................
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment