So... What happened in the last, what, month and half or two months since I wrote a blog? Well, lots and nothing, as usual. The big thing that happened is that mom and Jacques came to visit for two weeks from October 20th to November 3rd. I was in charge of planning this trip which had to include a few must-sees from Bolivia and Peru. They took all the pictures but my mom sent me a few that I'll post although they might not all illustrate my narrative here...
One thing about coming here to visit is that you lose a bunch of days adjusting the the altitude and generally feeling like crap. And crap-feeling time was spent in La Paz. Then we went to Tiwanaku where the weirdest thing happened. In that village where there is usually no tourists whatsoever staying in the bunch of hotels available, we got there and everything was booked! There was a sculpture festival of some sort happening and all the sculptors had taken the rooms. But never fear, this is my town. I got a hold of Doña Delia and I got us to stay in the house where I usually stay while living in Tiwanaku! Not quite as plush and cosy as the hotel I had planned to put my parents in, but at least it was giving them a taste of my regular life here. Turns out, to my extreme surprise, that house is super warm in the spring!!! I couldn't believe it! I woke up in the middle of the night and walked about in my boxer shorts and t-shirt and felt totally fine. Usually it's close to freezing when I live there. And squatting at Doña Delia's house allowed my parents to have another taste of what my life is here usually: I got Aurora to cook quinua cakes for us! It's my favorite food that our cook (Aurora) makes! So it all turned out fine and apparently I gained some cred in Jacques' eyes by seeing the "conditions" in which I usually live in. I wish everyone could see it then so that people would stop thinking I get "vacations" just because I leave Montreal for months at a time to go to a different country...
Ok, after Tiwanaku, we got to go to Copacabana, a beautiful small town right by Lake Titicaca which is the spot to catch a boat and visit the Island of the Sun (an important place for Inka mythology). Only Jacques got to visit the Island because mom got sick that night and morning so I stayed with her. It's not like I wont get another chance to visit it, while Jacques wont do the trip another time. Instead I stayed at our nice hotel and read in the sun. That was great, and I payed for it later. Contrary to my belief, I *can* get sunburns. Must be getting old... Here's a picture of me and mom sitting at the hotel. In the background you can see a bit of the lake.
After Copacabana, the hellish portion of the trip started. It is a given that you can't go to the Andes without experiencing some sort of unplanable problems, likely related to political unrest. Our problem was that the road from Copacabana to Cuzco was blocked by protesters, and it's not like there's lots of detour roads in the middle of this gigantic mountain chain. We had to take a detour that transformed our supposedly 9 hour bus ride into a 21 hour bus ride... Thankfully, most of it happened at night so we couldn't see where the bus was going because once the sun got up I saw we were on tiny dirt roads transformed into mud because it was raining hard all night all on the edges of mountains with no safeguards on the side of the road to keep the gigantic bus from tumbling down... But we made it, and got to Cuzco and our super cozy and beautiful hotel.
The hotel was a block away from Cuzco's main plaza (that you can see in this picture) and made it really easy for us to visit the historic (and pre-historic?) part of Cuzco. Cuzco was the Inka capital and a lot of its most important monuments have been integrated into the Spanish architecture which means you see Inka walls everywhere although you can't really see what the actual building looked like in Inka times. I love Cuzco. It feels like you are walking in hundreds of years of history, most likely because you are actually walking in hundreds of years of history...Now, if you want to see actual Inka structures you have to leave the city, or go to its outskirts. First stop was Sacsayhuaman, the "Fortress" that isn't one. It's overlooking Cuzco and has GIGANTIC walls with some stones higher than me, and that's where the Inkas retreated to fight off the Spanish so it was thought by the Spanish to be a fortress. But it most likely wasn't. It was more a place of ritual, when the Inkas weren't under attack. Here's me and mom trying to look past century-ish in sepia tones in one of the many doorways of Sacsayhuaman.
We also toured the Sacred Valley where there are lots of old Inka domains you can visit, the most famous one being Machu Picchu. I had never visited the Sacred Valley before, in my last visit I went straight from Cuzco to Machu Picchu. The valley is beautiful and there are lots of amazing sites to visit. I may not have planned enough time to do them all though. My bad. We first stopped at Pisac which I knew was my supervisor's favorite Inka site so I was excited to visit it. What I did not know is that to visit it you needed to walk on narrow paths flanking the mountain with no hand rails to stop you from falling if you tripped. And my mom is terrified of heights. So that proved to be a bit challenging... Here's a picture of us on one of the trails.
Pisac is indeed beautiful, I have no pictures right now of the actual site, but basically you go through these paths and then suddenly you have a bunch of structures to visit, then you continue on the winding roads and hit another bunch of dwellings and such. But we were mostly focused on bringing my mom through it without her having a meltdown. She was a trooper though, and soldiered on even though it was clear she was terrified. I'm glad to report that in a conversation after that she did say that given the opportunity she would do it again and this time focus a bit more on what's around instead of mostly focussing on getting through it. That's what happens when you face your fears (and survive it, tee hee hee!), you realize that it wasn't so bad after all.After this 2 hour walk through the site, we hopped back into our taxi and continued toward the town of Ollantaytambo. Again, I have no pictures of the town but it is AMAZING. Sadly we were tired from the Pisac adventure so we didn't explore as much as we would have liked to. Part of the town are still actual Inka streets, and there's water canals running through them. It kinda gives a glimpse of what regular folks living under the Inka rule lived like. And there's ruins of a bigger settlement that you can visit but again it flanks a mountain and we were too tired to climb. We did visit everything that was at our level though, which included fountains and just pretty ruins. We slept in a really nice cosy hotel there, right in the train station. There was a huge avocado tree right in front of our room, which made me crave avocadoes but none fell off... boo... We woke up at dawn and hopped on the train to Machu Picchu.
When we got there it was all foggy making it look kinda creepy and outerworldly.
Machu Picchu is huge and rather incredible too. And thankfully doesn't involve tiny paths over ravines. But sometimes, even though there's a wall, you are at the edge of a really steep fall. Mom had to look up, while I dared to look down (even though I do have a fear of heights, though I'm doing better since living in the Andes).
After our visit to Machu Picchu, we took the train back down to Cuzco where we arrived in a bizarre procession... No pictures again, but it made me giggle with glee as I love to randomly stumble upon weird things you'd never see in Canada. Here's what we saw trying to get to our hotel, oh and I should mention this was Halloween: although it was past 9pm, there was tons of kids in costumes, then tons of people all looking at a procession with a giant statue of... the Virgen?... and loud marching bands. Ok, it doesn't sound too crazy when I write this down, but the frenzied crowd and weird colors and lights were quite eery. Why would the Virgen need to come out on Halloween anyway?So that's it. We relaxed and walked around Cuzco some more the rest of the time, and I splurged on a plane ticket home because I was not about to face the blockades again!
Since then, life has been rather boring. I analyse all day, and lately I've been trying to tie loose ends, and prepare for my departure. I need to do stuff like cut the internet service, pay the rent for the months I wont be there (which is a bitch with the canadian dollar going doooooown - my rent is in US$), stuff like that. And worry about the mountain of bones left to analyse. Summer is definitely here though, which is weird and nice. I don't need a coat out, and usually I'm colder in the apartment than outside so I need to take off some layers before going out. Most of the time it's really sunny and the sun doesn't go down before 7pm so that helps to keep motivated to do analysis - no darkness to make you feel tired. Sometimes though there are these incredible storms with wind, hail, and thunder and lightning. But they never last for long. Ok, when I'm left talking about the weather, I think it means I ran out of things to say and should go do something else.
Sorry for the late post folks!
