Pisac, Peru June 6-7, 1979
After our trip to Machu Picchu we retraced our steps and spent a few more days in Ollantaytambo, a town that both of us had fallen in love with. We were fortunate to be there for a truly priceless bull-fight. The town plaza had been converted into a ‘bull-ring’ of sorts. Most of the bulls jumped the walls, others looked disgustedly around, seemingly stunned by the exuberant colours up in the ‘stands’ – the terraced ruins of Ollantaytambo. The towns people were dressed in their finest traditional garb – a lot of red and bright green with dashes of yellow and orange. And were wearing the fantastic black and red frisbee-shaped hats, dripping with coloured ribbons and plastic buttons.
There were children everywhere, and babies wrapped in the amazing day-glo striped mantas that at first hurt my eyes, but now am almost ready to buy… . Older kids with colourful aprons and baskets filled with tomales and choclos – and even real potato chips! One mama was beating up some egg whites as she stood in the melee of colour and watched the goings on. Two old guys sitting on their cartons of beer (12 of the big ones in each case), were chugging them back as fast as they could. And standing about in small groups – one here, one there – were wandering minstrel musicians, some with brass instruments and marching drums, others with quenas and street harps. All totally out of tune and time, but having a fine time nonetheless.
Before the bull fight there was a little bit of dancing with a very Spanish influence: colourful costumes, knitted face-masks, frisbee hats, sequined skirts. They dance-acted a working scene with whips and spurs. In one dance the dancers lashed out at one another repeatedly, generally slashing the whip across the person’s legs, around mid-thigh, then joining arms together and swinging one another around. I wondered what it all meant.
There were a few moments of almost bull-fight, as the toreadors waved pink capes about, but they ran like hell the minute any of the bulls showed the least bit of interest. There were a couple of near-escapes, when the drunken toreadors, who were having a hard time paying attention, feinted the wrong way to avoid a bull, who was paying attention. All in all a pretty hilarious day of local entertainment.
Apart from that our second visit to Ollantaytambo was quiet and very relaxing. We were able to stay at the Inn this time around, and basked in the luxury of warm (not hot) showers, enjoyed leisurely breakfasts of real orange-juice and homemade banana bread, and caught up on reading and letter writing.
After that we spent a day in Cuzco, organizing transport to Pisac. There was some excitement there as well. We had gone to the Banco Internacionale to change money – an escapade that took over two hours – and then to the Allyu Restaurant for a late morning coffee. We’d only been there for half an hour when staff started boarding up all the windows. They shut the doors, but these exploding open as crowds of obviously nervous gringos who were avoiding a bit of a melee associated with a demonstration by striking teachers just outside the main plaza. We sat it out in the Allyu, and by mid-afternoon everything was back to normal.
We got up early this morning to catch a bus to Pisac, the ‘gateway to the Sacred Valley of the Inca’. It’s a lovely town, truly nestled in the mountains, very contained, and very unspoiled – all mud-adobe, that and red-tile roofed, and so tranquillo. It was an ‘alternate’ market day, not a full market day, which includes items of interest to tourists, so there were almost no tourists, which was great. The local market was happening in the plaza, where several vendadores – all women – sat with their piles of vegetables. The most intriguing thing about these women was the amazing hats they wore – very tall white hats with black bows stitched on the crowns. It’s hard to imagine where the idea for this design came from.
We headed up the mountain to the ruins, climbing slowly – the high altitude is a definite energy-drainer (the elevation in Pisac is almost 10,000 feet. The ruins are very extensive, covering separate three hilltops. They were apparently constructed by the Inca emperor Pachacuti some time in mid-1400. It was a residence for him and his family – a secluded place where they could get away from the hustle and bustle of Cuzco – even then! There’s also an observatory and a citadel. The stone-masonry here is reputed to be even finer than that of Machu Picchu. Certainly it is impressive: the rectangular stone blocks are so perfectly cut and fit together that you can’t even insert a knife between them (I tried my Swiss Army knife, just for fun). Still, one or two determined plants had established a bit of a foothold.
Up there on the top of the mountain we had a great view of the whole of the Sacred Valley.
The valley runs east-west, so the south-facing mountainsides are cultivated, right to the top, while the north-facing ones often remain in their ‘natural’ state – mostly forested.
But it's the hillside terraces are really breath-taking – beautiful rock walls, around three or four feet high, marching up the mountainside like a series of giant steps. Each step is around six to eight feet wide. This is where the Incas grew their corn, but looks like nothing is grown here now – there were llamas grazing on some of them – but I could imagine long lines of corn – and I wondered how they brought the water up here to them... . Slaves?
Below us at one point we spied a family sitting in the midst of some half-threshed wheat, taking a lunch break, eating, laughing and talking. Beside them the circular ‘nest’ made by the hooves of their donkeys as they trod, hour after hour, circle after circle, to grind the wheat. A few lots of donkeys also passed us by, heavy-laden with wheat, and perhaps potatoes or yucca, encased in striking woven alpaca bags with brown, black and tan stripes, and tied on their backs. Some carried three or four of these heavy-looking sacs. Little boys ran barefoot behind them, brandishing a branch of eucalyptus. One little boy had a beautifully braided rawhide whip.
After visiting the ruins we managed to find enough energy to walk up the hot-in-the-sun dust-dirt road that ran alongside the river from Pisac to Tarai, a very small village not often visited by gringos. We passed a few campesinos on their way to Pisac, dressed in the most traditional garb I have seen yet. Women in very full, coarsely woven black wool skirts with multiple layers of underskirts underneath, of course. The skirts are long, to mid-calf, with a red and black border around the bottom. They swing and sway from side to side as the women walk, like music in motion. On top, the women usually wear a series of sweaters, often in dark colours, over which is draped the mostly red, and heavily designed Cuzco manta. It’s woven alpaca with double-faced geometric designs depicting men or horses, people walking, llamas and alpacas, birds, trees, mountains and rivers. Sometimes they wear two mantas – one to keep themselves covered, and one to carry things in – often children. In other places we’ve been we’ve noticed that the men are generally more Europeanized in their dress, but here the men were wearing more traditional garb – heavy black woven pants and red and black ponchos. Both men and women were wearing red and black frisbee-shaped hats hung with coloured – mostly red – ribbons, almost like a sunshade or fly-screen…. . But of course they could just be decorative.
Tarai is a small, poor mud adobe and thatch town with two remarkable mud adobe churches, the facades of which have been painted white. They are rich with architectural detail. Neither church appears to be in use now. The town square in front of one of the churches was desolate – it’s really just a grass field with goal posts at either end. We sat near one of them, in the shade of a eucalyptus grove, to enjoy the shade, and the quiet. After a time an older man appeared and tied some string around a couple of alpaca sacks that were propped against a nearby wall. He nodded; we nodded.
On our way back to Pisac we stopped to take a picture of some corn drying in the sun – yellow-orange and deep rich purple-brown. An old man and a little boy, both double-bent with loads of wheat on their backs, were passing by. The little boy asked for money for the photo; it was ‘his’ corn. We had just bought pancitos at a local store to give to some hungry-looking kids who weren’t there by the time we got back to where we’d seen them, so I gave him those. He was so grateful, shaking our hands and thanking us again and again.
We continued up the road, father and son alongside us now, with him run-walking as many campesinos do, even up the mountain sides, breathing hard and sweating under his heavy load, but still chattering happily away to us. He told us he was 11 years old, but not in school because of the teachers’ strike, and was taking this wheat to the molina, where it would be ground by burros. He had five brothers and sisters, two of whom were professoras and one of whom was studying medicine in Lima. This is a common story: many families are working hard to make sure their kids get an education, and get out of this crushing poverty. I harkened back to a conversation I had with Lindy, the owner of the hotel in Ollantaytambo, about wealthy families in Lima who buy their kids’ ways into schools like Harvard, then set them up in businesses – restaurants, shops, guiding outfits – in places like Cuzco where there are growing numbers of tourists with big dollars. I think, again, of the impossible size of the ‘gap’ that separates the haves from the have nots. And ever more shall be so.
When we parted from the father-son duo I gave the boy a little box of crayons. The old man came over to see what it was, and, seeing ‘lapices’ (pens), said “good, good, thank-you, very good.” The kid was again profuse in his thanks, and in a gesture both touching and sad, kissed my hand, saying “Gracias senorita.” A box of crayons for this impossibly poor kid, while I head back to my comfortable hotel, a restaurant dinner, a camera, lots of coloured pencils, and literal buckets of money…. Sometimes the disparities, the disconnects, the contrasts, are just too much.
Back in Pisac, sitting of a pile of flat, river-rounded rocks beside an old gentleman with many bundles, all of us waiting for a bus. Little by little we are joined by several other campesinos, a few gringos, and a few young Peruvian tourists. It began to look like the bus wasn’t going to come, so when some guys in a red pick-up truck yelled “Cuzco!” we all jumped up. There must have been 25 of us crammed in the back of that truck – standing, crouching, leaning against the bars that ran along the sides (for animal or human cargo?). The truck really laboured going up the many hills, and had to stop at one point for water for the over-heated engine. We hadn’t gone far when we came upon another group of people, maybe a dozen or more, also waiting for a ride. They’d been in a truck like this one, had paid the driver 40 soles, and then were left here when he ran out of gas and went back to Pisac to get more. When he reappeared his truck was too full to take them, so here they still were. Two gringos in the crowd squeezed their way onto/into our truck. The campesinos, with their bags and bundles, watched silently, their faces a mask of long-endured second-class treatment – or worse – and patience. Who knows how long they would continue to wait there…. .
Off we went again, but now the road was in the shade, and it was cold. Very cold. I tried crouching, and standing on the lee-side of a couple of big gringos in down jackets. It was impossible to get anywhere near comfortable. And then…. unbelievably… we ran out of gas. And even more unbelievably, the driver demanded we each pay him 75 soles, the same fare as the bus. As a group we agreed we wouldn’t pay him any more than 50 (I argued we shouldn’t pay him anything until we got to ‘el centro’ of Cuzco). Not surprisingly a loud argument ensued. But once we’d all paid, we coasted downhill until we reached a flat spot on the road, where our coasting days were done. And there we sat. The driver and his henchman seemed to think this was pricelessly funny, and horsed around a bit, pretending they were going to go for gas, holding a plastic gas can and saying “well, where is a gas station anyway?” “Oh, adelante no mas…” of course. A couple of us got fed up, and started walking, catching a taxi not much later that dropped us at the plaza. I suspect the truck driver and the taxi driver are in on this scam together…. .
We leave Cuzco tomorrow for Puno and Lake Titicaca.
For more information on Pisac go to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%ADsac
For more information on the Sacred Valley go to:
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