Huancayo and Cochas Grande, Peru May 16-19, 1979
It was a long, but splendid train trip, heading inland from Lima, first through dry and desolate-looking hills, where only a few clumps of coarse grass and some suspicious-looking cactus plants managed to survive, breaking the beige monotony of sand and rock. Later we climbed into somewhat greener valleys, some even blessed with running streams, but still in the background those dry and barren-looking giants, lorded over all.
View from the train window.
A couple of young men collecting firewood.
And loading it on a rustic wagon with a very long handle.
We passed through several mining areas – it looked like some of the mining was for metals (mainly gold, silver, copper and tin), some for coal, and some for phosphate, that looked like sparkling white sand. Although the environmental impact of the mines is undoubtedly considerable, it wasn’t as dreadful a scene as I might have imagined – in a way the mines blended in to the monolithic mountain scape – and the colourful tailings heaps and ponds provided a welcome relief from the monotonous dun and khaki palette. The villages near the mines reminded me of Lawrence’s descriptions of English collieries – and the bleak, regimented rows of cheek-by-jowl, clap-board houses – but here the army-barrack style string of houses are painted in pastel colours, which makes them somehow warmer, and friendlier. Still each house has a large letter and number painted on it so that the miners know which one is their ‘home’. In front of each shack there’s a multi-coloured line of laundry hanging hopefully in the intermittent sun.
Every once in a while we see a small herd of llamas, standing on a hill overlooking the tracks. They watch the train pass by with the particular superior air they have – it reminds me of their equally haughty cousins, the camels, in Israel. Maybe they just look that way because of their long necks – no matter what they have to look down upon everyone and everything else. Several of the llamas had colourful ribbons in their ears, likely a mark of ownership. “Mine is the one with the red and yellow ribbons.”
We clackety-clacked into Huancayo in the warm glow of evening’s last light, its rays making long shadows on the distant mountains – they look like prehistoric monsters – and turning the valley’s fields of wheat and corn to gold. A beautiful entry into what has turned out to be a not-so-beautiful city – just another town, but with a somewhat sinister and unfriendly air – and absolutely terrible restaurants.
This picture summed up, for me, the desolate nature of the place.
Added to that are my new, uncomfortable symptoms, apparently attributable to altitude:
· No energy – NO energy!
· Listlessness
· Difficulty sleeping
· Night mares!!!
· Dry, peeling skin
· Nose and throat dryness and irritation
· Straight hair – a different look for me!
Well, maybe the last three are not so much altitude as weather-related. It is very dry up here.
Cochas Grande feels to me like a combination of Tierra Dentro, Huaras, Esperanza and Vilcabamba. I feel like I am home again – home to the agave and cactus walls, the eucalyptus forests, adobe casitas with red-tiled rooves, peasants walking the land, the smell, sweet and herbal, of burning eucalyptus, the friendliness of the rural people, the joy of walking on grass beside clear-running streams and hearing the birds singing. But here the women are not spinning wool as they walk – they’re carving gourds!
We found a good small family inn to stay at, and managed to find a couple of good restaurants in town. At dinner tonight (fantastic cream of asparagus soup and a heavenly vegetable salad), the waiter presented me with a sketch – but we never did find out who did it. Anyway it’s a good recuerdo of how I was looking after five months on the road… .
We spent our days in Cochas, walking through the red, red-gold, red-green rolling hills, and dropping in on various gourd-carving families. Gourd carving is a fairly recent ‘industry’, flourishing due to the tourist trade. The gourds aren’t grown here – they’re grown down near the coast, making the same journey we made to get here. In almost every home we visited there was more than one family member carving – everyone, including children, gets in on the act. So there are tremendous differences in style, and in the quality of craftsmanship, but all of the gourds were interesting, and many tell a story.
One of the first families we visited lived in a large but disheveled casita with a big, open-to-the-sky inner courtyard (it actually looked as though a roof had given way some years before). There sat papa, a fairly young Indio, wearing a jogging suit and soccer shoes, carving gourds in the sun, as his wife scurried about, in and out of the house, maybe preparing a meal, and his six children – all under 12 – alternately played, whined and cried for attention. All of the children were dressed in rags, all filthy with snotty noses and hacking, barky coughs. Their cheeks were dark red-brown – that almost chocolate colour one sees in so many children here, likely a result of chapping due to their constant exposure harsh sun and cold, but perhaps also a result of malnutrition. All of kids also had red oozing sores on their faces and arms – insect bites? scabies? lice? Yet despite all of this, the children had the most amazing smiles, smiles that lit up their entire face. Sue and I sat amid the peas, the chicken shit and the wailing children, watching Papa work, and admiring two of his very fine, very detailed gourds, which they call ‘mattes’. He chatted with us intermittently about his work, and his life. Although it sounded like a hard, indeed harsh life, he was not complaining. He was interested to hear about our lives - where did we come from and what did we do? And our travels – where had we been and where were we going? The gap between our two realities felt to me like a yawning, unbridgeable chasm. And yet, here we were, maybe closing that gap just a little, simply by being there, and chatting.
A little further down the road we stopped at another house where the entire family – mother, two daughters and one son – were all involved in the gourd carving business. They were sitting under a grass and plastic shelter they had constructed beside the house, overlooking the patchwork of green, gold and red fields in the valley below, and the hills beyond. A beautiful setting. Papa was methodically splitting small pieces of wood into long thin ‘match-sticks’. I wondered what they might be for. Mama welcomed us with a big smile, and invited us to sit down on two little wooden chairs that her girls fetched from the house. She showed us her work – not nearly as fine as our previous jogging-suit friend’s – but much finer than anything we have seen in the tiendas – and with charming little birds and flowers carved in the ‘top’, where normally are only geometric designs. We decided to take one, which wasn’t yet finished. They hadn’t filled the carved lines with the black tint – or ‘ink’ – they use to highlight the carving. So we agreed to come back for it later.
We walked a little further, but slowly. The altitude was really slowing us down. We found a grassy spot by the side of a little irrigation ditch, and half-sat, half-laid ourselves down beside it. The ditch is the same one that the woman in the first house had washed the dirty bottom of her littlest one in; the same she later washed the charcoal grease tinting mixture in; the same one we saw various campesinos washing food, dishes, and clothes in; and the same one they all depend on for drinking water, there being no other source here. It looked remarkably clear and clean. We enjoyed the sun and our usual picnic fare of cheese and tomato sandwiches, and drifted lazily back down the road.
When we got to the second family’s plastic shelter, the chairs were brought out once again, and once again we admired all the gourds the mother and three children were carving, although now they were somewhat more distracted by our visit, and mama had to remind them, in none too gentle a voice, to ‘keep working!’ But now papa was squatting over the coals of his stick fire, the sticks arranged in a spoke wheel, one end very hot, the other green and dry, selecting one stick after another, holding the red-hot end very close to a gourd he held in his hand, blowing on it faintly to increase the temperature, and thereby scorching the skin of the gourd, brown and black, to accentuate the carved designs. We sat and chatted – again about traveling and gourd-carving (such poles apart) – until it began to rain. The girls went scurrying off to bring us mantas – those colourful red, lime green, orange, yellow and blue stripy patterned blankets that the Indios wear over their shoulders, or fill with fruit, vegetables, wood, and/or children – to keep us warm. Such simple, warm-hearted people.
These little gourds were carved by the children and blackened by the father.
Both depict people - likely men, wearing hats with ear flaps - playing quenas.
After we left them we wandered back up to a house we’d visited yesterday. A relatively nice, white house on the hill where a young man carved fabulously intricate – and fabulously expensive – gourds. He wasn’t there, but his wife, who was busy tending cows, chickens and two constantly crying children, showed us his gourds again. We looked for quite a while, but decided not to buy them. Although they were beautiful, their prices were beyond what our pockets could pay.
So back down the hill we went to the house of the lady with the purple gourds, who we had also visited before. Today her husband was at home, carving. Again we noticed the very intricate work, and interesting, almost cartoon-like figures. His gourds are somewhat different from others in that they tell a story – the bruja, the illness, passing a cuy (guinea pig) over a sick man, then dissecting it to determine the man’s illness. An unfinished gourd – very large – of house construction, dancing on the finished roof, a fiesta with a band of musicians. Tremendously imaginative. His wife, whom we had met the day before, again showed us their gourds while her husband continued carving, and two older women, with the aid of some of the children, sorted a gigantic mound of potatoes that pretty well filled the dirt floor of their inner courtyard.
We bought a couple of purple gourds, and would have bought more if they had been left in their natural colours and tinted with black instead of dyed purple – or green, or red, or coloured with felt pens as some of the artisans are doing now, because they’ve been told that ‘some people like it’ (I wonder who?).
We carried on, back to the noise and squalor of our soccer-shoed friend, who greeted us with a big toothless smile, sat us down on his only two chairs, and talked with us a little more about Peru, about conditions here, and about his work. Listening, looking, and thinking. I was glad we had not bought the gourds from the artist in the white house on the hill – he’s doing all right for himself and his family – and that left us enough cash to buy the two gourds from this man, a man trying desperately – and valiantly – to support his family. It is amazing, and inspirational, that, living under such harsh conditions, he continues to create such fanciful and beautiful dibujos – the intricate bird and flower designs – that adorn his gourds. A true artist.
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