Travel with an open mind: leave your prejudices at home.
October 11, 2013
What goes up must come down. After the yesterday's climb to 15,000+ feet, we spent this day going downhill, 3,550 feet down. My knees screamed.
But I don't want to get ahead of myself. Before we started our downhill trek, we visited the home of a local woman who lived with her husband very near Wayra Lodge. Maria had spent her whole life in this valley, living in a little hut and working her land by hand. Her husband had been employed by Mountain Lodges of Peru to work with the horses, and her son had a job with MLP as well (I don't remember what).
Maria's house was tiny, with one little window mostly blocked by a pile of stuff, some shelves, a table, a few low stools, and incongruously, an 80s-style boom box. An open fire burned on the dirt floor for cooking and heat, filling the room with smoke, but thanks to a government initiative, she had a solar panel to generate electricity. Cuy (Guinea pigs) nibbled on grass under the dining table, an ironically appropriate location.
Tiny little Maria (she couldn't have been more than 4'8", if that) showed us the foot plow she used to till her garden every year. After having the chance to observe her in her natural surroundings (I'd like to say we visited with her, but really, she just did her thing while Silver explained her life), we asked how old she was. Maria smiled coyly and said she didn't know. Silver thought 35, but Helen said 50 or so. Her son appeared to be in his early 20s, so it's possible Silver was right. Either way, her countenance was proof of a life lived hard.
After giving Maria a handful of Nuevo Soles to help support her extravagant lifestyle, we started walking. Over the course of five miles or so, we descended out of the arid high alpine environment down into the realm of the cloud forest. Vegetation got taller and denser, and trees became more prevalent. The humidity rose. We'd barely started out when we saw our first wildlife since the condors of the previous two days.
Clearly a case of going from one extreme to the other. There are supposedly 118 species of hummingbirds in Peru, but this little guy is the only one I saw.
After rest-stepping our way up Salkantay Pass yesterday, the temptation to race down the trail was nearly overwhelming. Before long, however, my knees reminded me that this walking stuff was still work, and I reminded myself that I hadn't traveled so far just to race through Peru. I slowed down and spent quality time at the back of the pack with Helen and my Nikon.
One of the advantages of hanging back with Helen was benefiting from her training as an ecologist (she had a bachelor's degree in tourism, and was earning a master's in ecology). She was able to feed my curiosity about native plants and how they're used. The seeds of the red flower below, for instance, were traditionally used as a contraceptive.
She pointed out one that looked like a pink aster on a large bush that was used for heart problems (it contained digitalis), and another with purple flowers on a stalk that gave purple dye. As I always do when I'm traveling someplace new, I wanted to settle in for weeks or months to learn the natural history and human uses. Maybe in my next life I can be an ethnobotonist.
I was particularly interested in plants that reminded me of ones at home in Alaska. Purple lupine was fairly common, and looked just like it does in Alaska. The Peruvians, however, have figured out some way to process the seeds to render them nontoxic and make them edible. Lupine stew had been served at a buffet earlier in the week. I also saw Usnia, a chartreuse lichen known at home as old man's beard, and was pretty sure I'd spotted sour dock near one settlement consisting of a few houses and several chickens. I asked Helen if she knew if the locals ate the plant, but she wasn't familiar with it. She asked Vicente, and he said that they used it in soups, salads, and sauteed - just like we use it at home.
I'd noticed earlier that I hadn't heard much of anything about wildlife in Peru, at least not in the mountains. It just struck me as so odd coming from a place with abundant wildlife. I finally decided I'd better capture whatever I did see.
Yep, that was it for the day.
After torturing my knees with so much downhill, it was a relief to climb a mere 500 feet up to Colpa Lodge, elevation 9,372 feet. Breathing was easy!
I believe I've mentioned before how nice the lodges were: hot tubs, down comforters, water bottles tucked between the sheets, excellent food.... I think my favorite part, however, was the women who met us at each lodge with warm, damp washcloths and glasses of cold juice. Heaven. Today, we were treated to chicha morada, traditional purple corn juice.
The woman on the left was also the lodge masseuse (every lodge had one), but I don't think any of us ever took advantage of the opportunity to get a massage. Personally, I had a hard time paying American prices in an economy where they really weren't warranted. I had the same difficulty buying $8 drinks. I think people should be paid a fair price for their goods and labor, but a fair price in Peru is not the same as that in America. Petty, perhaps, but that's how I was.
The highlight of the day was pachamanca, a traditional Peruvian meal based on baking the foods in a pit of hot stones. Before we arrived at Colpa Lodge, Zoilo, our chef, and the horsemen lined a pit in the ground with rocks, lit a fire in them, and carefully mounded more rocks over the fire. By the time we got there, the rocks were red hot, and Zoilo had chicken, pork, lamb, assorted potatoes, fava beans, plantains, and more seasoned and ready to roast. The men demonstrated how they laid the veggies and foil packets of meat on the rocks, covered them with more hot rocks, and then buried the whole thing in a layer of cardboard from boxes, dirt, old tarps, and more dirt. The cardboard and tarps didn't burn, but the whole thing held in enough heat that the food was fully cooked in just 30 minutes.
While the pachamanca was cooking, Zoilo was separately roasting a few cuy for us to try. They were so small that they would have overcooked in the rock pit. We had a buffet lunch once the food was dug up. Everything was delicious, although I can't say I was a big fan of the fava beans. I just didn't like their texture, kind of mealy, and I'm easily influenced by a food's texture. I did enjoy the sweet roasted plantain, however, which was another first for me. Then there was the cuy. I'd avoided ordering it at restaurants because it seemed it was typically served as a whole or half carcass, much like you'd see a pig at a pig roast. Just not real appetizing to look at. Although Zoilo had roasted the cuy whole, he had quartered them for serving, so they were less squeam-inducing to look at. Actually, they were very tasty, rather mild and sweet. Someone else commented that the cuy meat tasted like rabbit (see - something that didn't taste like chicken).
After we had a chance to settle in and let our feast digest, Silver offered to take us on an orchid walk. I'm not sure if MLP just built a trail through an area where orchids occurred naturally, or if they transplanted species typical of the area along the trail, but regardless, there was a trail with lots of orchids. Although the sign at the beginning of the trail identified over 30 species in the area, we were a bit early in the spring (just at the start of the rainy season) for most of the species to be blooming yet, but we saw a few. The most common were Telipogon antisuyense, the yellow ones in the first photo below. They are about the size of a silver dollar. The smallest ones we saw were not quite as big as a pencil eraser.
As we saw everywhere below the highest altitudes, there was an abundance of bromeliads in the forest. Alas, we were too early to see their floral displays, too.
Silver also offered to take us on a night spider hunt, but no one took him up on the offer. Despite an additional application of bug repellant, my ankles had gotten chewed up again on the orchid walk. I just wasn't up to torturing my skin further. I was quite content to end the day cuddled up with my hot water bottle and a good book.
