Latinalicious: The South America Diaries (19 page)

All right, Diary?

I’m back in the Leonard Hotel now, tucked up in a bed with blankets so tight that reception might need to come see why I haven’t checked out in the morning. I’m still writing in you, Diary, a) because we’ve become so close, and b) because my laptop is still in the safe downstairs and whoever has the key appears to have gone home.

We got back to Cuzco late after taking the train from the town of Aguas Calientes and then a rattling minivan along a highway lit only by a star-scattered sky. The AFL guys passed out with their heads against their duffel bags. It’s been a looooooooong four days.

But Machu Picchu. Wow. We had to pack up camp and wait in line in the dark in order to get through security early this morning, but once that was done we were all propelled by an extra burst of adrenaline on the hour and a half march towards Inti Punku (also known as the Sun Gate).

Getting there involved a lot more walking uphill on nothing more than a few crackers and an apple. The porters, including the fabulous Octavio, all raced off early to catch a 6 a.m. train back to Cuzco, so there was no proper breakfast. Elias told us most of the porters have never even seen Machu Picchu. Can you believe that? They just do their job on the trail and then go home. I guess it’s like living in New York and never bothering to go up the Empire State Building. What is the prize to us, the pay cheque at the end of all that hard work, is just another thing they can see any time … preferably when they’re less tired.

It’s funny. When you start to get close to the Sun Gate, you can hear the excited shrieks of all the people seeing Machu Picchu from up high. You get a tiny bit jealous that they got there before you, and resentful that you’ve still got about 300 more steps to climb. But onwards you must go. I marched ahead with Emma and Elias just in front and I almost cried when I got my own first glimpse of the ancient city below, all twinkly in the morning light and then streaked by wispy clouds moving across the mountains.

Elias offered me a huge hug and a high five as I took my final steps onto the viewing platform. The AFL boys all whooped and I shrugged my rucksack onto the ground, ditched my hiking poles and just stood there on the grassy terrace, hot, sweaty and soaking in the magnificence of Machu Picchu. Finally.

It was an emotional moment, Diary. Suddenly, all the pain and exhaustion was worth it. Suddenly, as the sun’s rays reached through the gate, illuminating the city as they’ve done for hundreds of years at the same time each morning, not showering for four days didn’t matter. Running out of Toblerone didn’t matter. Having to sleep on a precarious slope for three nights on Autumn’s travel pillow didn’t matter. I had made it to one of the world’s greatest wonders. I had climbed a mountain on my own two feet.

From the Sun Gate, it was another hour and a half to the site of Machu Picchu itself. On the hike down, we started to pass the day trippers all making their way up and, I have to tell you, Diary, I have never loathed the sight of tourists so much in my life.

‘You look like you’re going skiing!’ drawled one American woman at the sight of my hiking poles. I wanted to stab her in the eye with one. ‘Skiing?!?!’ I wanted to yell. ‘Lady, I have just been HIKING for the past four days. I have WALKED here, whereas YOU just plonked your arse in a train seat two hours ago! I’ll show you skiing … ’

To make matters worse, Elias had to tell these tourists to form a single line on the trail, as most of them were so eager to reach the Sun Gate that they threatened to knock our knackered bodies off the path and down the cliffs in their haste to get past us.

Having made it safely to Machu Picchu, we took the obligatory smug photos and, luckily, no V-toting Asian tourists got in the way. Strangely, I saw a girl I know from the UK, someone I went to uni with, in the middle of the ruins. I never even knew she was in Peru. As I pondered the chances of that and this weird, small world, Elias gave us a tour of the mighty Lost City itself. It’s even more amazing up close. Seventy per cent of it is pre-sixteenth-century original, apparently, and excavations are still going on in the surrounding valleys. Elias told us that just two months ago they discovered a stone wall running up the side of a nearby mountain, but as yet no one knows what it was for.

My own smug ‘look at me at Machu Picchu’ shot, with Elias.

As I mentioned before, no one really knows what Machu Picchu was for, either. There are a few theories. One is that the area was a retreat for Inca aristocracy. This might explain why no Peruvians knew of its existence and also why the majority of it is built to such an impressive standard. Another theory is that Machu Picchu was actually a university of sorts, as it seems to offer unparalleled opportunities for studying astronomy and agriculture. Either way, it’s monstrous when you’re standing in it, and it was built to house at least 1000 people, all of whom obeyed the Incan moral code — ama suwa, ama llulla, ama quella (do not steal, do not lie, do not be lazy).

Not being lazy at all, the AFL boys wanted to climb to the peak of Huayna Picchu, the mountain that overlooks the spectacular city and features prominently in so many stone sculptures around Machu Picchu. But they couldn’t because they didn’t book it in advance. Personally, I was so hot and exhausted that, after a couple of hours’ wandering around and sweating profusely through my shirt into my rucksack, I took myself to the bus stop and hightailed it to Aguas Calientes — just a twenty-minute zigzag away — where I holed up in a cafe with an overpriced coffee and rested my weary limbs. Eventually the others joined me for lunch, after which we made the hike uphill to the hot springs.

These were average, as far as hot springs go. To be honest, I had the distinct feeling I was bathing in a square tub of warm sweat and dirt, seeing as most of the people in it had, like me, come straight off the four-day hike and hadn’t showered in as long. I spent perhaps an hour in there, washed my hair under a hot fountain, put my grim and bedraggled clothes back on and went with the boys to a nearby bar for a well-deserved drink.

Here in my super tight-sheeted bed back in Cuzco, I can barely believe the journey I’ve just been on, Diary. The Inca Trail is probably the most exhausting, yet rewarding, thing I’ve ever done … a thrilling and simultaneously shattering experience that I’m sure won’t be matched until I give birth to a child. Machu Picchu is everything people say it is, and more, and I’m so glad I didn’t wimp out like those other tourists and take the train on a day trip. To really feel what the Incas must have felt, except maybe the Coneheads who were flown in on the spaceships, you have to live it for yourself.

Thanks for coming with me, Diary. I’m sorry we have to end this thing here, but you know how it is. See you next time my laptop gets locked in a safe. x

13/11

So, I’m having to stop what I’m doing and write things as they happen because what I’m witnessing right now is a rare gem. I’m sitting in Starbucks in Cuzco’s Plaza del Armas catching up on some Facebook admin after abandoning civilisation for four days, and a group of hippies appear to have taken up residence at the table next to me. There are twelve of them, all sipping Grande Lattes in Christmas cups, sporting those terrible stripy trousers that look like pajamas. I didn’t notice them until the wailing started. Now it’s getting interesting.

One woman, I think she’s the cult leader, is currently chanting in an indecipherable language in a considerably manly baritone. Another guy is rolling around in his chair with his head back, as though in a trance, and a man with a yellow long-sleeved T-shirt and cropped greying hair is holding his hands to his heart, rocking like he’s possessed and muttering under his breath. His eyes appear to be rolled back in their sockets.

Oh my God. You can’t make this stuff up.

Oh … wait … they’re all wailing now. In harmony. And their leader, the woman, appears to be speaking in a voice from another dimension. I can’t hear exactly what she’s saying, dammit. But I swear I just caught the word ‘chihuahua’.

Five minutes later …

The trance guy is swaying in his chair again, even harder this time, and another lady in a purple V-neck cotton top, who seems quite sane, is looking between them all with some confusion on her face, as though she’s not entirely sure what she’s doing here. I think her son is with her. He looks about fifteen and keeps catching my eye when I glance over. I feel so sorry for him. His mum probably thought bringing him on some spiritual tour of Peru would stop him shoplifting or spending all day on Facebook, but what she’s actually done is ruin his street cred permanently and made him believe in aliens.

Oh, wow … the woman leader is at it again. She’s now got her hands out in front of her over the table and she’s moving them in a stirring motion, muttering things in changing octaves. I can hear her words now, but they make no sense. I don’t even know if they’re English. Or from this earth. I feel like I’m in
Doctor Who
; some sort of parallel universe.

How do people do this? It’s Starbucks, for goodness’ sake. Don’t they have some kind of commune to do this in, where no one can judge them? Since when is the world’s largest coffee chain the place to sit and channel Peruvian mountain spirits? I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s intriguing but …

Oh my Lord, now they are
all
wailing. Wait, the leader is muttering in English. And … is she … crying? Yes, she’s crying.

‘Tell us who you are. For life and pure love. We love you.’

She is seriously weeping now, guttural bursts, like someone’s died.

‘For life and pure love, welcome, friend.’

Now she appears to be seizing up. No … hang on. She’s scattering imaginary grain around the table with her hands. The man in the yellow T-shirt is gasping, like some of it’s got wedged in his throat and he can’t breathe. She’s still throwing it anyway. If it were real, she’d be making quite a mess. Perhaps she’s actually distributing the life and pure love, which we can’t see, which we can only feel? I can’t feel it from here, mind you, two metres away. I just feel awkward. I keep looking around for the Tardis.

She’s singing now. Most of the other people have their hands in a prayer-like position. The trance guy has his head on the table, as though it now weighs too much for his body to hold up. The teenager is concentrating very hard on something with his eyes closed, as is his mum. Perhaps she’s decided this is where she belongs after all. No one apart from me is laughing, but then the other customers are round the corner in a separate section, missing out.

It’s getting better. I should be paying for this.

The female initiator is now nodding her head, waving her arms about in short, sharp, dramatic movements like a conductor. She’s done with the grain but she’s still crying. She’s so choked up she’s struggling to sing.

A cleaner has started vacuuming round the corner — maybe someone spilled their coffee? Remember, we are still in Starbucks. God, this vacuum is loud.

The waitress is approaching. Oh, this will be gold …

‘Can I take your empty cups, please,’ she asks them over her tub of empties. And everyone, and I mean everyone, stops being weird and hands over their cups. For God’s
sake
.

Oh, wait … now they’re getting ready to leave. Seems the show’s over.

‘Thank you so much for that love. It just came to me,’ one guy is saying, as he mops his brow with a Starbucks napkin. Everyone else is nodding.

‘I felt the energy in my shoulder,’ says the guy in the yellow T-shirt.

‘I felt it all through my legs,’ says a pensioner with copper-dyed hair.

‘He was definitely here,’ says the trance man.

‘My legs have been hurting but I felt this, like, hot energy in my ankles and it’s still there!’ says the teen, who’s going to be laughed out of every friendship circle as soon as he gets home. Poor thing.

OK, chairs are scraping back. They’re all off now. The vacuuming cleaner is approaching. Oh, wait, no.

They’re hugging.

The leader is wiping her eyes on another Starbucks napkin, as the mum in the purple top presses hers against her bosom, muttering, ‘Thank you.’

Still hugging.

OK … now they’re really going.

Wow. And to think I only came in for a Caramel Frappuccino.

16/11

Being one of only three people staying in the catchily named Casa Hacienda Nazca Oasis Hotel here in Nazca, I had a lovely birthday eve chatting to the other two guests last night — a retired couple called Janice and Bill from Massachusetts. Janice and Bill love travelling. They’ve been everywhere you can imagine.

Bill works for his own small town’s local council and his boss is the mayor. He regaled me with an excellent tale, over our decidedly un-Peruvian chicken
cordon bleu
dinners (we refused the roasted local guinea-pig special, for now, much to the chef’s disappointment), about how one day, he was called to remove a severed goat’s head from a local bench. Another time, he called the shots on what to do about a severed Asian man’s head seen floating down a river.

It was an amicable evening discussing life’s little sidetracks, our voices echoing around the empty dining room as the chef looked on in boredom, wondering when we’d piss off to bed. I don’t know why there’s no one else staying here. It’s quite a nice resort overlooking the dimpled mountains of southern Peru’s Nazca region. There’s even a refreshing swimming pool with a massive rocky water feature in it, which an eager little man rushes to turn on with a remote control every time I step outside. It’s a shame there’s no one else to appreciate it. Mind you, Nazca doesn’t seem to be a very endearing town in which one might stay very long. I have a feeling it wasn’t particularly endearing before the earthquake helped demolish most of it in 1996, either.

It’s since been rebuilt, but the majority of people who come to this scorched little pocket of Peru, come purely to either sand-board on the world’s biggest sand dune, Cerro Blanco, or to see the ancient Nazca Lines from a small plane, which is exactly what I did first thing yesterday morning, having caught an overnight Cruz del Sur bus from Cuzco.

The bus was actually pretty good, as far as these things go, although when I boarded I was asked to pay extra for something. I wasn’t exactly sure what it was that the woman was selling but it was cheap, so to save any hassle I handed over some money and took the ticket I was given. Some three hours later, the bus stopped and everyone got off. I wasn’t sure why but I figured I didn’t need a wee so I stayed put, and then I realised that my fellow passengers were actually all exchanging the tickets they’d bought for some kind of all-you-can-eat buffet in a roadside restaurant. So I missed out on dinner, even though I’d paid for it. I tried to sleep again, but the road after that had more ridiculous twists in it than a South American soap opera and every time I came close to nodding off I would slide on my slippery leather seat, or start to suffocate in the window curtain.

Anyway, the Nazca Lines. They were a bit smaller than I’d imagined, for some reason. I guess the perspective was a bit off from so high up. They’re actually spread over 500 kilometres and the largest figures stretch almost 270 metres. I didn’t get any good photos ’cause I wanted to puke every time we circled, but either way, paying $95 for the twenty-one minute experience was worth it.

Soaring over these mysterious lines took my breath away. This was only really because the plane kept jostling up and down and doing loops round each pattern, so all four of us passengers could see them. At one point the plane’s sick bag wouldn’t stop taunting me:

‘You’re gonna have to use me.’

‘No I’m not.’

‘Yes you are. You’re feeling it. Did you feel that bump? You’re gonna have to use me.’

‘No I’m NOT. Fuck off.’

I didn’t have to use it in the end. But it was a close call.

I’d first seen the Nazca Lines in a documentary when I was a kid and I’ve been fascinated ever since. They were, after all, like Machu Picchu, created with the assistance of extraterrestrials.

Of course, there are other theories, too. If you haven’t ever seen the Nazca Lines, have a little Google, but basically, set quite clearly into the sands and preserved almost completely by the flat, dry, windless desert plateaus are a series of ancient geoglyphs supposedly created between 400 and 650 A.D. They were discovered by a hiker in 1927, although it was an historian studying ancient irrigation systems in the 1940s who flew over them in a plane and realised that the strange lines and symbols converged at the winter solstice (when the sun is at its lowest altitude above the horizon). I can’t even imagine the concentration and
time
it must have taken for the Nazcas to get that positioning right. Did they move stuff about on every solstice?

‘Not there … not there … nope, not there … not there … nope, not there, not there … nope, not there. Forget it, let’s try next time.’ Until one year, ‘THERE! Yes, there. That’s the ticket, guys! Lovely work. Only took 200 years. Shall we grab some corn and potatoes and celebrate by painting some pots?’

It’s crazy when you think that these people had none of the measuring tools we have today. Wooden stakes have been found in the region, which may have been the tools used to create the shallow trenches in the ground that constitute the lines, yet the accuracy and intricacy of hummingbirds, a giant spider, a monkey with a spiraled tail, a cartoon-like whale, a flower and a tree — even what looks like an astronaut on the side of a hill — is unbelievable when you see the scale of them.

Some people believe the lines have a religious purpose, although I stand by the alien visitation theory. It’s the only one that makes sense to me. Erich von Däniken, a popular Swiss author, maintains that all the Nazca Lines are actually runways in an ancient airfield once populated by extraterrestrials, who the Nazcas mistook for their gods. Several patterns, I swear, really do look just like the outline of a small airfield. You can almost make out a landing strip and spirals shaped suspiciously like landing pads, all etched into the dirt like a blueprint among the pictures of animals. It’s creepy. The officials don’t agree and don’t encourage von Däniken’s ramblings but we’ll never know anything for certain, so personally I say why not make the sci-fi nerds among us happy and just go with it? Some people are so boring.

Anyway, I’m glad I got to see them after all this time, even if they were more exciting in the documentary.

Seeing as Janice and Bill left for Lima this morning and I was faced with a day alone, I booked a tour to the Chauchilla Cemetery, just out of town. It wasn’t the ideal birthday outing, turning thirty-three surrounded by withering corpses, but it was better than sitting around in the empty resort with no friends, waiting for the bored pool man to turn the water feature on.

Chauchilla Cemetery is the only archaeological site in Peru where ancient mummies can be seen in their original graves. The site, dating back to 200 A.D but only discovered in the 1920s, was looted by treasure hunters who took the valuable stuff and left behind the bones of those long dead. They left a lot of pots, too, of course. And bits of pots. I suppose there are only so many pots one knows what to do with, really. Even the tomb raiders were probably sick of them: ‘Not another fucking POT. I don’t care what it’s worth. Leave it there.’

It was pretty cool to see the place in its lonely stretch of desert nothingness, with the mummies returned to their original tombs, exposed to the air, no glass covering over them or anything. These thousand-year-old bodies have been preserved so well by the natural climate that they still have hair on their heads — huge Rasta-like dreadlocks curling around their skeletons, which are a sign apparently that the Nazcas were probably a nation of highly respected priests. Some even have the remains of soft skin tissue in places (mostly on their feet) and coloured clothing still wrapped around them. These people were dyeing clothes, creating some sort of ‘fashion’ 400 years before Christ; they were priests, warriors, architects (they built some nifty aqueducts, which you can also go and see), and excellent metalsmiths who worked with gold from the surrounding hills. They did heaps of cool stuff with next to no tools, those Nazcas.

Sometimes I think we should change the meaning of BC from Before Christ to Before Computers because, seriously, people got a lot more done before they came along …

Anyway, so here I am, still alone on my birthday with nothing much else to do in Nazca. At first it was quite thrilling being queen of the hotel but now, having read some more of my ayahuasca book collection, stared at the sky and failed to spot any aliens (again), I’m a bit bored, really. I feel all fidgety and friendless and I’m even considering ordering and eating some guinea-pig, just for something different … although my brother had a guinea-pig when we were kids and every time I almost order some here in Peru I think of skewering and eating poor, trusting Rumpelstiltskin and I feel like a bad person. Plus, they look like boiled squirrels on sticks. I’ll probably just have the chicken
cordon-bleu
again.

Had Janice and Bill still been here, of course, we would have swigged some birthday Fanta and talked some more about the severed heads that Bill’s had to evict from various Massachusetts landmarks. That would have been a fun birthday. But as it is, I think I might leave early and take another overnight bus — to Arequipa.

21/11