Category Archives: Culture

Downtown in The Lost Cities of the Amazon

This article first appeared in March of 2012, in Spanish in Caretas and in English in the Andean Air Mail & PERUVIAN TIMES.
By Nicholas Asheshov
Some weeks ago two events, one of them startling, came together to pin-point the mysterious new conundrum of the Amazon.

The first was the appearance on a busy riverbank in the Madre de Dios of a few dozen members of a previously-isolated group of Indians. They killed someone who had been trying to help them.

The naked Indians, seen on TV screens around the world, were described by anthropologists as descendants of an unbroken line of hunting and gathering savages, living fossils of our neolithic past.

This is, according to new Amazon thinking, incorrect. These Indians are the sad, socially degenerated remnants of nations and tribes that were productive, sophisticated and stable just a few centuries ago.

The other event was an article in The New York Times that reported on the discovery in Acre, only a few hours travel from the Madre de Dios Indians, of extensive, deep straight, or sometimes circular, trenches, ridges and mounds dating back to pre-Columbian times, indicating a large, well-developed society.

This was just the latest evidence that the Amazon, or at least parts of it, was heavily populated by well-organized societies in much the same way as the high Andes were remodelled by the Tiahuanuco, the Chavin, the Chachapoyas, the Huari, and the Incas.

Over the past couple of decades the pre-history of the Americas has been revolutionized, setting off poison-tipped academic and ecological vendettas.

First of all, the Americas were populated much earlier, at least 33-35,000 years ago, double the time previously calculated. That is back to Neanderthal epochs.

Second, there were many more people here when Columbus arrived than was earlier thought. And, most important, the societies and nations of the Americas were much more sophisticated and structured than was previously understood. They were agriculturalists, not the war-whoopers of the movies. Their mode of life and agriculture had massive, long-term effects on the original pre-human forests. Fire was a basic control mechanism.

Today the evidence of genetics, linguistics and archaeology is clear that the Amazon was not just an impenetrable green hell populated by primitive hunters and fishermen eking out an unchanging, culturally marginal existence.

The same applies to North America. Here most of the descriptions of primitive Indians come from 18th and 19th century travelers who were seeing only the sorry leftovers of great nations that had been obliterated by smallpox, viral hepatitis, influenza and other European and African diseases. The Conquest set off the Dark Ages in the Americas.

In the Amazon the same collapse, featuring malaria and yellow fever, was exacerbated by the rubber boom of the late-1800s and early-1900s.

You can check this out in three fine recent books. Two of these are Charles C Mann’s easy-to-read, well-researched 1491 and a sequel, 1493, just out; and in John Hemming’s Tree of Rivers, a masterly description of the Amazon. Hemming, author of the classic The Conquest of the Incas has also written, earlier, three volumes on the peoples of the Amazon.

Charles Mann describes, for instance, how my old friend William Denevan, Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of Wisconsin, discovered how the Beni, on the edge of the western Amazon in Bolivia, was a flourishing, well-organized center of islands and causeways on what is today a bleak, sparsely-inhabited combination of dense jungle and flood-plain, inhabited today by sad remnants of Siriono Indians.

Bill worked on the Peruvian Times just before me in the 1960s and his stories on the Beni and similar mounds and trenches around Lake Titicaca in the PT were the first indication of this revolution in South American prehistory.

“Beginning as much as three thousand years ago, this long-ago society,” Mann writes, “created one of the largest, strangest, and most ecologically rich artificial environments on the planet.”

Great stuff.

Mann describes the Amazon as one of the world’s half-dozen agricultural heartlands, where plants were domesticated, the epicenters of civilization. Others were the tropical Andes, Central America, the Fertile Crescent, and China.

The Amazon, including the area where the savage Indians appeared the other day, just north and west of the Beni, was the source of yuca, known elsewhere as manioc or cassava, as well as tobacco, peanuts chili pepper, chocolate, Brazilian broad beans, the peach palm, and Brazil nuts.

It was also the homeland of Hevea Brasiliensis, the rubber tree, which was to be, along with steel and oil, one of the three creators of the 20th century version of civilization.

For the Amazon, including the Indians on the banks the other day of the Madre de Dios, rubber became a disaster, just as gold and silver had been for Peru and Mexico. The malaria and yellow fever, imports from Africa, that it helped to spread turned the Amazon and its western tributaries into what Charles Mann calls “depopulated fever valleys.” Slavery did the rest.

The Amazon as a center of civilization has become the subject of a bitter dispute between two magnificent lady academics, the archaeologists Betty Meggers of the Smithsonian Institution and Anna Roosevelt of the University of Illinois.

Hemming mentions the two warring camps on the issue of whether or not there were tribes with sophisticated, stable, large populations: Dr Meggers says that the Amazon basically had only hunters+gatherers; Dr. Roosevelt says that there were big lively societies all over the place.

Here is a message to me the other day from John Hemming and you will find nowhere else a more precise and appropriately colorful description of the state of play today in Amazon studies.

Broadly, I think that Anna (and her acolytes like Michael Heckenberger) are right to say that there were large chiefdoms on some riverbanks of the main Amazon and its tributaries (although there were also very long stretches of uninhabited river). Those chiefdoms were based on the river and its fish and turtle resources. 

But I think that the Roosevelt school exaggerates the size and sophistication of their beloved chiefdoms, which they compare to the great civilizations of Peru.

They also exaggerate the extent of human manipulation of forests. Remember that it was very laborious indeed for early man to fell trees (other than palms) with their stone axes. And they had no need or desire to do so: they were very happy in pristine forests full of game. Planting the trees they liked near their villages was merely rearranging the deckchairs. It did not alter the Amazon landscape.

Meggers is right about the inability of Amazon terra-firma forest to support villages of more than a thousand people maximum – the surrounding game is exhausted otherwise, and the soils under mature forests are too weak to sustain large-scale farming. So, away from the rivers, early tribes were not much larger than their modern descendants at the time of first contact and before being hit by imported disease.

For many years, John was Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, London, and we can all understand what he means by “rearranging the deckchairs.”

But not everyone agrees. Charles Mann in his just-published 1493, calls the Amazon “the world’s richest garden,” quoting archeobiologists and looking at parts of the Amazon today that are carefully-distributed and well-tended collections of trees, plants and fish and game reserves.

Today there are tourists but it can still be a tough place. Near the Acre ruins noted in The New York Times, settlers are still gunned down by big-money ranchers. I remember John telling me of the day in 1961 when he carried the arrow-filled body of his friend Richard Mason back to camp. A decade later, in 1970, I myself was searching the jungles of the Pantiacolla in the Upper Madre de Dios for my friend Robert Nichols, chief reporter of the Peruvian Times of which I was then the editor, who had set out to find Paititi, a version of El Dorado. It transpired that he, and two French companions, had been stoned to death by the Machiguengas.

Unlike John, I am not prejudiced by knowing what I am talking about and I unreservedly plump for the Roosevelt school’s bumptious Amazonian super-civilizations and I am supported by no less than Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Their latest movie, due out this year, is The Lost City of Z, where Brad plays Colonel Percy Fawcett, the English explorer, searching in 1925 for El Dorado in the Amazon. Let’s hope that Brad has better luck than Percy, who never returned.

————–

Notes.
Colonel Percy Fawcett said: “The answer to the enigma of Ancient South America – and perhaps that of the entire prehistoric world – will be found when the old South American cities are located and opened up to scientific research. These cities exist, and I will prove that they exist.”
————-
Tony Morrison, the wildlife photographer and author, on a recent trip to the Beni:
“Setting out from Trinidad in the Beni we hopped on a 35b bus in the plaza and headed to the great mound at Eviata where the entire village is built above the floodplain. I went there to see the last of the Siriono tribe, as they have a base around the old mission church. What a bedraggled lot they were and the mound is now topped by a huge ENTEL satellite dish — not a bad place to site it as it should be above the annual flood.”
——
Vera Tulyneva charlie.quispe@yahoo.com . Ms Tulyneva is completing a thesis on “Paititi” at the Universidad Catolica, Lima. Commenting on The New York Times story on ancient remains in the Acre:

“The earth constructions of Acre have been in the news for the past five years. The first one to speak of them was Martti Pärssinen, an historian from Finland who had been working in the region for many years. In fact, they are not “geoglyphs,” i.e. earth figurative drawings of apparent religious/ritual function, but rather utilitarian earthworks, like drainage trenches. Acre, Mojos, Beni, Xingu and many other Amazonic regions are full of them.”
————–
Michael Heckenberger website on Xingu: The Xingu Ethnoarchaeological Project
————–
An article on Acre: Pre-columbian geometric earthworks
and Geometric Earthworks in the Upper Purus

————–
The New York Times: The Nazca Lines of the Acre jungle – Land Carvings Attest to Lost World
______________________________________

Nick Asheshov is a veteran journalist, noted explorer and entrepreneur. He was editor of the Peruvian times from 1969 to 1990.

——————————————————————

In response to this article, Dr. Jennifer Watling responded: (See her paper on the subject: Watling et al 2017 + SI)

For you to state the following: ‘These Indians are the sad, socially degenerated remnants of nations and tribes that were productive, sophisticated and stable just a few centuries ago’ for me shows a great disrespect and lack of knowledge about indigenous Amazonians and their ancestors, I’m afraid.

Best,

Jenny

Dr. Jennifer Watling
Post-doctorate Fellow,
Laboratório de Arqueologia dos Trópicos, Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia,
Laboratório de Micropaleontologia, Instituto de Geosciências,
Universidade de São Paulo
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jennifer_Watling2/info

Chinchero — Lost in the Clouds of Poor Engineering, Bad Finance

By Nicholas Asheshov ✐

It seems President Kuczynski is to lay the First Stone of the new Chinchero Airport in Cusco this coming week. If so, it will be the third first stone for this sad project. Presidents Toledo and Garcia have preceded him. Some locals say Presidents Belaunde and Fujimori were others. We have to hope President PPK’s stone suffers the same fate. Chinchero is a disaster waiting to happen.

This week top regulatory officials in Lima resigned in protest at the illegal contracts for the financing for Chinchero. But crooked finance contracts are the least of of what has always been a rotten project.

The Cusco city fathers say they need a new airport. This is incorrect. Their object is to grab the valuable building land of the present airport. But even if Cusco needs  a new airport, Chinchero is easily the worst of the alternatives. The Pampa de Anta, nearby, is incomparably better. Anta is dramatically lower in height and is already runway flat.

Chinchero is outside Cusco  at an oxygen-less 500ms higher, on the road to Machu Picchu.

It started off, as these projects do, with funny money. Four years ago the Cusco Regional Government, run then by ‘Humala associate Jorge Coco’ Acurio, paid $70 million for a 330-hectare string of potato fields on the rolling, cold, cloudy massif of Chinchero.

The lucky owners of the fields were the 426 members of a couple of Chinchero’s comunidades. They received $230,000 for each hectare, making them by far the most expensive potato fields in the world. You can buy a hectare of potato field in Idaho, the world’s biggest potato region, for $5,000 per hectare. In expensive southern England, in Devon and Somerset for instance, the same potato field might cost GBP 10,000, one-twentieth of the Acurio Chinchero price.

The Chinchero potato fields are good for potatoes, beans, a couple of sheep and a burro.  They make a lousy airport. Difficult in fact to find a worse location. The average height of this ancient farmland is 3,700 m.a.s.l. The only commercial airport in the world that is higher is El Alto, at 4,000 m.a.s.l., the airport for La Paz. El Alto can be used only for local one-hour , max 90-minute hops down to Cochabamba and Tarija and Santa Cruz. Arica is a ski-jump away, Lima a hop up the coast. But that’s it. El Alto never will be commercial because planes cannot take off at these altitudes with a full load of fuel and passengers.  You can have either a full tank and just a few tourists or lots of tourists and a few gallons of fuel, enough to get down the hill. In the case of Chinchero, that means Lima. As Newton said, apples fall down for free. Bolivia’s international airport is at Santa Cruz at 400 m.a.s.l. Passengers to and from La Paz to Rio, Buenos Aires, Miami and even Lima go via Santa Cruz. Check the timetables.

It will be the same for Chinchero. The bureaucrats and politicians in Cusco and in Lima, at ProInversion and the Ministry of Transport, have taken to calling it the ‘International’ Cusco airport. This is a lie propagated by the under-funded concessionaire, Kunturwasi.  Flights between Chinchero, if this idiot, foggy project goes ahead, will continue to go via Lima, as they do today and till the next century. With one difference. The tickets will cost $300 more than they do today.

Fog, hailstorms, normal in high mountains, add to the Chinchero danger. The glaciers and snowfields of the Cordillera Urubamba, at 6,000 m.a.s.l., loom over Chinchero. They are just a few miles to the north of the Chinchero potato fields. Picturesque, dramatic. Dangerous.

Technological advances in aviation are focused on electronics and nano materials. But Newtonian physics will not change, whatever the Cusqueño powerbrokers seem to think.

It could not get worse? Yes, it does.

The Chinchero massif is a limestone base. For engineers, this means sinkholes. For instance, the Inca terraces at Moray close to Chinchero at the same height, are sinkholes.  The Chinchero lakes of Piuray and Huaypo reflect the same geology. Engineering studies reflect no deep drilling to assess this risk. A 200-ton airliner will one day  land at Chinchero and open a massive instant hole. Not good.

Cusco road, sewage and electricity services are already pathetic. There’s talk, but no plans exist for new transport between Chinchero and Cuzco, nor Urubamba. Power cuts are almost daily in Urubamba, the province in which poor Chinchero is located, thanks to state-owned Electro Sur Este.

What to do with the 7 million tourists a year promised by President Kuczynski?  Machu Picchu is already at a standing-room-only 5,000, sometimes 7,000 visitors a day. A study commissioned by the government says the max daily entry cannot pass 5,400/day. Call it 2 million per year.

Cuzco thinks, says, it needs a new airport. The present one, Velasco Astete is at 3,250 m.a.s.l., 500ms lower than Chinchero, which is a big difference at these delicate heights.  Velasco Astete, run and owned by Corpac, the government airport authority, consists of 240 hectares of good flat land which could easily and cheaply have its runways extended and expanded, with new terminals and, above all, new electronics. The A219 and A320 used by Latam and Avianca can fly in on self-drive computers as they do routinely, of course, in Europe and North America where the weather, though for sure not the height, is much worse than Cusco ever is.

But the Cusco shakers, the chambers of commerce and the local politicos have other plans for Velasco Astete’s 240 hectares of land, which is only a few minutes from downtown. As building land it is worth already today $1,000/m2, $2,000/m2 before the end of the decade. Use your own fingers to work out how much this free gift of land will be worth to the imperial city’s top dogs.

In theory, the central government (all Peruvians) is owner of the land,  and indeed this is how it should be. But, no, the Cusqueños have already bought it. Under a quiet agreement with former President Humala, the $70mn it paid the Chinchero comuneros is being handed over to the central government in exchange for the 240 Corpac hectares of Velasco Astete.  Acurio was later thrown out of the regional president job by the Cusco Supreme Court for one of several instances of corruption. Acurio is one of the Humala-Heredia team being investigated by state prosecutors for corruption linked to the jailed Mr. Belaunde Lossio for thousands of millions of dollars in state construction contracts.

So Chinchero is shrouded in big money corruption, and should be stopped, investigated on these grounds alone. This apart from its technical stupidity, a characteristic of corrupt projects.

There is a good way for the Cuqueños to have their cake and eat it too. They can do the sensible thing and build a new airport on the Pampa de Anta, closer than Chinchero to their downtown and flat as a tortilla. It needs a few million bucks worth of drainage but none of the expensive earthmoving of Chinchero. Its approaches are no more dangerous than Cusco itself, better actually.

What height is Anta? Same as Velasco Astete, 3,225.

What is the Region Cusco to do with its world-record expensive potato fields, burro grazing at Chinchero? Forget it. The money has long gone on pick-up trucks and on a forest of dreadful cinderblock highrises.

Chinchero is a traditional Andean village with a fine cultural tradition in textiles, with superb views of the cordilleras reaching over to Machu Picchu. Leave it as it is. No airport means tourists will retain as fine a view as any in the Andes. The bells of the charming colonial church will continue to float out over the Inca ruins, the primary schools and the workshops of the internationally recognized weavers.

Nick Asheshov was editor of the Andean Air Mail & Peruvian Times during the 1970s and 1980s, and of The South Pacific Mail, Santiago during the 1990s.  He was Latin America Editor of Institutional Investor, New York over the same period.  He lives in Urubamba, where he writes a blog and where he has been prominent in the hotel and railway business.

This article appeared in the Peruvian Times on  January 26, 2017

The people who ran the Sun

By Nicholas Asheshov

The Incas, living as they did at 3,000m a.s.l., focused on the Sun’s capacity to provide more than warmth for their fertile, glacier-fed tropical valleys. They and their predecessors grasped, like the Egyptians and others, that the movements of the Sun, moon, and stars could predict rain and temperatures.

Informatica, then as now, was power. But the study and understanding of the sun and the stars gave the Andean peoples much more than a weather channel. They were able to reflect the orderliness and mathematical precision of the heavens into their own world. The unequalled exactitude of Inca stonework and their careful, magnificently engineered, imaginative landscaping of their mountain world was a statement of philosophical power on a Shakespearean scale. They would control the uncontrollable: the earthquakes, enemies, famine, and disease. Under the Inca there would be no apocalypse.

The Incas took it a logical step further. They would control the Sun itself. At Machu Picchu, Choquequirao, Pisac, and a score of other centres, they placed carefully-engineered granite blocks and windows so finely that at the solstices —June 21 and December 21— needles of light would hit exactly at such-and-such a marker.

The Incas, like politicians through the ages, spun the Sun story. It was they who were family with the Sun, sons no less of the Sun. Running the universe had become a family business. The sun’s rays would change direction on the orders of the Inca every 187.5 days.

At the winter solstice, the Inti Raymi, visitors to Ollantaytambo today can climb high up to the other, western, escarpment of the Rio Vilcanota and at 7:00 a.m. on and around June 21 can look down across the river half a kilometer away and watch a sudden sharp spotlight, then, moments later a couple of hundred yards away, another and then another, appear on an Inca throne-room the size of a tennis court.

If this is a stirring experience today it is not difficult to imagine the awe,, the grateful weeping, the roars of enthusiasm with which tens of thousands of Inca faithful would watch this mystic magic five, six and more centuries ago. They would see their Inca and his family re-born, the unchallengeable nexus of this world with the past and the future.

Accurate knowledge of how to interpret and predict stellar movement was a vital part of the management of a heavily populated agricultural society for which control of irrigation water and of the rivers was essential in both drenching monsoons and periodic drought.

The Incas upgraded the Tiahuanaco and Huari terrace systems and roads into one of the world’s safest and most productive polities, as we can see today from a million terraces in great flights of ingenious engineering of one of the planets most spectacular sculpted landscapes. The renovations included unequalled mountain hydrologic and civil construction, together with agricultural and genetic research.

The magnificent interconnected terraces in the Colca, the Urubamba, the Pisac and a score of other Andean valleys needed sophisticated agricultural techniques and engineering controlling water, heat, and experienced biological genetic experimentation. These terrace systems were so delicate that most of them are today unused because no one is sufficiently knowledgeable and well-organised to use them.

The Inca Empire, stretching thousands of miles along the Andes from Colombia to Argentina, was joined by perhaps 15,000 miles of stone all-weather roads with A, B and C grades of size for lateral valleys of better quality and deeper penetration than any land communications system anywhere in the world until the advent of the railways in the 19th century. Legal, census and production records were kept on the decimal-based khipu knotted strings.

Warehouse complexes stored food and clothing. The Andes were more cohesive, more productive than anywhere in contemporary Europe, on a par with Ming Dynasty China.

Today energy not the Sun, has become the new god. It is energy, starting just two and a half centuries ago with the invention, in England, of the steam engine, which has created a different universe. Before 1750 no one moved faster than a horse, a running man, or a sail-driven galleon. Wood fires became coal, electricity, petroleum and nuclear.

A Bank of England economist calculated the other day that if we look at the 50,000 years of the existence of modern homo sapiens and call it 24 hours, 99% of the progress will have taken place in the last 20 seconds. It’s a nice notion though it might be seen to give short shrift to the Acropolis, to Leonardo and Bach. But it makes the point that few among the seven billion of us can understand the world today and for sure no one can control it. It is built to change. Intrinsically unstable. It must, faster and faster, keep on the move.

By contrast, anyone can see, at Machu Picchu and at Sacsayhuaman that the people who built these achievements did indeed understand their universe. They had done it themselves, stone by careful stone. It was built never to change, to last forever. Maybe it will. FIN

First published in Spanish in Caretas in March, 2015

Traditional Candles

By Nicholas Asheshov

In a backyard patio in Tica Tica, a barrio high above old Cuzco, a cauldron was bubbling over a wood fire.

“It has to be 200, 220 degrees,” Mario Calderon tells me. “If you let it get any hotter the colours will spoil, go muddy.”

The cauldron contains 50 kilos of paraffin wax from China and Argentina and Mr. Calderon, a master candle-maker, will use this batch to make dozens of elaborately worked bright red candles of different sizes most of which will be used in churches for fiestas and saints days, or by people like me who like candles.

Candle-buyers preparing for the Virgen de Asunta for mid-August were crowding the Calderon’s shop in Calle Meloq down near the Plaza de Armas. Mr. Calderon’s wife, Gavina Ninantay, says: “Our year really gets going on May 3 with the Fiesta de la Cruz. That’s our big day of the year.”

Of course, there are dozens more saints days to attend to.

The candles produced by the Calderons are brightly coloured and elaborately decorated in blue, yellow, bone, black, green, brown and reds—with endless carved baroque vine-like curls on which are stamped silver and gold flowers recalling, one supposes, the days of the Colony.

The biggest candles here run to 1m 80, a head taller than most of the clients, and six inches in diameter, a pair of which, elaborately decorated as always, run to S/400. Foot-high candles, three inches thick with three kilos of wax go for S/50 the pair with all sorts of sizes and colours in between.

Ms. Ninantay, a bustling hard-sell grand-mother, tells me that clients take cases of her candles to Germany, Argentina, the U.S., “a todos partes. Los Chilenos son bien pagaditos.” Saga Falabela in Lima send her designs and substantial orders, she adds.

“Easily the best wax comes from Argentina,” Ms. Ninantay says. The China wax is “rough and flakey” by comparison but the Calderons use it because it’s cheaper, at S/.8,000 the ton. The Argentine is S/11,000/ton.

“Con pura China al momento de decorar se revienta.”

“The worst is the Española y Turquesa. Parece grasa, desaparece rapidito.”

She also brings in from Lima the coloured die powder, made by Bayer in Germany, and liquids, also from Bayer, with different aromas. Mr. Calderon says, “We use canela, rosas, vainilla, clavo de olor, chocolate”. Sounds lovely, but Ms. Ninantay says, “Putting in the aromas gives us both a headache.”

Another important element is the wick.

“Some are too fast and sputter,” Mr. Calderon says. He puts arida on the rolls of thick thread as well as acido borico “para purificarlo de lo plastificado porque ya pues no es puro algodon.”

“Experimentamos para que nuestra vela arda bien.”

Most of the Calderons’ candles come from home-made molds cut from PVC tubes of different thickness bought in the hardware store. Some of them were originally tin cans of Cil cooking oil.

One end of the tube is blocked with a round piece of tin cut to size, with a small hole in the middle for the wick. The liquid wax is poured into the top end of the mold.

“If you put the wax in too hot it melts the PVC and twists it,” Mr. Calderon says. “So you have to wait till it cools to 150′.”

Then it takes six or seven hours to cool: “You can’t do it in the fridge, se raja. Cuando trabajamos en esto, cerramos las puertas.

“Seria mas facil para mi comprarme unos congeladoras, but once we did it for a rush job but they came out pesimo, perdimos todo. In the fridge the outside of the candle gets cold faster than the core.”

The decoration takes two hours for each candle. I watched three lads in one of the rooms of the rambling house sitting on low stools with an iron bowl of hot wood coals on a low tripod. Each had a thick candle hefted in his left hand which he held over the brazier to keep the candle soft enough to carve, with different size sticks like pinceles, the intricate vines and flowers into it. They would quickly dip a small wooden flower stamp into silver or gold-coloured powder to produce an amiably busy shining effect.

Each of the lads, one of them one of the Calderon children, would be off to technical school later in the afternoon.

“Se trabaja a base de tradicion y habilidad,” says Mr. Calderon, whose father was a candle-maker. “There’s no how-to-do-it handbook.”

Published in Spanish in Caretas the week of August 14, 2009

Compadres

By Nicholas Asheshov

If you are someone’s compadre or comadre you should note that this year el Dia del Compadre is Thursday week February 12 and that the Dia de la Comadre is February 19. Out here in the campo we celebrate them, in my case cautiously, as an entree to Carnavales.

Most people are multiple compadres. I have at least two-score myself, counting those who are padrinos of my own children as well as those where I myself am the padrino. Every wedding produces another crop, one for the civil ceremony and another lot for the church, as does primera comunion. If each Peruvian adult has, say, just 10 of these relationships, that means around 150mn compadre relationships. Perhaps a Peruvian could register himself in the Guiness Book of Records as the world’s numero uno compadre.

Of most of my compadres and ahijados I am fond and proud. One ahijado, Jhon Acurrio Caytuiro, the son of a prominent Urubamba market mamacha, got onto the front pages of the Cuzco papers by winning first place on the entry list into the Universidad Nacional San Antonio Abad, the first time apparently that a lad from the outlying provinces had achieved this. He got into the Computer Science faculty and had done his secondary schooling at an agricultural school run by Spanish hermanos up the road in Yucay.

Another ahijado, Rene Huilca, started life at 3,600ms asl 24 years ago in a cold Quechua valley and I ran into him just this morning driving a station-wagon taxi, right up there with thousands of university graduates all round the world, on the Urubamba-Cusco route. He worked his way through secondary school in Cuzco as a cobrador on micros. He is a courteous live-wire for whom I was able to do my duty and give him, plus a sister, a job a few years ago, both of them honest, smart and bi-lingual.

Their father, my compadre Melchior Huilca tells funny stories in Quechua –you know they’re funny because he giggles all the way through them– and lives up beneath one of the Veronica massif glaciers fighting off pumas and rustlers among the crags and waterfalls. Once Melchior and I went to the foot of the glacier to buy a couple of llamas one of the costs of which was that I should become compadres with the owner who lived in a small circular stone and ichu-thatch hut at over 4,300ms asl.

On the way down a steep slippery path one of the llamas lay down and refused to budge. When camels do this you’re supposed, of course, to light a fire under them. Instead, Melchior just grabbed the animal by its ankles and, incredibly, slung it over his shoulders in a fireman’s lift and continued stolidly all the way down to our truck.

In Tarija, Bolivia’s most charming region, the compadre/compadre days see exchanges of cakes, turkeys, sheep and liquor, emphasizing what they call there the “parentesco espiritual” which is the essence of the southern European tradition of compadrazgo.

For getting married, having compadres de la boda is a legal requirement, both for the civil and for the church. Once my wife and I were dragooned into being the compadres for a shotgun marriage between the son of an already-comadre and a local girl who had just had a baby with the son. For some reason it all had to be done there and then, so we had a word with the alcalde and we had to spend the evening listening to a tinny recording of the Blue Danube, everybody making forced smiles at each other while we signed the papers.

There is a lot of US anthropology literature on compadrazgo, a key aspect of campesino culture well beyond the Andes, Alejandro Camino, the anthropologist, told me when he contacted me the other day. “The idea is to extend your reciprocity relations by establishing artificial kin ties, creating strong bonds and obligations.

“The word in Quechua for “poor” is huaccha –orphan; ‘Kin’ links is what makes you richer, from San Isidro to Cerro de Pasco to Urubamba.”

He went on like this for a bit more, emphasizing what a good deal it was to be a compadre.

“Ah yes,” he said eventually, clearly coming to the point, “I want you to be the padrino for the primera piedra of my new house.”

Published in Spanish in Caretas the week of January 28, 2009

 

 

Where there’s chutzpah, there’s Pachamama

By Nicholas Asheshov

I first met Washington Gibaja in 1995 when he was 13. He was the pushiest and most winning of half a dozen village urchins offering their services as guides in the dramatic ruins at Ollantaytambo.

“How did the Incas construct this citadel-temple?” he intoned in a pip-squeak voice, confidently imitating the big-shot professional guides. When three even smaller urchins began a song-and-dance act we said we hadn’t any small change. Washington said expansively, “Don’t worry. I’ll handle it”.

A week ago I sat with Washington at a table at the Tambo Café in the Plaza de Ollantaytambo eating roast pepper and palta salads. I had run into him at the airport. His card featured a classy chacana design and went on

Magical Tours Peru

Washington Gibaja Tapia

Manager – Photographer – Writer

Machu Picchu Cusco Peru

Private Native Guide Ceremonies & Workshops

“See you Saturday,” he had said.

His websites include www.Magicaltoursperu.com  and as we sat with him and his pretty wife Pamela and four-year-old daughter, Washington was signing for me a copy of his new book, Sabiduria y Amabilidad de la Pachamama.

Thirteen years ago his efforts as a guide supported a handful of younger brothers. Today as he scribbled quickly a dedication he was telling us of his trips to universities in half the states in the U.S., to Indonesia, Nepal, Thailand and Taiwan.

Then we moved on to his campaign a couple of years ago for mayor of Ollanta. “I lost because people got confused with the numbers,” he said. “I think I’ll be in next time.”

His English is quick and fluent. The bubbly energy that had caught our eye back in 1995 was very much still there but the brashness had meshed into a good-humoured earnestness.

I already knew how he had talked himself into an early big leap forward. He must have been 16 or so and was as usual working the ruins when he spotted Sharon Forrest. Sharon is a big, blonde Canadian leader of New Age tours to Peru, Egypt and India. Forty years in the business, Sharon once hypnotized me and said later that I’d talked like a parrot of my previous lives.

In any case, there she was like a battleship at full steam surrounded by her admiring group as she preached in the ruins. Ni sonso ni perezoso, Washington went straight up to her and said in broken English, “You were my mother in another life.”

It was chutzpah meets chutzpah. Sharon is an admirable personage who enjoys doing good and nothing by halves. A few months later Washington had a room in Sharon’s house in San Diego, California and was going to school there. One of his little brothers was later to join him.

Washington told us the other day that he had just returned from a tour including Sedona and the Cascades Ski Resort above Seattle. He had given séances and organized shamanistic ceremonies: “Groups of 20 to 30, put together by friends. I made $4,000. Ten percent of this I used to buy story books in Lima for the kids in the schools up in the highland communities. I coat them in plastic and give them to the teachers.”

This is part of a virtuous circle that sees Washington organize chocolatadas at Christmas for the 35 Quechua communities out in the boonies among the glaciers above Ollanta, Peru at its most profound.

When visitors buy Washington’s book, @ S/35, they mark one of four boxes on a fly-sheet to signify where they want their 10% to go. The choice is between ojata sandles; the chocolatada; school books and a school-lunch comedor for 120 kids that Washington has set up in Ollanta itself.

“They put in their emails and I send them photos of what they contributed towards. I’m building up quite a mailing list.

“Obviously I’m pretty well known to the people up in the comunidades.”

Sabiduria y Amabilidad is full of fine photos, many of people not just ruins, all taken by, of course, Washington. The book, which has a twin version in English, takes travelers through a score of sites as well as Machu Picchu including those round Lake Titicaca. It’s without doubt the top New Age guide to the Inca world. Here’s a sample from the Intro:

“Todos poseemos una forma de energia y solamente tenemos que empujarla hacia el planeta y compartirla con nuestros semejantes asi como la Pachamama comparte su energia con nosotros plena de amor y humor.”

It’s all fluid, fresh and polished, a credit to the Ollantaytambo and San Diego educational systems. FIN

Published in Caretas Magazine the week of Jan. 16, 2009

 

How Calca absorbed Maotsetung’s Naked Chullo

By Nicholas Asheshov

If Lima follows Manhattan this year everyone in Miraflores and San Isidro will be wearing a chullo to work when the wet winter begins.

Thousands of people were wearing chullos at President Obama’s inauguration parade in Washington and my colleague Verlyn Klinkenborg, in a front-line dispatch to The New York Times, “Season of the Chullo” reported: “Gone is the Afghan pakol. Gone is the keffiyeh. This is the winter of the Andean hat.”

Verlyn immediately, however, puts her fashionable finger on the chullo’s only weakness: “It’s impossible to wear a chullo stylishly.”

She describes the chullo as just “a bag for the head”, briskly writing off seven millennia of Andean civilization. But she does spot a message.

“Perhaps the anti-stylishness of the chullo, its simple functionality, is its politics.” She prattles on:

“Perhaps it signals indigenousness, international-ness. But what it mostly says is, I don’t care how I look as long as I’m warm.”

Warm, simple, colourful, cheap and politically correct is a powerful combination but though gringas wear chullos and often, whatever Verlyn says, look charming in them, up here in the Andes the chullo is for men only.

Las mamachas in the markets in their keep-the-sun-off stovepipe sombreros or, on the Altiplano, their little bowlers on top of their braids or the shepherdesses in the red-and-yellow soup-plate monteras come in hundreds of variations. But girls don’t wear chullos.

What’s more, it’s men who make them. Franco Negri, the man behind La Casa Ecologica in Cuzco, tells me that the chullos he buys in Ocangate, around Ausangate, the highest Apu in Cusco, are all made by men.

“Real chullos are made by crochet knitting with five needles,” he says. “The men make the chullos and the llama-fibre ropes while it’s the women who make all the textiles with the traditional waist-loom.”

The other day, in any case, I ran into the man who has produced the defining statement of our time for the chullo. His name is Maotsetung Jimenez Dorado, a 29-year-old sculptor who has created a 2.70ms bronzed stone-cement statue of a strapping Andean Indian dressed only in his chullo and it was installed not long ago outside the bus station in Calca, a lively market town 20 minutes up the road from Urubamba.

Sited on a two-metre plinth just up from one of Calca’s two traffic lights, it has caused an uproar. “La madre de las monjitas dominicanas del Colegio Belem puso el grito al cielo, los padres de familia quejaron diciendo que “los niños se enferman,” Maotsetung told me.

“La madre dijo que la estatua es ‘morbosa’ and asked me why didn’t I do a statue of something like Heroism or Religion?”

Maotsetung, an evangelico, tells me that “the chullo es la expresion indigena de las alturas“.

His statue tells us that “los indigenas no son alienados y que son tal cual desnudos.”

Maotsetung’s statue was his graduating thesis work from the Escuela de Bellas Artes de Calca.

Maotsetung says, “I did un estudio profundo para presentarlo como obra de arte y no erotico. I even made the pene disproportionately small.”

In one hand the chullo-wearer holds apututu, the sacred Andean conch shell used in ceremonies and in the other a sort-of plaque with “Escuela de Bellas Artes” inscribed.

The statue is a reddish-bronze colour made of 500 kilos of marmolina, @ S/.1.20/kilo con cinco bolsas de cemento, mas fierros, and seis cubos de piedras para plinth/fundacion. “No me han pagado todavia para las piedras,” Maotsetung says referring to the Sub-gerencia de Obras de la municipalidad.

It took months of door-knocking, endless waiting for appointments, for Maotsetung to get the municipality to put up the statue. “Nadie le daba bola.” recalls Jean Concha, a mutual friend who works in the municipalidad.

Instead of lobbying Calca’s highland alcalde, Siriaco Condori Cruz, Maotsetung focused on lower levels like the Oficina de Educacion y Cultura de la municipalidad. “No lo tomo al chico en serio,” Jean Concha says.

Maotsetung’s persistence paid off, “Pero no habia nada de inauguracion.”

“Al inicio lo taparon con plastico,” reflecting the controversy that swirled through the town’s two radio stations and its markets.

Though a little weary of small-town politics, Maotsetung is hoping to get financial and official blessing for his next project which will be, naturalmente, “una ñusta solamente con su montera.”

I am sending Maotsetung a suitable cheque to get the ball rolling. FIN

Published in Caretas Magazine the week of February 27, 2009

 

Colour, noise, religion, beer

By Nicholas Asheshov

A couple of weeks from now sees the fiesta of the Virgen del Carmen in Paucartambo, a cold colonial town east of Cusco. Just beyond is Tres Cruces on the dramatic edge of the cordillera and from here the escarpment plunges into the jungles of the Madre de Dios. There’s not a hill between here and Rio de Janeiro.

In Paucartambo I have a godson, Adolfo Concha, who is just starting his career as a policeman. “There’s not much to do,” he says. “Just play football.”

But once a year this Quechua market town, distinguished by an old stone bridge over a turbulent river, explodes into the raucous magic of a slam-bang Andean fiesta.

The fiesta at Paucartambo is famous for the discipline of its dozens of dance troupes, their wild costumes and masks together with battering brassy noise as hundreds of dancers swirl through the cobbled streets. It goes on for the best part of a week.

From now on through September most parts of the Peruvian Andes, not to mention the Coast, is wall-to-wall religious fiestas, enormously colourful and powerful.

The people of the southern sierra tend to be morose and introverted. Half a millennia ago they gloriously ruled the world but today they carry a sad chip on their shoulder and perhaps it’s not to be wondered at. They mistrust each other and the same goes for outsiders.

But this insidious gloom, in the middle of some of the world’s greatest scenery, explodes every year in every pueblo into well-organized get-together colour and noise. Here on the marches of Rome’s spiritual empire, ancient local traditions emerge in good humour -they throw a good party.

Cusco itself is always full of processions and fiestas. I remember a foreign hotel manager complaining of being regularly woken up before crack of dawn by the explosions of fireworks marking the beginning of yet another fiesta.

From now on it’s wall-to-wall troupes of masked dancers, thumpy bands, other-worldly pan-pipes, fireworks and Amazonian quantities of beer and chicha.

There is often a waiting-list of several years to become a mayordomo of the dances, The mayordomo finances the dances and the bands, and provides the meals and vast quantities of drink for each dance group. My wife and I have done it. It takes up a lot of time and energy for months beforehand but we knew that it was worth it, that we’d done our duty by our saint, la Virgen de la Natividad de Huayllabamba, and that we are living under her protection. We top up our devotion every year by supporting other mayordomos and, of course, joining the parties and processions and a mass or two.

As a mayordomo you get to walk in the procession with an ornate woven banner with your name and you get privileged access to your saint’s attention on His or Her day, indeed for the whole year leading up to the fiesta. It’s like having life insurance. You can ask special favours, like getting your child into university, curing a health problem, money for a truck or a house.

One couple who were mayordomos for the Capac Negro dance group at the fiesta for Mamacha Naty, as us devotees feel entitled to call her, were able to announce the birth of a long-sought child nine months after the fiesta. La Virgen de la Natividad is known around here as being “bastante milagrosa.”

By this stage I can take fiestas in strictly limited quantities. But there are one or two that I don`t tire of.

My favourite is at Coya, between Calca and Pisac, around August 20 where you can watch a super game of football with the players dressed up in masks and dancing gear. They start off with regular soccer but within minutes they’re picking up the ball and running with it and throwing it and it’s as slam-bang tough as Australian Rules. The ref is dressed up as the devil and the linesmen are junior devils. There are several crates of beer at stake and gentlefolk like you and me would not want to be on the receiving end, believe me, of a tackle from an Andean Indian in a mask. FIN

Published in Caretas Magazine the week of July 3, 2008

 

Death in the Andes

By Nicholas Asheshov

The hot tap in our bathroom is on the right-hand side, not the left like everyone else’s. The windows on the verandah overlooking the wood don’t shut properly or those that do can’t be opened, and the fireplace in the study smokes when we light it, as now, in the winter.

In other words, Anselmo, our handyman, had been at work. He was a friendly, willing soul who brought kittens for the children and who was always available to do his best to mend a doorknob, fix the wheel on the llama cart or unblock the drains.

But Anselmo is dead, killed in one of those accidents endemic to life in the provinces.

He was working on the construction of a small building in Urubamba on what was to be a balcony. He was carrying a couple of those long steel construction rods and as he swung round they connected with a high-tension line drooping, illegally of course, just over the rooftops.

The shock must have killed him instantly. In any case it knocked him off the balcony 10 metres to the concrete below which crushed his skull.

There was no investigation into the constructor, the electricity company or the municipality. The wife and daughters whom he had supported could barely be persuaded to come to the funeral which my wife organized.

A week or so earlier there had been a big funeral in Urubamba for four prominent fruit-sellers in the market who had died when their lorry, full of tropical fruit had gone over a precipice on its way here from the Valle de Lares. It seems that the brakes failed but no one really knows.

This same institutionalized carelessness saw me, accompanied by my boy William, attending the funeral of a three-year-old, the son of one of our employees, Alejandro Huaman, on a sad New Year’s Day.

The simple coffin of the child was painted white and was on a couple of portable worn old bronze coffin-stands with a disconsolate group of family on the steps of the old church in the Plaza de Armas. We had to wait for a half-hour because the priest had forgotten the key.

Looking at the coffin, Huaman said every few minutes. “He was one metre twenty. “Then he would add, “He would be three today. It was his birthday.”

The child had died after drinking Parathion, a pesticide that the Urubamba agro-products store told me later had lately been discontinued as “too strong” and “against the environment”.

Pesticides are routinely retailed in small quantities at market stalls and corner stores here and is often taken away as powder in a paper bag and mixed in the same kind of plastic containers as those in which chicha or aguardiente are stored

The Huamans were hard-working and reliable people, as we assured the District Attorney, who left it at that. As Huaman kept saying at the church, “He was our only child.”

The little boy had been left in the care of an 11-year-old nephew in a maize field next to us. The child had taken a drink of Parathion and the nephew had run off to find Alejandro.

Eventually it was our pick-up that rushed Alejandro and the baby into the Seguro Social a few blocks away. But the baby was dead on arrival.

The priest arrived and the sexton tolled the bell as the dreary service began. When it ended we walked the half-mile through the town under a harsh midday sun to the cemetery, stopping at each corner for a prayer.

There were a few more prayers at the niche into which the coffin would be slid. A neighbour knocked a few final nails into the coffin, a dreadful sound.

Then the young, pleasant-looking mother was allowed to fall on the coffin for her farewell.

“Please, my son, wake up, wake up.” My boy William, like everyone else, watched in stony silence.

The great snow peaks and glaciers of the Chicon massif stood nearly ten thousand feet above.

Outside the cemetery, they drank some ritual chicha but the Huamans weren’t the drinking type and they soon walked slowly off, a little apart from each other, into the afternoon. FIN

Published in Caretas Magazine the week of July 5, 2008

 

It’s The Serranos That Count

By Nicholas Asheshov

I’m expecting that the census the other day will show an upsurge in the rural population. We out here in the campo may even be getting back to the population levels of the Inca Empire.

There’s been only a modest increase over the past couple of decades. But anyone traveling round the southern sierra and in the montaña east of Cusco will see bigger villages, more roads and above all more school-children.

Every valley in the massive Cuzco core of The Empire is heavily-populated. The forest is being cut back aggressively.

By contrast all over rural England and elsewhere in Europe they have been shutting primary schools. But here in Urubamba and in the great hinterland beyond the Valley, primary schooling is a big focus. For nearly two decades the government has been opening primary schools and kindergartens for three-to-fives, even crèches called here wawa wasi.

A while back I was in Occabamba, one of Cuzco’s hidden, exciting cacao-coca-coffee valleys. Spectacled bear, deer and eagles are close by but you also see truckloads of school kids going to and fro at around eight any weekday morning and after one in the afternoon. Five of every 10 people is under 16.

Richard Webb, with his Cuanto? organization, the only people in town for numbers, tells me that the figures show that only 7.6 million Peruvians are classified as “rural.” But he suspects that often “tiny little hamlets are included as urban, meaning that the rural population is in reality higher. Whatever, around three out of every 10 Peruvians live out in the country.

The amazing thing is that the rural population of Peru is still lower than it was under the Incas even though the total population of Peru is three times greater. Of course everyone in Inca times lived en el campo apart from a few tens of thousands in Cusco, Chan Chan, Huanuco Viejo and Pachacamac.

The low point over the past six or seven thousand years came in 1620, with only 600,000. These would all fit today into Miraflores and San Isidro with room left over.

The Conquest produced one of the great population disasters of history. It was worse even than the Black Death of the 14th century where half of Europe was wiped out.

In Peru, out of every 20 people, only one survived.

Vital censuses were carried out by Viceroy Toledo in 1570, in Huanuco and in Yucay, just up the road from Urubamba. These were followed up in 1603 and 1620.

On the basis of the 1570 head-counts, carried out less than 40 years after the Spaniards had arrived in Cajamarca and just as Tupac Amaru was being executed in the Plaza de Armas de Cusco, Toledo estimated that the population of pre-Conquest Peru at eight and a half million.

This was a pretty good shot. according to the best work done on Inca population, David Noble Cook’s “Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru 1520-1620”.

Cook looked, for instance, at how many people would live off a hectare of tilled land –seven, according to a 1960s study– and came up with 6.5mn people living on the Coast in 1520, which was when Atahualpa and Huascar were getting ready to destroy each other, a decade before Pizarro landed in Tumbes.

Using statistical regressions based on Darfur-like disasters he calculated how many people had died from disease and warfare, and came up with a total population for Inca Peru of 9.4mn; the 0.4 there is William Devevan’s calculation of the population of the montaña. There’s a good case, he also says, for numbers of around 14mn.

So within less than a century the population had dropped by around 95% to 600,000, almost all of whom were sierra Indians. The native population of the Coast had dropped to zero. No one was left.

Ever since, Peru has been massively underpopulated, the classic land without people, and people without land. By the early 20th century, 100 years ago, the population of Peru had inched up to just over three million, according to my 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. By 1940 Peru had just over seven million. In 1961 it was 10.4mn, more or less as it had been before the Conquest.

The sierra saved a small genetic something of Inca and pre-Inca Peru. The sturdy Quechua tradition, with its Quispes, Mamanis, Usquamaitas, Corimañas, Orqohuarancas and Yupanquis is all that remains of the Incas, the Lords of Sipan, the Dukes of Chavin, the Earls of Huari and the Kings of Tiahuanuco.

Much more interesting than counting how many people spend their lives in unproductive cities would be some DNA studies of the ancient families of my neighbours here in the Sierra to tie them to the glories of seven millennia of one of the great success stories of civilization. We can be sure, in any case, that the per capita GDP of the Inca Empire was substantially higher than it’s ever likely to be under today’s slash-and-burn efforts. ENDS

Published in Caretas Magazine Oct 28 2007

Boulder –It’s the Solstice

When the sun hits the white granite boulder, it’s the Solstice

By Nicholas Asheshov

On June 21, just over a week from now, the winter solstice, easily the most important day in the ancient Andes, falls due and brilliant rays of sun will be flooding just after dawn through carefully-designed Inca windows onto sharp once-a-year marker stones.

In the old days everyone would be out in the sharp cold dawn at huacas in every valley. I myself will be out too, at a white granite boulder the size of a pick-up truck, in what used to be Huayna Capac’s palazzio at the upper end of Urubamba, beside the cemetery where there is a fine long Inca wall.

I will, like the Incas 500 years ago, be looking up to a couple of stone towers, four metres in height, on a far ridge soaring a thousanad metres above. Beyond these, yet another thousand metres, loom the great snow peaks of the Chicon and Sawasiray.

Between the stone towers, on this day a sharp ray of sun will slap precisely onto the white granite boulder, an intihuatanaa, a sacred carved map representing the Urubamba Valley.

I will feel reassured, as people all over the world did and do, that there are solid, precise, predictable events, or as Ecclesiastes puts it,

One generation goes, and another comes; the Earth remains forever. The sun also rises, and the sun goes down and hurries to its place where it rises.

In the Andes it is the mid-year solstice that has always been much the most important simply because it is the dry season and the skies are generally clear of clouds and haze. In December like as not it is pouring, good for the crops but not for astronomers.

I had pointed the sun pillars out some years ago to Kim Malville, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Colorado, and he has since written academic papers on them and on the solstice significance of other sites in the Sacred Valley including Machu Picchu, Llactapata, Ollantaytambo and, in the Cordillera Blanca, Chankillo.

The Urubamba sun pillars can be spotted from anywhere in town and they make a wonderful, steep couple-of-hours walk up to an ancient platform with an outstanding view over a dozen miles of the Valley. Brian Bauer, the Inca-ologist, reported them officially in 1995 as “useful examples of what Inca solar pillars may have looked like”. The reason that Brian says “may” is because there are hardly any left: they were exterminated by the Spaniards as of 1539 as part of the official campaign to destroy the Inca and other cultures.

Kim tells me today: “We’ve established over several June solstices that the Urubamba sun pillars mark the June solstice sunrise very precisely.

“I hope the boulder survives; we had heard that the folks in the cemetery had once thought of breaking it up to make a bridge for their clients.” The boulder is still very much here and elsewhere in the two-hectare main courtyards of the Palace are a couple more. Huayna Capac’s palace is at the centre of Susan Niles’s gripping The Shape of Inca History: Narrative and Architecture in an Andean Empire.

The close relationship of the stars to the Incas and their elaborate astronomy has fascinated the greatest of today’s Andeanist anthropologists, namely Tom Zuidema, of the University of Illinois, and Gary Urton, at Harvard. They have in their different ways combined careful measurements of the ruins, always focusing on the solstice angles and azimuths, and on the stories still told by communeros high in the Andes*.

The Temple of the Sun at Machu Picchu is shut so the best place to watch the solstice is from a point near the quarry from which the great stones of Ollantaytambo were taken. It is one of the most thrilling views easily available in the Andes.

At seven o’clock in the morning of June 21 a sudden shaft of sunlight against a somber early-morning background hits first one, then another and another, walled Inca courts, the size of a small football field. These are part of a pyramid-like set of fine terraces just below the main ruins.

This is Broadway in the Andes.

To get there is an easy hour or so walking from the Inca bridge just above the town along a mule path.

All around rise great steep dark slopes, peaks and narrow valleys outlined against translucent mists, wisps of cloud and sharp shafts of sunlight.

At the bottom of a thousand-foot scree is the Rio Vilcanota, including some rapids, pushing on down exactly the same route as it has for at least a thousand years, through ancient maize and potato fields. The Incas lined the sides of this river with stone and they’re still there.

In front rise the snow peaks of the Veronica, ‘Tears of Gold’ in Quechua. In the light of a full moon these great mountains, from this vantage-point, stand out silhouetted against eternity.

On the other side of the river runs the railway track, laid 80 years ago, on its way, along the bottom of the pyramid, from Cusco down to Machu Picchu.

In the little trains people are looking at their electronic watches to see if they are on time. FIN

Published in Caretas Magazine the week of June 5, 2009

Cooking is the difference between us and the chimps

By Nicholas Ashesho

At the University of Exeter, England, they have discovered that athletes who drink half a litre of beetroot juice a day increase their oxygen capacity by 18%. This would certainly help us up here in Urubamba, at 2,840 metres above sea level. But so far the main result I’ve noticed is that my urine has turned pink.

Beets, a cool-climate crop, are grown locally here and I make the juice from an extractor and throw in a few carrots and apples which soften the taste. But, staying with us the other day, a Japanese friend, Sensei Kanai, a doctor and martial arts teacher, got unusually upset when he saw the extractor being used at breakfast.

“No extractor, only liquadora,” Sensei ordered Sra. Ana, our housekeeper. He insisted that we should shove the fruit and veg into the liquadora and the result is indeed excellent, an all-inclusive Smoothie.

But I’m sticking with the extractor, too, since coming across “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human,” by Richard Wrangham, Professor of Anthropobiology at Harvard.

Prof Wrangham’s proposal is that the difference between chimpanzees, on which he is a leading authority, and humans, is that our ancestors, a million years ago, learned how to cook, that thanks to this our minds and bodies did a Darwin. It is this that has given us our biological edge over everyone else.

Here it is: cooked or prepared food is better for you than an all-in all-raw diet. This, he says, is why we are bigger than chimps and a lot smarter than everyone.

For instance, in order to get the oxygen benefit of a half-litre glass of beetroot juice I would have to gnaw my weary way through three kilos of raw beets.

In the same way I would have to eat twice as much raw fish or raw meat to get the same benefit as from half the amount of grilled, baked or fried.

For instance, Prof Wrangham says, our digestive systems can make use of 50% of the protein in a raw egg but of fully 90% of the protein in a cooked egg.

“Cooking increases the proportion of nutrients that the digestive system can digest.” Put another way; “Cooking makes the food we eat more nutritiously efficient.”

Raw-is-better is, Prof Wrangham says, simply not so. Our stomachs and mouths have become smaller and more efficient, thanks to cooking, and our brains bigger.

“Humans are adapted to eating cooked food in the same essential way as cows adapted to eating grass, or fleas to sucking blood,”

The catch is that those of us with middle-age spread have over-evolved.

One solution is to go back to a chimpanzee diet. Prof Wtangham says: “People who switch to a raw diet report feeling constant hunger and lose large amounts of weight.”

You don’t have to be a chimpanzee to know how that one works but Prof Wrangham repeats: “Raw foodism is against our biology”.

Up here in Urubamba, then, in the middle of a forest down by the river I have adopted a half-chimp, half-sapiens existence though I have the advantage, unlike most chimps, of having a qualified nutritionist, Andrea Suito to keep me on the straight and narrow.

I do the beetroot concentrate but only every other day, and the fruit Smoothie every day. Peru has a better selection of fresh fruit than anywhere in the world so I have a big plateful. I don’t have to leap through the trees to find it: Sra. Ana, of course, just trots off to the market.

During the morning I’ll have raw Quaker Oats with dried and fresh fruit and skimmed milk.

I get through the morning by cheating and drinking several cups of thick black coffee. I’m trying, with no success so far, to evolve to green tea.

Lunch is a huge raw salad and either some grilled trout from the Pumahuanca hatchery or a piece of supermarket chicken. During the afternoon I’ll have a milk shake of banana or, when I can find it, lucuma. Supper is a crema de tomate, green vegetables, onion or ajo with another bit of fish or perhaps jamon de pavo. I’ve completely given up sugar, even honey.

I’ve lost 10 kilos and perhaps the key to it is that I’m down to a glass, two on Saturdays, of red wine. Alcohol in any form puts on weight but clearly the French have evolved more than the rest of us: it was they who discovered that red wine is good for you, the finest marketing coup of the past million years. Prof Wrangham undoubtedly approves. FIN

v

 

Published in Caretas Magazine Oct 23 2009

See you in Uhujapacha

By Nicholas Asheshov

Last week we buried Ken Duncan in the cemetery at Huayllabamba, a riverside town in the Urubamba Valley and, as is often the case, it would have been more fun if Ken himself had been able to enjoy it too.

It turned out to be a rousing send-off. It included a trumpet-and-euphonium thump-thump band; a few hits of Scotch and the never-fails drama of a wailing widow determined to lay her hands on the money.

Ken, 64, an irascible, clever Scot had lived on his farm nearby for most of the past 15 years. It was he who introduced to Peru the awaymanto, a wild Andean fruit, as a commercial crop. He even sold some made-in-Cuzco jam, he would tell us, to Harrods and claimed to have met Mohammed Al-Fayad, Dodi’s father.

He spent the last month of his life in the clinic in Cuzco and had hired a couple of off-duty policemen to stand at the door to shoo off the wife, a communera from the highlands of Huancavelica who he hated.

No matter. She and her mum were there, tearful and in black, within minutes of his death and they quickly shelled out borrowed banknotes to acquire Ken’s body from the hospital.

“In the old days,” Roger Valencia tells me, “people in the Andes believed that when you died you moved along to Uhujapacha, which was a repeat version of the world they had just left.

“The only difference was that it was timeless. ”

Roger, friendly and polished, is Cuzco’s top guide: if you are a princess or a film star visiting Cuzco and Machu Picchu, you get Roger.

“If you were the Inca here, you were an Inca in Uhujapacha. If you were a soldier you should be buried with your equipment, a farmer or a ceramicist, the same. If you were a llama, you were a llama next time around. Not much social mobility.

“Also, it was important to take along presents.” All of which explains why ancient Peruvian graves have always been a rich source of treasure trove.

No longer. Not long ago I was window-shopping for a nice cemetery and the one up the road at Maras has a glorious view over the Cordillera. But the locals advised against it. They told me that these days people will quickly steal even your modest marble headstone.

Today people in the Andes are just like the rest of us and think, right or wrong, that we can’t take it with us so Ken was buried simply in a grave alongside his campesino neighbours.

After the funeral service in the town’s quiet colonial church, all organized by Carmen, the widow, we accompanied the casket and the band, playing noisily through narrow streets to the cemetery. At every corner the procession would stop, as is traditional, for a prayer or some wailing chants.

We crowded into the modest cemetery on the edge of town. A god-daughter and a couple of neighbours made short grave-side speeches.

Carmen, a thin 40-something who until Ken’s death had been prohibited by judicial order from getting within 1,500 yards of him, now stood flanked by her mum and lawyers within 1.5 yards of him, wailing as she shoveled her piece of earth onto the coffin.

Moments later things livened up again in the street outside with several crates of beer and wine. There must have been a hundred people, mostly from around Ken’s farm a few miles away.

As the afternoon faded into dusk even over the great mountains rising out of the valley, Carmen told everyone that she was serving supper down in the parish rooms. And the band, paid for by one of Ken’s god-sons, played on.

I remember a few years ago in San Lorenzo de Quinti, in Huarochiri, a traditional area in the highlands deep behind Lima, members of a family up from the city spent the afternoon telling ancestors the latest news.

It was good-humoured and convivial with frequent toasts in aguardiente.

“Y la Sandra, que te recuerdas tuvo problemas en tercero, termino muy bien su secundaria y esta de novia con un chico del barrio y esta trabajando como secretaria en la municipalidad.”

“El Jorge esta pensando entrar en la Policia Nacional…..la tía Juana no podía venir por estar delicada parece ser de los riñones y el esposo no encuentra trabajo….”

I certainly hope that when I’m getting bored in timeless Uhujapacha people will come and keep me, too, up to date.

FIN

Published in Spanish by Caretas magazine the week of October 27 2008

Paul McCartney, the Maharishi and Me

Nicholas Asheshov, Editor of the Peruvian Times during the 1970s and 1980s, recalls how in the Swinging London of the 1960s Sir Paul McCartney, who plays in Lima on Monday 9, helped him to his first break. —-

I first met Paul McCartney in a Kensington drawing-room in 1967 when he was already world-famous. I was on Fleet St, a reporter trying to make my name in the man-bites-dog jungles of the world’s most ferocious newspapers, each of them great empires selling millions of copies.

Mine was the Daily Sketch, a bumptious right-wing tabloid owned by Lord Rothermere with headlines like “The Duke and Mandy -Palace Denial,” probably a story floated by the Sketch itself. This was the tough end of Fleet St and we were paid much better than the schoolmasters on The Times.

Paul had not been famous for long and I had not been on Fleet St for long. I was 26 and he was 24.

Over there by the window was, yes, Mick, 23, also becoming famous, and Marianne Faithfull, his lovely fair-haired pre-Bianca girlfriend, daughter of a European baroness and a British spy. Marianne was already, at 20, a top-of-the-pops star.

This was all a complete shock. I had gone along with a photographer to meet some obscure Hindu yogi. It was a sleepy London Sunday summer afternoon. Newspaper people call it the silly season because nothing happens.

As we went in the photographer whispered, smiling, “John. Paul. George. Ringo.” He said the names slowly, as if he were pulling rabbits out of a hat.

I was stunned. He pushed me forward.

The drawing-room had thick carpets, tall Georgian windows with heavy-draped curtains, and there was a hushed, respectful atmosphere unusual, I imagine, among super-stars.  There were other showbiz people only some of whom I recognized, though of course the photogapher knew them all.

But the main point for me was not precisely that here were these world-famous fellow-youngsters but that they had been in hiding for months and I was the only journalist in the place. No one else had bothered to come to meet some old out-of-town holy man.

I will modify that only to enhance it. I had taken along with me Jane Gaskell, who shared a desk and a phone with me on the Sketch. Jane had become famous just a few years earlier as a 16-year-old best-selling author of soft-porn cavegirls-and-dinosaurs novels. She had long blond hair, long legs and very short skirts that were a feature of the cavernous newsroom overlooking the Thames, which half a century earlier had been a shipping warehouse. Jane was soon to go on to Hollywood and New York and was part of the new Swinging London.

This was a world where England’s tough young team had just beaten Germany at Wembley for the World Cup and where Christine Keeler, 20, had seduced the British Defence minister and, next evening, the Soviet military attaché, at Lord Astor’s house. Harold MacMillan’s government had tottered. Even the French were impressed.

After two world wars, hunger, and grey socialism it was suddenly OK to be young.

Myself, I knew more about the Amazon and Africa than about London. And here, suddenly, I was in this quiet star-packed nerve centre of the universe, alone with my note-book, a crack photographer and a micro-skirted girl novelist: finger-waves and air-kisses.

I had forgotten the Hindu. I went straight up to Paul –John looked less approachable– and whispered, “Nick, Sketch. What are you doing here?” Paul whispered in his thick, pleasant Liverpul twang, “We’ve come for a meditation lesson, I think. But it looks a bit crowded, doesn’t it.” I asked Ringo, “What’s happening?” “You tell me,” Ringo replies. “It’s supposed to be this holy man from Calcutta. Ask George, he knows.”

We were drinking tea out of china cups and here was the story: The Beatles had disappeared for months. Brian Epstein, their brilliant young manager, had committed suicide, for love of John, it transpired. The Beatles had also been had up before the magistrates for marijuana, a big deal in those days. They had gone underground.

But here they were and now they were producing a guru.  Or as it turned out, it was the guru who was producing The Beatles.

According to my front-page smash scoop next day for an amazed Britain, the Hindu holy man was, Paul told the Daily Sketch and the world, “changing our lives.”

“We’re on a new track. We’re moving again.”

Forget Vietnam, Israel, the sterling crisis, Russia, the Bomb. This was real news.

My obscure Hindu was the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and, once we were all seated, maybe 20 of us, in he came, a little chap in a straggly long grey beard and hair, parted down the middle, below his shoulders. We were all, starting with the Beatles, given flower rings to put around our necks.

My photographer snapped.

Flower Power was born.

The Maharishi, as I recollect, sat cross-legged lotus-like on a cushion on the floor. He was then, I learn from the internet, 54, more than twice the age of anyone else in the room. This was the moment that the Maharishi launched Transcendental Meditation, TM. This was the beginning of a worldwide empire.

Thoughtfully, the Maharishi had already registered the trademark, Transcendental Meditation. The Mahashi, as The Beatles were allowed to call him, was “really important,” Paul told me. “He’s helping us a lot.” Indeed he was: within a few months they were to produce the epoch-making White Album.

“Meditating is so easy, so simple,” the Maharishi said in a light sing-song, and using an English that was long out-of-date in England: “Even a duffer can do it. Even Ringo can do it!” We laughed obsequiously. Ringo was of course no more of a duffer, in his field, than Maynard Keynes was in his, and even richer, although when later The Beatles all went to the Maharishi’s ashram he was the first to give up on the grounds that he was fed up with vegetable curry and wanted a steak and chips. One of the steadiest drummers in the business, he has also had a movie career. I remember him as the lecherous Mexican gardener in Candy, and the blind gun-slinger hero of a spaghetti western. I saw him on the TV last year for his 70th birthday and he looked just as sharp and pleasant as in that London drawing-room four decades ago.

I had a chat with Paul, then Ringo, a word with John and George. “He’s wonderful” – “He’s changing our lives, our music” and moved on to the Maharishi: The Holy Man Who is Saving The Beatles, as the Daily Sketch told the world next day.

He explained to me pleasantly, “John, Paul, George and Ringo are the most admired young people in the world. If they take up Transcendental Meditation, TM, the whole world will follow.

“These people are hard-working, supremely talented. But they are tempted into problems, like drugs. With TM they won’t want these things.”

I got the Maharishi to pose for the photographer in the plush drawing room talking into a white telephone: this was chosen, presciently, as the front-page photo for the next day.

My story in the morning appeared as a slam-bang front-page Exclusive! The Holy Man who is changing the lives of The Beatles by Sketchman Nicholas Asheshov.

The photo of the Maharishi on the phone was splashed over most of the front page.

Inside, the whole centre spread was of the Beatles with the Maharishi, with quotes from everyone, with little photos of Marianne and Mick. Jane did a side-bar which started off with “The roses are back in The Beatles’s cheeks.”

All over Britain grannies, mums and teen-agers sighed a little tear of relief and pleasure.

The Maharishi died a couple of years ago aged 94 with two billion pounds in his bank accounts. He had fallen out with the Beatles a year or two after our get-together in Kensington and had taken up with other stars of the day and was, famously, accused of trying to rape Mia Farrow. Within a few years of our meeting he had five million followers, the first wave of tens of millions more and his TM was established worldwide as a useful and, at worst, harmlessly peaceful pursuit.

Paul McCartney, Sir Paul, was and, as many of you will see in Lima on Monday, still is one of the great musicians and creative forces of our time.

It was an unlikely genetic event that brought together these four modest boys in a grimy post-war British port town. That Lennon and McCartney should be two of the great artistic talents of our time is another marvel. Those of you who have had the forethought to acquire tickets will get your money’s worth. You will see and hear a Master. And when it comes to putting on a show, as the billions who watched the Royal Wedding the other day saw yet again, the Brits are in a league by themselves.

Myself, I shall be in Urubamba as usual, but thinking, as I am now, of how those four boys and I chatted for a while in the room where flower power was launched by another genius, the Mahashi. He had had the courage, the vision, the timing and the chutzpah to grab hold of the four boys who could launch for him a worldwide spiritual movement about which we all know and which coined him a massive fortune. When he arrived at that house in Kensington, for all I know he got there by bus. When he died he had his own fleet of planes and helicopters. A few weeks before he died he announced, a trouper to the last, that “My work is done.” In a century of flannelers, an all-time great.

And, bless him, and Paul and the Beatles, he launched me out of the back of the pack. Next day at the office, battle-honed veterans of savage Fleet St wars would pass by with their mugs of tea and mutter kindly, “Good read, Nick.” Or at the pub later, a paunched, nicotined warhorse might offer a pint and growl, “Nice one, Nick.”

I was on my way.

Published May 5, 2011 by

Santurantikuy and Christmas in Cuzco

Just before Christmas many years ago I had crossed by canoe from Peru into Brazil along little rivers to the north of Puerto Maldonado and had got to Abuna, a pueblo on the Rio Madeira.

On the riverfront there were half a dozen enormous river turtles lying on their backs, their feet flapping helplessly, their mouths gasping slowly. They had been caught and thrown there by locals and would remain alive for days more, waiting to become Christmas dinner.

In the middle of the hot grassy plaza a rail was stuck vertically into the ground to which a man, dirty but friendly, was shackled. He was a murderer, I was told. Jingle Bells and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer blared out in Portugese on the town public radio.

I had left Cusco by truck to Maldonado via Quincemil. In those days Cusco was so quiet that you could park your horse on the grass around Huanchaq railway station which today has traffic lights, high-rise hotels and shopping malls around it.

What remains of those days are the fiestas and saints’-day processions and one of the most powerful is the Santurantikuy, the great Christmas Eve fair. Santurantikuy, ‘Buy yourself a Saint’, packs the great Plaza de Armas with hundreds upon hundreds of stalls selling everything.

We go every year and pretty sharp in the morning because by the afternoon it is usually raining and by the evening it’s wall-to-wall packed, a major party. The earliest bird of all is Jose Ignacio Lambarri-Orihuela, the hacendado and antiquary.

“I’m there every year sharp at nine. You often get families from the campo bringing in old carved stones and ceramics. Lovely stuff. But by 10 they’re gone.”

Now you know why.

The stalls sell decorations like colonial-style wooden and pewter candlesticks, and candles, some of them really super, with ornate designs in thick wax and masses of colour and light. Some are of genuine beeswax and I have to be forcibly restrained from buying them all.

They will also, of course, sell you made-in-Thailand Christmas tree lights as well. But the overall impression from the Santurantikuy is of local stuff. The toys include big wooden lorries made here, accurately reflecting the dilapidated, tough, overloaded sierra trucks that grind forever along the cliff-hanging Andean roads.

Last year, a sign of the times, one of the stalls selling fake dollar and soles notes had added Euros. You buy a packet of this laser-printed currency ready to put on the altar of your favourite saint to remind him or her that you need some of the real stuff. This has to be blessed by the priest, along with toy apartments, houses, trucks and, these days, narco-style 4×4 jeeps.

There are all kinds of miniature pots and pans, kitchen stoves, plates and cups, and then earthenware animals of all domestic kinds, often selling for 10 or 20 centimos. These are to populate your Natividad, your crèche which with candles and incense will be the centerpiece of the family Christmas.

There are different kinds of musical instrument, of course, from guitars and mandolin-charrangos to all the pan pipes and flutes that many kids in the countryside know how to play. Last year I was sorely tempted by a locally-made fiddle, and by a saxophone made from the plastic piping you buy at the ironmonger’s. I saw an Andean harp, with its thick wooden sound-box, but the owner was playing it, not selling it. The Andean harp makes a pleasant, full-blooded sound, with the peculiarity that it doesn’t have semi-tone strings.

This is the place to buy Baby Jesus dolls. Also, plaster saints, quite elaborately figged out in their Christmas best.

Many Cuzco families have had their Baby Jesus and saints for generations. Next morning, on Christmas Day, women of all sorts and conditions take their Baby Jesus, new or old, along to church to have them blessed.

Here in Urubamba on Christmas Day at the church of Nuestro Señor de Torreychayoc the morning mass features a sell-out crowd led by the women and children and their hundreds of Baby Jesuses blessed in Quechua by the priest.

As the mass drones to an end, on come the dancers. It’s like a thunder-bolt, a shock of lighning within the church. Three or four elaborately-dressed masked groups backed by powerful drums and flutes advance and retreat, never turning their backs on the altar and its new-born Christ.

The dancers and musicians will go off to jolly lunches of maize beer and a parillada and they make even me feel that I’ve done something to earn my turkey and Christmas pudding.