Tag Archives: nick asheshov

Polling Day

By Nicholas Asheshov

With polling day on October 3 the campaigns for regional and municipal elections are heating up and this is not just a spectator sport in Peru. Hundreds of people in every district, thousands in every province are running for office and to judge by Urubamba, Cuzco and Lima, which I follow with attention, the democracy-count runs the gamut from vicious to ferocious.

Half-a-dozen candidates have been murdered, one would-be alcalde in the backwoods of Huanuco is in jail for organizing a who-can-drink-most competition with wood-alcohol at which the three winners died, and the alcaldesa of Santa Anita, a Lima district which includes a main foodstuffs wholesale market, escaped when her car was fire-bombed.

There are even aviation connections. In Lima the front-runners are Lourdes Flores, on my Right, and Alex Kourie, in the misty Middle. Lourdes, a 50-something lawyer, has run for President of the Republic two or three times and had always seemed to me to be jolly, too talkative but nice. Few, including me, now think this because the TV and newspapers have forced her to own up to working for years for a fellow called Cataño whose name is really something else but he changed after being nabbed years ago with 100 kilos of cocaine. Lourdes has for some time been Chairman of Peruvian Airlines, owned by Mr. Cataño, at $10,000 a month plus exes.

Lourdes also does not chat freely about another client and friend, Jose Luis Sanchez, the Spanish spinner who collected $3mn from Fujimori’s master-fixer Vladimiro Montesinos, now doing life in a Callao prison, during the 2000 general elections. Sanchez was in charge of the dirty tricks section.

Lourdes has also been legal advisor to the people, many of them from Pakistan, who import tens of thousands of second-hand cars, trucks and buses from SE Asia to come and gasp their last smoky, fumy breath on Lima’s clogged streets. Many of them, to add injury to insult, started off as right-hand drives from Japan, Hong Kong and the conversion to left-handers is often poorly done meaning dreadful crashes and buses going over Andean precipices. It’s all illegal, but Lourdes has shown the importers how to get local magistrates to slap amparos, laissez-passez orders thus circumventing the laws. Mr. Cataño, though not from Pakistan, is also a leading importer of pre-owned vehicles and the drugs police are pressing him for details on his finances.

Alex Kourie, mayor of Callao, has had problems with a tiny one-mile section of the only road to Lima’s Jorge Chavez International Airport where he was charging a $1 toll; for years it was easily the most profitable venture in town, making infinitely better margins than LAN, COPA and TACA combined.

An unfancied outsider, Susana Villaran, has come up fast on the loopy Left. Susana, one of those expensively-brought-up caviar socialists, as they’re known in Lima, has a collection of convicted terrorists on her aldermanic lists and spat furiously at my friend Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, the banker and former PM, when he mildly commented that foreign investors were “keeping an eye on”–some such– her swift rise in the polls.

The present mayor of Lima, Luis Castañeda, a close associate of Lourdes, is running for President in next year’s elections, but has been dogged by connections with a $20mn scam involving garbage collection and some Brazilians.

For us in the provinces this is all entry-level shenanigans. At the moment the mayor of Cuzco is the third since the elections four years ago. The first two achieved the impossible by getting caught with their fingers in the cookie jar. The way that crooked alcaldes actually get caught, though rarely, is what is politely known as nepotism; no one can resist having their cousins, children, domestic servants and mum and dad on the payroll. Actually, none of the voters objects -they’d do the same; noblesse oblige. But they only get accused of it when there are more serious matters that can’t so easily be proven.

Here in Urubamba we keep up with the metro crowd. Our alcalde, Benizio Rios, one of the vaguely-lefty NGO people who infest Peruvian and Bolivian provincial life, has just been booted out of the town hall for nepotism. Items like sewage infecting the municipal playground, gross potholes in the streets are not criminal offences. But you’ll be glad to hear that because of a judicial technicality, which may have nothing to do with Benizio being friendly with the appropriate magistrates, he is running for our alcaldia again. His slogan is “Honradez y Experiencia.”

Benizio has the backing of the well-heeled Hugo Chavez —come in, Caracas--party, whose symbol is a simple “O” for Ollanta Humala, an ex-army commandante and wanna-be Chavez whose wife has problems explaining where all her money comes from. On top of that Benizio has the support of the Machu Picchu bus drivers, to whom he awarded a 30-year monopoly, worth $10mn+ a year for 20 creaky buses between the train station and the ruins. This is totally, believe me, illegal but Machu Picchu is a no-rules zone, off-limits even for SUNAT, Peru’s tough IRS.

There are 13 candidates for Urubamba mayor and it’s not only Caracas and the bus people but the government budget that makes it worthwhile. Eduardo Guevara, a three-time mayor here, and a good friend, tells me that in his day it was a million or two. Now it’s $20mn. Eduardo, who’s running again, was round for a coffee the other day together with a candidate for mayor of one of our districts, a Catholic priest, an excellent young chap who we’ll call Arturo. As we were talking, I found that a lady had come in and was physically attacking Padre Arturo, spitting, hitting, swearing. It was a comadre of mine, a schoolteacher and it turned out that Arturo was the father of her one-year-old baby, a frequent visitor but we’d never been told and, of course, never asked about daddy. But there I was, like one of those referees in a wrestling match on the telly, trying to separate the contenders. Naturally, my comadre’s family is running one of her many brothers, also a good egg, for the alcaldia of the district against Padre Arturo. Try as one may it’s not easy to stay out of local politics and now you see what I mean about it being not just a spectator sport.

Letter from Urubamba, Sept 30, 2010

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

Kura Ocllo, a Peruvian heroine

By Nicholas Asheshov

As Franacisco, Gonzalo, Hernando and Juan Pizarro entered Cuzco in 1533 they were met by a deputation presenting to them the 17-year-old Manco Inca.

The Pizarros, who had just garotted Atahualpa, Manco’s half-brother, in Cajamarca and they were happy to set up young Manco as a front man.

It probably wouldn’t have worked anyway but a new tragedy unfolded that has coloured Peru ever since. Gonzalo Pizarro, a tough, tall, ferociously brave bully, conceived a passion for Manco’s young wife and half-sister, the beautiful, clever, loyal Kura Ocllo.

Gonzalo persisted. The Inca court gave him all the girls he could want. They even gave him another pretty half-sister and dolled her up to look like Kura. But after a few nights Gonzalo soused her out and kicked the sister out.

Gonzalo and a gang of his thugs simply sequestered and raped Kura and kept her. Manco, furious and desperate, left Cuzco. The rape by Gonzalo of Kura Ocllo set off a 40-year rebellion that blocked any possibility of a meeting of the minds between Conquistadores and Incas.

Kura escaped back to Manco and they both retreated to the mountain-jungle fastness of Vilcabamba, beyond Machu Picchu. From here they waged a partly-successful war against the Spaniards.

In one incident it was Kura Ocllo herself, now 20, who spotted a detachment of Spaniards creeping up a steep path to Oncoy, above the Apurimac, to capture Manco. She organized the womenfolk to impersonate Inca troops to frighten the Spaniards while Manco himself led the charge on the Spaniards, killing all 30 of them, a tremendous victory that ought to be celebrated by an annual national holiday.

Gonzalo himself then led a military expedition into the Vilcabamba. With him went two of Manco’s half-brothers, full brothers to Kura Ocllo. These went ahead to try to negotiate with Manco who, however, had them immediately beheaded –in front of Kura Ocllo. As Gonzalo and his men closed in Manco escaped, but alone. The horrified Kura Ocllo paralysed with shock refused to desert the bodies of her brothers.

Gonzalo threw Kura to his men. On the way back to Ollantaytambo, she tried to protect herself by covering herself in her own excrement.

In the plaza of Ollantaytambo, where today hundreds of tourists park their buses every day, Francisco and Gonzalo Pizarro ordered her stripped naked, tied to a stake and whipped while Cañari mercenaries stoned her and shot darts into her.

She refused to cry out, the chroniclers report, until just before dying, she shouted out, “Cowards!”

Manco, like his wife-sister, was clearly a noble, brave, devastatingly young leader. He was assassinated in Vilcabamba a few years later by the same renegade Spaniards who earlier had killed Francisco Pizarro himself down in Lima.

Gonzalo rebelled against the Crown, killed the Viceroy and 300 royalist Spaniards and was later executed in Cuzco by a new Virrey.

Manco and Kura Ocllo, youthful, dashing, are the stunning heroes in one of the epic moments of world history.

Here is Othello and Romeo & Juliet all in one, a crueler, nobler Helen of Troy-Paris-Achilles. But how many Peruvian children, or their parents, know this story? Two of my children did their early-ays schooling within a couple of miles of the scene of her outrageous death. But I’ve asked them, and other Urubamba kids, and they know her not.

Nor did I, of course. I have extracted and summarized the Kura Occlo story from Kim MacQuarrie’s excellent “The Last Days of the Incas” due to be published shortly in Spanish in Lima, in time for the Bingham-Machu Picchu fandango in July.

Kura Occlo and Manco are just two of a great cast of characters in a gigantic confrontation, the collision of two of the great traditions of humankind.

In France, Joan of Arc, burned at the stake by the English in 14xx, is a much-loved heroine, a registered saint and indeed us English treat her memory with equal affection. The English are also proud of Boadicea, the Celtic queen who was, with her daughters, publicly tortured, gang-raped and killed by the Romans two millennia ago. Kura Ocllo deserves, surely, to be remembered with similar pride by Peruvian schoolchildren. Manco, likewise.

MacQuarrie’s sources for the Kura Oclloa story are the account dictated by Manco’s son, Titu Cusi, the last-but-one Inca, to Cristobal de Molina, and a letter by a Spaniard explaining to the King of Spain how Gonzalo stole Manco’s wife.

MacQuarrie’s The Last Days of the Incas tells the stupendous story of the Conquista better than anyone so far. It is deliberately dramatic “…blood dripped from Pizarro’s sword…” etc. But it is also carefully researched and runs parallel to John Hemmings’ classic The Conquest of the Incas which appeared in 1970 and updated and translated into Spanish in 1995, a gripping must-read.

But Kim MacQuarrie’s “Last Days” brings the cruelty, the civilizing savagery, the wealth that was to transform the economy of Europe and above all the characters to immediate life. The five Pizarro brothers, unbelievably tough and courageous, impossibly wealthy, low-born and ambitious,

The backdrop was a society, the last, sadly, of a score of great cultures produced here over many millennia, which functioned much better than any contemporary in Europe, and incomparably better than any that has struggled to succeed in Peru or anywhere else in South America.

Perhaps MacQuarrie’s “Last Days” will inspire teachers in schools all over Peru, high and low, to take a new, proud look at their own world-class predecessors.

Published in Caretas Country Notes in Spanish

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

 

 

Planes, Trains and Boutique Hotels

By Nicholas Asheshov

July and August are always the top weeks of what has become a year-round rain-or-shine season for the Cuzco tourism industry though things have been slow following powerful flash floods in January. Global-warming rains suddenly quintupled the volume and speed of the monsoon water in the Rio Vilcanota, the one that wraps around Machu Picchu, slashed out big slabs of the narrow-gauge railway line that chugs tourists from Cuzco over the mountains and down a dramatic canyon to the ruins.

Machu Picchu Cut Off! Tourists are increasingly coming to see other things like the Manu and Iquitos jungles, the Nazca Lines, Lake Titicaca. Whatever: no Machu Picchu, no tourists.

The railway, a concession run by Orient-Express Hotels, OEH, is, six months later, not fully operational but the last 25 miles is open again with crawl-along speeds on the recently-repaired bits. But, hey, who cares if it takes a half-hour extra to get to such a stunning destination. Presumably by next year it’ll be back to rock-a-bye normal where on the only straight stretch top speed at the best of times is 25 mph.

This year, on this evocative little line another change is taking place. The Orient-Express monopoly is ending, a subject on which I am a world authority as a founding Director of Andean Railways Corp, the feisty challenger. We led a ferocious three-year regulatory battle against the PeruRail –Orient Express– monopoly. Today it’s all smiles, a bit guarded for sure, but those of us, starting with Bob Booth himself, who remember the glory days of airline regulation and outrageous protectionism, need no elbow-jogging to know the lengths to which monopolies will rise to keep the bacon to themselves.

The tourist industry in Cuzco has improved enormously in just a few years. Orient Express, a decade ago, brought five-star hotelier skill and style to their Monasterio, Cuzco and Mach Picchu Lodge and, using their panache and marketing zap, completely up-heaveled Cuzco. They quickly trained their amiable but one-star personnel to international levels and raised the comfort bar, with breath-taking prices to match. Good for them and today there’s a lively range from $10 to $1,000. No one in Cuzco, pre-OEH, knew even how to spell croissant. Today the Brescia-Libertador group, together with Starwood, are opening, next door to my own adobe riverside, woodland home, a spiffy $52mn Luxury Collection spa, lovely views of river and snow-peaks up-valley from MaPi itself. Marriott is putting up a new Olde Inca tambo in cobbled Cuzco, and there’s half-a-dozen charming luxury-boutique hotels already open. They meld in well with a daily roster of religious processions and up-the-workers down-the-politicians rallies.

There’s suddenly a flurry of snazzy restaurants with names like “Jack’s” and “Chicha” offering Novo Andino guinea-pig aux fines herbes and carpacho de alpaca. And, Dios mio! Starbucks is opening next to the Catedral. Cuzco’s been a 24/7 party since the beat-bearded ’70s so it’s just getting better. Even Barry Walker’s Cross Keys pub, which recalled the gun-slinger saloon in Star Wars, is in new, non-creaky quarters just off the Plaza de Armas with Manchester xxxx-ale and loos that work.

Today LAN is running 14+ flights a day to Cuzco, using A319s, TACA two (A319,A320), Star Peru two, and Cielos de Peru, a start-up, two more. No night flights, thank goodness. I can remember when CUZ, 11,300ft asl, would get one or two DC-3s and DC-4s wing-tipping it between the glaciers below the summits.

One example of the new upper-crust tourism involved the other day none less than Pedro Heilbron, COPA’s CEO, and Matias Campiani, CEO, Pluna, Montevideo, leading a lively bunch of top Young Presidents from all over: I had pleasant chats with South Africans, Greeks, Mumbai Indians, Francaises and most other breeds. Pedro, together with Alberto Beeck, the Peruvian financier, had asked me to tell them in a fireside chat How to Find a Lost City, an interest of mine since my National Geographic days. I told them that the way not to do it, about which I know a lot, is to look for a blank spot on the map and say, Aha! that must be where El Dorado is. I told them about people, including friends, who had come to a sticky end doing this, and that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are about to shoot a movie in Bolivia about Col. Percy Fawcett, the Lost World Brit who disappeared into the Mato Grosso in 1925.

My new computer-controlled hydraulic Parker-Cummins-powered DMU-autowagons, vaguely reminiscent of a San Francisco tram painted with parrots, is called, of course: The Machu Picchu Train –The Lost City Traveller. They have cost me and my partners slightly less than late-model Dreamliners with the advantage, I suppose, that if they run out of gas at least we can push them home.

Letter from Urubamba, July 23, 2010

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

 

The Niños and the financial roller-coaster

By Nicholas Asheshov

Ferocious blizzards in the United States, a warm North Pole, biblical floods in Queensland and drought in northern China are being blamed on La Niña but here in Urubamba in the permanent eye, one supposes, of the Niño+Niña complex, the weather could not be more charming.

The shock pre-Niña rains a year ago which cut away big slices of the railway to Machu Picchu, have been followed this year by the traditional monsoon mixture of warm sunshine and refreshing rainfall. It’s sparkling, green and friendly, our favourite time of the year. We sense some of the mystery of the carefully-sculpted Cloud Kingdom of the Incas where dramatically chiseled rock walls controlled the rivers, the fields and the ciudadelas.

The first El Niño that gave Peru a headline role in the world’s climate drama occurred four decades ago in 1972. Newspapers worldwide published little maps showing Peru with arrows going in all directions. My sister Anna, an international skier, complained that Peru’s desert rainstorms were ruining the snow in the Swiss Alps – globalization avant le mot.

That Niño had been preceded in Peru by a famously remorseless anchoveta hunt by the brash new Peru fishing fleet led by the engaging, brilliant Lucho Banchero. Every single anchoveta from the beach breaks to the whale belt 100 miles offshore was netted. Boats would capsize and sink with too much fish. The catch was 12 million tons, one in every five fish caught worldwide that year.

The Apus struck back instantly and implacably. The dense horizon-to-horizon clouds of seabirds, the world’s greatest, have never returned. In Lima we watched thousands of starving pelicans fight for their last scraps outside the Surquillo market. The price of fishmeal, corn, wheat, sugar, cotton and soya skyrocketed on the New York and Chicago markets.

Serendipitously perhaps, OPEC doubled and tripled the price of oil to $15 the barrel. I myself moved the market. I reported to McGraw-Hill’s commodities wire on the strength of a good-humoured tip from the U.S. Embassy, then literally a stone’s throw away on Av Washington, that Arabs had come to Lima to buy copper. I practically had them mounting their camels in flowing robes at the door of the Hotel Bolivar before riding down La Colmena. The Chicago Board of Trade copper price jumped from 60 to 70 cents the pound but I was too young and poor to take advantage. In any case I had just come from Fleet St where you learn on Day One never to believe your own story.

Thus the first post-WWII price crisis. Nixon had de-pegged the dollar from gold. The oil people had no idea what to do with their billions –before that a million or two was real money– and gave it to Citibank who lent it to obscure states that even Brazilians hadn’t heard of, to Peronist bag-men and soldiers in Buenos Aires and to the Banco Popular in Peru.

Six hyper-crises later here we are again. Hundred-degree heat scorched the wheat crop last year in Russia and the Ukraine, The same economists who six months ago were gasping deflation are now fighting inflation by, of all things, reducing taxes.

So even here in Urubamba we all know that bumbling bankers, confused bureaucrats and a cascade of  Niños and Niñas have packaged themselves into a global roller-coaster, though I bet that in the Andes we’re safer than anywhere else.

Here in any case is where we stand, broad-brush, in the southern Sierra.

Four decades of figures from Senamhi, the weather bureau, show an average increase of between two and three degrees centigrade -the figures themselves are precise but it depends on the location. This is a lot. The glaciers from the Vilcabamba south to the Cordillera Real above La Paz and Lake Titicaca have all but disappeared. All you’re looking at now is a dusting of snow. The remains of old airplanes that crashed into the ice fields 30 and more years ago are being uncovered, frozen bodies of young pilots recovered and buried by their families.

A few hundred miles to the east the Brazilians continue mowing down the Amazon and Sertao, unthinkable even as recently as the 1972 widescreen Niño.

Average rainfall here has lessened, too, though the overall figures aren’t startling. But the rain now tends to come in sharp bursts, meaning there’s a lot less for farmers.

“We’re having to undo the work of decades where European NGOs brought in big, expensive cows and thirsty crops like alfalfa to feed them. Now there’s not enough water,” a Ministry of the Environment official in Cuzco tells me.

“We’re bringing back llamas and alpacas, smaller fields. We’re going back to how it used to be.”

As you might imagine, the Incas had it all clear. Their huge high-altitude polylepis –queuña— forests, now largely cut down for firewood, conserved water. Their great flights of terrace complexes made best use of it.

If I, like many of my friends, were running for President –Election Day is April 10– my Government Plan would be just four words and here they are:

Back to the Incas. FIN

Published in Caretas Magazine the week of Feb. 17, 2011

Indian girls + machetes = Christians

By Nicholas Asheshov

Just downriver from Machu Picchu at this time of the year there used to be a slave market where Jesuits, Franciscans and Dominican priests from Cuzco would buy Indian women and children in exchange for machetes and other trade goods.

It was known as the Feria de Santa Rosa. Earlier it had been known too as the Feria del Carmen because it took place in July as well. The women and children were Machiguengas who had been pirated from their homes deep in the jungle by tough Piro Indians from the lower Rio Urubamba.

The Piros, great traders and travellers all over the western Amazon, would paddle up the Urubamba, past what is today the Camisea gas fields, a multi-billion-dollar industrial complex, in raiding-trading parties of dozens of war canoes, through the still-ferocious rapids of the Pongo de Mainique.

The Piros were such powerful paddlers that in their canoes they ressembled, according to one missionary, “centaurs as one with their horses.”

They would come to a site called Cocabambilla near the present-day towns of Quillabamba and Echarate where the railway line would later end; this was wiped out by a huge avalanche in 1998.

The women and children, acquired from Machiguenga curacas or simply snatched from their homes, would be exchanged, along with salted fish and other deep-jungle goods, for Cuzco mountain produce as well as knives and, later, guns provided by the rubber barons.

The Incas would have been impressed to see how their descendents, today’s comuneros from the highlands of Cusco and Puno, have taken over the eastern jungles. In the old days, 600 years ago, the Chunchos, or Antis (Antisuyos) were much feared by the rulers of the greatest empire of the 15th century.

No longer. Today’s jungle Indians are all but exterminated. They stood up to the Incas and then the Spaniards though by the early 20th century they had been badly hit by the rubber barons. But the invasion by sierra campesinos in the past few decades, plus lumbermen and oil and gas men from Texas, have just about done for them.

The Incas conquered the mountains with a wonderful system of tens of thousands of miles of roads. The Amazon was dominated by the canoe on the world’s greatest network of rivers. It may be that a couple of thousand years ago, say, there were great cultures in the Amazon as there were along the pre-Conquest Mississippi.

Some scholars, including my old chum Gene Savoy, the great Andean explorer, maintain that the Amazon is the original source of all the Andean cultures.

Until a hundred years ago the jungle indians, like the Piros and Campas, were the aggressive ones. The chroniclers record forays by the Chunchos into the Cuzco region, including one where a jungle princess went off with Inca Prince Copacabana and “large quantities” of women and children.

The Jesuits, Franciscans and Dominicans wanted the women and children, we should assume, to convert them to Christianity.

Whatever, there were occasional more refreshing side-effects. One of the Machiguenga boys, Martin Mentiani, arrived in Lima during the guano boom in the service of the gay Dominican provost of the Santa Rosa Convent.

Martin escaped and hid out on a French merchant ship during the Chilean occupation, turned up in Antwerp and became butler to Paul Gauguin’s art dealer. He returned to Lima during the 1900 centenary celebrations, and returned to Cusco and the jungles of the Alto Urubamba.

This and other tall jungle stories were told to me this week by Alejandro Camino, Peru’s distinguished and much-travelled anthropologist. He has just returned from Madagascar and has spent years in places like Nepal. He and Mrs. Camino serve the best Hindu food this side of Darjeeling at their home in Miraflores.

The Santa Rosa/Carmen slave market came to an end only three or four generations ago, in the early years of the last century.

I was reminded of it by a visit, also this past week, to the annual barter market at Tiobamba, Maras, just above Urubamba, where truckloads of people arrive from Pucara and other parts of the Puno altiplano with thousands of clay chombas which they exchange for maize from the Urubamba Valley. Most of the deals are still straight barter and all the chatter is in Quechua. The metre-high ones for making chicha make fine pots for plants, though I admit that I paid coin of the realm, not maize, for the chombas –S/25-30 for big ones, the same as the cost of a machete.

Published in Caretas Magazine

 

Don’t believe all you hear about lost cities. But then again, why not?

By Nicholas Asheshov

Sra. Nelly, who helps out on busy weekends, told me the other day when she heard me talking about a valley below Machu Picchu: “My cousin Alfredo knows where there’s this really big ruin. It’s on his own place, above Sta. Teresa.”

Nick's adventure as captured by Peruvian artist Carlos Christian Castellanos Casanova

I should have a double Scotch for every time someone has told me where to find buried treasure and secret ruins.

Nelly went on, looking round to see that no one else was listening. “It’s got these three lines of great walls, near the top of a hill. There’s a waterfall…”.

With lost cities and buried treasure there’s some common characteristics to the stories. One is that they are always second-hand.

The most consistently unreliable stories come from priests and protestant missionaries, invariably imprecise and gullible; perhaps it goes with the territory. The most famous in our area was a Padre Polentini, active for decades in the Lares Valley over a cold bare pass from Calca. According to everyone you meet in this attractive but little-visited area, Padre Polentini spent all his time -this would be the ’70s and ’80s– looking for lost cities and of course he built up, the same stories say, a hoard of gold and silver objects which one of the Cuzco archbishops sent off to the Vatican.

To add substance to the foggy world of lost cities and buried treasure, there’s a private museum in Lima crammed full of spectacular gold and silver objects that are all grave-robbed. It is much better than the tourist-trap Gold Museum, which is full of fakes.

A late-breaking version of the secret hoard syndrome is the story, first published in Caretas’ Country Notes in March this year, that Machu Picchu itself was looted in the 1880s by a German, August R. Berns, and all the huacos were sent off to the Berlin Museum.

The discoverer of this gem of lost city-ology, Paolo Greer, is much smarter and more persistent than the professional archaeologists and historians. One of Paolo’s specialties is locating old gold and silver mines, some of which are in production again over on the eastern slopes of the Carabaya between Cuzco and Puno. Today this is one of Peru’s toughest no-go regions, controlled by drug gangs and illegal gold panners.

Paolo has also been working on what he calls “Portuguese” silver mines to the East of Machu Picchu. He tried to get up there a few months ago but got turned back by impassable cliffs.

Others, led by Gary Ziegler, of Colorado, and Vince Lee, a couple of months ago held a symposium hosted by the Rocky Mountain Chapter of The Explorers Club. I’ve been out many times with Gary in the Vilcabamba beyond Machu Picchu and he thoughtfully combines GPS technology with ensuring that one of the mules is assigned to carry three crates of Stolychnaya with a few bottles of Martini for the women.

Technology doesn’t seem to have made the slightest difference to the rate of discovery of lost cities in the Andes.

The Instituto Geografico 100:000 maps, produced arm-in-arm with the Pentagon, are still dodgy, because they don’t do much footwork to back up the clever satellites.

However, things are a lot easier in the field today with the ferocious accuracy and handy cheapness of GPS machines the size of a telephone. This means that you can draw your own maps, as detailed or as sketchy as you like with spot-on accuracy.

But clear thinking is much more important than technology.

A few years ago a priest down in the Apurimac told me about a treasure-trove of dollars, quantities of camping equipment, a massive cache of canned food, a light bulldozer and shotguns up in the northern Vilcabamba. He added: “There’s a dozen late-model parachutes.”

I instantly realized he was talking about my own National Geographic expedition in 1963 Perú by Parachute – NGS 1964 (link to pdf of article) where, true, I’d had to abandon a couple of torn ‘chutes, a broken 16-bore shotgun and a pile of empty Coke bottles. I explained it all to the priest.

He didn’t believe a word of it.

Now I must get on with organizing a trip before the rains start to check on Sra. Nelly’s cousin Alfredo’s lost city above Sta. Teresa. FIN

Published in Caretas Magazine the week of Sept. 12, 2008

The Return of the Otter

By Nicholas Asheshov

Last Friday an otter appeared, warming itself in the morning sun on the path between the trees on the riverbank and our duck pond.

No one has seen an otter here for 30 years. I couldn’t decide whether to rush out and tell everyone or whether to keep it to myself, like when you find a new cebicheria.

The otter, which slipped into the pond with the wild immigrant ducks from Canada, was “a fish with two kinds of lungs,” Fernando, our nurseryman said, adding that it was “silvery”. That tells you how long it’s been since countrymen round Urubamba, 2,800 metres above sea level, have seen an otter on the banks of the Rio Vilcanota. Sra. Ana, our housekeeper, was less imaginative and more accurate: “It was like a cat, brownish with a flat tail, like on the telly.”

Now, we all know that the Rio Vilcanota, which runs from way up behind Cuzco and is the main river for the Sacred Valley, including Machu Picchu, is filthy, heavily polluted and getting worse. Most of the effluent, industrial waste as well as raw sewage, comes straight out of Cuzco itself via the Rio Huatanay, a tributary which is these days just a smelly ditch.

I’m surprised, for a start, that there are any fish left for an otter to eat. So we have to suppose that the fish, trout invariably, and the otter are going to the trouble of adapting to civilization. There are trout in all the cold mountain streams that bring the snowmelt down to the main river. The other day I met a 10-year-old girl and her four-year-old sister up in the Chicon valley carrying an old paint bucket with half a dozen trout between 15 and 20 centimetres long swimming around. She’d caught five and the tiny sister one, she explained, by lying on the bank and holding her hand in a pool until a trout floats into her fingers. Then she flips it out over her shoulder. In England, us kids and poachers called this “tickling” trout.

Coincidently, the New York Times the other day reported that a beaver had taken up residence in the river in the Bronx. So my Urubamba otter may not be so strange.

Otters, rather like owls, are uncommon but universal. You could find them in the marshes of the lower Euphrates, in northern Europe, all over North America and of course in the rivers of South America. There are also sea otters; there are still some left on the coast here. There have been best-sellers about tame otters, like “Tarka the Otter” and “Ring of Bright Water”.

You can still find otters in the more remote corners of the jungle. A couple of years ago the kids and I watched for half an hour a family pack of them in a lake in the Manu Park, over the hills from Urubamba. One of the older otters surfaced as we watched with an impressive two-foot fish flapping in his mouth. He nipped up out of the water onto a fallen tree-trunk a few yards from a crowd of baby otters who immediately started yapping and jumping up and down on their own tree-trunk. After a while the dad chewed down a piece of the fish and then let the cubs come and wolf down the rest of it. I was feeling quite proud of being a dad when my wife said, “I’m pretty sure that was the mother”.

What’s done it in for otters in many parts of the jungle has been the continual dynamiting of lakes and stretches of the rivers, or the use more traditionally of barbasco, a natural poison dumped into the river. Both of them kill everything around. Even though the otters themselves are probably canny enough to escape, there’s no food left for them. Today when people eat fish in and around jungle towns, it’s mostly canned atun from the coast.

I thought of popping over to the local trout farm and pouring a bucket full of fat, ready-to-eat live fish, at S/10 the kilo, into the duck pond. But in the unlikely event that this might work, I’d have been saddled with an otter family. Charming, but as much of a worry as my own kids and possibly almost as expensive.

Published in Caretas Magazine the week of March 4, 2007

 

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

 

Hemingway, Mancora and the World’s Greatest Fish

By Nicholas Asheshov

Last week saw me trolling the warm chop over the Mancora Bank at a brisk eight knots in a 28′ Phoenix Express fisherman hoping to hook a giant marlin, the king of the sea.

The boat belonged to Jose Luis Martinez, the international big game fisherman. Jose Luis, a jolly young Lima construction mogul, catches 30 or 40 marlin a year here.

I had six rods out with the lures between 20 and 40 yards aft a few feet below the surface, each of them glittering spoons aimed at attracting the attention of a curious, perhaps not too bright fish.

From the bridge we spotted a couple of marlin dorsals and spun round to trail the lures before their noses. No marlin takers today though we were to return to base at Punta Sal in the evening not empty-handed.

We cruised past a score of sperm and humpback whales, had a school of charming dolphins for company and a dozen artesan Kankas and Mancora fishermen long-lining in the distance for tuna and mero.

The temperature gauge showed the water at between 24 and 26 degrees centigrade. The Humboldt Current to the south is typically at 18 degrees and lower and the meeting of the cold north-flowing and warm south-flowing waters just here is what makes this the Piccadilly Circus, the Copacabana Beach of the oceans.

The depth sounder varied between 100 metres over the Bank, down to two, three and even five hundred metres.

A reel screamed.

“Es grande,” Alex, the captain, said.

I gripped the rod, My arms ached. My hands ached.

Then the fight was over. It was a Dorado, green and wet gold. It had a big head and big eyes.

I could hardly lift it. It was a big fish.

So might Ernest Hemingway, who fished these same waters six decades ago, have described my own fish, caught that day last week, a 50-pounder.

Anglers anywhere could be proud of a 50-pounder but in these exuberant waters it’s small beer. Hemingway himself brought in a massive 910lb black marlin here in 1956.

In the 1950s and 1960s the Cabo Blanco Fishing Club, founded by my old Cambridge chum Enrique Pardo, was the spectacular heart of international big game fishing.

Today, Jose Luis tells me, the best he can expect to catch, even with his state-of-the-art tackle, is 500 or 600 lbs., the size of a pony, terrific but half, even just one-third of the giants of half a century ago before the vast shoals of over-fished anchoveta disappeared.

Marlin are no good to eat. “Every one I catch we just bring it alongside, unhook the hooks, tag it and let it go.

*Sometimes after a big fight it’ll be exhausted so we stroke its bill and pull it along a bit to re-oxygenate it and then, suddenly it’ll flip and it’s off.”

Like salmon and whales marlin are world travellers. “My tags turn up in Australia or Hawaii,” Jose Luis says. The International Game Fishing Association, of Dania Beach, Fla. requires its members to fill in a form for every fish that’s taken.

The story of game fishing at Cabo Blanco, between Talara and Mancora, 250 miles south of the equator, is dramatic. A report by Doug Olander in World Record Game Fishes is headlined:

Cabo Blanco, The Rise and Fall of The Greatest Blue Water Big-Game Fishing The World Has Ever Known.

Olander talks of “colossal black marlin” and “huge bigeye tuna”. It was not just the size of the fish but their “amazing abundance”.

The rods in those pre-tungsten and carbon fibre days were of bamboo and the line not of tough stretch plastic but of ashaway linen.

“The biggest change has been in the reels with their gearing and braking systems,” Jose Luis tells me.

Olander describes a couple of epic all-day battles in Black Marlin Boulevard, as Cabo Blanco Club members called it, just three or four miles offshore.

The most famous of them came on August 4 1953 when Alfred C. Glassell Jr., a Houston oilman, brought in the biggest black marlin that has ever been caught and no one today doubts that it will remain the record forever. The fish is on permanent display in the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. The photograph of Glassell, a tall 180lbs or so, standing with his rod dwarfed by the marlin hanging from a rope round its tail, is a famous one. It has “1,560 lbs.” whitewashed on its side.

Astoundingly, beyond serendipity, a Warner Bros film crew, down in Cabo Blanco shooting The Old Man and The Sea, starring Spencer Tracy, registered the whole of Glassell’s fight in epic widescreen Technicolor. The battle lasted 1 hour and 45 minutes, shorter than many, and the film caught this massive animal, the size of a bull, leaping 49 times.

The Hemingway story, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize, was, of course, about a Cuban fisherman in the Gulf Stream but now you know that the fish and the sea are all from up here on the north coast of Peru.

My own 50 lb. Dorado the other day was caught for posterity on the cell phone camera of Jose Luis’ wife, my daughter Kitty. FIN

Published in Caretas Magazine the week of February 14, 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

 

A lesson in patience – The hand that rocks the cradle

By Nicholas Asheshov

The municipal cuna-jardin in Urubamba is housed in part of the collapsing remains of a long-ago government hotel in the middle of the crowded wholesale market.

The two-year-olds play in what must have been a well-windowed sitting room. But the rest are gloomy little rooms lit by a neon strip or a hole knocked out of the roof.

The rest of this ruin is used as offices for the town gobernacion.

Cribs beside a makeshift kitchen allow two- and three-year-olds to flop down for a siesta. Down below an ankle-deep pool of water from broken 50-year old pipes is close by two dim rooms full of quietly cheerful four- and five year olds.

“We’ve had the Defensa Civil here any amount of times,” Eliana Garcia, the school’s Directora tells me on a visit this past week. “Their reports declare yet again that it’s dangerous.”

But there is an immediate heart-warming contrast between the clapped-out building and the competent bustle of the handful of teachers and 120 kids. You have to suppose that one of the lessons the children, from lactantes of three months to lively boys and girls of four and five, learn is how to make do and get on with each other.

I know this place well. A decade ago my wife and I brought our own expensive three-year-old daughter, Tany, here every day. It was the only place for toddlers in town but, much more, it was the kindness she was shown by the overworked and underpaid teachers like Eliana and by Yasmina Concha, made up for the dismal facilities. Yasmina went on to become Tany’s madrina and an old family chum.

Tany, today a citified MP3 teenager, goes back to her first alma mater as an ayudante when she’s home for the holidays.

Like us and perhaps even more so, today’s mothers and fathers are for sure grateful for somewhere to dump their kids during the morning. The mothers, Eliana and Yasmina tell me, all have jobs, some in the market or in stores, some in offices. A handful are single-mother student teachers.

They leave bottles of powdered and, sometimes, genuine, mother’s milk. The toddlers bring along lunchboxes.

Eliana, a quietly-spoken get-on-with-it 40-something who has been in charge here for years, talks knowledgeably about the ministry curriculum which requires ‘stimulus’ for three-month-old babies and, for instance, counting up to at least 12 for the four- and five-year-olds. “They all get at least to 10,” Luzmarina, one of the teachers, says.

Most kindergarten and primary teachers I’ve talked to find the official curriculum itself quite good with its new efforts to go beyond old-style rote-learning to think-learning.

But still everyone agrees that public education is awful, as bad as it gets in the civilized world.

In a study, ¿Para Quién Trabajan? Médicos y Maestros del Sector Público del Perú, published by the Instituto del Peru a few months ago, Richard Webb and Sofia Valencia declare that “Providers, bureaucrats, politicians and union leaders have accommodated to a status quo of low wages, lax discipline, falling entry standards and inadequate levels of effort.”

The study adds that this is “irreversible” unless something “exogenous” turns up.

The patience needed by Eliana Garcia to cope with dozens of other people’s infants in a dungeon is nothing to what she requires to cope with officialdom.

Eliana takes me a few blocks up the main street to where the new cuna-jardin is being built on an 850m2 site. Half a dozen workmen are moving around. It looks as though it’s perhaps 20% done. “They keep on delivering the wrong materials and taking them away again,” Eliana says.

The foundation stone was laid, with speeches, a year ago, Eliana tells me.

In municipal budget discussions “the new coliseo always wins,” Eliana says.

The walls for the new cuna-jardin show a dull ministry-mandated building with windows starting at maybe 1.70m above what’s budgeted to be a bare cement floor. Not even a tall visitor can see over them to the snow peaks of the cordillera.

“Maybe the ministry thinks that the children shouldn’t be distracted,” Eliana says.

Eliana tells me enthusiastically, with the Maestro de Obras standing by: “Up there’s the second floor, for the Administration.”

But the maestro immediately says, “There’s no second floor. My contract is just for a one-story building.”

Eliana begins to protest -“I’ve got an Acta!” –but quickly stops..

“I’ll go and talk to the architecto en el municipio.”

“You do that,” the maestro says.

FIN

Published in Caretas Magazine the week of Nov. 22, 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

 

Looking for lost explorers

By Nicholas Asheshov

In 1925 Col. Percy Fawcett, an English artillery officer, disappeared while searching for a lost civilization in the Amazon and people have, in turn, been looking for him ever since.

One early hope in the years immediately following Fawcett’s disappearance was that he had found the lost city and that he and his son Jack, who had accompanied him, were living it up as honoured guests of the inhabitants: they were, after all, English.

One of those who went to look for him was Peter Fleming, brother of Ian, creator of 007 James Bond. Fleming’s book about his expedition, “Brazilian Adventure” (1933) was a best-seller.

Fawcett went into the Mato Grosso and the Xingu only a few years after Arthur Conan Doyle, inventor of Sherlock Holmes, had published ‘The Lost World”, the best-seller where dinosaurs, warring Indians, vicious man-like apes and intrepid English explorers were stirred into the heart of the Amazon.

Hiram Bingham, also, had just discovered Machu Picchu and his photographs had stunned the world.

Col. Fawcett and the whacko world of lost cities is the subject of a new book out just this month in New York, “The Lost City of Z. A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon” by David Grann, a journalist on The New Yorker.

‘The Lost City of Z’ was the description that Col. Fawcett gave to the object of his obsession. The reviews in The New York Times and elsewhere speak well of the new book but in fact others know much more about Fawcett and the Amazon. These are led by a couple of friends of mine; John Hemming, author of the classic “La Conquista de los Incas” and, out just last year, “Tree of Rivers; The Story of the Amazon”. Hemming is also the leading international authority on the wild tribes in the forest.

The other is William Lowther who has spent many years on the Fawcett story. Both Hemming and Lowther tell me that Fawcett was “nasty.” Lowther recalls how Fawcett simply left one of his English team members on the Peru-Bolivia frontier to die alone in the jungle after being badly bitten by a poisonous insect. The man by a miracle lived to tell the story.

This had happened in 1906 when Fawcett, who was born in 1867, had been hired to survey the Bolivia-Peru frontier which still stands as he defined it. Lowther tells me that “Fawcett was tough and energetic. He worked so fast that the Bolivians paid him a bonus.” They went on to hire him to do their frontier with Brazil, too.

It was during this time that Fawcett collected stories of lost cities and lost tribes. As a surveyor, he was also drawing up maps and from my own experience maps quickly acquire their own reality.

Fawcett fought through World War 1 on the Western Front in the Royal Artillery and Lowther tells me that he was almost promoted to General. By one of those coincidences Hemming’s father, a mathematician, was one of Fawcett’s junior officers and accused Fawcett later of basing his targeting on an Ouija board. “Untrue!” Lowther says.

But these were the great days of Spiritualism and cranky, high-handed Colonel Fawcett believed that you could indeed have contact with the other world. On top of that, like most English people in those days, he was a racist who thought poorly of the forest Indians.

He believed that a lost civilization in the Amazon was still peopled by a superior race of which his son Jack was also a member. So all he and Jack had to do, was to get to the right area and the inhabitants would spot Jack as one of their own and welcome him, and of course his father, in!

They were certainly killed by Indians. Some of their belongings were to turn up in the market some time later at a town in the area.

From my account it may seem as though Fawcett was a basket case who dragged his son to a certain death.

Maybe. But Hemming, a great scholar, Secretary for many years of the Royal Geographical Society, has told me how in 1961 he carried out the arrow-filled and battered body of his friend Richard Mason, both recently graduated from Oxford.

Nine years later, in 1970, I myself spent months searching for Robert Nichols, a friend, a Peruvian Times reporter who had disappeared while looking for Paititi in the Pantiacolla hills of the Alto Madre de Dios.

A year later we found that Nichols, relaxed and amiable but as tough and experienced as Col. Fawcett, had been stoned to death by renegade Machiguengas.

As a footnote, the leader of the main ground search party, Elvin Berg, who avoided getting attacked by the Machiguengas by reading the signs correctly, was himself caught a dozen years later in a remote corner of the Apurimac by a gang of Shining Path thugs who strung him up and burned him to death. FIN

Published in Caretas Magazine the week of March 13, 2009

 

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

Bishop Savoy, King Solomon and the Incas

By Nicholas Asheshov

You can walk through the middle of a lost city without seeing a thing.

Or you can find a couple of stones on top of each other and, mein Gott! I’ve found Atlantis!

I’ve done both but we can be sure that Gene Savoy, the great lost city explorer who has just died at 80, never made mistakes like that. Unlike most explorers Savoy, who was not confused by having a degree from Cambridge ni mucho menos, knew what he was doing. He discovered more lost cities than the rest put together.

He was often accused of being a huaquero and on a couple of occasions I had to rescue him from some comisaria and rush him into the diplomatic immunity of the Phoenix Club, where he would be safe at least from wives and girl-friends.

But actually he hadn’t the slightest interest in the bits and pieces of traditional Peruvian archeology.

Savoy believed that the Sumerians, Phoenicians, Essenes and Egyptians had set up great societies in the Amazon which had expanded into the Andes and had then spread up to Mexico. This was his Feathered Serpent thesis.

Here’s the focus. It came in an invitation he sent me to a black-tie do in Reno in 1998 to launch his “Project X –the Search for the Secrets of Immortality.” Gene, the Head Bishop of a church he himself had founded, had just survived the break-up of his 73-foot made-in-Peru Mochica Dragon-prowed catamaran sailboat Feathered Serpent III in a typhoon south-west of Hawaii. This had put an end to a projected seven-year round-the-world Grand Ophir Expedition.

For nearly half a century Savoy, the Project X blurb said, “has dedicated his life to the search for the secrets of immortality”.

Indeed, I remember Gene in the ‘sixties, between his successful Lost City trips into the jungle, chatting in the Haiti Café in Miraflores about south-east Asian monks and holy men living for more than 120 years thanks to yoga-like sexual contortions.

He had airbrushed this for publication. “As a result of our research and exploration, we have been able to recover the rudiments of a lost science practiced in ancient times…, techniques for prolonging human life and extending human intelligence…”

The Grand Ophir Sea expedition is “an odyssey in search of clues to a true understanding of the ancients and their global society”.

It is “retracing King Solomon’s actual visit to ancient Peru”.

There it is.

King Solomon’s mines were not in Arabia or in East Africa, but here in the Andes, maybe just up the road from Urubamba or, more likely in the north round Gran Pajaten or Gran Velaya, two of his great discoveries. Ophir, referred to in the Book of Kings as a source of immense wealth, was Peru.

A few years ago Savoy told me that he had located what he called a “glyph” etched into a tomb of one of his Andean lost cities which, he later wrote “not only looked like a ship but research revealed that the same symbol in early Semitic hieroglyphics means ‘ship’.”

The same symbol in another text “found in Israel” means “Gold of Ophir belonging to Beth Horon, 30 shekels”. It also appears in Egypt, we learn, meaning “ships bound for Punt, a place scholars believe was Ophir, the land of gold.”

Gene knew perfectly well that this kind of thing was not academically kosher but he didn’t care. “Archaeologists spend their lives with their heads in a hole in the ground. You can’t expect too much from them.”

He’s right. Archaeologists in Peru have provided a miserably boring and unproductive set of stories on what the ruins and remains show was clearly a fabulous set of multi civilizations.

It was not much more than a couple of generations ago that many of the sites, starting with Machu Picchu, were fictitious Lost Cities. It was Savoy who located Espiritupampa as the last refuge of the Incas, whacking the academics on the head. They said no, it was just a legend, or that it was Machu Picchu.

Sipan, with its eye-popping gold- and silver-ware, only came to light 15 years ago and Carral a decade ago, both of them sitting not in dense jungle but out in the desert. The Nazca Lines were discovered only in 1940, and most visitors think that they’re flying saucer airports.

Whatever, the archaeologists can’t tell you what they were and none of them have had an ounce of Savoy’s flamboyant physical and intellectual courage. Salud, Gene!

Published in Caretas Magazine the week of Sept 16, 2007

 

Bingham didn’t dig up the Yale huacos –he just bought them

By Nicholas Asheshov

Here in Urubamba Hiram Bingham’s reputation has taken a knock in the run-up to the centennial of the discovery in 1911 of Machu Picchu.

The revisionists are saying that Bingham was not just a persistent explorer but also, frankly, a humbug.

Bingham’s economical use of the truth has been compounded by the poorly-advised refusal of Yale University and its Peabody Museum of Natural History to return, as promised, what Bingham’s Yale expeditions dug up in the Vilcabamba 1912-15.

The Peruvian government is taking Yale to court but they’re not pushing it.

Here’s why. None of the good pieces in the Yale Machu Picchu collection were actually dug up by Yale archaeologists.

Instead they were bought by Bingham from Cusco collectors and huaqueros and smuggled out of Peru. Under U.S. law Yale is the legal owner. If Yale people had dug them up, it would be Peru that had the legitimate claim.

The out-whiffling from Peru of the Yale Machu Picchu huacos is much as Luis Valcarcel, an iconic Peruvian archaeologist, maintained noisily nearly a century ago when he and his Cusco Historical Institute took Bingham to court as a grave-robber. Bingham fled, never to return.

The first of at least two major consignments of Inca pottery bought by Bingham and today the pride of the Yale collection consisted of 366 primo pieces purchased by him from Tomas. A. Alvistur who, Paolo Greer, the archivist extraordinaire and systems whiz, tells me was a son-in-law of Carmen Vargas, owner then of the Huadquiña hacienda, just below Machu Picchu.

“Both the Vargas family and Alvistur had well-known collections in Cuzco,” Greer says.

Alvistur had asked Bingham for $2,200 though on top of that, Alvistur warned Bingham in a letter, he would have to add “a great sum to allow the collection to leave, for, as you know, the exportation of ancient objects is prohibited.”

Most of the 5,000-odd items that Yale dug up at Machu Picchu consisted of broken potsherds and bones. One, Richard Burger, of Yale, told me, turned out to be a piece of tough 1915 camp bread mistakenly labelled and coded by a zealous student.

Bingham had quickly realised that others had beaten him to it: Machu Picchu was well-known in Cuzco and had already been sacked. But it didn’t suit either him or Yale to say so. Greer tells me that Bingham visited in 1913 the Berlin Ethnologic Museum to study the collection sold to it in 1882 by Jose Mariano Macedo who, along with Ricardo Palma and other Lima luminaries of the day was a partner of the German adventurer August R. Berns.

Bingham forced Alvistur to lower the price on his 366 best pieces: “I realize that the material is worth more than this, and I wish I could pay more, but this is as much as I can possibly offer you.”

Alvistur himself put his collection through customs and onto a ship for Panama. Bingham later thanked the shipping agent for helping to make “Yale an efficient place in which to learn about Peru ancient and modern”.

My source for all this is Christopher Heaney, who I met in the Instituto Bartolome de las Casas in Cuzco a few years ago. Heaney, who consulted with Greer, did a fine job of putting the Bingham smuggling evidence together and published it in The New Republic, D.C., in October, 2006.

Heaney adds that while waiting in Lima in August 1915 for a steamer to Panama, Bingham paid for another “interesting lot of Peruvian antiquities … provided the owner would ship them out of the country.” The owner had them consigned to a fictitious character, “J.P. Simmons, New York.”

Heaney says that Bingham invested $25,000 in purchases, plus costs, of huacos which all went to Yale-Peabody. Bingham, famously, had married money.

If Yale had had any sense it would long ago have returned to Peru the boring bits of academic bones and pottery that its people actually found.

But it’s hard for Lima politicos to acknowledge that all the good stuff is protected by a statute of limitations.

Heaney quotes Richard Burger, the Peabody’s curator of anthropology and co-curator of Yale’s Machu Picchu exhibition, as saying that Peru’s bilateral agreement with the United States on antiquities “recognizes the impossibility of disentangling these historical cases and only applies to antiquities that entered the [United States] after 1981.” He also noted, “Private collections were widely bought, sold, and exported early in the 20th century, and museums in Europe and the USA are full of them.”

Heaney quotes a 1953 commentary on the looting of Machu Picchu. “…but where can we admire or study the treasures of this indigenous city? The answer is obvious: in the museums of North America.”

The comment, preceded by quiet thoughts to the effect that no one is to blame, comes from the Diaries of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. FIN

Published in Caretas Magazine the week of Aug 1, 2009

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