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

By Nicholas Asheshov ✐

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It could not get worse? Yes, it does.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finance Tightens — Peru joins the Troubled Ten

Nov23

By Nicholas Asheshov

Morgan Stanley has told its clients that its MSCI division, which monitors international markets, is preparing to downgrade Peru from EM, Emerging Market, to Frontier status.

MSCI has also expanded its Fragile Five 2013 list —Brazil, Turkey, India, Indonesia and South Africa— to its Troubled Ten for 2016, to include also Peru, Colombia, Chile, Malaysia and Singapore. MSCI says these countries have new and above-average currency risks. These countries will have increasing difficulty in covering their current account deficits, meaning that debt payments plus imports will be higher than today’s low, slow income from exports.

The party is over.

For Peru it was a good one, by far and away the best in memory. During the first dozen years of this century it catapulted Peru into a respectable new level of economic growth and management. An urban middle class expanded by millions. Poverty in the Andes dropped by millions. Pay levels and property values doubled.

But today in 2015, the rapid growth of China that helped Peru, Brazil and a score of others to flourish is finished. This was signaled last week by an initial 4.4% devaluation of the Yuan, the Beijing currency. It was this that woke up the Wall St. analysts even though the slowdown had started a year ago.

The practical effect is twofold.

One is that China is saying it will need less and pay less for oil, gas, copper, iron ore, lead, zinc, gold and silver. Second, it means that for the coming few years at least, China will be growing not at seven percent, much less the ten percent of earlier years, but more like one or two percent. This is the new normal, like the United States struggling to get higher than two percent a year, Europe which cannot get yet to one percent. China is joining them, just another shambling mammoth.

Peru, though no monster, marches to the same drumbeat. A remarkable part of the past couple of decades, here and elsewhere, is how much has changed for the good despite the weak quality and performance of the government, and the public administration. The ministries and the Central Bank have been slow and often indecisive. There is no sign that they are improving. Out in the provinces it has become seriously dysfunctional.

But this has always been a rough neighborhood. Few other countries in Latin America are any better and some are much, much worse. Brazil’s economy is falling this year as it will in 2016, in the midst of world-class corruption and mountainous mismanagement. Sao Paulo, for instance, has run out of water. Venezuela and Argentina, two of the best-endowed countries in the world, continue to sink into incoherence, apparently endemic. This is a level of political stress from which Peru has notably escaped with no sign of a turn, much less return, to the serious confusion of the 70s, the 80s and the 90s.

The most consistent measure of the perversity of today’s financial markets is in the commodities. These will continue to stay low and to sink. This is not, exactly, because the world is in recession. It is not even that demand for copper, oil, lead, zinc, tin has fallen but that it is not rising to absorb what is coming every day onto the market.

New iron ore mines and oil and gas fields and techniques have opened, paid for with cheap money. The problem is that even cheap money has a price, has to be paid for. The iron ore companies, including Vale do Rio Doce, Anglo American and BHP, have between them issued $200,000mn worth of bonds to finance mines without a market. China was supposed to buy it but is disappearing back into its Oriental mist. A part of this is the heat-hazy nature of Chinese accounting where statistics, profits, loans and taxes are spelled differently in Chinese. The same happened in Japan as of a quarter of a century ago.

Copper is in the same slow boat. In Peru, Toromocho (Chinese), Cerro Verde (Freeport M), and Las Bambas (Chinese), fine mines all, will be getting $2/lb instead of the $4-5/lb they expected just three years ago. Chile, led by Codelco, the state-owned, high-cost mammoth, has it even worse which is why it, too, is being downgraded.

Morgan Stanley says that its downgrade warning on Peru will be confirmed on September. 30 but this is a formality. It means that foreign funds will be selling their investments in companies like the Banco de Credito, Graña y Montero and Buenaventura quoted in Lima, and Peru-based companies quoted in New York and London. Many funds will be selling, too, some of their holdings of bonds issued by companies in Peru. The sums may be impressive. Between 2010 and 2013 alone, US$15,000mn worth of bonds were sold to international investors, according to Bloomberg. Peru is just a part of a bond bubble including China itself, as well as other members of the Troubled Ten.

Similar downgrades are being issued for other countries in Latin America and elsewhere. The government-backed debt of Brazil, not long ago a Wall St. high flyer, has been knocked down to a notch over junk.

This is not the case for Peru, which has just raised $2,000mn on Wall St at only 2.5% more than the rate paid by the United States Treasury. It is remarkable, looking back a couple or three decades, that loans of this size and price should have become routine, merely a note in the middle of the financial pages. The money is needed, this time, to shore up the government deficit that has appeared because of the slowdown of the economy, and they will certainly need more to fill an even bigger tax shortfall in 2016.

Another sign of homebrewed discomfort is that inflation is running strongly higher than the Central Bank’s target of 2%: it is probably higher than six percent. This week Mr. Velarde, executive president of the Central Bank, cited inflation, which he has a constitutional mandate to control, and the exchange rate as among his “growing fears.”

Peru’s Central Bank, the BCRP, and even the lame-duck Humala government, may want to take comfort from being in the same lifeboat as bigger, noisier countries. Peru is only three percent of the dollar investment to Latin America. Another way of looking at it is that Peru is being dragged down by the neighbors.

This is not going to persuade many Peruvians. They will remember that the economists at the Central Bank, BCRP, and the Ministry of Finance, the MEF, were predicting as recently as this past Christmas that Peru would be growing this year at a tear-away 5.6%.

This made no sense (PT, Jan 22 and 29, 2015) but set the scene for inappropriate policies. They should long ago have launched an emergency plan, with low Soles interest rates and a fast-track devaluation of the Sol, from S/.3=$1, as it was at the beginning of the year down to S/.4=$1, before the end of the year. This was the path taken by well-managed central banks like those of Japan and the EU, Canada, Sweden and Mexico. Instead, the Central Bank in Lima has moved the exchange rate only just a tad more than inflation, to just over S/.3.25, burning $1,000mn a month of dollars that are going to be needed 2016-2018. This is allowing bankers here and abroad to buy billions of dollars at a giveaway price. This questionable policy is why Peru has been dumped, as Bloomberg has it, into the bucket of the Troubled Ten.

Forget a recovery, even of the United States

There is no prospect that basic commodities prices will increase for years. Huge iron ore mines in Brazil and Australia will be producing at a loss. Oil will be priced at thirty-something dollars a barrel. Natural gas will be down to prices that only the huge fields in North America, Australia and the Middle East can do.

For Peru as for other third-level hydrocarbon areas, this means that the jungle oilfields and the Camisea gas fields are today, and maybe forever, worthless. They are, in today’s terminology, “stranded assets”, on the books as potential profit centers but in practice valueless.

Peru has great resources and fine prospects, in agriculture, for instance, as well as mining.

But in today’s world, Peru is nowhere for oil and gas. As part of a Peru emergency plan to ride out the recession, the government should close down Petroperu and write off the jungle gas and oilfields. Peru will be able to buy cheaper for years from Mexico, Canada and the United States.

Work on the Southern Peru Gas Pipeline should be halted immediately. This $8,000mn piece of corruption-ridden nonsense, being constructed by Odebrecht, Sao Paulo, whose chief executives are in jail for similar boondoggles at home, should be transferred to the Brazilian taxpayer.

Any expectation that the Peru economy might stay afloat is made unlikely by predictions in Lima, the United States and elsewhere that a big El Niño is beginning. Based on the experience of 1972, 1983 and 1997-8, this will subtract between two and four percent from the country’s output.

The good news is that a capable new government may take control in less than a year’s time, ready and able to turn the progress of the past several years to good account.

Published in English by the Peruvian Times on August 21, 2015.

A Spanish version of this article appears in Caretas No. 2399 under La Fiesta se Acabó.

Sell, Collect your Money, or Go to Jail

Jan9

Lofty principles, sacred promises, the public interest, the Constitution, and democracy itself are at stake in a heavyweight bout between El Comercio and La Republica. The dispute is about which of them should control Correo and Ojo, two of Peru’s biggest and best newspapers.

By Nicholas Asheshov

(From Caretas)

The fight is, of course, about money and power. Today in Peru, unusually, circulation is much bigger and more valuable than ever before. Peru is in the run up to a wide-open presidential election in 2016 and this is one of the first big skirmishes of the campaign.

Amazingly, in the electronic age, Peru is a fast-growing, feisty newspaper market. Millions of unlettered 20th century families have morphed into 21st century householders and straphangers. The straw shacks of two and three decades ago are today brick and cement and not just in Lima but in Arequipa, Ica, Chimbote, Trujillo, Chiclayo, and Piura.

While The Washington Post has had to be rescued by an electronic biz kid who probably doesn’t touch a newspaper from one week to the next, El Trome – El Comercio‘s zappy down-market tabloid – has tripled its circulation in just five years to 650,000. It is read by the new commuters, including the chauffeurs and maids of the people who read and advertise in the Establishment’s El Comercio. El Trome is read by one in three newspaper buyers in Peru. This is over three times more than the numbers who read the company’s flagship El Comercio (94,000) together with its less turgid stable mate Peru21 (87,000).

In Peru, each copy has a readership of perhaps four or five. The Internet has a still-low penetration of around 25%.

There are, or rather were, three Big Newspaper groups in Lima. These are, or again were: El Comercio, the tough, rich Establishment leader; La Republica, the left wing group; and the Agois-Banchero group’s middle-of-the-road Epensa, featuring Correo and Ojo. Today, Epensa is just a nameplate.

In July, La Republica’s financial backer, Salomon Lehrner, had quietly arranged to buy out the Agois’ 93-year-old major Epensa shareholder, with 54%, for $17.2M, a bargain. In August El Comercio muscled in at the last minute with $18M, including an $800,000 pourboire for Apoyo, its bankers. Still, a giveaway. They got the deal.

Overnight, El Comercio’s share of Peru’s newspaper market went from around 50% to 80%, more than that of Beijing’s The People’s Daily.

Here, in this case, notwithstanding the adage to the contrary, otorongo no come otorongo, as things stand, El Comercio – more, an anaconda than a quick-footed mountain lion – has swallowed, in a single cheap gulp its only competitors, market leaders Correo and Ojo, both of them livelier and more market-friendly than its own products.

This is not good for the newspaper business in Lima. It is, in fact, a disaster. It gives the Comercio group four out of every five newspapers, and the deal would have been unhesitatingly thrown out of Anti-Trust court anywhere in Europe or North America. Anywhere, indeed, this side of Iran. Even Pravda Granma never had 80% of the market.

Correo’s market is A and B, Ojo’s is C and D. Correo and Ojo have been growing, fast. Ojo, a feisty tabloid has doubled its circulation lately to 300,000 Correo is, at 155,00 and growing, easily the market leader in the A and B level, triple that of La Republica, (45,000), the left wing tabloid.

Leaving aside for a moment the unfortunate readers, advertisers today have a choice of ONE. As Henry Ford liked to say: you can have any colour you like so long as it’s black.

Journalists who don’t see eye to eye with the numerous Miro Quesada family, El Comercio‘s patriarchal owners, will be out of luck and a job. Politicians who don’t get the nod from the Miro Quesadas will be in the same boat, offshore and heading west.

The Miro Quesadas say they will not interfere in the journalistic side of Correo and Ojo. As we used to say in Fleet Street, “pull the other one, it’s got bells on.” Rupert ‘The Dirty Digger’ Murdoch, my old employer, said the same when, in London, he bought The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun, The News of the World and, in New York, The Wall Street Journal, among a hundred others elsewhere. Today his people, courted and employed by every prime minister since Margaret Thatcher, are being sent to jail in London for behaviour disgraceful even by Fleet Street’s flexible standards.

The Miro Quesadas are the cholo version of the Murdoch tradition, memorably cartooned as Lord Copper of The Daily Beast in Evelyn Waugh’s classic Scoop.

For decades the Miro Quesadas carried on a deadly vendetta against the big up-the-workers AAPRA party and have enthusiastically backed every golpe militar within living memory. They helped oust President Belaunde’s democratic government in 1968. Velasco’s military whipped round and nationalised El Comercio as well as the other dailies.

Belaunde, a gentleman, returned El Comercio to the Miro Quesadas the day that he returned- to the Government Palace in 1980.

Today’s El Comercio, with its bland, deviously cryptic front pages, is a well-established formula in Latin America, like the Edwards family’s El Mercurio in Santiago and their equivalents in Buenos Aires and Ciudad de Mexico. A rich, sad bunch of Little Murdochs. The Miro Quesada newspapers do a poor job of reflecting the realities of Peru, one of the world’s most varied, fast-moving, and fascinating countries.

La Republica’s journalistic tradition is a little better, but not much. It was, for instance, anti-Fujimori i.e. anti-political gangsterism. But it has been quiet about the vote-rigging, phony finances, and corruption associated with Presidents Toledo and Humala, its political friends. Salomon Lehrner, a La Republica financial angel, has been a backer of Toledo and Humala and has built up a colourfully disreputable financial reputation, outlined more than once in Correo, over the past few decades.

However, La Republica, an attractively laid out full-service tabloid, is at least livelier than El Comercio. Circulation figures show, however, that it is a poor representative of the 50% of voters who regularly place their confidence in populism, which is what’s left, as it were, of the Socialism of the long-gone 20th century. It is, in the A & B range, outsold three-to-one by middle-of-the-road Correo. It was Correo, for instance, that broke the US$50M Toledo scandal: this features a bankrupt Israeli-Peru financier Josef Maiman, with whom Lehrner has worked closely in the past. Lehrner helped finance Humala’s campaigns in 2006 and 2011 and was Humala’s prime minister for the government’s first months.

Curiously, El Comercio and La Republica are partners in the market-leading TV Channel 4, El Comercio with 70%. This has been returning annual profits of between $15 and $20M, important to La Republica’s cash flow.

Gustavo Mohme, La Republica’s publisher, is a well-established construction figure. El Comercio is associated with Grana y Montero, Peru’s top construction company, quoted since 2013 on the NYSE.

La Republica is understandably upset about losing the Epensa deal. which Lehrner had engineered through a backstreet notary in the no-go Lima district of Puente Piedra. But La Republica’s directors would never have kept their left-wing fingers off middle-of-the-road Correo and Ojo. People with a political agenda, left, right and centre are boring and newspaper readers everywhere, of course, know it.

El Comercio will surely be told by even the most susceptible magistrates. that their protestations of good faith are meaningless, even if they claim that they are nice-guy reformed characters.

The magistrates will, we can hope, crossing our fingers, tell them that they have to sell their new prize, but will tell La Republica that they cannot be the buyers.

President Humala has weighed in on the TV, saying that the purchase of Epensa by El Comercio, “an octopus,” is in every way wrong and that he is drafting a press law. Lehrner and others have chimed in but this would, as we all know, make things worse. The answer is to tidy up Peru’s well-intentioned but confused anti-trust legislation. All that’s needed is to copy the European Union legislation, already in Spanish, under which corporate fusions must be routinely cleared by the regulators, in this case Indecopi, which often works quite well.

FIN

Nicholas Asheshov, Editor for many years of the Peruvian Times and The Andean Report, worked on Fleet Street for Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail, Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times and for the Financial Times, and Institutional Investor. He lives in Urubamba and in 2010 broke Orient Express’s Peru Rail Machu Picchu monopoly.

Published in Spanish by Caretas on Jan. 9, 2014

The Niños and the financial roller-coaster

Dec22

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

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

Dec22

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

Dec22

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

Dec22

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

A lesson in patience – The hand that rocks the cradle

Dec22

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

Dec22

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

Dec22

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

Dec22

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 14^th 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 20^th century, 100 years ago, the population of Peru had inched up to just over three million, according to my 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. By 1940 Peru had just over seven million. In 1961 it was 10.4mn, more or less as it had been before the Conquest.

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

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

Published in Caretas Magazine Oct 28 2007

Boulder –It’s the Solstice

Dec22

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

Why Easter is so late this year

Dec21

By Nicholas Asheshov

Every afternoon this week, including Monday – which in Cuzco was the Day of Our Lord of Earthquakes – thunder has battered the steep sides of the Urubamba Valley. This is very unusual. Normally thunderstorms announce only the beginning of the rains in October and November. Normally the rains end in Urubamba like clockwork between March 23 and the 28th.

Not this year and I consulted Kim Malville, professor of Astrophysics at the University of Colorado and a leading authority on ancient Andean astronomy, which I’ve always thought of as the Weather Channel for the Incas, Moches and the rest. I wanted to know why Easter is so late this year and what effect this is having on our weather.

Here Kim, with whom I have traipsed into the rugged Vilcabamba looking for ancient solstice and other star markers, tells us how the Church which sadly, as we know, replaced the Incas, decides each year when Easter is to be, something I’d never understood.

Read carefully.

“Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox – well, almost. The Church has messed things up a bit by making it the first Sunday after the Paschal Full Moon, which is the ecclesiastical full moon, which may be two days off the real full moon because when they established tables of the full moon 1,700 years ago, in A.D. 325, they made a few accounting errors, which the Church cannot correct: you’ll have to check with your local Cardinal why not.

“But the Church fathers did not mess it up for 2011. There was a full moon on March 19, the day before the vernal equinox, so we have had to wait a full lunar month for the next full moon which was at the beginning of the week, on Monday April 18, and then another six days for Sunday April 24,” which, Kim adds, is his birthday.

April 24 is a very rare Easter Sunday. I checked on the internet and it hits the 25th of the month about once a century: the last one was 1943 and the next one is in 2038.

Though Easter is so mobile, I’d always thought that the equinox, like the solstices, were fixed for the 20th or 21st of March and September. The equinox is when the sun passes over the equator. The solstice is when it reaches its furthest point north or south, 23.5 degrees: Antofagasta, for instance, is 23.4 degrees south, Lima is 12 degrees south and Cuzco 13 degrees.

However, Kim tells me that the equinox is itself “a pretty abstract concept” as it is the day the sun crosses the celestial equator,” which no one can actually see.

“On an island in the Pacific on the equator, with an utterly flat horizon, the sun will rise due east on the day of equinox. Elsewhere, either because of an elevated horizon such as at Urubamba or even Lima, or because of refraction, it will not rise due east.”

Kim adds that, “With so many llamas, condors, cats and dogs in the way it should make no difference to you.”

More to the point, the late Easter has no effect on the length of the rainy season.

“Your rains have nothing to do with the Church, the Paschal moon, surfing competitions at Punta Rocas, or anything astronomical.

“Because the Earth moves around the sun in an ellipse and travels faster when it is closest to the sun, the number of days between the two solstices and the equinox is not the same. The half day count between December and June solstice lands some 3-5 days after spring equinox (and before fall equinox), so that ancient people counting the days would celebrate equinox at a different date than on our wall calendar.”

Myself, I shall stick, as advised by Voltaire, to gardening.

Published April 22, 2011 by Andean Air Mail & PERUVIAN TIMES

Machu Picchu, Maize and the Advantage of Backwardness

Dec21

By Nicholas Asheshov

– Special for the Machu Picchu Centennial –

Machu Picchu and the Inca Empire were the creation of an import from Central America, maize, and a dramatic climate shift that turned the Andean highlands from inhospitable wet-and-cold to pleasant, as it is today, dry-and-warm.

For more than half a millenium before this shift the high Andes had been miserable. With the new dry-and-warm, starting around 1000 AD, a backwoods tribe, the Incas, put together the new climate and technology breakthroughs and by 1500AD had produced the world’s most go-ahead empire, heavily populated and larger, richer, healthier and better organized than Ming Dynasty China and the Ottoman Empire, its nearest contemporaries.

The Incas, like a score of tribes all over the tropical Andes, had moved up over the previous millenia from hunters-and-gathers to llama-herders and, latterly, agriculturalists, farmers of potatoes and quinoa, the top names among a world-class agricultural flora that was famously described in the National Academy of Science’s The Lost Crops of the Incas (1989).

Then came maize. New studies, the latest just published in London by Alex Chepstow-Lusty, the Cambridge archeobotanopalaentologist, show that high-altitude, large-kernel maize suddenly became widely established around 2,700 years ago – 700BC.

Alex’s work is based on core samples he took from Marcacocha, a pond at 3,350ms asl just 30 miles upstream from Machu Picchu itself.

They provide a high resolution (40-100-year) environmental and agricultural history of the heart of the Inca region over the past 4,200 years, encapsulated within 6.3 meters of well-dated, highly organic sediments.

In these core samples the maize opal phytoliths first appear in 700BC, early on in an earlier warm-and-dry cycle.

The samples record, in general terms, a 500-year cycle of warm-and-dry alternating with another half-millenium of cold-and-wet, though the past 500 years haven’t been as bad as earlier events.

Analysis of maize opal phytoliths from four archaeological sites in the Copacabana Peninsula, Lake Titicaca, have also come up with a date for the appearance of commercial maize of 2,750 years ago. Even though Lake Titicaca has always provided a special solar-heated mini-climate, at 4,000ms asl this is an astounding height for a species that started its career in muggy Yucatan 7,000 years ago.

Maize, together with new weeding techniques, irrigation, fertilizing and genetic selection, was to transform the Andes into a center for a succession of productive civilizations, starting with Tiahuanaco around Titicaca itself. The Andes were, as the Cambridge archaeologist David Beresford-Jones puts it, “one of humanity’s rare independent hearths of agriculture.”

“Maize was the last piece in the puzzle of the Andean agricultural package, which allowed an expansionist agricultural intensity threshold to be crossed,” says Alex’s latest study, just published in Antiquity, London.

Recent stable isotope analysis of the bones, taken to Yale by Hiram Bingham a century ago, show that the main item in the diet of the inhabitants of Machu Picchu was not the potatoes and high-protein quinoa native to the Andes, but maize.

The Incas got their kick-start to fame with the global warming that was also underway in Europe. It was this climate change that allowed Western Europe to emerge from the cold-and-nasty Dark Ages.

At the same time as the Middle Ages in Europe were blossoming into the Renaissance, the Incas were developing a sensational re-construction of the natural verticality of the Andean landscape. They created thousands of well-drained flights of level stone terraces, unequalled anywhere, covering whole valleys. Turbulent river-courses were channeled and walled.

Not only did the population explode, but the Incas knew how to marshal this key resource. They would put thousands of workmen onto the job just like a modern engineering concern.

The Inca understanding of stone, of construction and of hydrology is described by Kenneth R. Wright, a prominent engineer from Denver, in his first-class Machu Picchu: A Civil Engineering Marvel (2000).

Few of the Inca terraces are in use today. The complicated irrigation flows and long source-channels have fallen into disuse. What they did was to make the best, in the dry-and-warm cycle, of the snow-melt, rivers, streams and lakes, ensuring that agricultural production remained high even during long droughts. Now that we ourselves are into a new global warming it’s certainly time to see how the use of these super-terraces might be resuscitated.

The empire was pulled together by thousands of miles of all-weather stone roads and a warehouse network with two or three years worth of strategic reserve food and clothing. These were immediately ransacked, of course, by the Spaniards when they took over in the 1530s.

Bureaucrats, another feature of empires, were prominent. Gary Urton at Harvard has shown that the khipu, knotted, colour-coded cords, was a complex mathematical and legal record system that was certainly as competent as the double-entry book-keeping that was being introduced in Europe at that time. Much easier to transport and store, too.

Quinoa, a chenopod not a true grain, is much richer in protein than all true grains, so the pre-maize potato+quinoa Andean diet sounds rather healthy.

But cereals, starting with wheat, barley, oats in the Middle East and, in the Far East, rice, have invariably provided the high-volume calories that empires need to support cities and armies. No cereal, no empire.

Graham Thiele, of the International Potato Center in Lima, tells me: “Potatoes are bulky and perishable. So maize has a huge advantage. It was the transportablility of maize, even more than the productivity, that made it a key part of the Inca scheme.”

Maize, he adds, is easy to store, while potatoes go bad and get ruined quickly by bugs and blight.

I have to say that this new emphasis in the historical record on high-altitude maize comes as a surprise to me, even though I live in the heart of Urubamba, 2,840masl, one of the great maize valleys of the Andes. I have always thought that potatoes were the true Andean basic, with hundreds of varieties backed by a cultural tradition akin to that of rice in China. By the way, the International Potato Center tells me that China is today –surprise— the world’s top grower of potatoes and camote (sweet potatoes).

When the last big-cycle global warming began around 1,000AD, the established regimes in the southern Andes, Tiahuanaco and Wari, were unable to adapt and the Incas moved in.

Fashionable economists and political scientists today have started to call this “the advantage of backwardness.” This intends to explain, for instance, why China, India and Brazil, basket-cases three decades ago, are suddenly leaping forward into the top ten.

A favorite instance are the Romans around 300BC who, regarded as crude barbarians by the Greeks, Persians and Egyptians, quickly took them over and created the world’s best-loved empire.

In the Peruvian Andes the Inca country cousins out in the Cuzco boondocks reacted quickly to the drought while the entrenched Wari sat, watched, and disappeared. Their impressively sad capital, Pikillacta, an hour south of Cuzco, is next door to the parish church at Andahuaylillas, the ‘Sistine Chapel of the Andes.’ Gordon McEwan’s masterly Pikillacta: The Wari Empire in Cuzco (2005) is the sourcebook.

Today the Incas would have won the Nobel prize for agriculture, architecture and another couple for conservation. They planted high-altitude polylepis forests to encourage and capture rain in the high cordillera. We have cut most of these down for firewood.

Like the Romans the Incas brought in talent. The stonemasons of Tiahuanaco, metallurgists and goldsmiths from the Coast and agriculturalists from the North.

Sadly for the Incas, there was to be no advantage when the Spaniards arrived, to their backwardness in warfare. It took less than five quick years for a handful of Spanish warriors to destroy the monumental achievement of five centuries of a civilization that was built, as Machu Picchu shows, to last forever.

NOTES:

Richard Webb, former President of the Central Reserve Bank, comments that the concept of the Advantage of Backwardness was created by Alexander Gerschenkron, a Vienna-educated Russian who was in charge of economic history at Harvard and influenced a generation of economists there, including Webb. “His examples were Germany, France and Russia, which all benefited from lagging after England during the 19th century.”

Hugh Thomson, the film-maker and author of The White Rock and of Red Cochineal, both on travel and the pre-history of Peru, comments:

“I am not sure that the transition from Wari to Inca was quite as seamless as you make it sound (‘the Inca country cousins out in the Cuzco boondocks reacted quickly to the drought while the entrenched Wari sat, watched, and disappeared) – the model I’ve usually heard is Wari decline around 1000 A.D. , for climatic reasons, slow emergence of Incas from around 1300 AD, ‘full-on’, to use an archaeological term, expansionist Inca period from after 1400 on, although I know that this early Inca period is constantly being re-evaluated by Bauer and others.”

David Beresford-Jones, the Cambridge archaeologist and author of the just-published Lost Woodlands of Ancient Nasca‘ (Oxford University Press), comments:

“Excellent… The point about maize, for which Alex’s work (among others) provides real data, builds upon an argument that the Andean linguist Paul Heggarty and I make in a 2010 article in Current Anthropology, ‘Agriculture and language expansions: limitations, refinements and an Andean exception?’

“But I am not so sure about the detail of how you portray Wari. For I’d say that all of the elements of statecraft that we think of as Inca: roads, khipu recording systems, and intensification of maize agriculture through terracing and irrigation, in fact had their roots in the Wari Middle Horizon. Indeed, Paul and I would argue that we should add to that list another element still popularly associated with the Inca Empire: the Quechua language family.

“This is developed in another article of ours making that case, ‘What role for language prehistory in redefining archaeological culture? A case-study on new Horizons in the Andes’ recently published in Investigating Archaeological Cultures: Material Culture, Variability and Transmission, edited by Roberts, B and Vander Linden, M., pp. 355-386. New York: Springer.

Gary Ziegler, the archaeologist and explorer comments: ”The transition from Wari decline to Inca expansion remains one of the great enigmas in Inca study.

“The fall of the Inca was historically determined by the arrival of epidemic disease (likely Bartonellosis from Ecuador and the resulting war of succession following the death of Huayna Capac, not European military superior capability. I suspect Topa Inca would have made quick work of Pizarro’s handful of raiders had they arrived a few decades earlier.

“It is interesting that maize apparently did not get to North American until around 800 AD. This probably allowed the development of the advanced Mississippi and Anasazi polities.”

Vince Lee, the architect and Vilcabamba explorer, commenting on Nick Asheshov’s piece and on the Wari/Inca connection, refers here to the Wari tombs found recently by INC archaeologists at Espiritu Pampa. Espiritu Pampa, identified by Gene Savoy in 1964 as the true last refuge of the Incas, is down in the jungle beyond Machu Picchu. The discovery of the Wari tombs has set off speculation of a close connection between the Wari and the Inca, but Vince Lee doubts it. He says:

“The Wari tomb is not in the midst of the Inca ruins, but several hundred meters away. So it does not look like the Incas found or simply reoccupied an earlier Wari site. As you may know, there are several hundred years separating the decline of the Wari from the rise of the Incas. When I first went there in 1982, Espíritu Pampa was covered by thick rain forest and looked exactly as it did to both Hiram Bingham in 1911 and Gene Savoy in 1964. The growth was so thick that even finding the ruins took quite a bit of work in 1982. I mention this to suggest that a Wari site abandoned there for several hundred years would have virtually disappeared long before the arrival of the Incas.

“I note that lots of speculation is turning up that attempts to somehow connect the Wari and Inca cultures via this find, but I’ll be surprised if future work confirms this.

This article, without the end comments, was published in Caretas magazine the week of June 27, 2011 in Spanish.

Santurantikuy and Christmas in Cuzco

Dec19

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now you know why.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nicholas Asheshov

Country Notes from Urubamba, Peru

Tag Archives: Peru

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

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The Niños and the financial roller-coaster

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

The Return of the Otter

How Calca absorbed Maotsetung’s Naked Chullo

A lesson in patience – The hand that rocks the cradle

Death in the Andes

Looking for lost explorers

It’s The Serranos That Count

Boulder –It’s the Solstice

Why Easter is so late this year

Machu Picchu, Maize and the Advantage of Backwardness

This article, without the end comments, was published in Caretas magazine the week of June 27, 2011 in Spanish.

Santurantikuy and Christmas in Cuzco