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| Tomb at Shutuy Marca ruins |
The Road to Junin
Traditional Andean life is not that distant from Lima. As the crow flies, Junin province is just 100 miles away, with towns where small ladies wear traditional hats, children have cheeks polished by sun and wind, and the earth is often tilled by hand.
Taking the central highway due east out of Lima put us at 15,800ft above sea level, in a mountain pass called Ticlio. It's the highest I've ever been. There we were, not mountain climbing, driving our Hyundai at 1,000 feet higher than Mt. Whitney, the tallest peak in the contiguous 48 USA. We had left while it was still dark, but the sun rose rapidly while we left the fog and smog of the city behind. We watched the river canyon squeeze in around us and the road start to fold back and forth on itself, eventually passing under snowy crags at the pass before winding down a long canyon to end up at a town called Jauja (how-hah). You may know that Carter and I are fans of Tintin and, in The Temple of the Sun, he and Haddock come up this canyon by train and meet the boy Zorrino in Jauja. So we enjoyed seeing the book come alive, though the train only runs seasonally now and lost it's status as world's highest railway in 2006.Simply driving this route is no small feat, it's a road of overloaded and underpowered trucks, spewing black fumes, serving the mines or the oilfields over in the jungle, and big suicidal buses. This route is notorious for epic traffic snarls that have trapped people we know for up to 5 hours. The truck we saw flipped on its side was not all that unusual; at least it was off to the shoulder. There are certain tight turns where only one truck at a time can pass, but we were lucky and none of these spots got jammed up. I passed the trucks when possible but also kept a wary eye for the oncoming cars inexplicably passing trucks around blind curves, forcing me to break suddenly or roll along the shoulder. Once, we only avoided being muscled off the cliff by coming to a complete stop and letting a truck come within millimeters of us. At another point, we were forced to pass a large careening bus listing dramatically to one side. The climb up the canyon is so long and steep that we burned half a tank of gas on our way up while our return down would later burn only a quarter tank. If I ever had a moment to see beyond my white knuckles or the road, I appreciated the rugged beauty of sheer rock faces dotted by cacti and epiphytes, dusted atop with snow.
Jauja
Eventually we crossed the pass, coming quickly on a large mine community and following the polluted river down to Jauja, a town of 20,000 people at 11,000 feet. It had taken us almost 5 hours to go 160 miles. Jauja is very provincial, but it served the conquistadores as their first capital in Perú (probably for the simple fact that the Inca left behind a couple year's worth of supplies and riches). We checked into a very simple but friendly hostel and set out to find a cup of coffee. Though some of the world's best coffee is grown just over where the jungle is, it's not easy to find a cup in Junin, the people drink a hot barley drink instead. But we asked around and ended up under a tarp at the market stalls where old ladies serve food and beverage. Along with the coffee for Jen, I felt obligated to purchase a bowl of "patasca", the specialty at our stall; it turned out to be an unpleasantly tepid bowl of soup, with choclo (fat corn like posole) and grizzly chunks of meat I only later realized was goat head.Geocaching
Geocaching is a kind of high-tech scavenger hunt in which a hand-held GPS or phone guides you to specific coordinates where someone has hidden a little treasure or "cache". Typically, you sign a logbook and trade a little trinket for one from the box. The best caches also take you someplace new or interesting (e.g. I did it once in Oregon and was taken to a relatively unknown pioneer cemetery) or even take you on a kind of tour. That's what the local Peace Corps volunteer has done here to encourage ecotourism, she has set up over 40 caches that introduce outsiders to local culture, history and environment (https://www.keteka.com/geocaching/). We spent the day with her and a local guide and artist named Chasqui (he is called this, the term for the ancient Inca long-distance runners, because he used to be an extreme athlete, once running the Inca Road from Ecuador all the way down to Bolivia). Carter has been developing the idea of himself as explorer, so we all enjoyed searching out 5 caches over the course of the day.
The first cache was in the valley floor, well-protected under the spines of a cactus, close to a small river where women were washing clothes. Another brought us into the little village of Acolla where locals were practicing a kind of street art, spreading colored sand and flower petals to create large images like carpets on the dirt road. Eventually we headed to an even smaller and more remote village called Saca and got out for a long, breathless climb up a peak there, at times walking portions of the Inca Road. At altitude like that, we rested often, taking in the view and checking our GPS signals. We passed a father and a daughter who was roughly Carter's age, turning the soil of their 45-deg slanted field by hand. The coordinates eventually brought us to the top of the peak where we came upon Shutuy Marca, the pre-Inca ruins of a small community. The ancient people here were not particular friends of the Inca, but this spot was off the beaten track even in those days, so perhaps the Inca let them be. Chasqui blew on his conch shell, asking for permission of the spirits before we entered among the stone walls, many still partially standing, with a dozen or so small circular houses clustered around the peak, a couple still showing large lintel stones over their doorways. The cache was hidden in a nook behind a small funerary tower still holding bones (though the age of the bones is hard to know). Alane, the Peace Corps volunteer, had brought some bright Indonesian fabric along so that she and Carter could play/dance in the wind, flying bright gold and scarlet in that landscape of brown grass and blue sky. But the light was waning, so we hurried down the steep slope to a little canyon where the wind and brush was replaced by the tinkling of a stream and green turf. We found the last cache hidden in a little dell along the stream and walked back to our car. It was rush hour; but since ours was the only vehicle apparently in the village, the commute consisted only of the shepherds bringing in their sheep and cows for the night. We had to stop for a while because the traffic jam of sheep in front of us blocked the entire road. Before leaving the village, a dozen local kids ran up and when we asked, only about half said they had seen gringos before. Sadly, we were so exhausted that we could not do more than take a few photos with the kids. Leaving Junin
We took Alane and 4 other PC Volunteers out to dinner and then quickly crashed into our pillows for the night. I was up pretty early on Sunday, so I walked out of town and up to the high hill where the remains of the Inca fortress are. Walking like that seemed to highlight little things: the man who shook my hand because he was proud I was walking up to the ruins, the stone in my hand to throw at the blustering dog, the rebar and neon cross set on the hill amid the ruins, the little girl crying as her mother painfully combs her black Andean hair before going to market, the campaign murals that look like folk art, the priest sprinkling holy water on the engine and interior of a minivan as the family watches. Something about the air and light in the Andes makes me feel awake. The attendant at the locked lot where we had parked was not awake, however, but luckily a couple of local kids knew where he lived and went to wake him up. I returned for Jen and Carter with fresh rolls and squeaky cheese and yogurt; thus fortified we drove back up out of Junin, back towards the pass. We almost got stuck when traffic nearly locked up in a small cliff-side town where the highway squeezes through very narrow lanes…2 large trucks got pinned at tight corners several blocks apart, blocking the highway, and it was only by luck that Jen was able to get out and find an alley and direct some traffic and get us out of that town.
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