Protests and Scams in Choquequirao

As we were driving on the highway toward Cachorra, the starting point for our hike to Choquequirao, our taxi driver seemed to be playing Frogger with the numerous piles of stones that would intermittently appear in the middle of the road as we rounded hairpin mountain curves. I was silently trying to figure out whether there had been an unusual number of landslides lately and it probably wasn’t safe to be driving on this road, or whether maybe they just never cleaned them up so this was a year or more’s collection of landslides. Then when we turned off the highway toward Cachorra, there were fallen trees everywhere along the sides of the road and across the middle of the road, in addition to all the rock piles. At this point I was starting to wonder if an earthquake or other awful natural disaster had recently struck.

Apparently all of this destruction was how local protesters were expressing their frustrations with the government. Pushing rocks around I guess I can understand, but cutting down all your own trees seems kind of like stabbing yourself in the back. Obviously these people were desperate to get their voices heard. As I understand it, the protests are about government money allocated to their region being diverted somewhere else by some corrupt official. And maybe something complex about a private company diverting the river that flows through the area to Chile too, although the people there said they had been without running water for months. I guess the protests were working because traffic was cut off between Cuzco and Lima and buses weren’t running, which was why we were in a taxi for the last leg of the journey in the first place.

Choquequirao is another large “lost” Incan city like Macchu Picchu, except you can only get there via an extremely steep and difficult 32 km hike from Cachorra, which meant that when we arrived there were less than 10 tourists there instead of the suffocating hundreds you find at Macchu Picchu. Mostly there were just birds and butterflies.

At one of the campsites along the way we were talking with the woman who lives there. She's in her 50's with diabetes and glaucoma and had just returned from Lima (several hours by bus, not to mention the several hours hike required to get from her house deep in the canyon to the highway) where she had gone to see a doctor that she had heard was “very good” and therefore worth the 350 soles he had charged her. (As a comparison, our clinic charges 5 soles/visit). She had a bag full of pills and when she learned we were doctors she wanted us to tell her what the different pills were for. In her bag of goodies, we found all sorts of fancy herbal preparations from Germany, Canada, and the United States. What we did not find was one single treatment for either diabetes or glaucoma. No wonder she complains that her vision is still worsening. If rich people want to spend their money on expensive nutritional supplements that’s fine and dandy by me, and maybe they help, but it’s not fine for a doctor-—if this person even was a doctor-—to pawn this stuff off on people who are living in poverty in the middle of nowhere, and lying to them that it’s going to bring their vision back.

P.S. it seems that Picasa has a limit to the # of photos you can put in an album, so the remainder of Peru photos, beginning with Choquequirao, are now moving to album #2.

Tourist Ticket

Here in Cuzco they have an annoying thing called the Tourist Ticket. This is basically a clever trick to raise prices to near-exorbitant rates, and then send all the revenue to Lima instead of giving it to the people who live and work locally. It’s one ticket that gives you admission to 16 places. If you only want to go to 3 places, you’ve already spent more money than you would have by buying the whole ticket due to the artificial price inflation at these 16 sites. However, they also like to stick in stupid sites that no one really wants to go to, like a 1-room “museum,” so they can claim you’re getting more for your money, while sites you would actually want to visit are not included. And there’s an expiration date so you only have 10 days to see all these sites.

Anyway, I finally bought the ticket and then rushed to do as much as I could during my 10 days (and I am actually working too, so I don’t have all the time in the world). About 10 of the sites are Incan ruins. I managed to make it to all of these, although some were certainly more spectacular and intact than others. A few would probably never have visitors if they weren’t listed on the tourist ticket. Within such a short period of time, I must admit that all of the ruins start to look like pretty similar piles of rocks. Tons of pictures are posted at PicasaWeb but if you’re not captivated by the history of the people who built and lived in piles of old rocks, or at least their architectural or aesthetic properties, you might get quickly bored.

The only thing on the list that I decided was worth going to in Cuzco itself was a “native art show.” This was a 2-hr show with I think 4 or 5 dances and 2 orchestral numbers. All the dances claim to be traditional dances brought from different rural regions of Cuzco and performed in traditional costume. I don’t really know how accurate they are or how much they've been modified for the pleasure of us tourists, since I've traveled around rurally and have never seen people wearing any of the costumes I saw nor have I heard about/seen any dances, but 2 dances were true highlights. The first was, per the announcer: “a traditional dance performed by the teenagers.” In this dance, all the men basically stumbled around like they were really really drunk while the women, who were actually dancing, at one point supported the drunks on their shoulders but spent most of the time beating off their drunken advances. At least that was my interpretation. I’m pretty sure the “teenagers” were imitating drunk people. The second interesting dance was a “deer hunt.” What made this interesting was that the “deer” was dressed as a reindeer stripper, wearing nothing but antlers and a loin cloth. The first part of the dance was presumably the deer living in his native habitat before the hunters came after him. There at home he liked to spend 5 minutes humping the stage.
Then the “hunters” came and “killed” him by tying pretty little bows on his antlers and dancing around him in circles. It must have been the loss of his stage-humping machismo that brought him to his end.

Finally, a woman led him off stage by a collar like a dog.