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.