Colca Canyon

Hello all,

This week I finally got to talk with my artesan group´s president and made some headway with resuscitating the residential tourism group. These are both excellent signs because they mean I am finally working on what I was brought over here to do, small business. I´m continuing my English classes of course, although I cut back my adult classes to just the teachers because they were the only ones who really showed an interest. I´m not sure if this is genuine disinterest or just the chacra keeping people from wanting to come or hearing about the class, but I won´t bother with the regular population classes again until I´ve made some headway with the tourism, when they´ll really want to be able to say some basic things in English.
Otherwise, things are going pretty well in town. I´ve settled into a routine for classes and meetings, which can get kind of boring but seems to be on the way to yielding results. I still have the mountains to look at every time I walk out the door, which helps recharge me when I´m not feeling particularly like going to a meeting. These mountains and the wide-open sky above them have a different look and color every day, and some sunsets are simply indescribably beautiful. So I´ll certainly survive the monotony of work since my environment offers me anything but that.
This week I figured I’d touch on the region I’m in right now, the Colca Canyon. There is a bit of a debate on whether this is the deepest canyon in the world, but all agree that if not Colca it is the Cotahuasi Canyon, also in Peru. A group of Polish explorers just mounted an expedition into some unexplored reaches of Colca with the intent of establishing it once again as the deepest in the world, but I have yet to here about the outcome.
The canyon itself isn’t like the classical example of the Grand Canyon with its sheer walls diving down from a fairly flat surface. Colca is nestled in the Andes Mounains, so the canyon sides slope down from huge mountain peaks and make more of a V than a straight plunge. There are several towns nestled on the lip of the canyon, underneath or on the side of mountain peaks, and the upper reaches are thinly populated with llama and alpaca farmers that rarely come down into the valley.
My last post described the tourist attractions of my town, which pretty much encompasses the tourist attractions of our side of the canyon excluding the whitewashed old churches that each town boasts. On the other side of the canyon is Cabadaconde and its Cruz del Condor, which attracts the vast majority of tourists in the canyon. Cruz del Condor is an outlook that overlooks the canyon, although not the most impressive portion by any means. The real attraction is the fact that condors fly across the canyon there frequently and can pass quite close to the outlook point. Other attractions are the numerous hot springs and the adventure sports possibilities such as rock climbing and mountain biking. Lastly, if you climb up behind the ridge directly behind my side of the canyon (or take a round-about route by car) you can reach the origin of the mighty Amazon River, something I’ve yet to do but would like to get around to before too long.

Town

Hello all,

This week I finally got to do some talking with town authorities on the subject of small business in Madrigal, which is my trained and educated specialty, instead of youth development which is where most of my work has been directed so far. I will still work in this field as no work with adults begins before seven o’clock here due to the farm-centered lifestyles of the people. The organization that is showing the most promise is Turismo Viviencial, which centers on a type of live-in tourism that pretty much just attracts Europeans at the moment. This form of tourism involves people coming to live in a home in another country for a period of time, from a week to a couple of months, to get an idea of the habits and customs of a people and their surroundings. Since we are in one of the most beautiful spots in the world this is a big opportunity for the town. Still, there is a lot of footwork and restructuring to do before we can get a move on things.

On other news this week, I’ve been a bit under the weather but still doing everything I need to. The amusing part of all of this is when anyone hears me cough they have another natural remedy they would like me to try to cure it. I had to have received more than ten amateur prescriptions this week. I also pinned down a learning aid my high school English students enjoy- using activities centered on song lyrics. It’s good for listening comprehension and vocabulary building, and I had a completely quiet classroom for the first time since I began!

It just occurred to me that I haven’t really got around to describing the town. It is seated in a depression surrounded by mountains, the most impressive of which is an extremely jagged peak that is right next to where the canyon really plunges down. You can’t really see the canyon from the town because you need to descend a series of step-like slopes full of farm fields to get to it, a difficult descent. The jagged peak bears an Incan fortress, Chimpa, overlooking the deepest part of the canyon. Also on that side are ancient rock tombs including a mummy, cave paintings, a ghost town, a rock forest, and a forest of puyas, plants that flower once a century, Closer to the town is an abandoned mine and then kilometers of farm fields.

The town itself is built around a central plaza that has a small park with a fountain, a few statues, and bushes cut in the shapes of animals and objects. For the most part small stores and governmental buildings populate the square and residential houses radiate outwards. Towards the edge of town are a large public meeting hall and the schools. The schools are single-story complexes of buildings built around a cement common area. Most houses are built of painted adobe with tin roofing, including mine, although there are still some of the traditional stone, straw-roofed houses around.

As far as amenities go, we have streetlights and for some, including my family, thankfully, running water. The roads are still primarily dirt, although we are building a stone and asphalt one entering town. The stores don’t have a huge selection, but you can find most of your amenities and fill in the gaps by going into the closest big town, Chivay. Madrigal has all of the hallmarks of a small town, but it has everything I need and I have certainly never lived in a place so naturally beautiful.

Food

Hey all,

This week has been more of the same, although I did walk to the town across the canyon to visit another volunteer Saturday, which pretty much left me burnt out. It took four hours of descending into the canyon through all kinds of terrain and then climbing back up and out to the highway. This is particularly difficult at altitude, and as skinny as I’m getting I’m still in terrible shape. Should probably start up that running pretty soon… Getting back was as difficult, but only an hour as I hopped a ride from my fellow volunteer’s town back home. As far as work goes, I got to talk to a local governmental agency called Sierra del Sur about a variety of projects, including a women’s savings club that will be meeting next week. I’ll also be meeting with a residential tourism group that needs revitalizing and the mayor to talk over some possibilities, including starting a town library. Still no dice on the radio show though, although I’m working on getting the radio key.

This week’s topic is food, then. For the most part, it’s pretty tasty, although after they butchered a sheep we ate random guts for a week straight. Not my favorite week. They have a different approach to meals in the canyon. Breakfast and lunch are the biggest meals of the day and more or less the same. Dinner might be a smaller plate of food or just tea or coffee and bread. I don’t get a whole lot of meat, although when I do it is usually sheep jerky or on good days chicken. We also get alpaca, a llama-like animal, every once and awhile. Yesterday in my friend’s town we even had donkey, which was tough but not too bad.

Generally, though, we eat rice with some sort of side that usually involves potatoes, including a type of sun-dried potato, called chuño, that tastes awful in most settings and the very strong regional red onion. One of my favorite meals is spaghetti with a sauce made primarily from shaved carrots. Soup is another constant, and is usually quite good and sporting potatoes and chives. My mother also makes a simple cheese that is quite good and often makes tostado, which is just corn fried until it is nice and crunchy. To drink we get fresh milk, tea brewed from local herbs, coffee, or chicha, which is kind of like a sour beer brewed from corn that usually isn’t alcoholic. Overall I can’t complain, and going into the capital once a month gives me the opportunity to get hamburger now and again so I can’t really ask for more.

Transportation

Blog 2

This week has been a crazy one. Monday I taught in the Primary School, where we had a parade celebrating the gift of a couple new computers and some desks and chairs. The students marched in classes, the style being the goosestep we last saw in Hitler’s Germany and still used by many South American countries. There is little consciousness concerning World War II, South America being just about the only area largely unaffected by the war, particularly its Pacific coast. So, this is most likely a vestige of the time when German military advisers were the primary resource of military knowledge in the continent, although Argentina was the country with the strongest ties, even being the center of a conspiracy theory involving an escaped, living Hitler. Also, an interesting note on the high school- the students are made to pay for the paper their tests are printed on, which strikes me as a similar practice to making the executed’s family pay for the bullet. When I told my class not to worry about it they insisted, which I guess puts money back in my pocket…
Anyway, after Primary, I was to do the first installment of my radio show and computer class, but I got a series of no-shows for those. I did have success Wednesday with my teachers’ English class as well as teaching at the high school and pre-school Wednesday-Thursday. I also started up a basketball club to give me a sport I have a chance of competing in (instead of soccer). In my free time I put the finishing touches on my first book of poetry, as requested by a few fellow volunteers, and wandered over to the health post to see what I could help out with. Thus ended a pretty busy week. If you want a Word copy of the book, shoot me an email, which if you don’t have it is: henryjfromage@hotmail.com.
Topically, I thought I’d tackle transportation this time. The primary form of transportation is on foot because all of the others are so infrequent. I walk most places, which usually isn’t too bad, although it is an hour-plus hike to the next town which gets long. Also, walking to the chacras, or fields, can take up to two hours. Another option is by horse, which I haven’t taken advantage of yet.
Speaking of engine-run transportation, the primary is the combi, which is a slightly larger passenger van that goes back and forth to the nearest big city, Chivay, three times a day and is packed beyond belief, and then goes and picks up more people in each successive town. For anyone significantly over five foot, it is pretty rough, but when you have no other options… Also you have the big Greyhound-type bus that leaves for the capital city of Arequipa every morning at 3 a.m. This is fairly comfortable, although to take it at night back to Madrigal might mean you’re standing for a significant portion of the trip. There are taxis as well, but the cost is prohibitive to return from Chivay. Also, the municipality has a huge, construction-type truck, called a bolquete, that they use to ferry materials and people around the town’s jurisdiction and occasionally elsewhere. If you can catch it when it’s leaving there’s generally space in the cab or up top. Lastly, in Chivay are the mototaxis, like we had in Lima, that are basically low-powered motorcycles with passenger cabs attached to the back. There isn’t a whole lot of point taking them as Chivay is pretty walkable. That’s more or less the slate of transportation available, little of it comfortable but with the distances in question, all of it essential.

Lastly, here’s another batch of long-promised photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/zijerem/Peru3#