To Speak of Motorcycles and Carrots

Note: My pictures from Arequipa are up in the last post now.

So… i have finally experienced a little bit more of the area here… and it still feels like there is so much potential for so much photography and for so much learning. i have decided to take that primarily as a good thing.

Thursday marked my return to human existence… which consisted of a 35 minute walk to the internet café on the outskirts of town… and which obviously included a 35 minute walk back from the internet café on the outskirts of town.

But… my time in the internet cafés of the world usually isn’t much to be too longwinded about. i get the necessary emails and facebook messages sent, get my latest update up, groan inside when i realize that i left some needed pictures back at the house, have people who have never met my parents call them (what a fun game!), linger longer than i need to, and leave.

i would be amiss, though, if i neglected to inform you that the local children decided to hold a pick-up game of volleyball in this particular internet café on Thursday afternoon. Oh yes. i kid you not.

Onward, i suppose…

The real fun started shortly after lunch on Friday. Brian Powlison invited me to join him on a motorcycle ride… which i obviously couldn’t turn down. Our first stop was at one of the churches that the Powlisons had recently been involved in building. He stopped to let me look around the area, and i shot off a few pictures. This is Brian and the motorcycle with the church in the background.



We eventually made our way up to a hill with a great view of the surrounding area, but i decided not to post any pictures from that hill because they are somewhat redundant with other material that i have posted.

After returning home, i decided to see what kind of life i could find nearby to take pictures of. Coming to the point where two roads diverged in a dusty village, i wasn’t very sorry that i could not travel both and be one travel, so stood i not long, nor did i bother to look down one very far, for i already knew that it went into Cusco, but took the other… just as fair? Neither of them seemed to be claiming much of anything, and the one that i chose was more of a back street than the other one, which was the main thoroughfare through the area.

That choice made all the difference, though, because after only a short walk i found that a truck had just dumped a huge load of carrots into a dammed off section of the local irrigation canal. Around 10-15 people were wading almost knee-deep in their new orange swamp—rinsing and bagging the carrots was their task.

And so, of course… i shot a few pictures.



Eventually i found my way over to where some young girls were talking. They were… busying themselves with some other form of plant life that i foolishly neglected to ask about. The soft tones of evening shadows made me optimistic about the possibilities of some portraiture, so i tried my hand. This was probably not my most successful result.



Finally, i walked back towards the Powlison’s for the evening… and as i made it back to the road, a local boy was pulling his pony (or otherwise small horse—i claim not to be an equine expert) along the road. i didn’t have long for the picture, so guessed manually at the focus with the lens set at 18mm and shot from the hip. The exposure was difficult, but i thought it made an alright black and white.



And that is where end i now.

So tune up the bagpipes… May is reaching a conclusion!

To Speak of Cusco

First things first... i somehow managed to foolishly leave my last Arequipa pictures back at the house a 35 minute walk away... so they'll be blank until i get them to an internet cafe. Please do not cry. i am very sorry.

And greetings from Cusco.

This update will be fairly long… although probably not long enough to shock you, given how long-winded i can tend to be.

i write it from my residence just outside of Cusco, the house of my relatives the Powlisons.

Cusco is perhaps the most beautiful city to which i have ever traveled. i have found distinctions in the strengths of northern Peru and southern Peru in general as i have traveled through the country in the past… these distinctions are not fair, for course, but are merely points relevant to the areas to which i have traveled. i have found the south to be of a scale unmatched by the north, while the north has possessed a complexity and lushness unseen in the areas that i have visited in the south. Cusco has, to my brief glances in my first twelve hours here, offered a taste of both sides. i hope to drink strongly of its draught during the time that i spend here—in exploring mountains, in learning Quechua, and in growing to know the people in a more real way than i ever have been able to before.

However… more on Cusco shall come later.

i aim now instead to conclude from my time in Arequipa.

There is a great parade in Arequipa every Sunday. i had business to conduct on Sunday, and so was not able to spend much time taking pictures of the parade… however i tried to take a few.

Often my sentences start with these two words. As an independent sentence… they stand as truth.

i struggle… in this instance, the struggle is to take pictures of large-scale, obvious public events such as parades that accurately provide a sense of the situation. There are, however, a few strategies that i try to employ to communicate the feel of the situation to at least a minor extent.

In this setting, i desired to convey the speed and dynamism of the dancers in the parade. A straight shot with an adequately fast shutter speed to freeze the action sharply would do exactly that… sharply freeze the action. The word “freeze” is no mistake. And freeze is not what i would like to do. And so i slowed the shutter speed down (i believe to 1/20) in order to shoot a pan… losing sharpness, but gaining back some of that desired energy and dynamism.



i did not desire merely to communicate energy, though, but also to communicate a glimpse of the people involved, to keep a sharp picture that demonstrates individuality.



And eventually i found my way to the Plaza de Armas. A few simple shots… a newspaper salesman. Lens backed out to 18mm, stopped down to f/. 8.0, and camera set at ground level. Just a typical Arequipa scene.



And as my Arequipa closer… i really like graffiti… a lot. As my whimsical and unfocused photographical ambitions have as of yet failed to provide me the discipline that i need to link together cohesive stories. However, i sometimes catch glimpses of stories that could be good… and this was one such glimpse. i have a sort of graffiti addiction. i would have liked to have put together a better series on the tourist-ization of Arequipa… but i just didn’t spend enough time there. This is a place from which a picture for such a series could have been taken. “Arequipa no se vende”… Arequipa does not sell itself.



i wrote the above on Monday evening… and am now filling in the interim on Thursday afternoon.

i seem to have mid-week crises… somewhere on Monday evening or Tuesday morning i think that i eat something that i should not eat, on Tuesday afternoon i start feeling like i ate something that i should not eat, on Wednesday i sleep a lot and ask myself why i ate that thing that i should not eat, whatever it was, and on Thursday i start feeling a little bit better. Or at least that’s the way it happened last week and this week.

So as a result… there’s not a whole lot to fill in from my time in Cusco, although hopefully there will be soon. For now, though…

As a first Cusco picture, i think i’ll provide just a touch of the area in which i am living. This was taken a short distance from the Powlison’s house. The dirt road has a fine, dusty upper layer about two inches deep. Apparently the dust was hauled in from elsewhere… i always thought that that wasn’t the ideal road surfacing material, but what do i know? At the top of the hill on the right you can barely see a metal gate… this is the gate to the Powlison’s house. The majority of the people in this neighborhood speak Quechua. While most are bilingual, there are a few who speak no Spanish. i don’t know which category this lady falls into, but she is definitely a Quechua.



On Tuesday i decided to hike up a nearby ridge, taking it as close to the summit of a pseudo-nearby mountain as i could. i managed to keep a pretty good pace, and after two and a half hours was resting at 12,300 feet, shortly after having come over a 12,500 foot subsummit. The mountain that i had intended to climb—probably just a little bit over 14,000 feet high—seemed to be reasonably nearby… but i decided that with it just being my first full day here in Cusco i would turn around and call it a day. It was probably a wise decision… This was taken from my resting place at 12,300 feet. The mountain i was trying to climb was not visible from here, but was blocked by some other lower summits between it and my vantage point.



i got back to my room at about 2:30 on Tuesday… and didn’t do much but sleep until 8 on Thursday. i tell you, it’s a wild life down here in Peru…

As a result, there’s not much else to report. i am starting to feel almost human again today, so hopefully i’ll be able to get out and meet people and learn some Quechua and take some pictures and have exciting things to report to you the next time i update.

Just in case you were wondering… dried papaya seeds taste better with a little bit of yogurt.

And remember… Cochabamba is the third largest conurbation in Bolivia. This could win you a lot of money someday.

To Speak of Barzillai the Gileadite

i’m still back in Arequipa for a few hours yet.

i think that we have established how i feel about cities, so i´m not going to bother with more of that.

But… i feel like i don´t have much new from my trip to discuss… i’ve just been doing boring logistical things, and at 8:30 i’ll be catching a bus to Cusco.

i probably will regress to Arequipa in my next post to get a few pictures up that i haven´t had time to look at yet, but for now, i’m going to speak on slightly broader issues.

My hotel in Arequipa was named Hotel Mahanaim. This is a word that Peruvians can’t really say… it defies a lot of phonetic and practical rules in Spanish. i thought it was a funny and obscure name… but my reading coincidentally shed some light on it.

In 2 Samuel 13 we see one of the terrible results of David’s multiple marriages. In this chapter, one of his sons, Amnon, finds himself madly in love with his half-sister, Tamar. After raping her, he finds that he then hates her. Tamar’s brother Absalom is enraged and kills Amnon, and as a result is exiled.

After three years, he was allowed to return to Jerusalem. During this time, however, he wins over some of the people and stages a revolt. David is exiled from Jerusalem.

There is a sequence of loyalties and betrayals that plays out over the next several chapters—this advisor flees with David, that one betrays him, the other one is loyal to David, but is sent back to confuse the plans of Absalom. The priests start to follow David, but are sent back in peace. This man curses David, that man blesses David.

And then we come to 2 Samuel 17—

“Then David came to Mahanaim. When David came to Mahanaim, Shobi the son of Nahash from Rabbah of the Ammonites and Machir the son of Ammiel from Lo-debar, and Barzillai the Gileadite from Rogelim, brought beds, basins, and earthen vessels, wheat, barley, flour, parched grain, beans and lentils, honey and curds and sheep and cheese from the herd, for David and the people with him to eat, for they said, ‘The people are hungry and weary and thirsty in the wilderness’”
--2 Samuel 17:24,27-29

There is a great battle between David and Absalom, Absalom is (treacherously) killed by David’s general, and David is able to return to Jerusalem. 2 Samuel 19 describes an interesting exchange with Barzillai:

“Now Barzillai the Gileadite had come down from Rogelim, and he went on with the king to the Jordan, to escort him over the Jordan. Barzillai was a very aged man, eighty years old. He had provided the king with food while he stayed at Mahanaim, for he was a very wealthy man. And the king said to Barzillai, ‘Come over with me, and I will provide for you with me in Jerusalem.’ But Barzillai said to the king, ‘How many years have I still to live, that I should go up with the king to Jerusalem? I am this day eighty years old. Can I discern what is pleasant and what is not? Can your servant taste what he eats or what he drinks? Can I still listen to the voice of singing men and singing women? Why then should your servant be an added burden to my lord the king? Your servant will go a little way over the Jordan with the king. Why should the king repay me with such a reward? Please let your servant return, that I may die in my on city near the grave of my father and my mother. But here is your servant Chimham. Let him go over with my lord the king, and do for him whatever seems good to you.’ And the king answered, ‘Chimham shall go over with me, and I will do for him whatever seems good to you, and all that you desire of me I will do for you.’ Then all the people went over the Jordan, and the king went over. And the king kissed Barzillai and blessed him, and he returned to his on home.”
--2 Samuel 19:31-39

This is obviously a very large passage… seven chapters of 2 Samuel, with 12 verses in particular highlighted. There is a lot that can be drawn out of it… but i had just a few points that i wanted to make.

First… what a shame it is that we neglect great men such as Barzillai in our treatment of the scriptures. How clearly graces of boldness and generosity and humility and servanthood are so powerfully portrayed in them…

And his humility is very interesting to me. i think that all would agree that the text portrays him as very humble in spite of his great wealth. Yet look at the language that he uses: i think that we can assume that he was worthy of the reward that David wanted to give to him, and i think that it is safe to say that in his heart he knew that he was worthy of this reward. And when he declined it, note that he did not try to pretend to be unworthy. That would not be humility, that would be deceit and pretentiousness. Instead, he didn’t make his merit of the generosity an issue at all… he completely avoided the question of dessert. His humility was that his thoughts were on something besides himself, not that he thought little of himself.

It’s not that he thought little of himself… it’s that he thought of himself little.

And… i think i’m going to conclude, even though there is much more that i could say.

i encourage you to find a reading plan that guides you through the entire Bible in a year and that includes an Old Testament reading and a New Testament reading every day… the point not being that there is some special spiritual merit in reading the Bible from cover to cover in the magical time span of a year, but instead that there is so much richness in Scripture that we miss out on by skipping the “boring” parts, that there is great benefit that comes from a disciplined lifestyle as pertains to reading of Scripture, that reading Old and New Testament concurrently enriches both of them, and that sometimes God orchestrates things such that your rigid, objective plan has you reading about David’s time in Mahanaim as you sit in your room in Hotel Mahanaim. i believe that you will find that the more time you spend reading the Bible, the more relevant it will appear to you.

That is not the Bible changing. That is you changing.

To Speak of Victor

Greetings from Arequipa, though i type this from Aplao.

Sorry folks... this one's a novel.

(And as an update from Friday night in Arequipa… to make a long story short… i have my rainfly.)

As another calm night falls over the Majes Canyon, i am making preparations to draw my time here in Aplao to a close. i am taking my final pictures, cramming as many as-yet unfulfilled ideas in as i can, packing my bags, and settling in for one last night in the tent for a little while—although for how long i cannot yet say.

For any of you who may have had some idea of my projected itinerary before i left… you would do well to fold such ideas up neatly and toss them into the trash… or perhaps make practical use of them and burn them.

For after a few days in Arequipa hammering down some logistical points it appears that i shall be putting my backpack on my soldier (much like the good little soldier?), traveling to Cusco to spend some time with relatives that i have who live nearby. They have graciously invited me to come help them with and to document their work, and i am very excited about this opportunity.

Cusco was the capital of the Inca Empire, which once stretched from Colombia to Chile—3,000 miles in length—and boasted arguably the most sophisticated and best designed infrastructure in the world at its height.

My relatives—the Powlisons—work with an indigenous Quechua population a short distance outside of town. i have worked with Quechuas in other parts of Peru, and have truly grown to love the Quechua language and culture. This also gives me a chance to hang out with Elena again, who became the Quechua side of my family tree after being adopted by the Powlisons. She’s awesome.

My time here in Aplao has been well-spent, i feel, if slightly different from expected. i feel that i was able to do some successful landscape photography, i was able to have some time to slowly adjust to being in Peru, i was able to eat a lot of ice cream, i was able to explore the countryside, i was able to enjoy the company of Julio and Durby, i was able to polish my Spanish, and i was able to begin to feel more comfortable with taking pictures of the people here as a result of the time that i have spent in Aplao.

i did not, however, get to experience in Aplao close, intimate, story-oriented photography as i had hoped to. i wasn’t able to spend time in people’s houses or in their fields and record and document their lives and work. Certainly this is more my own fault than that of anything else or anybody else, however my aim is not to assign blame, but instead to state fact… and the fact in this case is that such intimacy with the culture is not something that i was able to experience.

Traveling to Cusco, however, i feel that i will have much richer opportunities to experience such a close documentary style. i will be able to work from relationships that the Powlisons have spent years and years developing, i will be more comfortable from the time that i have already spent in Peru, and i believe that perhaps i will be able to start telling stories that are more demonstrative of the true lives of the people rather than merely the beauty that surrounds them.

As one of my strongest thoughts from my time in Arequipa today… i treated myself to a nice Italian meal in the touristy side of town. i spent an exorbitant amount of money on it (about $7… boy, did i splurge!) on the basis that it has been over a week since i could have spent an exorbitant amount on food if i had wanted to, and sat in a corner seat.

All around me were other tourists… most of them very obviously American. It is easy for me to slip into very intense arrogance and elitism in situations like this… but humor me for a moment, if you will. i watched their interactions with each other… with the waiters… and the thought that came to my mind is—“That feels so foreign to me…”

It was only after i had thought the word that i noticed my use of “foreign”… for seemingly i was in Peru experiencing something very foreign, and seemingly the “Peruvianness”, if i may use such an expression, was what stood in contrast and opposition to the Americans. And yet… anybody who has read much at all of this knows that i have experienced unexpected quantities of this “foreignness” in Peruvian culture as well.

And then it occurred to me that what truly feels like home is not American culture or Peruvian culture… but instead the conversations with and friendship of, among a few others, those who have been commenting on this blog. Likeminded people who desire to see Christ made much of in every way possible and who desire to live as Him as a practice of daily life and not merely as a title or as a social affiliation or as a set of facts to which one gives begrudging intellectual assent…

But onward to what has happened.

By way of recap of the past few days… i mentioned on Tuesday that i made some chicha with Julio on Tuesday. i tried to take a few pictures of the process… but there wasn’t much to the process, and as a result i always seemed to be about two seconds late with my pictures. Here’s one picture, though, taken as Julio was lighting the stove.



The stove, he said, is of a design brought by the Germans. It consists of two levels of cooking surface with an exhaust pipe rising from the top level, and is made of brick, although Julio’s is covered with tile “because i had the tiles just sitting over by my room”. It requires two logs to cook a meal, and when the cooking surfaces are covered, smoke is forced to exit through the exhaust pipe. Julio’s is outdoors, so smoke wouldn’t have been much of an issue, however in the houses of the locals the stoves were traditionally more along the lines of open fires which would fill the houses with smoke… this obviously wasn’t very good for anybody’s health. The German design—which was built free of charge for all of the inhabitants of the valley, according to Julio—allows the smoke to remain contained until it exits outside through the exhaust pipe, as if through a chimney.

The pot at the upper left was what we used to make the chicha. It contained five liters of water. Julio took some of the local purple corn—a much smaller corn than is familiar to most Americans—broke each ear in half, and placed the halves into the water. He said that when his neighbors have corn available, he tells them that he doesn’t want the actual corn, just the cobs… that they can feed the corn to their chickens. The chicha is a product of the core of the cobs, which dissolves into the water, and he used about twelve cobs for the five liters of chicha. As the water with the corn came to a boil, he added a little bit of cinnamon and a little bit of a spice of which he didn’t know the English name and covered the pot. After thirty minutes of boiling, he took it off the stove, allowed it to cool for the afternoon, poured it into bottles, and refrigerated it. Traditionally, he said, the Quechuas would allow it to ferment for two or three days, making it an alcoholic beverage, but he prefers the smoother, sweeter flavor of the more modern version, which has been adapted as a popular drink all over Peru.

i was not feeling well on Wednesday, and as a result i spent most of my time relaxed at the lodge reading and writing. Spending long periods of time doing “nothing” can seem very frustrating… but i find that it is important for me to remember that such times—even when sick—were what i was really anticipating when i came to Peru. Time to relax and think and pray through life, to read for shamelessly long periods of time, to enjoy small breaths of wind and gentle rustlings of leaves. This is not wasted time… and perhaps it is to the shame of our culture that one would have an internal urge suggesting that it is wasted time.

i went out to take a few more pictures this afternoon. Something that has bothered me a little bit about many of my photographs so far is the utter lack of power lines. That may seem a strange thing to be bothered by… and indeed, not so long ago i would have been ecstatic at the success that i have had omitting power lines from my pictures… however i desire to be honest in my photography, not merely beautiful. And honestly… much of this area is a tangled mess of power lines. Certainly there are ways to get away from them enough to take pictures that do not contain them… however they are here and are very important to the recent history of the area. According to Julio, there were no power lines here 40 years ago.

So as i walked towards the cliff from which i take many of my landscape pictures, i decided to take a picture of the road that i travel almost nightly to take these pictures. As i prepared to take my picture, i found that i just couldn’t quite get the power line out of the frame… which shook me back to reality. Perhaps i can’t get the power line out of the frame because it’s important? Perhaps it is not so difficult to take beautiful pictures as it is to take planned pictures that communicate detail about a place. And so i stepped back fifteen or twenty feet to include the pole to which the lines are fixed and took this picture.



And yet… this post is entitled “To speak of Victor”. i would now like to introduce you to Mr. Victor Gomez. Victor lives a short distance down the road seen in the previous picture from the Majes River Lodge. i often have seem him as i walked to the canyon’s edge, and as this was my last afternoon in Aplao, i decided to go talk with him briefly.



Think of a time when you spoke with somebody who was hard of hearing, and found the conversation slightly difficult. With thought in mind, please accept my apologies for the subpar nature of my description of what was said—not only was i having a conversation with somebody who was hard of hearing, but i was having this conversation in my second language.

Victor was born 84 years ago in Pampacolca. That refers to a reasonably broad area, however i have found that around here, when people start sticking the word “pampa” in a place name, they are generally speaking of sparsely populated highland areas—you can generally assume elevations of at least 12,000 feet. He says that over 40 years ago he moved from Pampacolca to La Central, the region above Aplao where he currently resides, and worked for the beer company—la cerveceria. He was particularly quick to note the great advancements in the irrigation that have occurred over the past 40 years.

What was not explicitly stated was the affect of the German presence in the valley between the 1920s and the early 1960s. i find that his moving down from Pampacolca coincides approximately with the Germans’ sale of the Majes Valley back to the Peruvians, which Julio stated to have occurred in 1962… and can only but wonder if that was a cause of his moving down from the highlands. i can only imagine but that at the age of 40 it was a very difficult move for him after having spent his entire life likely self-employed as a subsistence farmer at high elevation.

He was a pleasure to speak with, although i was only able to speak with him briefly, and i am glad that i had the opportunity to hear a little bit about his life.

And if ever you’re in the Majes area, by the time 3:00 or 3:30 rolls around and the sun is starting get low over the western hills… this is where you’ll find Victor Gomez. He’ll be seated in his wheelchair next to his baby blue house, a broad rimmed hat on his head and dignity in his eyes. Perhaps his children will be cooking and cleaning nearby… perhaps his grandchildren will be playing with small, brightly colored toys… or perhaps he’ll be alone. But he’ll be enjoying the beautiful view from his seat in the shade.

To Speak of a New Week

i’m going to have to say that not much has happened that was tremendously exciting since my last update.

On the one hand, that means that i get to bore you with stories and pictures that may not be quite of the caliber of other stories and pictures from this trip.

On the other hand… that means that nothing has gone terribly wrong. And i assure you… i like it when things don’t go terribly wrong… although it usually makes for awesome stories when things do go terribly wrong.

So… i’ll let tales of things going terribly wrong before last-minute rectification and tooth-skin escapes and swagger and bravado wait for another day.

Sunday ended up being a pretty laid back day after the rafting experience, much as i had hoped. i eventually did exciting things in town (i bought oranges, for example… and a Sublime ice cream bar… now that’s exciting!) before finding my way back to the lodge.

i had conceptualized a picture idea involving one of the mountains near the lodge on Saturday, so after returning to the lodge i made my way over to the canyon overlook that has served as one of my primary sites for taking pictures. Much to my horror and chagrin, however, the moon proceeded to rise in precisely the wrong place… i told it not to, my friends, but it did anyways. Seeing how i would need to run about two miles and find a suitable place for my tripod in a combined total of about five minutes (i was feeling too tired for that at this point in time) or to pick up my kind mountain friend and relocate her (him? I hope the thing doesn’t get mad at me… [Note: Spanish has me assigning gender to everything.]) about 750 or 1000 feet to the right (once again… i was feeling too tired for this, as well… but just barely) in order to get the picture that i had envisioned… i eventually just tried to make the best of the situation and come up with another idea on the spot.

i dare anybody to make sense of that last sentence. Three parentheses and a set of brackets. English teachers everywhere are feeling sick to their respective stomachs.

So… whenever i am completely out of any other ideas whatsoever… i resort to self-portraits. So this is just my attempt to fly? (To Australia? Nothing happened? i did get the night sky, though?)



i only tried this 33 times. Yes… 33 times. i hope that i like at least three of them. And my legs got very tired.

i decided to go for a little walk on Monday. i left the lodge at about 9:50 and headed upstream. It wasn’t a particularly eventful walk (although my legs felt very tired throughout it, probably related to my hill experience from Friday and my self-portrait experience from last night?), but i did enjoy watching the landscape slooooowly pass by and having time to note the subtleties of the countryside. i occasionally—although not very often—stopped to take pictures of people working beside the road… but i still am not quite comfortable enough to walk up to people hard at work and ask if i can shoot off, oh, 50 or 75 pictures… or merely five or seven, for that matter. Soon, perhaps…

Regardless… i occasionally would take a few pictures of people working in daily life fashion as i passed… but something inside of me strongly objects to taking daily life pictures zoomed all the way in to 200mm, particularly if the subjects aren’t explicitly aware that i am doing so.

So… Poor style or no style, here’s one of my people working pictures… a pretty typical scene here… bright colors against neutral colors—never any middle ground at all—bright, harsh midday sun, some unused bricks, some haphazardly stacked rocks… and lots and lots and lots and lots of dust.



i had no destination… but at around 1:15 i got there. The road and the river swerved around a soaring rocky ridge before angling towards the east. The road had been several hundred yards and about a hundred feet above the river for much of the journey up to this point, but road and river reunited at the aforementioned ridge. A short hike down the rocks that separated road from river brought me to a comfortable rock that had been smoothed by the rise and fall of many floods, at which i stopped to eat lunch (mmm… oranges and bread!). i had rolled up my sleeves earlier in the day, as it was pretty hot, and remembered to pull one of them back down when i got to the river, but not the other. i personally find that fact slightly amusing… but not as amusing as the fact that the arm of the still-rolled sleeve was utterly devoured by the ruthless biting bugs of Aplao, while the other arm was untouched. It’s kind of like a crazy tan… but better. Oh yes…

In retrospect, i knew the light was utterly deplorable (that’s what 1:30 does, i suppose), and should have tried something to break up the mundanity of the scene that i photographed (like maybe stick my camera on a tripod and prance through the rocks on the riverside… prancing usually adds healthy spice to my self-portraits.), but i didn’t, so you’ll have to live with the boring version, which features my friend the very large nearby rock, the Majes river, and a few hills. The one that i climbed on Friday is the tiny thing barely visible in the upper left.



So, i left my spot by the river at about 1:50 in order to arrive back at the lodge at 4:57… just moments before the 5:00 target time i had set on Saturday night.

Julio asked what i had done, so after consulting my map, i told him that i had gone to Hacienda Peru, a settlement that i had passed a few minutes before stopping. He told me a little bit about the history of the valley—apparently Hacienda Peru was developed by the German man who owned most of the Majes Valley between the 1920s and early 1960s—before stating that i had taken the combi. i told him that i had actually walked, much to his surprise.

Apparently he thought it was kind of a long distance… and it makes me feel like i’m not doing too bad if the locals think i’m walking far.

My estimate—somewhere between 12 and 15 miles in total. Not too bad for a short day, i suppose. i’ll have better numbers for everything when i get back to Arequipa and can use the internet on my own computer… or when i start remembering to take Tye Brown’s GPS with me on my brief excursions… i can’t believe that i forgot it again. Never again! (i hope…)

And… i made some chicha with Julio this morning, which was pretty cool... not much to tell a story about though. We stuck some logs under a stove, lit them on fire, broke some purple corn in half, threw it in some water, set it on the stove, and let it boil for a while... but it was a lively cultural experience!

Very well… i now away.

And remember—it takes true talent to succeed in the Icelandic Circus.

To Speak of a Hill

Another day, another update?

Something like that… cheap access to Aplao means cheap access to the internet, and if i can, then why not?

i feel like the trip is starting to come together conceptually for me a little bit more. i am able to see what i want to accomplish a little bit better, i am able to recognize what i want to strive for a little bit better, and i am able to relax and take what comes a little bit better as time goes on.

After my update yesterday, i did boring things that nobody wants to read about in a blog about backpacking the Andes… like eat food and buy groceries… although there was a D’anafria Sin Parar… chocolate… If anybody from my 2006 Peru team, and to a lesser extent my 2004 Peru team, is lurking… that means nothing but good things. Note: i like ice cream. A lot.

During this time i also tried my hand at a little bit of quick street photography… setting up to shoot some daily life to try to capture a little bit of the mood of the city. Here’s one example from Saturday morning… probably not my worst picture from the session, but probably not my best, either…



Regardless, noon rolled around and i needed to get back to the lodge to make good on my afternoon plans. i found a combi (a 15 passenger bus/van that functions as a taxi service… they will have routes as short as 15 or 20 minutes or as long as 8 or 10 hours) headed up this way (Ongoro-Central! Ongoro-Central!) and hopped on expecting a 20 or 25 minute ride. That was at about 12:25. At 2, we rolled up to the lodge. What we did with that hour and a half, i have no idea, but i know that my ten liters of water and i were very good friends with a number of Peruvians, because there were not a mere 15 people in that combi. 25 would be a better guess… with every person having some sort of baggage with them (like 10 liters of water, a camera, and a backpack, for example).

And my mother is going to be so happy, because here come some self-portraits!

i decided to climb the mountain that i showed in my last update (the one on the left, for those who are keeping score)… so i headed off at 2, with three and a half hours of daylight left. That’s not normally the best time to start, but the combi had eaten an extra hour. i was feeling pretty good, though, and a brisk clip, some dancing through a corn field, maybe some trespassing, a very angry bush, a trek across the moon to make Neil Armstrong jealous, and 50 minutes brought me to the foot of my quarry. The climbing was pretty straightforward, with a local use trail cut into the ridge that i had picked out for my route. The route was very loose, and there were often interesting dropoffs on either side. After a few minutes i decided to shoot off a quick self-portrait with the route in the background.



That’s why i normally stay on the other side of the camera…. :-D

i eventually dragged my weary self onto the summit at about 4, just before the best light of the day would come. Twenty minutes on the summit yielded a summit picture, a little bit of rest, and the resolve to try to get back to the lodge within four hours of having departed it.



Somebody´s boyfriend is a huge dork…

It goes without saying that i walked down this mountain with my heart held high, or something ridiculous like that. i knew that it would be a lot harder to get down in time if i stopped to take pictures very often… but naturally, as the light got better and better as the sun got lower and lower, i just couldn’t help myself… This is typical of the views that i had as i descended.



i had left the lodge at 2:05. As i wearily strolled through the gate, my clock ticked over to 6:05. Mission accomplished.

And surprise! Julio begged me to go rafting on Sunday morning to help guide a group that had two girls of ages around 5 and 7, maybe... so i went rafting on the Majes. Naturally, though, i didn´t take my camera.

Some reading, some Jesus time, and some bed are calling my name again as i type this on Saturday night. Sunday could, i’m sure you’ll be shocked to hear, be interesting… so remember to check back… and don’t forget that fruits and vegetables are our friends!

To Speak of a Few Days in Aplao

Greetings from Aplao!

What an interesting trip this has been… and i haven’t even eaten a guinea pig yet.

i safely arrived at Aplao (although if i remember correctly, the word “sound” in the expression “safe and sound” refers to mental state, so i’m not sure that i can say i arrived safe and sound…) on Thursday at 2.

If you expected any logistical issue to resolve itself in a pleasant and reasonable way on this trip…

Well… I’m assuming that none of you were as foolish as me to expect something like that. So, for the rest of you who eagerly wait whatever tales of strange logistical circumstances causing me to crinkle my forehead and scratch my scalp (which may be slightly burnt… i should buy some sunscreen today… although i probably wouldn’t put it on my scalp… i suppose i’ll use a bandanna for that…)… i have great news for you!

i arrived at the lodge where i’ll be camping for the next indefinite number of days and pitched my tent… to find that—surprise!—the tent had no rainfly with it.

So… that’s always interesting. A three-season tent… and this time without a rainfly… somewhere (it would be Tulsa, for those who truly must know), Brent Higgins doesn’t know whether to laugh a lot or cry a lot.

Just laugh, my friend… just laugh.

For those worried about my health… the rainfly is in the mail, and i’m currently on the outer reaches of the driest desert in the world, so i’m not horribly worried about getting rained on. If a storm hit… well… a rainfly wouldn’t be the least of my concerns. Plus… how cool would it be to say that i lost a night of sleep because i got hit by a rainstorm in the driest desert in the world after leaving my rainfly in Oklahoma during a three-month trip to Peru! That would be awesome!

After thinking of that… i kind of hope that it rains before the rainfly gets here. It would be awesome to have that to tell the grandkids…..

Regardless of what the grandkids have to say about the issue… here’s my four-star setup here at the Majes River Lodge near Aplao, Peru... and you can click the pictures for larger versions now:



The sick mountain in the background is named Cerro Huatiapa, and is actually just a small foresummit of Cerro Luceria, which is almost 14,000 feet… but actually is just a small foresummit of Cerro Tururunca, which is around 15,200 feet. i can’t see any of those from where i am. The mighty Cerro Huatiapa (elevation: about 8,000 feet) is blocking my view. Things are big here.

i went for a brief walk on Friday to get to know the area. The Majes Valley’s main products are tourism, dairy, honey, and grape products, with a few wines that are fairly well known throughout Peru. i know all of these things but tourism merely secondhand.

They grow corn, too… and this was taken while sneaking around the periphery of a corn field while on my walk. It’s really pretty typical of the area… rocky soil in gently wavy furrows, a few young plants growing up, a field braced by endless rock walls, some hills looking on from the distance. It’s pretty cool, eh?



i’m thinking about charging up a hill or two while i’m here… i haven’t really decided which one, though. The two that look the most conducive to good stories are also on the other side of a river that i’m not quite excited about freezing in (it’s snowmelt not so many miles [and 14,000 or so vertical feet] upstream)… but i found another one that looks perhaps a little bit easier, but still very interesting to the northwest. It’s one of the central mountains in this picture, taken on Thursday.



Finally, i just thought i’d leave you with a picture that i took while waiting for the sun to set on Friday night. This is, once more, the mighty Cerro Huatiapa, bathed in the late evening light that comes around here at 4:15 or 4:30.



i’ve taken 250 pictures now… not nearly on pace to hit 15,000, but i expect things to pick up here in a little while. Being alone, i don’t have the fallback option of taking pictures of my partner when things are slow, which is what i do on most trips… but as i get more comfortable with the local culture and as i start to see people for the second, third, fourth time i think that we’ll start to be comfortable with each other enough for me to take some pictures. Currently i feel a pretty strong urge to devote myself more to social photography than landscape photography… so perhaps in the next week or two there will be less pictures of mountains and more pictures of people. Mountains are just easier to take pictures of while i’m still adjusting to changes from 13,458 angles at once.

(i made up that 13,458 number.)

Also… i just thought i should say that my parents are basically rock stars. You should get their autograph the next time you see them. They pretty much know how to be encouraging stateside support like you wouldn’t know. You should all grow up and be parents like mine. Unless you are already grown up… then you should just be parents like mine.

And i think that Caroline is pretty cool, too. If you ask her to be your friend on facebook… i’ll… smile and laugh and think it’s cool?

That sounds like pretty good incentive to me!

Very well… 9pm is rolling around as i type this on my computer from the lodge, from which i will save this update on a flash drive and take it into Aplao tomorrow morning, it has been dark out for the past three hours, my sleeping bag is terribly comfortable, i went through the trouble of getting my pillow out of my backpack today, so i’ve got that on last night, and some Jesus time and sleep is calling for me.

Sleep at 9pm? Whatever has Peru done to me!

So… it’s time to keep on keeping on, i suppose.

The trivia question for today has two parts:

1) What do the native Inuits call Greenland?
2) If you were an island, which island would you be, and why? Fruit answers such as papaya are unacceptable.

And if you’ve got a minute theeese days, just remember what i said about double-decker buses and ten ton trucks, eh?

Photos from Arequipa

Arequipa, though a good one, is a city nonetheless... meaning i barely function in it, and certainly have no photographic inspiration whatsoever.

i've said this in my past 947 updates, actually, but i don't know when i'll get the chance to update again, so i figured i'd get a few pictures up...

Perhaps the next time i put pictures up everything will be better--perhaps the pictures will be more inspired, perhaps the accompanying text will be more worthwhile... but for tonight i'm tired, i'm looking forward to taking advantage of the hot shower that getting stranded in the city acquired for me (at the cost of a hotel room), and i'm a little bit underinspired by that classy thing called the city life. It's not my favorite thing ever... so hopefully nobody will hate me for the below-average quality of my first batch of pictures.



Merely the view from just outside my hotel room. The keen observer may note that Picchu Picchu looks on in the upper left... while the less keen observer would probably still note typical unadorned and often unfinished Peruvian brick walls receding at chaotic diagonals from the blue of my hotel. Bright colors on unfinished neutrals tend to be the norm in this country, i have found.



Hardly poisoning... this boy was feeding pigeons in the park. i really should have done better with my pigeon pictures... but although i wasn't quite feeling it (at all), i thought i'd stick at least one in here.



Mountain light as the sun falls ever closer to one of the three towering volcanoes that brace the town. It streams down a side street. Anonymous walkers, romantic ideals, a flag glowing translucent, a town waking up for sunset.



And night falls a little bit more. Anonymous people, anonymous cars. Even the friendliest of cities is, ultimately, anonymous, it feels. Perhaps the bus will make it to Aplao tomorrow. Perhaps with it some of the fire will return.

i know not when another update shall come, my friends. Do enjoy your weekends.

To Speak of Rockfall and Arequipa

If things went according to plan, then this wouldn’t be Latin America.

My 15 and a half hour bus from Lima to Arequipa passed rather uneventfully, reminding me of why i like bus rides so much… it’s nice to be able to turn off the brain and rest every once in a while.

Upon arriving in Arequipa, i hauled my bags to the booth of the carrier offering service to Aplao—Transportes del Carpio. After buying my very reasonable priced fare, i kicked back in a chair to restfully pass the thirty minutes separating me from another three mindless hours before arriving in Aplao. Perhaps five or six minutes had passed when the man behind the counter motioned for me to come over to him.

“I’m sorry” he said—in Spanish, of course. “Rockfall has blocked the road to Aplao, and so there will be no buses to Aplao today. Perhaps it will be opened again tomorrow, but Friday is the safest guess.”

So lacking other options, i started trying to find a reasonably priced hotel, which brings me to my current residence, a reasonably priced single room about four blocks from the Plaza de Armas.

Even as much as i hate cities (of which Arequipa is the second largest in Peru), Arequipa feels much more like home than Lima did. i’m going to try to get out and take some pictures around town today, and perhaps will have one or two to put up tonight.

i guess getting there is half the fun, eh?

To Speak of Lima

i love Peru.

i quite possibly hate Lima.

Perhaps Lima´s most endearing quality to me is the persistent fog. Temperatures in the high 50s with almost constant fog are approaching ideal conditions for me... the problem is that the fog happens to be more along the lines of oppressive smog.

Updating my blog, i am obviously not in a bus station as i said that i would be at this time. After a series of eventful flights (actually, they were probably incredibly eventful, complete with unicycling clowns and baby-juggling llamas, but i was asleep for it all), i landed in Lima at about 10:30pm. i then proceeded to get robbed hand over fist by the airport taxi cartel (they only allow ¨safe¨ taxis into the airport... which is good, but also means that the taxis get to charge whatever they want). i paid $25 to go halfway across Lima. Tomorrow i´m paying $15 to go halfway across Peru. i love Peru. i hate Lima.

So my taxi takes me halfway across Lima to the Cruz del Sur bus station on Javier Prado. i´ve put in many 2am-5am nights in bus stations in Peru, so i just assumed that it would be open with women´s shrill voices calling out ¨Juliaca-Puno!¨ and ´´Ica! Ica! Ica! Ica! Ica!´´ as i was accustomed to... but such was not the case. Instead, it was quite closed, and the only human presence was not quite of the reputation that i cared to spend any time around. The taxi driver recommended a ´´cheap´´ backpackers´ hostal (which costs about twice as much as i want to be in the practice of paying for lodging), where i write from now.

On the upside, i managed to find a phone card, and also to find that as long as i don´t call from the wrong pay phone it´s good for quite a considerable amount of time. So something went right tonight!

Thanks for the comments, they´re all very encouraging... hopefully i´ll have another update up with some pictures by the end of the week or so. My bus leaves Lima at noon tomorrow (not soon enough), and i´m hoping to roll into Aplao by 10 or 11am on Wednesday.

Cities aren´t my forte... i´m ready to be in the middle of nowhere. Soon...

To Speak of Logistics

And so it comes to pass that my plane takes off in a mere eight hours.

i suppose that it would have been nice to have had sufficient time to think through this post a little bit better before writing it...

But i'm kind of running a little bit short on time... as i need to wake up in five hours to leave.

So i will keep this kind of short because i am quite tired.

My plane departs Oklahoma City at 9:10am tomorrow, ultimately arriving in Lima at 10:50pm. My first bus out of Lima leaves at noon on Tuesday, so i will likely hang out in the bus station and try to keep myself awake until then. The bus ride from Lima to Arequipa, a city in southern Peru, will take about 14 hours, putting me in Arequipa at about 2am on Wednesday. i'm hoping to catch a bus to the town of Aplao somewhere in the area of 5-7am, which would get me to Aplao around 8-10am. Aplao is my initial destination, and is the location from which i will next be updating.

Aplao is located at about 2,000 feet above sea level on the Majes Canyon, which is the lower section of the Colca Canyon, widely considered the deepest canyon in the world, although most current sources cite it as the second deepest behind the nearby Cotahuasi Canyon. i will spend several days to a week in Aplao adjusting to Peru, getting to know the people, brushing up on my Spanish, climbing some nearby mountains, and, of course, taking lots and lots of pictures.

So i shall update sometime around the end of the week--or perhaps i will be able to talk Caroline into occasionally informing the world that she has heard from me and that i am not dead.

Pictures shall come soon, hopefully!
--sam

To Speak of Leaving

And so it comes to pass that i will be finding my way out of the United States of America within the next six days.

This will be the place in which, when convenient, i will occasionally leave a few thoughts or impressions or plans that come to me as i spend the next three months of my life backpacking in Peru. Perhaps a few things that i think i learn will find their way here, perhaps a few pictures, perhaps a few anecdotes of life in the Andes, perhaps some Quechua... those who are persistent enough to follow this even loosely i applaud. Hopefully it will not be a waste of your time.

i shall open with a brief overview of the trip:

i depart Oklahoma City on Monday morning, to arrive in Lima late Monday night. i then plan to travel by bus to the town of Aplao in southern Peru via Arequipa. i will spend an indefinite amount of time in Aplao exploring the small nearby mountains and adjusting to the local culture before continuing on to... somewhere else, most likely the town of Cabanaconde.

My purpose in undertaking this trip is primarily to develop my photographic portfolio. i will be going to places of great cultural, geographical, and aesthetic interest, and i will seek to first understand and appreciate these places myself, and then to try to translate this understanding into photographs that are honest, relevant, and--when appropriate--aesthetically beautiful.

i am not calling this trip a mission trip. i am, however a follower of Christ... and so while i am not going with an agenda or a specific strategy of ministry, my attitude is that my witness is not fundamentally what i do, but that it is fundamentally who i am. And so as a result, i will be seeking opportunities to speak of the frailty of man and the death and resurrection of Christ and the glory of God, however the occupational purpose of this trip is photographic in nature.

i close with a picture of the village of Choco, one of my eventual destinations, from a short distance up the Choco River, taken during the month that i lived there in 2006--