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.