To Speak of Children and Evening Light

And so it is that my body was left weary by Tuesday’s climb.

As a result, i have spent much of the intervening three days resting. The majority of my time was spent reading and studying… and yet somehow i have taken more pictures since my last update than i took in all of my time in Aplao.

Admittedly… most of them were not so good… the quality in general was lower than that of my Aplao pictures… but it wasn’t a bad two-day run.

I first managed to drag myself back to the land of the living (after my Wednesday internet trip, of course) on Thursday afternoon. i stumbled around blindly for a while without finding anything tremendously worthwhile to shoot… and eventually found myself in the presence of some small children. i took a fairly consequential number of pictures while i was with them…

At around 2:30 or 3:00 in the afternoon i took a few pictures of some boys playing with their tops outside of the building in which i was staying.

His name is Nelmer. He is always in front of my camera. No matter which way i am pointing it. It is fairly intense.



i returned to take some more pictures as it began to get dark out. The kids swarmed me mercilessly… but occasionally there would be a break and i could back out so as to organize some sort of composition besides a close portrait.

This is the road that leads towards San Jeronimo, the nearest town. This road ends two kilometers away. Town is a shot distance farther.



i had to get a picture of myself with the kids… so… it’s not a great picture by photographic merit… but these are the kids that i took a couple hundred pictures of.



A few long hours of reading and studying woke up with me on Friday morning. At 3:45 i set off towards San Jeronimo in order to try to take some pictures in evening light at the railroad crossing.

About halfway to the tracks i encountered a lady and three men working in a field alongside the road. i talked with them briefly, and quickly conversation gave way to pictures. i had a mud fence separating me from them, however i tried to take what pictures i could… and perhaps one or two of them were reasonably acceptable.

Their names are Maria Atayupanqui Viuda de Ccollo, Dionicio Huaman Huaman, and Vicente Huamantapia. They were harvesting a grain that is used to feed “rabbits, horses… all types of animals.”

“We grow all types of foods here. Potatoes, corn, quinoa… all types of food,” they told me.

Maria took a brief break from working and walked towards the fence that separated me from her. “Here, the men and the women work. That is how we will advance ourselves here. Nobody will be lazy, the men and the women will work, and we will advance ourselves.”



Eventually i made it to the railroad crossing… a place where the rural villages and subsistence farming plots begins to give way to a more urban setting… not a purely urban setting, but a place where small stores and restaurants reign instead of corn fields and drifting pigs. A few moments spent at the railroad crossing will yield a diverse cross-section of the local population… elderly Quechua ladies dressed traditionally, their walk—though stooped dramatically as a gnarled cane keeps them from topping over—proud and dignified… stray dogs searching diligently for anything at all to chase after… small children playing with tops… or perhaps young men in soccer jerseys running into town. (For Philip… and anybody else that may care: f/. 10, 1/10 second, 95mm, if i remember right).



Or perhaps it is not a young man in a soccer jersey… perhaps it is a middle aged man pushing his cart.



And as i began to walk back for dinner, the man at the house on the corner stepped out to greet me.

His name is Sandro. He is a student of agriculture. He would like to travel to America someday… for there are good aspects to all places and bad aspects to all places… but America seems to be a beautiful place that he would enjoy visiting, he said.

“And if you want to see any of the other local sights… Ollantaytambo, Saqsayhuaman, Q’enqo, the ruins of old Cusco… just come find me and we can go.”



And i feel that there is so much that i should say… that this update has been very fast-paced, very limited in scope, and very lacking in insight. i would remedy that if i knew how… and yet it seems that tonight i have no words by which to do so.

My next update may be my last update from Cusco. Perhaps it will contain more of a view to what has been on my mind by way of retrospection.

And in closing… Make of this what you will.



And remember… though we know that the cat is the one to be held responsible, we make it our aim that all passes well and we have no need of blaming the poor thing.