To Speak of Departure

And so bring i one more update before i leave for Choco.

There is little to speak of in this update, and only a few pictures to include in this update… but i thought that i would try to be up to date when i departed.

My bus leaves for Cabanaconde at 1am on Sunday morning. i will have the day to spend there relaxing, shopping, eating last-minute ice cream, taking pictures, dancing in the streets, riding cows, and eating alpacas. If everything works exactly according to ideal plans (hahahahaha!) then i will catch a truck out of Cabanaconde on Monday morning, probably at around 6 or 6:30. If things continue to work exactly according to ideal plans, then i will arrive in Choco sometime Monday evening. Probably pigs will fly, too.

Speaking of pigs… my heart goes out to my dear friend the Great White Pig of Death. i hung out with this kindly pork in 2006, which is when this picture was taken. The Great White Pig of Death greeted us every time we tried to find a nice tree downstream to use as a restroom. It lived under a small dropoff that had to be descended to get to the river. i imagine that this beast of dignity and scale and wonder is no longer with us, however i thought that it warranted mention.



i’m actually going somewhere to which i have traveled before… so i figure i’ll throw in another picture or two to testify to the beauty of the place. This was in my veryvery first post… but i think that most of my current readers maybe didn’t ever see that post. It is Choco from a short distance upstream.



That is where i am going… after i cross the Colca River, which has been known to look like this from time to time (like in the summer of 2006).



What’s fun about all of these pictures… is that they’re hopefully not nearly as good as the pictures that i am going to take in this trip to Choco.

Further… Choco was my destination in 2006… this year, Choco is my launching pad. i will be spending some time in the higher villages of Mina and Pullcho as well before heading over the 17,000 foot Paso Cerani to herds of llamas, internet cafés, small buses, telephones and D’Anafria freezers below. And will maybe have a yareta fire in honor of the Coleman Stove Experience of 2006.

Watch out for those trees that are disguising themselves as rocks.

So… you should hold out hope that possibly i will take some pictures that are not terrrrrrrrible while i am gone.

Very well… onward.

As i mentioned in my last update… i did some work with a short-term team from Georgia over the past week—yay Parkview!

My pictures tend to be from VBS’s… but i feel like i spent profitable time with the team aside from translating… be it putting almost enough people in the back of a truck, eating, sitting in a cold circle under the stars while Matt and Aaron took requests for praise songs, staying up too late talking to Will, angrily throwing my wallet out of a combi window (a slight exaggeration), admiring goat heads in the market, preparing to kill the bathroom operator, or just talking to any of them… i can honestly say that my time with them was enjoyable and encouraging.

But… my pictures tend to be from VBS’s. And surprise! More pictures from Vacation Bible School!

On Tuesday afternoon they led a VBS a few miles up the valley. Every mile up the valley is a mile distanced from Cusco, and consequentially the economy becomes more centered around subsistence farming and the population becomes more Quechua… and it is beautiful.

And... portrait of me translating. Photo courtesy of Aaron McGarity.



As kids began to show up, i tried to shoot off a few portraits.

i feel that in general (and i say this knowing that my best portrait of this trip was taken with no landscape context whatsoever… so it’s definitely a generalization and not a hard-and-fast law) my best portraits are either taken with my 50mm fixed lens or zoomed out to a wide angle and that they usually feature a unity between the person being portraited and the environment within which he or she lives. Even in the aforementioned portrait (which can be seen from a post about two weeks ago), the presence of the boy’s bread and staff provide indications of his environment even though the background is an off-white blur.

So that’s what i was going for in this portrait (which is not one of my best portraits from this trip… but at least i tried). Plus… i even managed to include myself in action in the bottom right corner. What fun!



Finally… another picture that is not one of my better pictures from this trip… but a picture that demands by being posted that i tell the story behind it.

So i suppose that the subject matter is fairly obvious… some people in the back of a moving truck.

There were quite a few of us back there, actually… this probably goes down as my second most pleasant truck experience ever in Peru.

i was standing in the back middle of the truck. Every time the driver accelerated, it became very important that i not let people fall out the back, because if they fell out, i would be falling with them. i didn’t have a roll bar or anything to hold onto, so i occasionally bruised the shoulders of those in front of me. Sometimes i prayed that we wouldn’t hit a bump too fast, let go of everything, and tried to get my camera in place for a picture of what was going on. This was one such attempt. For PJ’s sake, this was somewhere between 1/5 and 1/8 second at 18mm in a fast-moving truck without holding on over a bumpy rock road.

But i'm not going to post it because of internet troubles. Sorry.

Sorry, PJ… i only bring you up because i know that you won’t be reading this in quite some time.

So i draw to a close my last update in some weeks. Hopefully i will be back in the land of globalization sometime around July 7 or so and will begin updating again.

i think that when i get back (and my mind may change on all of this, and if that is the case, then i am afraid that all of this will be lies. Forgive me.) i will post one incredibly broad but shallow update that lets you know that—yes—i do live, that includes perhaps two pictures which will probably be selected more for being pretty than for any intrinsic photographic merit or for any storytelling purposes, and that provides a basic outline of what i did. It will probably read more like an itinerary than a good book.

Throughout the rest of the trip i will perhaps include more in depth stories and insights. It will be about a three and a half week span of travel, two weeks of which will be spent away from “civilization” and on my own… so i reallyreallyreally hope that i come up with a halfway decent story or two. Any time that i run low on things to stay… i may stick more information in. And likely i will continue the blog for a little while after i make it back to the states… unless there is just no interest in it whatsoever. Then i’ll probably just keep writing novel-length facebook messages to whoever happens to be the victim of the day.

So… remember that if, when you are translating, you have no idea what the speaker is saying… announcing the beginning of a massive party is always a viable option.

And… pancake-battered chicken fried steak is a potato-peeler’s tornado fleeing delight.