To Speak of Peru

To Speak of the Chacras

2008-08-06T16:20:00.000-07:00

i am sorry that i have not been very faithful in updating lately. There is really no legitimate excuse… and it looks like i will not get very close to caught up to the end of the trip before i make it home.

So if there is any interest whatsoever… i suppose that i will continue the blog at least until i finish an overview of my time in Peru after i get home.

i’m going to try really hard for this update to be less than 700 pages long. Please forgive me if i fail in the matter.

i think i’m going to continue with Choco pictures for a little while… this post is going to be a photo essay detailing a little bit of the work done in the fields around Choco. i traveled to fields with Juana Lupaca Blanco on two separate occasions and tried to document the goings on. This series is almost a month and a half old now… so my memory might be a little bit hazy (and i’m not going to go back and read through my notes on the occasions right now)… but i think i won’t be lying to you… too much.

But before i go there… i thought that i would provide a picture of the overly kind missionaries with whom i have been staying in Trujillo. So here, ladies and gentlemen, are Eric and Lora Karraker… or Lora and Eric Karraker, as they appear in this picture.

So… Choco is located in the bottom of a canyon. The village itself fills the only nearly-flat ground in the area, and is braced on all sides by near-vertical cliffs. The fields, then, are often a fairly long walk away, cut out into the mountainsides in the form of terraces.

In this picture, Juana’s donkeys are on their way to one of her fields. The donkeys are necessary to transport whatever is harvested back to her house… and on particularly long trips are occasionally ridden for a while.

Upon arriving at her field on this particular day, we began by collecting the two mature avocados in her tree. We started by throwing rocks at them to knock them down… but after i notched a direct hit to no avail, we decided to try a different tactic. Juana saw a 12-15 foot tree branch a short distance away and charged off to bring it back.

Upon arriving, we quickly were able to use it to knock the avocados down. She kind of liked the thing, though, and so decided to hide it so that she would be able to use it in the future. She climbed up to the edge of one of her terraces and lowered it out of view down the other side.

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After collecting the avocados and hiding the branch, Juana began picking cactus fruit—tuna. Here she holds out a peeled tuna for me. Yum.

Juana finished off the day by harvesting some corn. She first picked the ears off of the stalks, and then cut the stalks down to take back to her home to feed to her donkeys and sheep.

And i suppose that a fitting close would be a portrait of Juana in her field… so here you go.

Very well… in a few hours i will be leaving Trujillo for Lima, where i will arrive fairly early in the morning tomorrow. i will be spending three days and two nights in Lima before flying back to the states. i hope to get one more update written… but i don’t know how much freedom i will have to do so in Lima. So this may be the last one before i get home.

To all who have faithfully followed this blog… i hope you know that i have appreciated your interest, even that of those who have lurked but not commented.

And… i’m not kidding. Buy me coffee when i get home :-)

Would that i were two, he said, a dark and snowy night.

To Speak of Great Mystery

2008-07-31T09:44:00.000-07:00

i’m going to be honest… before i get to the actual business of writing this update… i feel like you need to know that i am sitting at Pastor Tito’s house… and the TV is on… and i’m listening to music currently, so i didn’t hear the dialogue… but the man in the Uncle Sam costume—complete with dollar store hat… elastic string under the chin? Oh yes…--just went off on the two men in the clown costumes. And this is a serious show. A very serious show. i can tell you that the girl in the orange vest is the good little girl who gets caught up in all kinds of trouble (after about two minutes of occasionally glancing at the screen) precisely because she is wearing an orange vest that is not so fantastic by most modern American standards… kind of the “Not-in-Prada-but-still-looks-cute” effect… the Princess Buttercup image, if i may. The girl with the small mole a couple inches from the corner of her mouth is obviously the deceitful, manipulative arch-villainness, because she has a mole a couple of inches from the corner of her mouth. And the guy who stuck a revolver in his pants is nothing but trouble.

i just thought that you needed to know what was up in the world of Peruvian television tonight—but don’t worry… i assure you that Revolver Man is well-intentioned… he probably wants to protect Cute Innocent Girl’s honor, but it’s all going to backfire because Gandhi wouldn’t stand for such methods.

So all that said… it looks like the Great Mystery referred to in my title is not Peruvian television. Which is kind of a shame.

Instead, i am… temporarily? permanently?... indefinitely, to be sure, reverting from my leap into the realm of fresh material to old stuff… where in this case old means pictures taken five weeks ago. Admittedly… some of the last pictures that i have taken… but… that is certainly much more my fault than their’s.

No, but the mystery is indeed profound. For i am speaking of Christ and the church.

Am i at times inflammatory in my posts? This may be one of those posts that is potentially inflammatory. Hear my heart stronger than my words, i ask.

Which is a long way of saying… i do not know the extent of my readership very well… and perhaps some of my readership does not know me very well. i caution all to not take this post as my overall opinion of Catholicism, or as a generalization that describes an attitude that i take towards all Catholics, but rather as a description—and yes, a criticism—of a particular form of Catholicism that i encountered on a particular day in a particular place, namely June 26, 2008 in Choco, Castilla, Arequipa, Peru. If, based on my statements here, you think that i would criticize some other manifestation of Catholicism that you can think of… well… i probably would, and i am unashamed of that.

The day was June 26. It was a Thursday.

i had been in Choco since Monday.

i started slow… i needed some time to adjust to the new culture of the secluded, more closed village that Choco is… but after some adjustment i began to take pictures much more prolifically than at any other point previously in my trip—and certainly more prolifically than any at any other point successively in my trip. i usually spent my morning reclined against some rocks as John Piper brought the heat through my mp3 player before returning to town for some lunch and the pursuit of some activity with which to fill my afternoon.

This day i was kind of short on ideas. i was still kind of tired from all of the change that i had been subjected to over the past week… so i wanted to do something fairly sedentary and local.

As i sat against the wall of the City Council building in the town plaza, i heard the unmistakable sound of the Choco band. Imagine a drunk middle school marching band with instruments made out of tin. But maybe more exciting than that. If anything could possibly be more exciting than that. The percussion marks time ad libitum and molto rubato… if i may do such harm to the word rubato. And i sometimes wondered how much libit-ing they were doing and how much it was purely unintentional.

But it is the Choco band, and we love them when we’re not trying to sleep. They’re usually more drunk than normal at 1:30am, and that makes their music even more… endearing?

But it was the Choco marching band… so something exciting was happening. Because nothing happens in Choco that isn’t exciting. And i’m trying really hard not to use really dark examples. Especially since Jami Layman isn’t a regular reader of this blog.

But it was the Choco marching band… and they came into view. And behind them the men were in suits. The women were in the beautiful and elaborate traditional Quechua dresses that i have found nowhere but in a few villages near Cabanaconde.

A solemn procession it was. First into town hall for a few minutes… and then towards the cathedral. And the doors opened.

i lived in Choco for a month in 2006… and really wanted to find a way to get into the cathedral. i never succeeded.

But here was my chance.

i’ve never fancied myself to be a wedding photographer. i shot one wedding last summer… Chad McMath and Emily (formerly) Reagan… and while they don’t seem to hate me now, meaning i probably didn’t do an exceptionally horrible job… i know that weddings are probably not my forte (although if you need a wedding photographer you just might be able to talk me into it these days… if i ever end up with a working lens again). But this day—from the back row, because i wasn’t feeling very assertive—i was a wedding photographer. Get excited.

i’m going to present my documentation of the wedding in two parts. This update will include the ceremony and the procession, and the next update (that i devote to old pictures) will include the reception.

Does that structure sound surprisingly western for a small village in the middle of the Andes? It did to me, too.

His name was Abrahan Vilcape Quiquea. Her name was Victoria Monica… and she had a last name, too. But i don’t remember it.

His father was one of the preeminent men of the town. That is why the wedding took place in the cathedral and was officiated by a priest—who had to be paid to come in from Arequipa, six hours of driving and seven miles of walking distant. i believe that most marriages in Choco are more along the lines of common law marriages… perhaps there is a smally ceremony of some sort within the community… but basically the man and the woman move in together and everybody recognizes them as married. Choco is not a very religious village… but i think that there is a lot of prestige associated with having been married in the church.

So i stepped into the cathedral… and gave my eyes a few minutes to adjust to the dim light. To my right were a few rows of pews and an elaborate altar that occupied the entire back wall, as well as many smaller altars along the other walls. To my left was a dusty storage area. The whitewash hadn’t made it that far.

The doors of the cathedral are only opened two or three times i year, i have been told.

The ceremony began with the ceremonious (fitting, eh?) signing of several papers as the assembly sat solemnly and quietly.

As this happened, i shot a few pictures of the interior of the church… such as this.

Perhaps i will be criticized for using this word… but i do not quite know what else to use, and i am unashamed of using it… but this would be one of the several idols found along the walls of the cathedral.

Besides the obvious fact that this is an idol in what presumes to be a house of worship to God… this pains me for another strong reason as well. And obviously this reason is vastly subordinate to the robbed worship of God… but i think that it is relevant nevertheless.

You’re not going to find anybody in Choco who looks like this man. Not remotely.

Wait. i lied. If i’m in Choco… then you will. i am kind of a spitting image of this man, in fact. He’s a bit more obviously Spanish, whereas i am perhaps subtly Swiss… however… this is a white guy with a beard. He has more facial hair than all men and women of Choco combined.

And what have the Spanish been to these people but oppression? Condescension. Mockery.

As the liturgy of the service progressed, the people mumbled through rote prayers and statements of faith with reluctance and hesitation that i have never remotely seen in an American church… and i have seen very reluctant and hesitant American churches.

These people were not talking to their God. The god that they were talking to was white. He has a beard, just like the idols of the saints. The god that they were talking to speaks Spanish. The god that they were talking to hates their Quechua language and encourages them to pretend not to speak it so assertively that they had me fooled for the whole month that i spent with them in 2006. The god that they were talking to wants their money. That way he can have gold-plated altars in locked up cathedrals. The god that they were talking to was not their God. The god that they were talking to was not my God. The god that they were talking to was not any sort of God. The god that they were talking to was dead, was the hellish spiritual reality manifested physically in five centuries of Spanish oppression.

Would that at least they had a conception of a God who cared about people who have dark skin, too.

But the service began, all the same.

The priest, as i said, had been brought in from out of town. He was a big-city priest. Probably about as conservative as they come. So if you take what he had to say and add hundreds of years of isolation and the variation that comes with such isolation and the syncretism that is characteristic of local people… then you will have the typical religion of local people… when they care enough to think about religion at all. Which honestly is not very often for the people of Choco.

“Before we begin this holy service of matrimony, let us confess our sins” said the priest.

i was floored. This was more orthodox theology than i have ever encountered in Catholic Peru before… and we had hardly even started.

“Pray with me.” He said.

“Dear saints, dear blessed Virgin Mother, we have sinned. Make us good people, so that we will sin no more. Amen.”

Nevermore will i be able to hear a Peruvian tell me that they don’t pray to Mary or the saints. i have strong enough objections to any sort of concept of praying “through” Mary and the saints or asking them to pray for us… very strong objections to such a practice… but there is no way you can paint what happened to open this service—with a very conservative priest from the big city, mind you—in such a light. That prayer was to the saints and to Mary, it asked them to bring about an end.

And what was that end? A righteousness of our own. This is not the gospel. This is not Christianity. Christianity is this: yes, we have sinned, and that God demands of us a righteousness that is not our own, and that we are utterly incapable of offering such a righteousness, and so we are under His wrath and fully deserving of hell at this very moment. But against this desert of wrath and hell, the righteousness of God is revealed… a righteousness that is not our own is given to us, not that we might attain to merit or that we might prove good enough to counteract the immense weight of sin, but that the righteousness of Christ is counted to us and our sin is counted to Him and we are made new beings. If we are going to be confessing sin, we would be well advised not to ask that our flesh would yield works of righteousness. If you want apples to come from where a fig tree is planted, you’re going to have to do more than ask the fig tree to give you apples. You would be wise to kill that fig tree and uproot it and dispose of it and plant an apple tree in its place. The whole organism has to change… and there will be no boasting by the fig tree or by the soil that now you have your apples. No… the gospel of which i am not ashamed, the gospel for which Paul was in chains and for which i may one day be given the honor of joining him there, the gospel that all who have received have been commanded to share is one of grace and not of works of the law. If you want to work for your eternal reward apart from faith, then by all means do so… but i warn you that whatever does not proceed from faith is sin, the wages of sin is death, and to him who works, his wages are not counted to him as grace, but as wages… so you will get those wages for which you worked, and those wages will be death.

But to him who does not work, but who believes in Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith will be counted to him as righteousness. Fall on Christ. Don’t ask yourself or Mary or saints or even Jesus Himself to help you earn a righteousness of your own. You will just be collecting filthy rags.

i would call that a lengthy aside… but the gospel of Jesus Christ is never an aside.

But i know that it is time to get back to the wedding (this is going to be sosososo long… do you see why i decided to break it into two updates?).

And so this is some people kissing. Wahoo! (?) (eek… i’m sorry.)

Had i mentioned the Choco marching band? Well check it out! Here they are standing in the back of the cathedral, randomly playing when they are not supposed to play and randomly not playing when they are supposed to play!

i think that people in Choco hate birds.

After the ceremony, Abrahan and Monica worked their way toward the door of the cathedral. As they donned their bread breastplates (please comment with your opinion of what a bread breastplate at a wedding symbolizes, if you are bold enough), the kind people of Choco unloaded on them with large quantities of rice. i stopped my 50 down to f/. 10 and contented myself with shooting them instead of assailing them with bird-killer.

And from the cathedral they walked in regal procession across town to somebody’s house, where the reception took place. The bird extermination program continued fervently.

And with that i think i am going to conclude this update… five and a half pages is enough, don’t you suppose?

A spot known, a claim absurd, a tree grown, it thus was heard, face of stone, the chosen word.

To Speak of Yacila

2008-07-30T08:22:00.000-07:00

And so i returned to Trujillo.

i feel like i could end up having a lot to say in this update.

Which means that probably i will try to say those things that i have to say, and then fail in the process.

On the upside (hopefully it’s an upside?), i have a few pictures that are newer than a month old for this update, definitely giving it a trump card over most of my updates lately.

Don’t get too excited, though… they won’t be anything to write home about.

Unless you are me… in which case that is exactly what you are doing right now.

So get excited, mom…

Mmm… where should i start. i will start tangible. That way i can make sure i say those tangible things that should be said before i get so convoluted in abstraction that i forgot what tangible things i wanted to say.

i will start by saying that i traveled from Piura to Yacila. Getting to Yacila consisted of catching a one hour bus to the town of Paita, and then a 15 or 20 minute taxi (unless it is a 40 minute taxi, which it can at times easily be… but that is a different story entirely) to Yacila.

Yacila is a fishing town. It is not a large town by any stretch of the imagination, but neither is it small. i would estimate—without having consulted the trusted goodness of fallingrain.com—that its population is in the area of 400-500. Its economy is completely dependent upon fishing.

The taxi dropped me off on the beach. i threw my backpack—a much lighter backpack than i have had the pleasure of hauling around for most of the trip… the joys of packing for only three days—on my shoulder and… went somewhere. Most of the somewheres i went for the first five minutes ended up being nowheres… but i soon found a somewhere that seemed to work, and there i went.

Yacila is built around a small beach. On the south end the beach is braced by a cliff that rises about 80 feet vertically out of the ocean. There is no access to this cliff, though, because the fishing industry has developed the area immediately next to the cliff. This left north as my only option.

The beach stretches probably about a quarter of a mile. The southern half is filled with small private fishing boats, while the northern half is actually gratuitous recreational beach. The ocean is clogged with more boats just a short distance away. The ones in the water look more comfortable than the ones on land.

Imposing rock structures seemed to block my passage on the north end of the beach. Frustrated that i could find no easy way over them, i was contemplating a long hike around them—a particularly frustrating contemplation because i wasn’t eager to carry my backpack too far, for at this point in the trip i have degenerated into a bit of a pansy—when i saw that there was actually a fairly large opening in the towering spires… a sort of natural door.

i turned around from the other side of the door to take this picture back towards Yacila… and i apologize that once more i have a terrible selection of Yacila pictures… i didn’t do a very exhaustive documentary of the area… i have struggled even to take pictures at all lately… but here is one.

45 minutes—and two more surprising “doors” in seemingly impassable rock structures—later i found myself faced with what seemed to be a fairly decent, fairly remote beach. i pitched my tent and pulled out my tripod for a few pictures.

i didn’t understand why at the time… but my camera adamantly refused to make anything remotely approaching an appropriate exposure with my 18-200mm lens… the lens that i probably take at least 80% of my pictures with, and probably 99% of my landscape pictures with. After a little bit of playing with manual exposure—underexposing horrifically from what the auto-exposure meter suggested—i managed to get an exposure that didn’t make me want to throw up. i framed this scene looking back towards Yacila… which includes your friendly 80 foot cliff and fishing fleet, but not Yacila itself. Fear the angry waves of rising tide.

i feel like this picture is kind of a two-year regression in photographic merit… but it communicates the point that i want to communicate here. My friendly beach was also filled with friendly crabs… teeming with them, in fact. i don’t know how to explain it… but if they were of such a mind, they could easily have eaten me in less than 15 minutes, i think, if they worked together hard enough. This picture doesn’t exactly scream “TEEMING!”… but at least it has a few crabs in it. That’s better than i can say of the pictures that don’t have crabs in them. It would be embarrassing to try to use one of those to make a point about crabs.

Finally… this is the picture that struck me with a terrible clarity of why i couldn’t get pictures to expose properly off of my 18-200…

This picture kind of makes me angry. i want to throw something expensive—anything expensive—at something hard—anything hard—when i look at it. But i usually decide not to, because i’m just a poor college student who emptied his bank account so he could be alone for three months. The future is indeed bright for me, my friends.

And it is still a pretty picture… and that’s nice… i like pretty pictures and all… it’s just not a good picture. What i saw was a good picture, what i took was a bad picture, and for once it wasn’t my fault.

i would prefer that it was my fault.

i stopped down to f/. 20.0 and framed a composition that balanced the driftwood and the small ridge that marks the high-tide line against the cliff in the background, sure to include a little bit of the ocean for context. i was careful to stay at 90 degrees off axis from the sun in order to use my polarizer filter to greatest effect. With an aperture of f/. 20, the picture would be acceptably sharp from three feet to infinity… which is nice, since that’s kind of what i was going for.

Unless crabs have eaten both of your eyes, this picture is not sharp. Oh, it’s sharp enough at three feet… but at infinity… well… f/. 20? i may as well have used f/. 5.0.

Wait… f/. 5.0? That seems like exactly what my shutter speed was set for, even if my aperture was set to f/. 20 (which should require a substantially longer shutter speed). i did some checking… and sure enough, it appears that my 18-200 now takes all pictures at f/. 5.0, whether i have aperture set to something different or not. This may or may not ever be solved… but i can promise you that unless God decides to bring healing to my lens, it won’t happen here in Peru. Which means that not only am i tremendously unmotivated, but i also don’t have the lens that i take probably at least 80% of my pictures with. Don’t expect many more pictures from this trip… which is pathetic, since i’ve only taken around 6600 during the whole trip. Which is not many when you consider that i was hoping to take 15,000. i guess that’s what happens when you take the month of July off.

My fragile psyche was not helped by the revelation of the death of my lens. i threw my stuff in my backpack and went back to Yacila, where i spent the next two nights in a hotel room… not doing much of anything. Sounds like the rest of the past month of this trip.

From Yacila to Piura, from Piura to Trujillo… where now i write from the ever-hospitably opened home of Pastor Tito Sevilla, with whom i have worked extensively in the past.

i’ll be here for a little over a week. i currently tentatively hope to travel to Lima on the evening of August 6—to arrive on the morning of August 7—to take three days of retrospection and vision-seeking before returning back to the states on August 10. Hopefully i’ll update two or three more times before returning home… and if there is any continuing interest whatsoever… then i will continue my blog at least until i work through the photo sets that i have picked out. i probably have a good six or seven left—well… good isn’t guaranteed to be an appropriate adjective… but the point stands, i suppose.

And will there be any additional new material in that time?

The short answer is that i wouldn’t bank on it.

But perhaps you’re not content to settle for the short answer. If you are… then i suppose that you can stop reading now. But i have a small feeling that perhaps people who have already gone through the trouble to read all of this have expectations of a little bit more on the point than that. For those of whom this is true… you are, as always, invited and welcomed to read on, but by no means compelled or obligated to do so.

i’m not going to get into all of specifics that i could relate, because i think that many of them would not belong on a forum so public as this even if i could reduce them to words in such a manner as they deserve… but i will say that this has been a very difficult summer for me personally in a number of different ways… which has caused me to focus on points in my life other than photography, consequentially leaving over little passion or energy or inspiration or motivation for photography. i wish this was not so, but i do not regret it.

But further… as i have had a little bit of contact with other people that i know in the past month… and as i have communicated with people that i know who have just returned from fairly long trips overseas… i have become more and more convinced that the difficulties of the solitary photographer overseas are not limited to the emotional strain of being alone. i suppose that i am kind of getting at this point backwards… that most people would recognize the logistical struggles and then be caugh off guard by the emotional struggles… but i was more prepared for the emotional struggles—as pertains only to photography—than the logistical struggles.

My photography for this trip was dual in vision. i desired to take fine art landscape pictures and socially relevant photojournalistic pictures. i have largely failed on both counts.

My vision for fine art landscape pictures involved remoteness. i desired to go into the mountains to places to which other people do not go, places that are remote, difficult to access, and beautiful… and there to take most of my landscape work. But traveling alone… that is extremely difficult. A very confident, fit, well-adjusted backpacker/photographer could still do it, i suppose… and while i am in decent shape, i have greatly lacked confidence and have not adjusted well to being alone this trip. So i am unable to get very remote, which has made it difficult—though not impossible—to get the landscape photos that i desired.

As for the socially relevant photojournalistic photos… my vision from these pertained to extremely remote mountain settlements—much more remote than Choco—and these didn’t work out for much the same reason as my landscape photos… or to pretty rough urban areas… and i tried to make a list of things that seemed like better ideas than going to rough urban areas alone and waving around a big camera. The list went something like as follows: Get in a hugging match with a boa constrictor. Practice my fire-breathing act at a gas station. While on foot, play chicken with a semi. Juggle running chainsaws. Drink lots of battery acid. i couldn’t think of anything else.

So… i’ve been struggling to take pictures… and for many more reasons than those. Those are just a few. Now my lens with the widest range of uses is stuck at an aperture that i use for almost nothing and home is crawling into sight… so don’t bank on any new work before i get home.

All of that said… it would be a lie to say that i do not greatly enjoy taking pictures.

And i think that i am going to here conclude, for now… no pictures from Choco… because the next pictures that i’m going to post from Choco are a series… and it is going to be a long series. A series, in fact, so long that i just decided that i am going to cut it in half… the first half will consist of four pictures, the second of five. Get excited. The subject matter is unexpected.

And as a parting word of advice—you just knew that i wouldn’t get away without a Choco picture, eh?—don’t ever let those nasty llamas of Choco even think about biting your feet.

But yet those trees are weak and small, and what proof that they shall grow at all?

To Speak of Piura

2008-07-25T07:50:00.000-07:00

Well... there's not much to say about Piura... which is fitting since i don't have much time in which to say it.

But i thought that i would get a quick update up before i ran off again... and maybe when i come back i will have a legitimate update for the first time in... what... a month? Five weeks?

i haven't felt tremendous for most of the time that i've been in Piura... so i've come to know my hotel room pretty well. Lots of reading and John Piper-listening and writing, i suppose.

i return home in 16 days... so hopefully i can take about 8,500 pictures in that time.

Well... that's one way of saying i'm not going to come remotely close to my goal of 15,000 pictures this summer. That's what happens when you pretty much stop taking pictures halfway through a trip, i suppose, though.

Regardless... i'm at least going to try to take a few more meaningful pictures. Wake up, sam!

That said... i suppose i'll include a picture in this update... if only because the theory was that i would keep a blog that i could put pictures on... so if i'm not putting pictures on it, it kind of defeats the purpose.

So this is just another river picture from Choco. It's a little bit darker in mood than many of my other river pictures... but i guess i kind of like it.

And now i must do some packing... i am going to travel to the town of Paita this afternoon after eating lunch with an acquaintance from the states, and from Paita will either travel a few miles north to the town of Esmeralda or south to the town of Yasila (currently i'm leaning towards Yasila a little bit), from which i will hike about 30 or 45 minutes out of town, pitch my tent, and camp where the cliffs fall into the ocean. If i can't get decent/average/not terrible pictures there... then i may be a lost cause.

Very well... i wish you all the best.

And i am gladdened by such discussion of inconvenience.

To Speak of the North

2008-07-22T08:45:00.000-07:00

Weary and—in a strange way, i suppose—wary do i approach this update.

Reasons myriad for hesitancy… perhaps i am intimidated to further endeavour to convey my opinions or feelings about Choco. Perhaps i am uncertain of what i have to say for myself as pertains to the week and a half which has passed since my last update.

Out of the loop, out of words, out of rhythm, out of touch… out of inspiration, out of confidence, out of assertiveness… out of balance, out of passion… out of excuses.

i suppose that as a simple exercise by which to try to begin to open my mind to the prospect of writing once more… i will detail the time since my last update.

It will do no good to try to talk at any greater length about the time before the AweStar team came… that was never any subject matter to begin with, and then i wrote page after page about them… so i will start with last Sunday… July 13, perhaps?

i suppose that for those who don’t know what “the AweStar team” is, the previous paragraph could seem a little bit confusing… so while i feel like just about everybody who comments on my blog knows about AweStar and the AweStar teams and such… i feel like i have been told that there are others who read without commenting who may not know.

Comment!

Excuse me… did i say that? You don’t actually have to comment… but i would certainly be thrilled if you did. Even if (particularly if?) i have no idea whatsoever who you are.

All those tangents covered… AweStar Ministries is a mission organization based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. i have worked with them extensively in the past, and they had a team in Peru this summer. This team was led by two of my closest friends, Brent Higgins and Kristen Lockwood (until August 2, when she becomes Kristen Adams… but even when she’s Kristen Adams she will continue to be one of my closest friends, i hear), and included a number of other people with whom i am good friends.

So on Sunday (July 13) i woke up at 3:30am to meet this team at the bus station. i spent the next week following them around and translating for them as they worked with Pastor Tito Sevilla in pursuing the building of a foundation upon which to start a church in Huamachuco.

On Wednesday the team and i left Huamachuco for Trujillo, where they worked for another several days, and on Sunday (July 20) we parted ways—the AweStar team to Guayaquil, Ecuador, en route to the USA, i to Piura in order to… uhhh…. I’m still working on that one.

For a more detailed blow-by-blow account of my time with the AweStar team, go to www.awestar.org, click Trip Updates, and click Peru.

My aim is not—and never has been, i feel, although at times perhaps my practice has been—to give a blow-by-blow account… but rather a taste of my personal impressions and feelings as this summer passes. So i will provide a couple of those… and maybe eventually come back for more specific anecdotes from this past week and a half… or possibly i will just leave this time never to return. i do not know. Maybe you do. If you do, then you are quite gifted.

Every morning i would wake up to get coffee with the leaders of the team. Sometimes all that we were able to scrape up was very shady Nescafe (Brent and i are world-famous Nescafe lovers) instant coffee… sometimes we would stumble upon gourmet cafes with fine coffees… but regardless of the quality of the liquid in front of me, the company was always of the finest caliber. Such times were true blessings to me… to have the company of Brent, Kristen, and at times Laura Oksol and Tyler Martin, two other of my friends with whom i have shared experiences overseas prior to this trip and who helped lead the Peru team, was tremendously refreshing. An unpretencious, vulnerable time when no airs needed to be put up, when we could speak our hearts—no matter how sober or how lighthearted—and know that they would be received by other hearts who shared the same desires and the same burdens and the same passions.

As pertains day-to-day affairs involving the rest of the students as well… i merely made it my goal to make things as easy for the leaders as i could… sometimes that meant that i was translating, sometimes it meant that i was arguing with Peruvians, sometimes it meant that i was eavesdropping on Spanish conversations, sometimes it meant that i was talking through Scripture passages with students, sometimes it meant finding a corner and making myself as non-present as possible… and never did i do well enough what i was asked to do… but perhaps my presence was a means by which a Peruvian will have inherited the Kingdom of Heaven during the past week and a half… or perhaps a means by which such a thing will happen ten years for now… or perhaps a means by which a student on the team was affected in such a way that leads a revival among an African tribe in 25 years… i will never know as long as i live, i desire only that i would be faithful with the time and opportunities given to me.

On my first day with the team i was asked by Brent to talk about what i have experienced so far this summer… i threw together a PowerPoint that included about 85 of my pictures, stuck some Aradhna in a playlist on iTunes… and proceeded to ramble for perhaps an hour and a half.

Certainly longer than i had expected to spend… but somehow it seems that most of the people on the team feel that they profited from it… some may even have enjoyed it. i am not quite sure how… but i know that having people who cared what i had to say—or at the very least pretended very well to care what i had to say—was a real blessing to me.

i have been struggling to take pictures lately. Really struggling… it has been three and a half weeks since i last took pictures with any sort of consistency. Consequently… i once more don’t really have any fresh material to add. i don’t even know how much fresh material i will have before i come back to the USA in 19 days. This is not how i would have chosen for things to go… and yet it seems to be the way that things have gone, so i will try to be faithful with what is left to me… But i can only force things so far.

So back to Choco, i suppose…

i said that this post would be reserved for some close portrait work… which i suppose is easy enough for me. This portrait series was all taken during preparations for the party. Hopefully you don’t hate them.

This man’s name escapes me… but he was one of the men who worked on erecting the… big thing that they built. i’m still not quite sure what to call it.

And… the same thing, in fact, could be said of this man. So i offer another typical Choco-ite.

When in doubt, shoot the kids… so was one of the themes of my slide show for the AweStar team. Beginning to lose inspiration with the adults, i turned to the kids… so quick to drop their self-conscious airs and acct in the relaxed and dynamic way of one with nothing to prove.

And that, i suppose, is where i’m going to leave things for this update… Mediocre, i feel… but at least an update. i’ll try to do better next time, but i make no promises.

For there’s nowhere here, but there it was.

To Speak of Chifas and Choco

2008-07-12T15:30:00.000-07:00

The paro is over.

i begin writing this from my new hotel room a few blocks away from the old one. i’m saving $10 by staying here tonight. i may be here tomorrow night, as well. If that is the case… i’ll save $20 on the deal.

It seems like hauling all of my gear across town was a lot of work to go to a vastly inferior hotel room with a public bathroom… but as i told my brother… $15 is three days’ worth of budget for me these days, so Abraham Lincoln may well cry because of how tightly i pinch pennies…

But the paro is over.

For three days the city was down… lots of time with little to do but think and write… and walk around town trying to find a shop into which i could sneak for some ice cream. It’s a Lamborgini Casino ice cream sandwich (chocolate chip ice cream… satisfactory for the purpose for which it is claimed) for breakfast these days with a Sublime (chocolate ice cream, covered in chocolate with a few nuts in the outer chocolate) for afternoon snack.

And of course there’s other food, too… but ice cream is just kind of a really big deal, you know?

But dinner is different. i actually get real food for dinner, you may be surprised to hear.

i do not know why it is… but there is a very large Chinese population in Peru. i haven’t observed such a thriving Chinese population in any of the other Latin American countries in which i have spent time. As a result, there is a fairly large concentration of restaurants called chifas. Chifas aren’t usually Chinese restaurants like we normally think of them. Most chifas have a limited menu that includes some fried rice dishes, some noodle dishes, and maybe a few other simple items… but i have found myself fairly addicted to them.

Will this post be inflammatory? i imagine it probably could be if it is not read gracefully. So if you’re looking for a reason to say angry and negative things about me… well… if you don’t already have a reason, you’re not very good at looking… and so i’ll do you a favor by warning you that if you really want such a reason, you can probably read this post and call me an arrogant racist. Which would probably make me laugh more than it would offend me, because i think that to do so would completely miss what i am saying… but if you want to do so, i suppose that that is your prerogative.

Because i have really come to feel that Latin American culture is generally tremendously racist. i feel like i need to be careful in drawing out comparisons with American culture lest i seem to suggest that i think American culture is ideal… or even any better at all… but i think that people who have followed this blog or who know me very well know that i have some reasonably choice words for American culture, also. So if i could ask anything of my reader, it would be to read this post—really to read anything that i ever write—within the context of everything else that you have divined about me from things that i have said in the past, from where i spend my time and my money, from what you have seen to be desires, and what you have come to see as my character—or lack thereof.

And so rather than reading my statement that Latin American culture is generally tremendously racist as bigoted, self-righteous condemnation, i ask that you instead read it as an effort at an objective statement from a man of unclean lips from a people of unclean lips.

All of which is to say… chifas tend to be kind of on the outside of culture here in Peru. They tend to have successful enough businesses… but i have found that often the owners seem very withdrawn, are seldom interacted with by the clientele—as opposed to the tremendous socializing common with Peruvian owners of Peruvian restaurants—and seem to be on the outside looking in at Peruvian culture very often.

And as i said earlier… i have found myself to be fairly addicted to chifas. When i get into a new town… i look for four things. Most people would look for something like… a place to buy water, a good hotel, maybe a restaurant, and a hospital… or a set of things like that.

i look for a place to buy ice cream, an internet café, a chifa, and a backup ice cream supply. From there, i keep track of any and all additional ice cream supply places. Huamachuco has been hard since everything has been closed… but i know of three stores that sell ice cream, i have seen another store that hasn’t been open since i got here, but that i’m optimistic may carry the stuff, and i have a part of town that i think may offer another store or two.

But if chifas are going to be on the level of ice cream and internet cafés… they must be a pretty big deal.

And there are a few reasons for this… the food is generally pretty good—if you like fried rice—it’s generally very inexpensive—a property of being a little bit outside of the local culture, i think—and… i think i just feel a comfort level at places that are, while fairly integrated into the culture, still very much on the outside looking in.

The paro shut down the whole city of Huamachuco.

My chifa (Chifa Nueva China) never closed.

i ate dinner there on Tuesday night. And on Wednesday. And on Thursday. And i ate lunch there on Friday. And i’m about to eat dinner there tonight… tonight being Friday.

The proprietor is a Chinese man. He stands at the front of the restaurant. He wears a wool beanie with a symbol resembling a Nike swoosh with two hooks stacked on top of each other instead of just one hook.

As i paid on Thursday night, he tried to make some small talk with me. He doesn’t speak very good Spanish. But yes… i’m traveling alone, although a group of friends will be here in the next day or two. Yes… i enjoy Huamachuco. i’ll see you tomorrow, friend.

i walked in this afternoon for lunch, and his normally stern face broke open into a warm smile. He shook my hand, and i asked him what his name is.

“What?”

“What is your name?”

After some back and forth, he understood my question. He pointed to his chest. “Poso!”

His smile came back… bigger than ever, and his hand shot out again.

We were just two outsiders settling in for another afternoon in the rioting town of Huamachuco.

And as a further note on the paro…

The grand finale was this afternoon. The strikers all assembled in the plaza de armas—about two blocks from my hotel—and had… what kind of looked to me a little bit like a high school pep rally.

According to fallingrain.com—an amazing source of information, it is an exhaustive database of all known cities in the world, including coordinates, elevations, and populations—Huamachuco has a population of 7,000. i would estimate that between 2,500 and 3,000 people were gathered at the plaza today.

A platform was set up and fiery speakers spewed passion and vitriol into microphones.

Again… perhaps i condemn myself by commenting on such things as this, as i have never had a hard day in my pampered American life… but it never ceases to amaze me how easy it is to stir a mass of people into a frenzy. And certainly… this wasn’t exactly the most frenzied frenzy of which i have ever heard. There was no violence or anything…

But it seems to me that if you have a crowd of people who think that they are poor… all you have to do to win their hearts is first tell them that they are in fact poor, and then criticize the status quo as much as possible in every way. Alternatives, solutions, defense for criticism of the status quo… these things are all optional.

And talk about fighting. The crowds love when you talk about fighting.

One of the chants that i heard today said:

“Only if the people fight will the government listen to them!”

It works a lot better in Spanish… i promise.

The president of Peru is a man named Alan Garcia. No president of any country is ever popular after he or she has been in office for nine months or a year. Garcia is around year two of this stint as president.

He ran against a man named Moises Ollanta Humala.

i do not profess to be an expert on Peruvian politics… so some of you may even know more about the dynamics of the 2006 election than i do… but allow me to give my impressions, which may be as ignorant as the rest of the things that i say.

From what i gathered, Ollanta made Hugo Chavez look like a US-loving capitalist. He had no extensive education or experience in political matters. He was very militant. He was indigenous. And because he was indigenous and militant, he won the heart of the campesino populations of Peru. Probably most of the places in which i have spent time in voted overwhelmingly for Ollanta.

Peru is a very fragmented society. i haven’t looked at the actual numbers in quite some time… so i may be a little bit off… but about 22 million people or so live in Peru. Of those, over 10 million, i believe, live in or immediately around Lima, the capital city. Over a million live in Arequipa, and the cities of Trujillo and Cusco have populations numbering in the hundreds of thousands. The urban population of Peru is really quite urban… over half of the population lives in two cities. The rural population of Peru is really quite rural… endless villages have no road to them, economies—while certainly increasingly globalized… think MP3 players and DVD players 15 miles from the nearest road—are largely fundamentally still based upon subsistence agriculture and are locally self-sufficient. There is a huge gap between the city people and the country people… and so when there is an election, you can imagine that people who live within 20 miles of the capital city will win, and people who live farther than 20 miles of the capital city will be very angry.

Huamachuco was, i’m sure, overwhelmingly in support of Ollanta. And during politically charged events like this, people don’t tend to forget that they supported Ollanta.

So the fact that they are unhappy and the fact that Alan is president (i don’t know why everybody refers to him by his first name…) become connected in their minds, and the demonstration takes on a decidedly anti-Alan bent.

One chant that i heard for a while translates to something like this:

“Hey Alan, listen! The people find you to be repugnant!”

i was very impressed at their vocabulary that they were using the word repugnant. It was really in a different tense… something like, “The people repugn you!”… but… maybe i’m wrong, but i don’t think that repugn is a verb in English—although i may start using it as one—hence my more licentious translation.

But… again… it just makes me wonder what the people want.

First off… again… i’m no expert of Peruvian politics… but i’m pretty sure Alan (this term) has been one of the best presidents Peru has had in a while. Even if he had to return to Peru from exile to run. (Yes… the election came down to a runoff between the militant, socialist, uneducated Ollanta and the disgraced, exiled Alan Garcia…)

The last president was a man named Toledo. Upon being elected, he went to Machu Picchu and sacrificed a llama to the sun god, i hear. Oh yes… i feel competence coming on. In 2002 i watched him give a speech. He was wearing his pajamas. His hair was disheveled. A Peruvian standing next to me said “That is our president. He embarrasses us”. Toledo was not a success story.

The election that put Toledo in office was between Alan and Toledo. It was forced on the spur of the moment. The previous president was a man named Alberto Fujimori. He had just started his third term, and was generally popular. He had spent his first two terms turning around Peru’s economy after its catastrophic crash at the hands of the previous president. But on a diplomatic trip to Japan—where much of his extended family is—he faxed his resignation back to Peru. There had been a large amount of scandal—Nixon-esque, it seems to me at times—around him for a few months, and he decided to get out while he could. Fujimori wasn’t exactly a model president.

The president before him was Alan Garcia. Our friend! Basically… the entire Peruvian economy crashed and burned and he was exiled. That presidency wasn’t much of a success either…

But from what i have gathered… the economy has been improving under Alan this term. Peru recently established an equivalent of the EPA. Peru recently hosted a meeting of the heads of state of a number of Spanish-speaking countries. Alan really hasn’t been doing too badly… to my knowledge.

But Ollanta was their man, because he was indigenous himself and because he used the fighting rhetoric that the poor so love to hear.

However… i listen to people talking here… or to people red-facedly screaming into a microphone… and they talk about wanting to be like America, to have freedom… but i tell you that most assuredly that is not what they really think that they want.

i spent my previous post discussing briefly why i feel that that is not what they want. But i now say that that is not what they even think that they want. They think that they think that they want it… but it’s not what they want.

It is so easy to understand to rise of totalitarian socialist/communist/fascist dictators. Rhetoric without reason.

Again… i feel reluctant to say what i feel on some aspects of this issue… because i do not intend to say that Peruvians are lazy. i know that probably somewhere between 99-100% of the people that were gathered in that plaza are harder workers than me. But my failures do not diminish the natural human tendency to want to get something for nothing. They only serve as evidence of it.

They demand that the government “catch them up” with people from America or even from the city. They fancy that people in America each have small farms and trek from chacra to chacra every day harvesting their potatoes and corn and quinoa just like people do here. And what i’m saying isn’t intended to belittle their way of life—to the contrary… those who know find that i admire it greatly—but instead to point out that they are trying to live in the protection of the good aspects of another completely different economic structure without changing their way of life at all… and the American economic structure simply does not seem to admit the small farming way of life. We’re an economy of cash and capital with a poverty of time, relationships, and independence. They’re an economy of time, relationships, and independence with a poverty of cash and capital. Who’s poor? Nobody is! We all are!

But… the easiest way to win the heart of a people is to try to offer them both. And so politician after politician taking up populist causes promises to take that money from those nasty, lazy rich people and redistribute it to you poor farmers so that you can have cars and computers and TVs and Nike shoes and digital cameras like they do… and so that is what people expect from the government, i think. That the government will leave those aspects of their life that they like—the independence, the time, the relationships, for example—untouched while subsidizing their cravings for more industrialized goods… which i argued in my previous post will never satisfy them no matter how much they think they want them.

And again… my goal is not to criticize the way of life of the campesinos here… it just bothers me to hear the phrase “extrema pobreza” used so many times.

Extreme poverty.

Oh… and it’s so easy to be arrogant here. And it’s so easy to stand on my velvet pedestal of American citizenship, having never lived a hard day of my life, and romanticize what probably is a very hard life.

But i think that if some of these people were to travel a little bit more… if they were to travel to their very own capital city of Lima and look at the endless shanty towns on the outskirts of the city… they would get a better feel for what extrema pobreza really is. i have seen some extrema pobreza… and i have friends who have worked in extrema pobreza… and i don’t see it here. i was told that Choco was a place of extrema pobreza. i simply don’t believe it.

The people here have meaningful work. They have food. They have shelter. They have independence. They have time. They have friends. They have recreation. They don’t have much cash… but their economy really has no use for cash. They personally have plenty of use for cash, yes, i’m sure. But their economy, the entire social structure on a macro-level… doesn’t really have use for cash. It is funny to me… i think subsistence farming economies might be the purest form of socialism that this world has seen… and that may be a vastly ignorant assessment from an outsider… but there is local independence, there is minimal social stratification, exchanges of goods take place on a personal relationship level much more than on a distant business level… and everywhere in the world that has this pure socialistic order seems to clamor for a large-scale, militant, inevitably corrupt, abusive socialism.

From this velvet pedestal it is easy to romanticize their way of life… but i think that it is much more beautiful than they realize. And i think that this velvet pedestal comes with some pretty big shackles of its own.

Whew… i hate economy and politics. i’ll finally stop pouring forth my ignorance like a fire hydrant in a high school parking lot… and move on to my first photo essay from Choco.

My first picture has very little to do with anything else that i’m going to talk about… but i feel like it would be criminal to forego its inclusion. And if i did something criminal… then i would be qualified to run for political office in a Latin American country (ouch… i know… that was low… i’m feeling just a little bit cynical these days. On the upside… whenever i feel bad about the election in the US this year [which happens to be every time i think about it, actually], i just think about Latin American politics, and suddenly i feel so much better.).

But… When i got to Choco on Monday, June 23, the town was preparing for its annual party—a five day affair beginning on Tuesday, June 24 involving lots of drinking, some pseudo-dancing, lots more drinking, a seemingly quite inebriated marching band, and culminating in a bullfight on Saturday, June 28.

So on Tuesday morning i hiked a short distance upstream to spend some time reading and studying. And what? Las Llamas de Choco! AAAAAHHHHHHH!!!! THIS IS SO EXCITING!

i lived in Choco for a month in 2006 without seeing a single llama… but the llama owners came down from many miles upstream to enjoy the festivities and could hardly leave their llamas alone.

So fear not… i did get a llama picture up.

This update is so long… i’m going to break down what i was going to do for my Choco half of the update into two sections. i have an essay devoted to preparations for the fiesta, and i am going to break it down into an essay focused on some of the work that was done, which will be included in this update, and an essay focused on some portraiture of some of the people of Choco as the preparations were being made, which will be included in the next update. Sorry, Julie… no Juana or Ruly in this or the next update… eventually there will be a bit of Juana, though, and i’ll email you a Ruly picture or two when i make it back to the states.

This man’s name is Jesus. No, not that Jesus… but he is a very nice man.

He was in Choco in 2006 when i came, and is one of the soccer players. He might be my favorite Choco native.

For you see… he just seems to be a happy man. In 2006 he became nicknamed “The Pirate” within about 2.3 minutes of our team meeting him. But he is a very happy pirate.

i have never found a bigger smile in all of Peru. And not only is it a big smile, but they are big, white teeth. Except for right in front. That is big, black not-tooth. If i was casting a movie about Peruvian pirates, he would be the first person i called, and he would smile a lot—because that is what he does—and show off that missing tooth and those great pearly whites.

He’s not smiling in this picture though… that’s because he’s working on digging a post hole out of the middle of the street in Choco’s main plaza. This post hole would hold—oh the shock!—a post that would support the… altar/shrine/trifold presentation?/platform for the celebration of Choco that was under construction.

i don’t know this man’s name. If i had a wider angle lens (maybe even Philip’s 16-35 would have done the trick… i think it would have done lots of tricks on this trip though :-D) i would have been able to include more of what he is actually doing… but i still like the picture. This man is tying the Peruvian flag to a pole that will be attached to the altar/shrine/trifold presentation?. And looking at me like i am very very strange.

i think he’s probably right.

Choco called in a traditional band from Cabanaconde. They played two songs, and they played them a lot. They sang a lot better when they were sober… but i didn’t experience that very often, so i can’t be positive.

“Dime amorcita, cual es tu problema? Me haces mucho daño!”

“Tell me, my little love, what is your problem? You do me a lot of damage!”

This line was sung many, many times. And sometimes very, very inebriatedly. i am sorry for making up words like “inebriatedly”.

So here they are likely talking about which of their two songs to play while in the background locals get ready to do some hardcore dancing. No, not that kind of hardcore dancing… these people basically hold hands and walk in a circle. It’s very exciting.

Finally… as things began to get a little bit closer to completion, the bread bouquets came out. Bread bouquets? Oh yes… they’re a big deal in Choco. Get a nice bouquet of flowers together (i think it’s classy that Choco-ites have the sense to grow some flowers with their more practical vegetation. Definitely a positive in my book), stick some skewers in, and add a few pieces of bread.

Here, some locals reclaim some of the bread from a bouquet that was apparently over-breaded.

And welcome to Choco, my friends… i will be in Choco for probably at least five or six more updates… and i won’t even include most of my best pictures, i’m sure.

Coffee, i’m telling you…

And here is to successful boycotts…

To Speak of Cabanaconde

2008-07-10T08:45:00.000-07:00

i am a little bit unsure of how to handle the remaining months of updates. i haven’t written a real update in almost three weeks… and those three weeks have perhaps been the densest, perhaps been the most intense, perhaps been the most emotionally charged, perhaps been the most remote, perhaps been the most detailed, perhaps been the most elaborate weeks of my trip to this point.

So obviously i would be a great fool to try to pack everything from those weeks into one update.

i think how i am going to try to manage this, then, is to write my updates in dual. i will describe the present as i have sought to do since the beginning of my trip… but also i will break my three weeks down into a series of miniature photo essays describing stories, which will perhaps leave out a few of the more aesthetically pleasing pictures, in order to at least provide a glimpse of some of the experiences that i have met.

i am a compulsive disclaim-er. So i would not be myself if i did not disclaim the next indefinite number of posts obsessively.

You will likely find some very large holes in some of my photo essays. i warn you beforehand… there will be a photo essay over the bullfight in Choco on June 28… but there won’t be any pictures of bullfighting. These three weeks have demanded a lot of me… i dare say more emotionally than physically… and so as a result my photography became tremendously volatile. Some days i took pictures that i number as among my best with surprising frequency. Other days… i couldn’t even look at my camera. So expect a lot of variation in quality.

And expect perhaps a slightly volatile writing style. i am still trying to get my mind around the past three weeks… and not doing such a good job of it. So if i sound a little bit bipolar at times… well… please be patient with me. Perhaps as weeks and months provide a buffer of experience and perspective to separate me from the blinding intensity of the moment i will acquire a more balanced and fair and realistic and consistent vision of what my time in Cabanaconde, Choco, Mina, Chachas, and Andagua held for me.

And obviously… don’t assume that i am writing an exhaustive account of what happened over the past three weeks. In fact… don’t assume that i’m hitting the important points or the high points. i tell you beforehand… i’m not going to. The most significant moments are probably those that i will fail to mention altogether. This will merely be an account of a few experiences that were typical of life over the three weeks that i was gone from the outside world…

But of course to say that these experiences were typical of life over those three weeks really doesn’t mean anything at all. All that it means is that these experiences are what i want you to think that life was like. i took enough pictures (around 2,150) that i could paint these three weeks in whatever way i want. And it is impossible for me to present anything without painting these three weeks in some light or another. So if you want a more holistic view of how these three weeks have been—or how the trip in general ends up—i’m afraid that you’ll just have to buy me coffee on an afternoon or evening when you have a few free hours and let me tell you my impressions in person.

Am i shameless? i think that i am. But i’m completely not kidding. i will definitely talk about my trip and show pictures at the cost of some coffee. No matter who you are.

So after that brief (hahahaha…) disclaimer… i suppose i’ll actually update you as to what has happened since my last update.

i’ll give the very quick overview of the past three weeks of my life for those who have no idea whatsoever about what it is that i am talking.

i suppose that i will start on Saturday, June 21 in Arequipa. i caught a six hour bus to the town of Cabanaconde on one side of the Colca Canyon. Then i caught a two hour truck to the bottom of the Colca Canyon. Then i backpacked to a village called Choco, where i lived for eight days. Then i trekked to a village called Mina, where i lived for a day and a half. Then i trekked over two high passes to the village of Chachas, with a brief hitchhiking detour. Then i hitchhiked to the town of Andagua. Then i caught a 10 hour bus to Arequipa. i spent the day in Arequipa before catching a 15 hour bus to Lima. i then caught a 10 hour bus to Trujillo. i then caught a 7 hour bus to Huamachuco. That is where i am now.

And that makes the three weeks seem so simple. i kind of like it.

i haven’t taken any pictures since Saturday in Andagua. i also haven’t been anywhere but inside of buses since then… so that shouldn’t be too surprising. As a result… i obviously don’t have any new work to put in this part of the update. That will change with my next update, i’m sure.

i arrived in Huamachuco last night at about 8:00. i don’t really know anything about Huamachuco yet… but i’ll pretend briefly. Huamachuco is a city of several to many thousand people. It is located at about 10,500 feet in the Andes of northern Peru. The people generally seem to speak Spanish, which is very fortunate for me. If they spoke Mandarin Chinese or Mandika or any other language starting with “Mand…” i would be in serious trouble.

i am in a much wetter part of Peru. It rained during part of the bus ride in last night. At times i could see a light dusting of snow on the roofs of houses… but that was at a higher elevation than i am at right now. The clouds are heavy and sincere.

Today is the day of the “paro”. Everything is closed down and people are marching through the streets in protest of… life, i suppose? It seems to be a little bit of a general populist strike… a strike in which people say “We’re not happy, but we’re not really sure why! We think we want more money… but what we know for sure is that we’re not happy. So we’re going to protest so maybe you will see our dismay and fix things for us.”

We’re not sure who the “you” is who would fix things… but presumably it is the government… and from what i have gathered in talking with people… the government would fix things by turning Peru into USA South. i feel like this probably isn’t actually what they want, although they think it is. Certainly there are many aspects of life in the US that would be an incontrovertible upgrade over conditions here in Peru… but i assure you that if they all started earning twenty times as much money and lived in bigger houses and gave all farming responsibilities to agricultural industries and all had cars and dogs and 2.3 kids… they would find that they would find that they still wouldn’t be happy. Social or economic status is never going to make them happy—there will always be somebody above them, and if there is no longer anybody above them then they’ll just get bored and find the whole world petty. A place is never going to make them happy—they’ll probably like it for the first week or two, and then find that this new place is filled with problems of its own. There is a natural urge in humans to seek wealth and to seek the perfect location. The problem is that there isn’t wealth on earth enough to satisfy their desires. The problem is that there isn’t a place on earth good enough to fulfill their hopes. The problem isn’t that they desire too much—or that you desire too much, my American friend. The problem is that they try to fulfill their great desires with small and petty things like money and places. What good is money? What good is a place? They were made for a purpose that is high and that is noble and that is rich and that is beautiful… and until their eyes have been open to this purpose such that their lives are unselfconsciously poured out as offerings before the great God who created them, they will always find that there’s not enough money to meet their desires and that there are flaws with the place in which they live.

Which is not to say that they are wrong to seek for and to fight for social justice and improved living conditions. But if that is where they stop… if they seek for and fight for social justice and improved living conditions and nothing greater… they will find that all the social justice and all the improved living conditions will only leave them burnt out, disappointed, and disenchanted. Rather, they stand before a God who will “render to each one according to his deeds. To those who by persistence in well-doing seek for glory, honor, and immortality, He will give eternal life”. Why settle only for seeking for social justice and improved living conditions when you could first seek for glory, honor, and immortality? Would that their eyes be opened and that they would be granted the grace to see the richness of the glory of God and the satisfaction that only comes from joyfully selling all to buy that field of the kingdom that the treasure might be theirs.

Very well… enough about Huamachuco and small aspirations and unsatisfied people (are there any other type?).

i left Arequipa on the evening of Saturday, June 21. i think the bus actually left at 1am of Sunday, June 22.

The ride to Cabanaconde is always a fun one. The road goes over a pass that is around 15,500 feet high. All through the trip the bus stops to pick up new passengers. Two years ago i counted around 225 people on our 60 passenger bus. But i couldn’t count the people who crawled into the luggage space under the bus. And there were many of them.

This trip wasn’t so intense…but the aisle was packed.

i arrived at around 7am and settled into my hotel room… it was nice to fall into a nap for the remainder of the morning before taking the afternoon and evening to stretch my legs and walk around Cabanaconde for a little while.

Cabanaconde is located at around 10,500 feet on the side of the Colca Canyon. It is the access point for a number of villages on the other side of the canyon, villages to which there are no roads. Villages like Llanca, Ucuchachas, Mina… and Choco. Choco was my first destination.

There is ice cream in Cabanaconde. This is very important.

i spent the evening on top of a small hill just outside of town. i took a pretty fair number of pictures… 200 maybe?

But i’m just going to put two in this update.

Why? i suppose so that you’ll buy my coffee when i get back so you can see the rest?

i just can’t leave that alone, can i?

i suppose that i’ll start with an overview of the town.

Sunrise and sunset while deep in a canyon tend not to be particularly impressive in and of themselves… so it is necessary to be a little bit more creative. i tried a few ideas to preserve some element of drama and dynamism in my sunset pictures… i will leave for you to judge if they worked or not (and i will also tell you that i didn’t include my best pictures in this update… coffee? [actually… i haven’t included many of my best pictures all trip long. Coffee isn’t the only reason… the main reason is because i’m trying to tell stories, not to show off my photography, and so i try to include pictures that advance the cause of telling a story.]).

So this is Cabanaconde. i waited until the sun had set and darkness had begun to settle into the valley. As dusk fell, lights began to come on in town. i framed the picture with three elements in mind: i included a rock to anchor the foreground and hold in the lower right corner of the frame… and was unsure if it would be visible or not, but hoped that i would get a result similar to this from it. Subtle but present. i held the artificially lit town of Cabanaconde in the mid-left of the frame as the main interest. Finally, i included the barely visible snow-capped summits in the upper left as a final counterpoint to the town and to provide a sense of place. The summits are part of the volcanic triumvirate of Hualca Hualca, Sabanacaya, and Ampato. For Philip… the EXIF data is: ISO 200, f/. 9, 8 seconds. Since i know you love landscape photography so much… Also… the PJ a few posts ago wasn’t you, i’m afraid… it would be a friend of mine named PJ Accetturo. You should facebook him… i think that you would appreciate his photography and i think that he would appreciate your photography. His name is Peter Accetturo on facebook. Also, anybody else that wants to facebook PJ should do so. He’s a good guy, no matter what kind of horrible things Jordan Kilmer might say about him. And since they’re both in North Africa together right now, they can’t read my blog, and since they can’t read my blog, i can talk about them in front of the whole world. Speaking of which… all are invited to pray for PJ and Jordan—as well as a number of other close friends of mine—who are in North Africa right now… as well as other friends that i have in Chile, South Asia, and Peru. They are doing real work that yields real fruit, and i think that you would find being a part of what their work to be real and satisfying and worthwhile. One of my close friends, Brittany DiSalvo, told me yesterday that she thinks that praying for her friends who are overseas is possibly affecting her more than it is affecting them. Rest assured that your prayers do affect those of us who are overseas… but perhaps you would find that those prayers also change you.

Around ten or twelve years ago Sabancaya erupted, depositing dark ash on the summit of Ampato. The dark ash expedited the melting of snow on Ampato, revealing mountainside that had been obscured for hundreds of years. A climbing expedition stumbled across a perfectly preserved young lady… an Inca who had been offered as a human sacrifice at over 20,000 feet of elevation some 500 years earlier. The story was covered fairly extensively, even earning at least one full length article in National Geographic.

Finally… when i struggle to put together a meaningful composition, you may have noticed that i try to find a way to stick myself in the frame to include a human presence to add a little bit of life to the scene.

But i also find that just standing in place and smiling like a moron (although i am pretty good at doing things like a moron, if i may say so myself) just isn’t very satisfying.

Plus it doesn’t make my hair do cool things for other people to make fun of.

So… sometimes i think that maybe i could jump instead of standing in place.

And i promise you that if you were to stand and watch me take some of these self-portraits… you would immediately admit me to a mental institution for life. But every once in a while… one works out well enough… and so i am willing to subject myself to such absurdities if it gets me what i want.

The practice generally consists of me finding a low place to put the tripod, composing a pleasant but static and uninspiring fine art landscape scene with some sort of interesting light, setting my camera to a remote setting with a self-timer, activating the remote, and timing a jump that will hopefully not look utterly moronic.

Sometimes i get lucky with my timing. And sometimes my hair flies powerfully into the air. That yields pictures like this… and with this i leave you.

And what terrifying hope do we in frailty embrace.

To Speak of Brevity

2008-07-06T17:15:00.000-07:00

This will be the worst update i’ll write all summer.

i’m alive after Choco. And now i’m heading north.

And i’ll write a better update later.

To Speak of Departure

2008-06-21T11:52:00.000-07:00

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.

To Speak of a Town in Review

2008-06-17T07:03:00.000-07:00

Hmm… this will be a strange update, and i am unsure of how to structure it.

i believe that i will endeavour first to recount the events of the past few days in the fashion of other updates, then to discuss what i anticipate over the next few weeks, and finally to take a retrospective approach towards what i have experienced and what has been impressed upon me during my three weeks in the area around Cusco.

First: Two short-term trips arrived in Cusco on Saturday. i am capable of translating to some extent, and translators are always in short supply… so my services as a translator have been made use of ever since.

On Sunday afternoon i played two hours of soccer with some of the local men and men from the church. i’m not good for too many consecutive sprints up and down the field at 11,000 feet… but having such a leveling experience with them was very refreshing and enjoyable. As i would make runs down the sideline, my name became samuel instead of gringo. It is nice to be seen as on the same level as everybody else rather than as distant or strange or foreign.

On Sunday night i translated for the short term teams at the church’s youth service. After having not translated anything since last July, it was a little bit of a shock to my system to dive back into the world of translating by translating a sermon… but i made it through the night alive, fear ye not.

Thanks to the pleasure of wonderful conversation, i got not so much sleep on Sunday night.

But Monday allowed me to take a laid back morning before resuming translating in the afternoon.

The two groups worked on two main projects today: a massive expansion project at the clinic that the missionaries run, and a Vacation Bible School for some of the nearby kids.

i spent most of my time trying to corral the children and trying to communicate to them what the short-term teams were saying. Included is a picture from some game time at the park across the street from the church.

As dusk approached we returned to the clinic, where the others were still hard at work. Here Keith makes sure that a section of the framework for the flooring is square.

i post this update on Tuesday morning. i will be translating more on Tuesday afternoon and for much of the day on Wednesday. On Thursday i pack up and leave Cusco… which brings me to a natural point in this update at which to speak of what i have experienced here… however, before i do that, i will address what the next several weeks will likely hold for me.

So second: As i just mentioned, i leave Cusco on Thursday night. i do not have a rigid itinerary, however my expectation is that i will be in the village of Choco by Monday or Tuesday, and probably by no later than Wednesday. i plan to spend about a week in Choco, during which time i will spend time with old friends, play soccer with the men of the town, take pictures of waterfalls for Lisa, and hopefully visit the mines on the Colca River.

After that week has passed, i will backpack farther up into the valley in which Choco is located, with the intention of reaching the town of Mina. i will spend one or two days in Mina, and then perhaps attempt to locate the town of Pullcho, which may or may not exist, and may or may not be located at over 16,000 feet above sea level if it does indeed exist.

i will probably not spend more than one night in Pullcho, though, if i even spend a night there. Within a day or two i will endeavour to backpack over Paso Cerani, from which i will be six thousand feet of descent away from the town of Andagua. From Andagua i will be able to catch a bus back to Arequipa, where i will hopefully arrive by July 6 or 7.

From June 22 until July 7 i do not expect to ever have access to the internet. As a result… i won’t update my blog. If i find a way to update my blog without accessing the internet, i’ll be sure to let you know. But perhaps news of my continued survival will make it to my blog once or twice while i’m out, and be sure to check back in a week or so into July, for i am sure that i will have something of some interest to say for the time that i was out and about.

Which brings me to my third point, a brief retrospective with regards to my time in Cusco.

This is a topic about which i have had many thoughts over the past several days… and none of these thoughts have been written down, and as a result, most of these thoughts for all intents and purposes no longer exist now.

i came to Cusco desiring to get my feet under me a little bit more firmly, to spend time with relatives, to try to connect a little bit more with the people, and to do a little bit of hiking. i feel that i largely succeeded in these intentions.

Further, i was able to see a great deal of pressure fall from my shoulders as i made an effort to enjoy photography more than i forced photography, and instead took time to try to read and to learn. Perhaps i have succeeded a little bit in this, and if so, that in itself has made my time here worthwhile.

i climbed 1700 feet higher than i have ever been before.

And so my time in Cusco has been profitable.

But i feel that it is indeed drawing near to time to move on. My aim in this trip was to spend much of my time in remote and extremely rural villages. i am currently in a village, yes, and most of the people in this village speak Quechua, yes… yet it is not what i had aimed to experience when i left for this trip. It is a few short miles away from an urban setting. Cars drive up and down the road all day. Where i aim to be a week from now is miles from the nearest road, and that nearest road sees little more than a car or two per day. i think that it will be stimulating for my photography and for my mind and for my soul.

So onward i go… i will update at least once more before i leave for Choco, but will have begun my travels by Thursday night.

And yay road trips! Do enjoy, spake he, Alabama and German companionship.

To Speak of Children and Evening Light

2008-06-14T13:54:00.000-07:00

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.

To Speak of Pachatusan

2008-06-11T13:35:00.000-07:00

i am quite tired again tonight… we shall see what words i have and what words i do not have. Perhaps i have more than i feel that i have… but perhaps this will be short.

Probably i will begin by saying something about it being short, and then will proceed to write a novel.

i took a fairly leisurely day on Monday—lots of reading and studying and such. Shortly after lunch i tried to go take some pictures by the incredibly bad-smelling and garbage-choked river… and i took a lot, but was pleased with few.

And as tends to be the case when i am running low on ideas… there will be a few self-portraits in this update as well. i’m sorry that you have to keep looking at me.

Self-portraits?

Well… one of the local schools had let out shortly before i arrived to take pictures at the river. A group of boys were playing with tops as they waited for the truck that would take them several miles up the valley to their village.

i came over to take a few pictures… but of course as is customary when i try to take pictures of a group of kids, within moments every kid was within about nine inches of my lens. It’s hard to take pictures of them that way… but was it Capa that said “If it’s not good enough, you’re not close enough”?

Sorry, Henry… i think i was close enough… the problem must lie elsewhere.

So… after having taken a few pictures of the kids, i decided to look to see if any of them were not terrible. As i recall, the conclusion was to the negative. However… as i was looking, of course the entire mob of kids suddenly was head to head with me. i looked at the next picture… and then the next picture… and then the next picture… and then flipped my camera around so that the lens was facing up instead of the display screen and snapped off a self-portrait of me and the kids looking at my camera.

And so i set off on Tuesday at 5:50… Pachatusan, a 15,930 foot mountain usually hidden from view by nearer and lower mountains was my target.

i did not see Pachatusan for the first time until after i had walked ten miles. Poor logistical decision after poor route-finding decision had left me walking much more than i really needed to… and as i crested a ridge at about 11,400 feet, i quickly observed that i had overshot my quarry by a solid mile and a half at least, and would have to work my way back towards her.

Needless to say… i was not persuaded that i would be able to summit today… i still had 4,500 feet of vertical gain separating me from the summit and i was feeling quite worn out already.

“Hola, papito!”

The voice came from a man walking down the road that i had finally found. In his hand was a rope tied to his horse.

“Adonde vas?” he asked… where was i going?

“Arriba, arriba, arriba!” i replied… gesturing upward and repeating the word several times in typical local fashion to emphasize my point. i wasn’t just going up, i was going up, up, up. If not more ups than that.

And from that statement he asked me to join him, for he was going up as well.

One thing led to another… and soon he had talked me into riding his horse for the course of the time that we would travel together for a small fee.

It wasn’t quite riding bareback… he had tied a few sacks which he would soon be filling with potatoes onto its back… but it certainly wasn’t quite a saddle, either.

As was evidenced by one of my early updates from Cusco… i am hardly an authority on those things horse-related. But i will have you know that i did not fall to my death a single time.

1,100 vertical feet later, we parted ways.

His name is Saturnino Quispikuña. He farms potatoes at 12,700 feet on the side of Pachatusan.

One thing led to another… and suddenly i was at 14,000 feet. And then at 15,000 feet, licking a frozen waterfall. And as i dragged myself onto the summit… my head spun and my stomach felt kind of funny. i took a step back.

i was standing at 15,930 feet. About twelve inches from my foot the mountain was no more. And a river ran through the valley 7,000 feet below. Never before have i seen a drop so huge or so vertical.

i had thought about doing a handstand for my summit picture while i was climbing. i decided against it out of fear that 16,000 feet would cause me to drop myself on my head on a very pointy rock… but as i stood on my small patch of earth from which i could reconsider… i decided that a 7,000 foot tumble was not my current idea of a good time.

i was too tired anyways… and didn’t have the energy to get my tripod out. (Note: i dragged my tripod up all the way to the summit and back… 21 miles on my feet… to an elevation of 15,930 feet, and then back down to the town at the foot of the mountain at 10,400 feet… and didn’t take it out of its bag. Once. i did hit a dog with it, though.)

So… i instead backed out to 18mm, stopped down to f/13 so the background would be kind of visible, and held up the camera to show me and my awesome dropoff. And tried really really really really really hard not to fall over backwards. That would have been mostly bad… but would have made a great story. Somebody else would have to tell it, though. And… the awesome faces that i make in summit self-portraits are completely unintentional. It’s a gift?

For some reason high places seem to be associated with high thoughts. It is often thought that the summit experience is one of great revelation and insight.

It normally goes more like… *Big gasping breath* “Mmm… tired was am i right now…” *Big gasping breath* “Hike long for today as it had maybe i could eat a banana” *Big gasping breath* “Snowflake yum dark comes hours not many” *Big gasping breath* “Gnome to take picture of” *Big gasping breath* “Down to go place good now were then” *Big gasping breath* “Now done not to fall tired falling bad.” *Thre more big gasping breaths*

And i wish that i could have had time to sit on the summit… to eat and to drink and to be merry… to write poetry and to take pictures of flowers… To take a summit picture of me juggling the rocks that used to be the summit cairn…

But it was 2:30… i had spent over eight and a half hours in getting to the summit… and i had three hours until it would get dark out. So i picked out what looked like a good trail somewhere down in the distance to aim for (or maybe it would end up being an irrigation ditch… what can i say… i was tired?) and started down.

The misery of tall, dense grass from between 15,000 feet and 14,000 feet needs not be relived again soon… and then the improvisation of finding that my path was not a path… and soon it all gave way to a Quechua village at 13,000 feet.

“Disculpe, mamita… busco camino que sigue a Huasao,” i said to a Quechua lady who had just walked out of her thatch-roofed home. “Excuse me, ma’am… i am looking for a trail that leads to Huasao.”

A look of confusion flashed across her face and she called for her granddaughter. She was a monolingual Quechua speaker… one of the first that i have ever met, actually.

She pointed me in the right direction with the help of her translating daughter, i emptied my entire Quechua vocabulary on her, and headed down.

And shortly was passed by a boy with a backpack on. And then another.

i stopped this second boy.

“Are you coming from Huasao?” He was.

“Is that where you go to school?” It is.

“And so you go this way every day?” He does.

“This way”… “this way” is a trail leading from 10,400 feet in Huasao to his home in the Quechua village at 13,000 feet. Every day… down and up in order to go to school.

i think i need not say more. His name is Fernando. He is eight years old.

And so i have arrived back safely.

i think that the next couple of days call for some rest :-)

And may gunpowder tea be a source of joy for you.

To Speak of Warmth in Green

2008-06-08T14:29:00.000-07:00

And despite times when the contrary would seem to be so, time does occasionally take it upon itself to pass quickly… and in many ways has done so over the past three days.

i suppose that i shall merely speak chronologically, addressing what has passed in a reasonably concise manner without speaking at great length… my reasons being that i am tired tonight and that i do not feel that i have very much of any particular insight or interest to offer tonight.

So if this update reads rather crisply and pointedly… perhaps that is why.

i am, these days, feeling a little bit less of an urge to force myself to go do things and to try to force things to happen. And so Friday morning, for example, i spent five or six hours sitting in the Powlison’s house reading.

At lunch on Friday i was invited by one of the local missionaries to travel to a nearby Quechua settlement for a showing of the Jesus film. Seeing the opportunity as a chance to take some pictures in a fresh locale, i leapt at the opportunity.

The settlement was at 12,000 feet, and we arrived at about 5:15, just as the light was beginning to fade… making my photography a test of the limits of my equipment.

My first picture from this settlement is probably going to seem to many to be one of the least impressive shots that i have posted… however i am much more pleased with it than most others that i have posted.

The focus is abysmally off, but it contains some of the complexity and depth that i have desired for my pictures. The first people to come were, of course, the children… and these particular children, as is the case with most children the world over, were rather thrilled at the appearance of a camera.

“Toca foto de mi!” they would yell… Spanish their second language, as evidenced by a phrase that would be ridiculed in most Spanish classes and by most native Spanish speakers.

Their faces would be inches from my camera. Tough working conditions, i suppose.

And all of the sudden there was an opening. Girls running in circles with arms locked. A boy looking back as he ascended the small hill on which i stood. A little bit of chaos below. Auto-focus went all the wrong places… but at least i saw something when i took this picture. It is better than can be said of most of the pictures that i have taken this trip.

And as a technical note for readers who are photographers: i am not very happy with my RAW processing of this picture… i feel like the tint is too much toward red and the temperature is a touch warm. Also, as the lighting conditions were pretty intense for pictures taken this evening, i will include some EXIF data: This was at ISO 400, 50mm, f/. 1.8, underexposed -0.7, and 1/80 second.

And… this is almost certainly my favorite portrait of the trip so far.

His name is Anderson, and he is eight years old. i do not know more of his story… but on this evening he sat alone off to the side, his stick—a walking stick?—in hand, occasionally taking a bite of his bread. He seemed much older than his mere eight years.

i approached him and asked if i could take some pictures. He assented… and immediately assumed the rigid and self-conscious posture that makes me cringe. i fired off a few (18, to be exact) shots and hoped for a distraction. i do not know what it was, but something suddenly attracted his attention, and his guard fell as he glanced to his right. Which left me with this picture.

ISO 800, 50mm, f/. 1.8, underexposed -1.3, and 1/60 second.

Gradually a few more people arrived. As they took their seats on a bench, i tried to frame a simple image providing a broad overview of the people.

ISO 800, 50mm, f/. 1.8, underexposed -1.3, and 1/13 second.

“Toca foto de mi abuela!”

i was reluctant… i didn’t want this lady to feel pressured into having her picture taken… Quechua women tend to be shy and modest, and i wanted to respect that… yet as i asked if she was sure that it was ok to take her picture, she nodded her approval with the quiet pride that is so characteristic of Quechuas that i have known throughout Peru. Her name is Sebastiana Velazquez Chocce. She maintained a quiet dignity as i tried to wring every last drop out of the long gone light. It was dark out. i could hardly see her. Autofocus couldn’t see her. i auto-focused as best as i could, and tried to manually finesse the focus from there. Not that it mattered a whole lot with as slow as my shutter speed was. Then it was an issue of holding my breath, putting on my best surgeon hands, and clicking away in hopes of something reasonably sharp.

This was the closest that i came.

ISO 1600, 50mm, f/. 1.8, underexposed -1.7, and 1/8 second.

And as a side note… it gets kind of cold at night at 12,000 feet.

On Saturday i ventured back into the hills.

It was a fairly straightforward day… my intention was to get a reasonably early start, climb Cerro Pintas, a hill just over 13,700 feet tall, and then to climb a nearby unnamed hill that is around 13,930 feet tall.

Friday night had been a fairly late night, and so after breakfast and gear-assembling at the Powlison’s i didn’t start hiking until around 8.

My aim was to find my way to what appeared to be a trail in the valley between the two main ridge systems leading to the mountain from the west. i found what seemed to be a road leading in that direction… but it stalled out in a steep-walled valley very early on. Walking in this area is unreal… there is so much history that is by now merely part of the landscape. Trekking through this valley… i quickly stumbled upon seemingly endless ancient terrace works… abandoned for unknown hundreds of years, but very evidently of human origin. There is, in my opinion, nothing to equal the scale and the pervasiveness of evident ancient artifice that has proven to exist in this area.

Eventually, however, i found my trail… and it took me surprisingly close to my target. By 11 i was standing on the summit of Cerro Pintas. Climbing makes for tough photography, because i usually don’t get to places from which i desire to take pictures until the light is utterly deplorable… and since i am alone, i don’t have a victim to shoot portraits or action shots of. So… i am left with little but myself to add interest to shots.

i tried a few summit self-portraits… and this is one of them, more or less. i set my tripod up on the summit, scrambled down to a ledge surrounded by vast dropoffs (which sadly aren’t very evident in this picture… it is hard to know how things will look when i can’t look at them as i take the picture) and tried the tired old trick of the jumping self-portrait… it has worked better for me… but i thought that i would go ahead and post this one. One thing that i learned is that i am not very good at jumping at 13,700 feet after having hiked a pretty solid distance. And my hair is doing some pretty awesome stuff, if i may say so myself.

Finally… i descended Cerro Pintas and set off for the other mountain. i summited shortly after noon, and once more was left to think of summit picture ideas. i decided essentially to frame a decent landscape selection on a tripod and then walk through the frame with a remote and snap off a bunch of pictures in hope that one or two of them would be not horrible. Most of them were very horrible… but i kind of liked this one. Cerro Pintas is right behind my left elbow.

And that is all for now, i suppose… and a celebration of two months, for sure.

To Speak of the Usual

2008-06-05T13:35:00.000-07:00

Another two days have passed since my last trip to the internet.

Another two days… with little to report.

One of my biggest hopes when i came to Cusco was that i would be able to do a lot more social photography—that i would be able to get close to the people, that i would be able to take pictures of what is important to them, that i would be able to describe daily life… and so far i am really struggling in this endeavor.

What i find instead is that the only time i seem to get pictures that i like very much is when i am getting out away from people and shooting landscapes while climbing things… which is really what i wanted this time in Cusco not to be about.

So… i have a few more social ideas to try that would be a little bit of a break from what i have tried to do in Cusco, and i have a few more mountains to try… hopefully a little bit of variety and a shift in vision will serve to get me better pictures.

Because i feel like my photography is really degenerating right now, and it would be best if that wasn’t the case.

i spent Wednesday morning by one of the waterfalls that i have found. It is in my last picture in this update. It was nice to have a few hours to sit outside, listen to a waterfall, do some reading and praying… and i found that as i sat by the waterfall it grew quieter and quieter and quieter.

“This is interesting”, i thought… “i guess the longer i sit out here the more i get used to the sound of the waterfall, so then i don’t notice it as much.”

After two hours of sitting by the waterfall, i gathered my belongings and started back, throwing a final glance toward the waterfall.

i was shocked to see that indeed it had slowed to a trickle. A few pathetic drips tumbled from rock to rock. It was hardly the inspiring force that i had come to two and a half hours earlier.

And this is the strangeness that is a heavily irrigated area… this creek seems as if it has been running for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. It is right between two mountain systems, and so is a very natural streambed. The rocks are smoothed by what can only be the passing of years and years of water…

And yet a half mile or so upstream there is an irrigation project… sometimes water gets diverted from the stream, and sometimes water is allowed to flow into the stream and in that way… the people here turn their waterfalls on and off.

But on Wednesday afternoon i went for a walk in hopes of maybe taking some pictures that weren’t too bad. i didn’t really succeed, but at least i tried.

This first picture is a prime example of degenerating photography… admittedly… in retrospect i probably would pick a different picture to use in this slot if i were to do it all over again (and which i obviously could do if i felt like spending the time to change it)… but i was forcing things a bit for this one… and should have probably aimed for a better point of view.

But his name is Julian. As i walked by his small field, he was digging up his latest crop of potatoes. It was still a little bit early… the light was mostly just harsh. i really could have used some clouds to break up the intensity of it, actually, but i worked with what i could. i climbed up onto the terrace that he was working on to take a few pictures. Here is one of them… probably not the best, probably not the worst… just kind of a middle-of-the-road shot from his potato harvest.

i can’t say that i haven’t taken many pictures since my last update—i’ve probably taken around 200—but i can say that i haven’t taken any that i like. So… one thing i’ve learned is that as a photographer, if you can’t please yourself, you should at least try to please the crowd. And i have also found that a cheap and easy way to please the crowd is with really cute kid pictures. So… there’s not a lot to it, there’s not much of a story to go with it… but here are some really cute kids. Not a fantastic picture, but some really, really, really cute kids.

And finally… i woke up on Thursday morning and headed back to my waterfall with a tripod and the shade of morning to try to take some pictures of the waterfall. This is a tough waterfall to take pictures of, because it occurs at a bend in the stream with fairly steep walls on either side of the streambed. As a result, there is a very limited number of places from which i can take pictures of the waterfall… the most success that i have had has come from a rock just a few feet in front of the final cascade… but i lose the entire upper portion of the waterfall from there. Regardless… it’s not one of the better waterfall pictures i’ve ever taken, but at least you will be able to see a little bit of where i have been spending my time.

Hopefully i will have something better the next time i update… i think another mountain hike is in the plans for the next couple of days, and i also have an area that i am going to try to document… if i can do so in a way that is at least slightly meaningful. The potential is there, i’m just not sure that i am equal to the task.

To Speak of a Short Walk

2008-06-03T14:44:00.000-07:00

i hate typos.

i sometimes reread what i have written previously… and i find a typo or two. They make me kind of angry. Please forgive me for my occasional typographical gaffe.

i am writing once more from the Cusco area.

The past few days have passed reasonably quickly… Sunday with church and John Piper sermons, Monday with another casual mountain stroll.

i am writing this Monday night… and am pretty tired, so i will probably make this a shorter than usual update… although it probably still won’t be short. Again, apologies.

i’ll start with a little bit more portraiture… just a picture of a man, i think i took it on Saturday evening, but it may have been Sunday evening. Just a little bit of 18mm portraiture, i suppose.

And as a post-processing note… i made extensive use of the clone stamp in this one. You see… this man apparently has weak convictions about zipping up his pants (a common area for Peruvian men to have weak convictions in, actually)… and while i aim to portray the culture honestly… well… this is one area where i felt that it was ok to take some Photoshop liberties. i zipped up his pants for him in Photoshop, in short.

And this morning i decided to go for another walk. This would just be a gentle, easy walk along the road… i would get to know the area better, take some pictures of people doing what they do, not kill myself, and come back feeling awake and energetic.

Hahahaha… Right….

So i made it a few feet when i heard some water running in the valley below. i am kind of maybe a huge waterfall addict… so i had to investigate, of course. i charged down the hillside… saw that there was indeed a small waterfall… and worked my way back to the road.

i lasted 50 yards… if even that. At the first switchback i saw a weak trail leading straight ahead. i couldn’t help but follow it… it could take me to the home of some elves, maybe, or perhaps even a door to Narnia!

i can be kind of an ADD hiker sometimes…

It goes without saying that this trail, like most Peruvian trails, inexplicably died out after a few feet. That didn’t stop me from pretending it still existed, though! Tenuous slab-climbing moves on loose dirt, intense bushwhacking on a sixty degree slope, aggressive laybacking with hands full of grass… words don’t really express what i had to do to make progress over the extremely steep valley (canyon?) wall.

But sometimes… my progress would bring me to another waterfall… this one is five feet high! That’s pretty cool…

And a little farther… and i hear something roaring. This one’s taller than me…

i wanted to see what it looked like from above… so i worked my way to the left in hopes of finding a way up. A rock wall blocked my way… but a few fun moves brought me to the top.

And what was waiting for me there was unlike anything that i had seen before. It didn’t translate into pictures very well, and i fear that nor will it translate into words… but perhaps if i try with words and pictures both, you will have some sort of conception of it.

The stream funneled into a very narrow stretch of rock that acted like a tunnel with the top half cut off so that we mere mortals could observe the internal happenings. The tunnel S-curved, forcing the water up onto its sides, before opening up as the waterfall as i had seen it from below. For this picture, i backed out to 18mm, stopped the aperture as narrow as it would go for a slower shutter speed that would blur the water, held my camera about an inch or two above the water (note the water spot in the bottom left corner), and tried to hold my camera still for about 1/20 second. Which yielded this… which was taken just before the S-curve.

i eventually did find my way back to the road… but not until marveling at a wide range of waterfalls… from 30-foot three-level cascades to a fifteen foot straight drop off of an overhang. This road seemed to like to go up, and it did so quite well until coming to a stop at what looked like a forgotten tree farm at 12,000 feet… trees planted in row after row, with the intervening spaces slowly becoming overgrown with other kinds of trees and brush.

i was a little disappointed that the road had ended… and then i was suddenly at a pass at 12,300 feet. All thoughts of the road ceased… i charged madly up the hill on one side of the pass… but all too suddenly found myself standing on a little 12,600 foot summit directly over Cusco. Cool… but not quite what i had been going for.

i decided to try the other side… and after more technical near-vertical grass climbing and endless up-and-downing over false summits and proving my rare knack for taking all of the wrong trails and avoiding all of the right trails, i found myself on top of a 13,460 foot hill. This is a little bit of a different landscape style for me… but here is one of my summit views, looking towards Cusco, parts of which can be seen in the distance.

i thought i would try going back a different way, and started doing so immediately. Probably because i could see a decent trail from the summit that seemed to be going generally down. It seemed a little bit more appealing to me than descending near-vertical grass. i love that stuff.

And as i started towards the trail… i was greeted by some old ruins. How old they are is difficult to say… but i think they are pretty old. The sort of care that went into the structure in question is simply unseen in recent architecture… my guess is Spanish, at least a hundred years ago, likely older… although Inca is not out of the question completely, i think. My summit is in the background, too.

My short day’s walk… ended up yielding 11 miles, 4,000 feet of elevation gain, and a high point of 13,460 feet. That makes me tired.

And don’t forget… we, too, would like to echolocate.

To Speak of Motorcycles and Carrots

2008-05-31T12:52:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-29T13:57:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-25T12:38:00.001-07:00

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

2008-05-23T19:04:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-20T12:15:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-18T11:16:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-17T07:49:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-14T18:33:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-14T10:23:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-12T23:28:00.001-07:00

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

2008-05-11T22:49:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-06T14:43:00.000-07:00

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--