Cloud Lands
Perú. A place I’ve wanted to see as long as I can remember. Today is May the 2nd, my first waking up in this country, and I have almost no energy with which to see any of it. The leg of travel that I completed over the last two days, from Vilcabamba across the border, down into the jungle and up to here, took a lot out of me. Fifteen hours yesterday from door to door, that is, the Hotel San Luis in Zumba, Ecuador; to the Hostal Norte in Chachopoyas, Perú. It required a force of will to get out of bed at eleven, make a pot of tea, and walk down to the mercado, where I got my first look at this town in daylight.
This, fully San Juan de la Frontera de los Chachapoyas, is a dusty old colonial mountain town, dating from 1545. For a long time this was well out of the way of everything. It is not lacking in a certain gritty charm, but isn’t fancy or ornate in the way of the old town of Cuenca or Villa de Leyva in Colombia. The architectural style is whitewashed buildings with brown trim, overhanging brownish-red tejado roofs.
This remote area, bounded by ranges upon ranges of Andes to three sides and rainforest to the east, was one of the last conquered by the Incas. The Chachapoyas — an Incan name for “people of the clouds” — resisted incorporation into the empire fiercely until the end of the 15th century. In fact, almost all of present-day Ecuador was taken before this area. Like the Cañari people to the north, the locals sided with Huascar in the Incan civil war, suffered terrible consequences for choosing the wrong Inca, and were already devastated when the Spanish arrived.
The city mercado is a real, old-fashioned market, the first I’ve seen like this since Guatemala. This is my favorite kind of food shopping, to wander from stand to stand variously arrayed with colorful produce, dairy, grains and meats, inspecting the different food items. My method is to walk one time through to peruse, then buy things on the way back. One of the first things I noticed is that the quality of produce is excellent. Ended up with blue criollo eggs, a big green avocado, a few good-looking tomatoes, an onion, some bread rolls and a little block of hard queso blanco.
Walked back and cooked breakfast, huevos pericos (scrambled eggs with diced tomatoes and onions) and sat in the sun in the courtyard to eat. It’s two in the afternoon and that’s all I have to show for my day. I have made it to Perú, over land. For a long time I didn’t know that I would. Perhaps that is enough of an accomplishment, just to be here. But now I feel an obligation to go out and see things.
Though the transit yesterday remains something of a blur, I feel like I have to get it down on paper while it’s relatively fresh. I think that will be my afternoon, and I also see the way through to finishing this purple notebook with a big psychedelic paisley flower on the cover. My second of the journey, I bought it in Santa Marta, Colombia, and I’ve been writing in it for five months.
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A couple days later, sitting at the Cafe Fusiones just off the Plaza de Armas, which might be a nice place except that it’s undergoing a massive renovation project, and is walled off with chain link fencing. The streets of much of this area of the old town, including the one I’m staying on, seem to be under construction, and in this dry, windy climate, there is dust in the air and on the ground.
This cafe, on the other hand, is a place of refuge. I had a good little meal here after a long day out. A sanduche de hornado — roasted pork sandwich — on a homemade sweet roll with lettuce and carmelized onions. A side of sweet potato chips, which I’m delighted to find are a thing here. That good feeling of a day’s exertions ceased: tired legs, light heart. Drinking a cup of black tea with cocoa husk, my second refill, actually. Lingering here at my table because my hostel is not a particularly comfortable place. Functional, cheap, easy enough to be at, but not comfortable. You can sit at the one table next to the little outdoor kitchen if it’s not taken, or on the low bench on the second floor balcony, but other than your bed, those are the options. This cafe is mostly empty, and the barrista-waitresses don’t seem to mind if I hang out for awhile.
At eight-thirty this morning I made a gametime decision to go see Kuelap, , the largest pre-Inca archaeological site in northern Perú, the capital of the Chachapoya culture. This meant that a 9:05 colectivo would be coming to fetch me. It wasn’t a tour, just the local regional transport, but the way it seems to work is that you tell your hostel, they make a call, and then the van comes to get you around the corner. Hustled a couple blocks down to a travel agency at the Plaza to change some dollars into soles at S/3.18 apiece, a decent rate, the place only taking a 2% commission. Then up the pedestrian street to a little bodega advertising sanduches. “De queso, de palta (avocado), o de huevo?” the woman asked. I chose one of the palta and one of the queso variety, made on these little pita-like flatbreads, and ran back to the hostel just in time to grab my daypack and catch the van.
We traveled an hour to the south along paved but pot-holed roads, first steeply down, then following the Rio Utcubamba, our colectivo full of local folks, all hauling sacks of goods they’d acquired in town. A sunny day in a beautiful valley, and everybody on the van talking, a very chatty vibe, and whenever a new passenger would get on, they’d give a round of “Buenos Dias”es, and make eye contact so everyone was included, even the gringo. It was sweet. From travelers, I‘d gotten a picture of Peruvian culture as reserved and unfriendly, but in my forty-eight hours in the country, this has not been my experience.
One other traveler was sitting in the back row with me, a red-haired hippieish woman in her early thirties. After a while, we got to talking. Ira, from Germany, slight with blue-green eyes, traveling north from Chile, almost five months on the road. Seems like the majority of the long-term travelers I meet in South America are going south to north. She was smart and earnest, quick to disagree with me. She was also going to Kuelap, but planning to take the teleférico up to the ruins. When I told her that this van was going almost all the way up, that from there it was just a short walk, she said “I’ll go with you.”
We left the river road at the village of Tingo, and ten minutes uphill from the original town, came to Nuevo Tingo. Our colectivo stopped at an open-air market where half of our passengers got down, and we took on four replacements. Much loading and unloading of plastic-mesh bags from the roof, no one in a rush to get anywhere, Buenos Dias all around.
On we went, dirt road now, through shallow creeks, past three or four little villages with houses made of dirt brick, some whitewashed, along the walls of a deep canyon. Winding up past the modern teleférico station, cars steadily ambling up a giant mountain. There were several delays aside from the regular stops dropping people off at their homes. Two bunches of platanos fell from the roof, and the woman to whom they belonged yelled at the driver to stop. Many of them were broken, and cursing in an indigenous language, she collected the whole ones and the salvageable pieces, throwing the rest in the ditch.
Then we came to a sharp curve where we saw in front of us that a tanker truck with agua no potable written on the side was parked on a bridge, entirely blocking the road. Two guys had a big plastic hose drawing water from the creek below. This seemed to be outside the bounds of propriety, and the pleasant mood of the combi soured. Our driver honked, passengers yelled out the window, the woman who’d lost the platanos went over to confront them up close, taking out her morning’s frustrations. All to no avail. They shrugged and raised their open hands and sat there on the roadside until the tank was full.
It took us three hours in total to get to La Marca, the last little town on the road. I asked Ira if she wished she’d taken the teleférico we’d passed an hour ago. She did. It was just us and one lady left on the colectivo by then. We walked up a path twenty minutes to the bottom of the site, which from below looked like a medieval castle. Stone walls in places fifty feet high, the ruins of a rounded tower at one end. From its mountaintop location and the impenetrable-looking ramparts, it seemed that they must have been very concerned about attack.
The first gate was being repaired after some stones had fallen, so to gain entrance we had to walk to the very far end of the curving walls. Up stone stairs in a passageway that narrowed as you climbed, and above, opened to reveal the ruins of an ancient city on top of the world. The foundations of circular houses and buildings as far as we could see. All made of stone, some with inlaid geometric adornments, little balconies, doorways beckoning, many with large batáns — stones for milling grains — and rounded mortars inside.
We were offered a guide, but only in Spanish, which Ira said she wouldn’t understand enough of to be worth the fifty soles. So we walked on our own through this expansive site that seemed to be on top of the world. Maybe there were fifty other tourists here, most of them Peruvian. We walked through multiple levels of the town, bigger and smaller houses, walkways, up to a tower at the far end. This place that once had been home to thousands of cloud people, now populated only by trees growing amidst the stones, and llamas that they bring up to graze during the day, to add a certain Andean ambience.
Ira and I wandered slowly around, trying to imagine what it would have been like to be here back when, speculating on the function of this or that building. At times we’d catch up with various guided groups, and hover a bit to eavesdrop for bits of knowledge that I’d translate. This site was first occupied around the year 800, and after the Incas finally conquered the area in 1475, they allowed it to continue as a semi-autonomous religious and administrative center, albeit under Incan control. There were no constructions that appeared to be Inca.
At the far end was the main temple, an improbable structure, the showpiece of the ruins. The platform base, all that was left of it, was a reverse cone made of large white cut stones, growing wider as it went up. Around it were four or five tiny houses perched right on the edge of the outer wall, in what we gathered were the residences of priests.
Here it began to rain, a light drizzle, and this drove away almost all of the other tourists. Ira and I decamped to a spot under some wiry old trees, for a damp lunch. We got into a discussion of immigration policies in our respective countries, and at some point I used the word “expats”. She didn’t like that word, and we talked about the difference in connotation between that and “immigrants”, the sense of privilege involved. I got it, but I still find the word descriptive of a certain type of person, someone who has gone to live by choice in a far-off country. She wanted me to call the white people in South America, from Europe or North America, “immigrants”, too. This led to a discussion of comparative politics in our countries, me once again trying to explain Trump.
It stopped raining and we wandered back to the temple area, the highest point in the ruins, and happened upon a group with an English-speaking guide. It turns out this wasn’t a fortress at all — the walls were built so high to demonstrate their desire to be closer to the gods. Three thousand people lived up here, to lead and administer to three hundred thousand in the immediate area. There had been four large cities in the valleys below, which are mostly still un-excavated. I looked out over the landscape: green mountains, mostly pasturelands, crops, patches of undisturbed cloud forest. It was hard to imagine where those cities could be hiding. What a thought that somewhere down there, under the trees and grass, were the remains of so many lives. Other worlds beneath the surface. “We are opening them,” the guide said. “Not tomorrow, but soon.”
It started raining again, harder now, and with the wind it was cold up here at 9000 feet. It was time to leave this cloud-world, and we carefully descended the now-slippery path back down to the road. We stopped in to the little museum, but a security guard came up and asked if we were taking the teleférico (we were) and said the last one was at 4, in ten minutes. After a rapid scan of the exhibits, we jogged down to the station. Suddenly it appeared that the rain and clouds had passed, and the skies were opening up to a brilliant blue. I knew there was a path to walk down the mountain, which I’d planned to do if the weather was good. The lady said it was 20 soles (about six dollars) for the ride down, and I looked at Ira and shook my head. I’ll see you in Chachapoyas, I said, though I figured I probably wouldn’t.
Back at the museum I asked the guard where I could find the path down to Tingo. He told me it was on the other side of Kuelap, where we’d just walked down from. And how long? Tres horas. Argh. I needed to move to get down by full dark. Up the slippery stones, trying to avoid the mud. Twenty minutes later I was back at the now-deserted site, and started walking counter-clockwise, looking for the trail. Near the far end I found some workers who were reinforcing the towering ancient walls with buttresses and thick beams, and asked them. Otro lado. So I walked another quarter of the way around the ruins, half annoyed and half just savoring every minute I had in this enchanted space.
Finally, the trail. A horsepath descending the mountain into a deep broad valley before me, the far side lit up in sunlight, walking down into shadow. The trail quickly became a quagmire of mud and puddles, deep holes from horse and llama hoofsteps. I had to gingerly make my way down, creeping around the edges, hopping from island to island above the muck, and feared with the current trail conditions it would take me much more than three hours. After a while the way improved, and the path switchbacked down, down, past farmsteads of dirt brick and corn fields, vast mountainsides of scrub-brush and rocks. Epic country, elemental spaces. Perú was making quite the impression on me.
The weather held, and it was three thousand feet down to the Rio Utcubamba again, my feet sore and knees wobbly. It was much warmer down here, with thick jungle vegetation. The river was churning fast by, tan-colored water with somewhere to get to. Found a second wind when the land leveled out, the sound of the current spurring me on through the twilight. I made it to Tinga at six thirty, just as it was getting dark, and asked a couple guys sitting outside a tienda if colectivos were still running to Chachapoyas.
Do you like to go to a casino and play? the guy replied cryptically in Spanish. I thought about this question, wondering how this applied to my current situation. Decided to be honest. Yes, I like to play, but I don’t really like casinos. So you think you are lucky, he said. I shrugged. Then you will find a colectivo.
I sat down on the wooden bench a little ways down from them, stretched out my legs and lit a smoke, and a couple minutes later a honking white van pulled up and the driver said “cha-cha” and I got on and an hour later I was back in town. A good day.
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Sitting back on my comfortable bed at the Hostal Petaca just off the Plaza de Armas in the little town of Leymebamba, a couple hours south of Chachapoyas, steady rain on the terra cotta roof. Something about rain makes it easier to write. Perhaps it is about the release, the sky letting go of its energy.
Didn’t know until ten o’clock this morning that I was going to be here. Couldn’t make up my mind where to go — one of those moments of travel fatigue when everything seems like it’s not worth the energy required. At the same time I knew after five nights that it was time to leave Chachapoyas. While it is an incredible area that I feel like I barely scratched the surface of, the town itself didn’t feel all that comfortable.
Maybe it was that the two hostels I stayed in weren’t particularly welcoming, and I didn’t sleep well the past few nights. Snoring roommates, which led me to move places, only to find that this dorm room was occupied by late-arriving hard-partying folk. I have a list entitled “Things I’m Too Old for” which I started in Mexico in the first month of my journey, and the very first entry reads: “bad nights of sleep in hostel dorm rooms”. But here I am, ten months later, still enduring them, due to budgetary considerations. My travel budget is $30 per day, and before I left I had serious questions about whether that would suffice. It turns out that on average, I can indeed travel through these countries at that rate, but maybe a better question would have been “at what cost to my well being?”
Or maybe it was the fact that they’re tearing up and rebuilding all the streets in downtown Cha-cha; the central plaza itself is all fenced off and everything is covered in dirt and dust. The sounds of jackhammering and digging start early. Or maybe it was the traffic, re-routed due to all the construction, the hundreds of honking white taxis and combis.
Besides, I am now on a schedule. I am due to arrive in Arequipa — in the far south of this country — in twenty-three days, and so my allotted time in Chachapoyas had come to an end. But where to exactly? My original destination was Cajamarca, on the way to the coast, but the only buses for that twelve-hour ride left at 4:30 am or 8 pm, neither of which seemed humane. The second entry on my list of things I’m too old for is: “night buses”. I know because of the extreme distances between places in Perú, I will likely have to break this rule at some point, but I’m not ready yet.
The other option was to scrap all that, and just take a bus down to the coast, nine hours to Chiclayo. It’s farther along my route and a shorter ride. But I didn’t feel all that ready for the heat of equatorial sun at sea level, and the buses for the coast leave at 1 pm. I have found that getting into unknown cities well after dark is not an enjoyable experience.
The third alternative was to come down here to Leymebamba, spend the day and night, and catch that same bus for Cajamarca at 6:30 am tomorrow, a less cruel and unusual hour. I think I chose the easiest option, the do-as-little-as-possible-today option, and I came here. So far, I feel really good about this choice.
Woke early but took a leisurely morning, made a couple of egg sandwiches on the these sweet cemita rolls that appear to be the best kind of bread around. Over the past day I had been handicapping the Kentucky Derby, telling myself that if I saw good options, I would wager a little bit of money, despite my dwindling budget. I think I was fooling myself, and that once I made the effort to spend hours researching the horses, I was going to bet regardless.
Before I left the hostel I made my picks online, putting $25 on the race. Got my bags together and left the hostel at 11. Took a taxi down to the colectivo terminal and caught a noon combi full of people not talking. We rode down the switchbacks for half an hour, fast and veering, until a young man in the row in front of me called out “bolsa, bolsa!” and someone gave him a bag and he got sick.
At the bottom we hit the Utcubamba, and followed the same lovely river valley I’d traveled a few days before, to Tingo and then beyond. Eventually we started up again, winding through broad passes and coming into this modest colonial town-village at 2. I liked it right away. Got a room right on the plaza, at S./30 my most expensive so far in Perú, reminding myself against the expense that it’s for a private room, and only $10. I was shown my room by a very cute woman in her early 20s, and almost immediately got a mototaxi heading for the famous museo arqueológico, supposedly one of the best in the country. The location was a few miles out of town, and the tuk-tuk was dying, groaning and creaking uphill, but somehow willed its way up there.
The Museo de Leymebamba is this lovely Spanish-style villa below a sheer thousand foot wall of green, laid out in a C-shape around a courtyard of flowers and greenery. All through the grounds are reproductions of the painted funerary urn statues in which the Chachopoya people buried their dead, like Easter Island heads in miniature. The main attraction is some two hundred mummies, but that turned out to be a very minor aspect, one part of one room.
What it was really about was the Chachapoyan culture, and the artifacts on display brought that to life to a degree not usually achieved in museums. After an hour and a half, I felt moved by having been in the presence of the ancients, of a beautiful and mysterious people. Little mundane objects were what really made them human: combs, sewing needles, a vest, little mesh bags for collecting herbs, a large ceramic mug with a handle.
There was mystery: the funerary urns they kept the mummies in, these limbless hollow statues that they’d put high up on cliff ledges to watch over the world, or stand in rows in remote caves. The quipus, the ancient Andean system of writing comprised of string of different colors and lengths, with various types of knots. I had long known about these, thought it was an Inca thing — in so many ways, the Incas were the beneficiaries of thousands of years of culture before them. These quipus preceded the Incas by hundreds of years, and were far more than the cat’s cradles or abacuses I had imagined. Laid out in front of me in all of their complexity, I saw that this was something detailed and complex, magnificent and altogether different.
And then there were the mummies. I found them disturbing, not just that I was looking at a bunch of skeletons, many with skin on and bits of hair and fingernails — one of them even had eyes (!) — a child with its hands covering most of its face, but this one revealed eye watching me. Moreso, it was that these had been real people, not objects, people who had lived lives, and that while here they were being protected from looting, they had never been meant to be displayed in a museum. While it was all respectful, I suppose, and I could rationalize that their presence was helping to protect the legacy of their people and culture, it felt somewhat exploitative.
That aside, it was a fantastic museum, and I felt much closer to experiencing the lives of the cloud people whose capital I’d seen at Kuelap a few days before. I saw a reconstructed roundhouse in all its glory, charming and whimsical. I’d like to come back to this part of Perú and explore more extensively — there are dozens of archeological sites in this area that are a little farther off the beaten path.
Got a fortifying cup of chocolate caliente from the museo cafe, and then walked back down to town. Got to see this narrow river valley far better than I had from the claustrophobic tuk-tuk, the far pastureland lit up with golden evening sun. The road curved along with the mountain, then opening into a long vista of the upper and lower town.
Walking down through the streets, past warming scenes of daily life, kids playing soccer alongside grazing horses and sheep, women sweeping their sidewalks. It all seemed very idyllic, and I envied them for the apparent peace they were living in.
Back at the hotel, the cute receptionist recommended a restaurant caddy- corner across the plaza called Sabores de Mishqui. They had a dinner menú del día of trucha frita, polenta soup, roasted potatoes and salad, served with a cup of anise tea. Eight soles. There was this feeling of just-right-ness to everything that comes when food is made with care and heart. Dining in these little towns can be so satisfying or so disappointing. You never know.
Came back to the hotel and used the kitchen on the open-air roofed-over fourth floor terrace, to make some tea, with all sorts of meats and herbs and plants hanging to dry on lines. Sat next to the railing to watch the last of the day on the plaza below, a light rain starting to fall.
In my room I looked online and saw that I had correctly picked the winners of the Derby. The two hours of study and computation had paid off. My GHI (Goldstein Handicapping Index), an amateur system I’ve developed over some years, predicted a finish of 7–5–6. In fact it was 7–6–5, but I had that trifecta, too, and the 7–6 exacta. I was up $151. I wish picking horses was always like this. I’d taken a gamble in the most literal sense of the word, money I couldn’t afford to lose, won, and now I am in slightly better shape to make it to Arequipa. I’m going to take a hot shower to take the edge off the gathering chill, then try to get some sleep, for the early bus tomorrow to Cajamarca.
