Cuenca and Ingapirca
Had I left my fate up to the vagaries of my journey, Cuenca, this city in the south of Ecuador, is likely the place I would have stayed. That was always the plan, to wander towards Uruguay, and if I found a city that spoke to me, stop. As it is, I have already taken a job in Peru that starts in six weeks, so I will carry on. But this is the first new city I’ve found on the course of my migration where I genuinely would like to live.
Set in a broad valley in the Andes at eight thousand feet, surrounded by green mountains in all directions, the natural setting is lovely. Four clear mountain rivers meet in this basin (the meaning of the Spanish name), and I’ve spent a fair bit of my time here sitting by the Rio Tomebamba which runs below the ciudad viejo. How good to have a clean, fast-moving rocky river, surrounded by trees and parks, right in the midst of a city.
The climate is temperate, fresh mountain air delightful after the stifling heat of the coast, but a good bit warmer than Quito. Apparently, there is a significant population of American expats living here, and though I have seen little evidence of their presence (apparently they mostly live in suburban neighborhoods outside of the center)I can see why they’d choose this place.
The story of Cuenca is similar to that of Quito: while there is evidence of human occupation in this valley for ten thousand years, the permanent settlement of Guapondeleg dates to about 500 AD. This was a capital of the Cañari people, the most powerful group in what is now southern Ecuador for a thousand years, well developed in agriculture, astronomy and architecture. In the late 15th century, the Incas attempted to conquer Guapondeleg as part of their expansion north, but were at first driven back by fierce resistance. When they returned with massive reinforcements, the Cañari “welcomed” them as conquerors and were absorbed into the empire, but allowed to some degree to retain their culture.
The Incas re-named the city Tomebamba and undertook significant civic building projects. This city became a favorite of the conquering emperor, and his son Huayna Capac, the second-to-last Inca, was born here. But less than forty years after the Inca conquest, the empire began to break apart. Capac’s two sons, Atahualpa, born in Quito, and Huascar, born outside Cuzco, fought a civil war of succession. Though much closer geographically to Quito, the Cañari chose to ally themselves with the southern faction. This choice proved disastrous when Atahualpa’s forces were victorious, and they enacted brutal revenge when they re-took this area. Some sources say that up to three quarters of the Cañari population were killed.
Within a year of the conclusion of the civil war, Pizarro arrived in Peru, and the remaining Cañari, still angry at their treatment by Atahualpa, unsurprisingly allied with the Spanish and fought with them all the way to Cuzco. When the first Europeans came to Tomebamba, they found only ruins. There has long been speculation that the inhabitants destroyed their own city to keep it out of Spanish hands, but it seems more likely to have been the result of the recently ended civil war. The only significant ruins left from that time are the foundations of the Pumapongo Temple on a bluff overlooking the river. The Spanish founded the current city of Santa Ana de los Cuatros Rios de Cuenca in 1557 in the ruins of Tomebamba, and it is today the third biggest in the country.
Despite liking Cuenca from the first, my time here has been rather strange thus far. I arrived on a rainy night three days ago, and shared a taxi from the bus station with a Canadian woman and her teenage daughter to the Hostal Alternative on the edge of the old city. I don’t know what is so alternative about the place; it seems to be a fairly standard modern hostel. Exhausted after ten hours on buses and contending with a headache from eight thousand feet of elevation gain, I went across the street for half a roasted chicken and papitas, which turn out to be french fries, and retired early to bed.
Only to find that a good night of sleep was not one of the things to be had at this hostel, which again does not make it particularly alternative. In fact I have not had a single good night of sleep since my tent in Canoa six nights ago. Just outside my room was a covered patio where a group of young German party people were holding court until all hours. Drinking, watching videos on their phones, singing along, laughing, yelling. It would be one thing if they were at least listening to good music. But it was all EDM and bad Euro-pop. I went out several times to politely — then not-so politely — ask them to be a little quieter, then finally yelling. No effect. They said: This is Hostel. How could I argue? Add to this the street noise from Calle Huayna Capac below, plus a bar next door and a loud beeping signal for the blind to cross the street, and you get a nightmare which unfortunately was not encompassed in sleep.
The next day, lacking in energy, inbetween sporadic bouts of rain, I spent the day walking around the Centro. Cuenca is described as a colonial city, but I didn’t expect this level of charm. There are ten square blocks that might as well be Spain or (my idea of) Italy. Buildings with character and color, sleepy overlooked plazas, a certain relaxed energy to the street. There is excellent architecture all over the old city, a wonderful place to wander and get lost, to notice little details like ornately carved wooden doors or mosaics in the sidewalk.
I found the broad yet cozy plaza, shaded by firs and palms, and facing it, an impressive romanesque cathedral, one of my favorites I’ve seen. The main building is made of reddish-colored stone, with arches everywhere and arabesque flourishes, but the three blue-and-white-tiled domes, invisible from most of the plaza, are almost from another building.
Found my way down to the river and knew right then that if I wasn’t otherwise engaged I would stay here. Sat there for awhile watching the river flow, then wandered back up to the city. Came across a restaurant, the Cafe Moliendo, with a lively lunch crowd in late afternoon, a signboard advertising a menú del día for $2.50, and found a table in the back. It turned out to be a Colombian place. The funny thing is that Colombian food was often lacking any soul in its own country, but here I am in southern Ecuador finding excellent Colombian. I think there must be some kind of lesson in this. The meal was a Cazuela de Frijoles, a stew of the big brown kind of beans you find in Antioquia, topped with avocado and fried plantains and chicharron. This is what Colombian food should be.
It started raining again after lunch and I hurried back to the hostel. Met a guy from Israel who speaks fluent Sanskrit but not any Spanish, and sat with him under the awning of the patio and watched the rain for awhile. I wasn’t aware that anyone actually spoke Sanskrit — thought it was a dead language like Latin. He had studied traditional herbs and sacred/medicinal plants in India, and had been out in the jungle learning about Ayahuasca. From what he described, like everything else I’ve heard about it, I don’t think it’s the thing for me, at least not at this point. Traveling indefinitely out in the world leads to enough soul-searching as it is. And I tend to be wary of things guaranteed to make you vomit.
After another night plagued by the young Germans, I moved hostels rather than resorting to violence. In late morning, just after arriving at the Hostal Yakumama, my stomach started feeling bad, and by noon it was a bad scene of digestive breakdown. The afternoon brought chills and a fever, and I left my bed only to huddle under blankets on the couch downstairs, suffering through watching my Warriors lose to the Spurs in the fourth game of their playoff series. Retired after that back to my bed, where I was alternately freezing and burning up, and generally miserable.
As badly as I needed a good night of sleep, it was again not to be. Our dorm room was a circus. The door has an incredibly loud squeak when it opens, scream-like, a girl was doing yoga (in the dark) at midnight and then again at five am, and people were coming and going, packing and unpacking all night. I didn’t even have the energy to complain. I was sure that this sickness would shut me down for some days, but this morning I actually felt okay, if worn down, and by afternoon I even left the hostal. It seems like often this kind of stomach bug lasts for a brutal twenty-four hours, and then is done.
Which brings me to now. I’ve stopped into a little cafe across from El Parque de la Madre for a chocolate caliente, my standard hot beverage in these lands of weak tea. A little while ago, I was sitting in a plaza by Calle Larga, the biggest street in the old town, when I saw a familiar figure walking down the street in my direction. After a moment I realized it was Victoire, the French girl that I’d spent a day with in Medellín, then run into in San Agustin, and again in Otovalo, where we hiked around a crater lake together. I called her name and she recognized me right away and came and sat down. This was the fourth time we’d crossed paths, which makes her the most-seen fellow traveller on my journey.
We’d split up in Otovalo with some strange vibes that I didn’t understand, but I was delighted to see her again and she seemed to share the sentiment. Seeing her again was some kind of confirmation that I was on the right track. We sat there on the bench for an hour, trading travel stories. She had a bandage on her foot and explained that while working as a volunteer at a hostel in Chugchilan on the Quilotoa Loop, she’d poured a pot of burning oil on it. Two weeks before, I had unknowingly walked right by her hostel. She had now spent a month longer in Ecuador than she’d planned, and was shortly heading for Peru, but by a different route than me. It turned out we were both thinking about going to see the ruins of Ingapirca the next morning, so we said goodbye knowing that perhaps we’d see each other again shortly.
I felt like I could probably eat food for the first time in thirty hours, and got a delicious cheese and avocado sandwich on focaccia bread. Feeling encouraged after seeing a friend, and restored with food in my system, I took a long walk across town. Through the more modern section, over bridges across two more little rivers, the Rios Yanuncay and Tarqui, then waiting for a break in traffic to cross a highway. In my weakened state, I just barely had enough energy to climb the 581 steps to the Mirador de Turi, where a little chapel looks over the whole valley atop a hill. Sat exhausted among families and Ecuadoran tourists, admiring a fine view of an excellent city.
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Late afternoon, riding the bus back to Cuenca from Ingapirca, the most significant archeological site in Ecuador. A little curving road through wide gently sloping valleys, green quilted mountains, patchwork of potatoes and purple-stalked corn, pasture land with sheep and cows. A mostly empty bus. Thick low-slung cloud cover emanating up from the valley bottom. Today I saw my first Inca site, and the impressions from it are still running through my mind.
Woke up early this morning, and after tea, walked twenty blocks out to the Terminal Terrestre. Wandering around looking for the correct ticket counter, I discovered Victoire in the midst of the same process. We had run into each other for the second day in a row, though this time it was not unexpected. We were both pleased to see each other, and happy to take an excursion together. We located the company that goes up to the ruins, bought tickets with ten minutes to spare for the last bus of the day, and found a couple seats together near the back.
It was a nice peaceful ride through a little bit of Azuay province and a lot of Cañar, rolling countryside hills, sun fighting a battle for the day with heavy grey clouds. Out here the indigenous women wear felt bowler hats, white with the brim lined in black, maybe some kind of an embroidered flower on the band. While this 1920’s fashion was still a strange juxtaposition with their traditional hand-sewn clothing, at least these were antiquated hats for women, as opposed to some of the strange black stovepipes and fedoras women wear in the north. Victoire and I talked and talked and it was good to have company after so many hours on buses alone; later she slept and I looked out the window.
We arrived at Ingapirca at eleven, and soon after we were on a group tour of the site, which we were delighted to learn was included in the ticket price. Supposedly there were English tours, but none available at the moment, so we took one in Spanish. The guide spoke clearly, if not slowly, and I was able to pick up the majority of what she said as we walked around a little broken plateau sectioned off by the foundations of stone walls in geometric designs, surrounded by green hills.
This had been a ceremonial site, along with some agriculture and housing for the people who maintained it, set on two small adjacent flat-topped hills, with curving terraces and ritual baths below. Each of the hills had the foundations of large buildings: one the Cañari-built Templo de la Luna, the other the Incan Templo del Sol. Both were stone constructions — the Cañari used tan-colored naturally rounded river rocks with mortar to make their circular buildings. The Incas cut and quarried grayish granite blocks, fitted perfectly without the use of any adhesive, to build rectangular buildings with trapezoidal doorways and niches for the placement of sacred objects.
Though in my youth I had read about and idealized the Incas, by this point my feelings towards them had cooled considerably. For the last seven weeks I have been in what was once Tahuantisuyo, their name for their empire of the four directions, in places they took by force late in their reign. Traveling ever closer to the heart of their lands, I have encountered repeated stories of their brutal conquest, which make them seem not unlike the Spanish.
It seems that if it existed today I would be deeply opposed to almost everything about their empire. We talk about problems of inequality: here was the most extreme form of feudalism with an absolute (divine) monarchy at its head and absolutely zero rights for common people. This was a militaristic culture of expansion and conquest, subjugation, slavery. Peoples that resisted their rule were treated with vicious cruelty; their cultures outlawed; forced to re-settle in far off lands. Even those who accepted being absorbed into their ever-growing empire were subject to long periods of forced labor each year and a potential tribute of their children as servants to the nobility or worse, human sacrifice. Growing up I had always seen the Incas as good and the conquering Spanish evil, but now I wasn’t able to find that much of a difference between the two.
All that said, when I finally came into contact with my first Inca building, I couldn’t help but be inspired. The base of the Templo del Sol, built atop Cañari terraced foundations, is made of perfectly cut grey granite stones with some kind of copper in them, so that they have a green hue. The stone blocks are about a cubic foot, fit together so well that five hundred years later, it is the rare place that you could fit a piece of paper between.
The structure, somewhat reminiscent of the hull of a ship, which was only the base for the temple, is about ten feet tall. Each of the stones is slightly curved on the outside, so that while each block is mostly flat, somehow the shape imperceptibly curves and gradually forms an elliptical shape about a hundred feet long, with sharper curves at the stern and bow. On each end of the platform above were open platforms for ceremonies and astronomical observation. The temple structure itself, of which only one A-shaped wall remains, had two doors on each side, where the sun would shine directly through on the summer and winter solstices.
The Spanish must have admired this structure, too, as it is the only one on the site that they didn’t disassemble for use in their villas and churches. Although perhaps that was only because the stones were so well-fitted they weren’t actually able to pry them apart. The guide showed us one place where much later, the Spanish, looking for buried treasure, had been forced to use dynamite to break through the base, only to find solid rock below. I have never seen stone-work like this. It is otherworldly. Whatever their faults as a society there was obviously some greatness, some genius about these humans.
The tour was relatively short, maybe half an hour, and afterwards Victoire and I took a hike down into the canyon below, to see some more of the sights. A lunar calendar carved into a boulder, with twelve little depressions that, when filled with water, would reflect each of the full moons in a year. Stone canals that led to now-dry boulder fountains with serpentine cut channels. A peculiar cliff face that maybe was the carved face of an Inca, and maybe a natural phenomenon.
Once we got back to the top it was time for Victoire to catch her bus. Ever on the move, she was heading for the beaches of northern Peru that night. I told her to look me up if she came to Arequipa, having given her the name of my school, and we said goodbye. We’d spent time together in two countries and three cities, and never even exchanged any contact information. It all just happened, and it seemed perfect that way. Perhaps I’d see her again in a couple weeks, perhaps not ever again. I was in no rush to get anywhere; sat on a rock slab that had waterways cut into it and admired the view, missing her already.
After a not-bad lunch of trucha con arroz, I walked through the museum, then took the tour of the site again, this time in English. It turned out I’d understood most of it the first time, but now I was able to ask deeper questions. Like, why did the Cañari decide to put their ceremonial site here, when there were hills and mountains in every direction? Cristian, my guide, a young man from the village who’d studied at university in Cuenca, had an answer which far exceeded my expectations.
The Cañari (and Inca) were people that walked the land, always looking for energetic centers. He pointed out several geographic factors: apus — sacred mountains — with names and personalities, in each of the four cardinal directions, which he confirmed with the compass on his phone. See that mountain there? That is so-and-so, due north of here. Then that one…and so forth. There are rivers to the north and south with a confluence below us due west. Beneath the Templo del Sol there is a giant boulder that was considered the anchor of energy of the place. Finally, the harder curves of the elliptical foundation were the range of solstice points at sunrise and sunset. My god. This spot, which had seemed somewhat random to me, was chosen for myriad precise geographical and astronomical reasons. I appreciated his passion and pride in his ancestors, and thanked him for it.
Energy center or no, riding the bus back I find myself energized and invigorated after some hours in the footsteps of the ancients. I came in steeled against the Incas, but it took exactly one structure for me to start admiring them again. It was more than a building: there was so much craft and knowledge and awareness of the universe built into it. Tomorrow morning I will see what’s left of their Pumapongo Temple in the center of Cuenca, and then take an afternoon bus six hours south to Vilcabamba, my last stop in Ecuador, not far from the border with Peru.
