Machu Picchu

The train to Machu Picchu seats exclusively. Local Peruvian Car: 3 dollars. Backpacker Car: 31 dollars. De facto segregation. I was never offered the Peruvian car, though technically I am a Peruvian resident and it should be offered to me. White face. White place. Backpacker car. The rationale is that the service in the backpacker car, which includes a seat and a small cart that offers beverages, costs more. I guess it makes sense. The Peruvian car only offers the seat. Beverage cart service mark up: 28 dollars. To be ironically fair, there were Peruvians in the Backpacker Car. Wealthy ones. So the segregation is therefore not racist, not blatant bigotry. It's the economically stimulated kind, ala los Estados Unidos, that makes sure that the haves and the have-nots don't kanoodle with one another. Kanoodling may lead to sharing, understanding. Mixing.

I sit back in my seat. "Coca-Cola please."

Arrival to Aguas Calientes, tourist dumping grounds. Get off the train. Go to the exit.

"Hostal. Hostal. 20 Soles. 15 soles. Hostal. Hot Water. Warm water. Water. You get your own room my friend. You get nice bed my friend. You get laid my friend. 10 soles. Hostal. 5 soles hostal. Just right here, my friend. Right around the corner, my friend. Real close, my friend. Hostal Numero Uno. Hostal Las Palmas. Hostal Machu Picchu. Right this way, my friend."

I go with the 15 soles hostal. I'm lead over a bridge. In the river below, trash pools dance like cans on the back of a newlywed limosine. In the corner of my eye I see the first class train arrive. Hostal workers scatter, replaced by men in suits holding signs with names typed in Arial Black.

"Here's your room, my friend."

"Hablo español."

"Yes. Very good my friend. Here's your room. 15 soles."

"Hay agua caliente?"

"Yes my friend. Hot water. Very comfortable. 15 soles."

I pay the cash. 5 hours of train and collectivo travel thus far. My stomach aches from starchy traveling foods. I just want a bed. I go into the bathroom. No toilet paper. Shit. Check the shower. No hot water.

4:30am. Wake up to hike to Machu Picchu. Catch the sunrise to see the paradise at the same moment when God will wake up and look at it again. Throw some cold water on my face. Choke down a granola bar and some yogurt. Grab my bag and I'm off down the street. The river churns, rages, growls and swallows the morning drizzle. GoreTex jackets already flood the streets. The bus stop is speckled with North Face, Marmot, Mountain Hardware logos. I move down the street to hike up to the ruins. Bus price: 20 dollars. Walking price: a sweaty shirt and a red face. The trail cuts through tropical forest, up steep granite steps, until an opening where the road comes in. Vvvrrrooooom! A bus flies by. Cross the street. Up the steps. Lush tropical forest. Candy wrappers and discarded plastic bottles. Road. Vvvrrroooom! Bus number two. I pick up the pace. Lush tropical forest. Granite steps. Pass a pasty white german. Pass a Limeño dressed in designer jeans. Get behind a Peruvian kid moving fast, lithe. Try to catch him. Tropical Forest. Granite steps. Almost get to him. Vvvrrrrrrooooom! Road. The kid prances elegantly up the steps across the road. I catch my breath. Last twenty meters. Ten. Five. Machu Picchu, one of the most beautiful places on earth. The line behind the green control station stretches for miles. This isn't even tourist season.

I wipe the sweat from my face and stand in line. Paradise seems to be a relative term and I am flabbergasted by the amount of tourists here. I get angry. Natural beauty should not be bastardized like this. Paradise should not have a line for miles. The masses change form. They become parasitic, filthy, ugly creatures, draining the life force, the magic out of Machu Picchu. The line morphes into a refuse bleeding tube sucking at the entrance of the archeological site. I stand critical, furious that I wasted my time and energy to arrive at the feeding grounds of the gluttonous gringo. And no matter how consciously I critisize, I too become the fat, hungry tourist. I blend into the bleeding tube and I wait my turn to bastardize beauty.

I enter and flee to higher places. A view. An escape. Something to be different. To honor the place. To witness beauty without the judgement of how it is, but rather what it is.

I get to a vista. Mist covers everything. I see no other people. The mist is too thick.

Amidst the mist I become cleansed. We all become cleansed. Our filth and parasitic nature is slowly sloughed off of our shoulders and we find a place to sit and wait. I forgive myself and ask forgiveness from the masses. The mist lifts. It's beautiful.

I cannot concieve of a world where Machu Picchu exists as nothing but a memory. For it to be a real sanctuary, a secret in the Peruvian Andes for nobles and gods, means that I must detach from any world that I can understand. I have to believe in a reality where stones can be hauled up mountain sides, where masonry work done with ancient tools is more precise than with modern ones. To understand Machu Picchu I have to understand that man can coexist with his natural surroundings and that man can create something as beautiful as the peaks that God created around the area. There is no way for my ignorant mind to be able to understand a live Machu Picchu. I settle instead for what I see before me. I realize that all of us are there to know that beauty. There is no fault in that.

I spend a few hours at Machu Picchu. I climb the peak that rests behind it. I get rained on on my return to Aguas Calientes. I feel better though. Tired, but better. I am heppy to have sat in the rising mist at Machu Picchu. I'll probably never go back.

Blog Entry Turned Rant

THIS IS A KIND OF EXPERIMENT. THIS STARTED OFF AS A SIMPLE BLOG UPDATE AND TURNED INTO A SORT OF RANT. I THINK IT IS HONEST THOUGH AND SO I AM LEAVING IT IN ITS ORIGINAL FORM AS A GLIMPSE INTO THE KIND OF WHIRLWIND OF EMOTIONS THIS KIND OF LIFESTYLE CAN BRING ON.


Look at the beautiful peaks of the Cordillera Blanca from the waste choked banks of the Rio Santa. Ranrapalca. Ocshapalca. Vallenaraju. Sucker wrappers and soiled pampers. Dead trout suffocating on plastic bags. Walk through the campo and see vibrantly dressed Quechua women clean their clothes in concrete ditches. Watch hummingbirds sniff at honey suckles while the scent of human feces arises behind adobe houses. Listen to the educated, inspired private school teacher drone monotonously to his class, producing facts like a copier produces worksheets. See the world traveling, adventurous gringo in his cookie cutter home in a gated community.

I have sought balance here in the Andes—a balance that would usher in happiness, wisdom and truth. But there have been few instances of equilibrium in my year and a half living in Huaraz. Hardly any really. I have lived jumping between stark contrasts and culture shocks with fear that any misstep would mean slipping into an abyss. But perhaps that is the nature of Peru.

I am starting to measure the value of my time here, though I acknowledge that I am too ignorant to really understand how this will affect me. For each amazing experience I see a dramatic opposite that rests beside it. I loved working with my students, learning how to teach well in this completely different culture. I loved seeing that my students could improve drastically in their English simply through engaging them in different projects that kept them motivated and needing to use the language. But I hated working from 7:30 to 6:00 for most of the year. I hated that teachers saw me as an idiot because my methods did not include worksheets and rote memorization. I hated the conservative Catholic school, how the religious infrastructure supported ignorance rather than destroyed it. I never understood how teachers could piously clasp their hands together in weekly prayer and then use those same hands to grab students by the neck and shake them as a discipline technique.

This land is beautiful. To sit and stare at the glaciated peaks of the Cordillera Blanca is to be a witness to true beauty—nothing filtered down, or airbrushed. They are awe inspiring muses. When I walk with my friends through the campo at the base of the colossal mountains I feel lucky to be able to brush shoulders with a culture so different than my own. Though most of my days are spent locked up in the affluent community of El Pinar, my weekend forays take me through small villages of adobe huts and small farms called chacras. I have learned a few phrases in Quechua to be able to greet villagers. They always smile and laugh at the gringo that has somehow picked up the language of the Incas. When they respond back, they realize that those single phrases are all I know. How are you? Pretty sheep. Shut up dog. It doesn’t do much good for holding a conversation, but it does do wonders for making a cross-cultural connection. Somehow those three phrases allow me to sit with women who are sun wrinkled and toothless, who wear bright red and green dresses and carry babies in equally vibrant blankets. I can exist with them as something other that a tourist. I am certainly not Peruvian, and certainly not Quechua, but I have been fortunate enough to slip into an existence where I feel a part of this place. I believe that that feeling only comes with the act of living in a country and cannot be achieved by simply passing through. And I feel blessed that that connection includes those women and the surrounding mountains.

But it’s time to leave. I can’t take a single moment more of pretending to do work when I have finished everything and I still have three hours left before I punch out. When your day consists of hours in front of a computer screen (because that is really the only thing that looks like work here) to be followed by hours in front of a television screen after work because it rains every afternoon, you’ve lost something that makes you human. In the last few days I have taken up drawing again because my soul screams for something creative. I want to break from the routine and I have found art as a needed outlet. Travel is my next step.

It is funny how blinding any lifestyle can be. When I lived in my truck as a climbing bum, I got used to it and considered it good. And there were good lessons in it. But as a climbing bum it is easy to become consumed by that culture to the point that you can get stuck. You are prevented from expanding beyond that because it is what you know and what you are comfortable with and expansion would mean discomfort. Likewise, as I stash more money into my pockets than I have ever had, as I am honored as a great teacher (and still criticized at the same time), as I go home to a two story house and cable t.v. I see myself growing comfortable, and becoming blind at the same time. My dilemma is however, that I recognize that I learn best by being challenged, drastically challenged. And challenge brings with it struggle and pain, suffering. And when I am not challenged, when I settle for a bit, I also feel pain, I feel struggle, I suffer. I am stuck in a lifestyle catch twenty two. But the only relief is when things are new, are different, are exciting. Then I have the strength to endure and to become stronger. And so I must move, I must find what is different, what is exciting, because if I don’t I exist as a listless shell of a man. I lose my passion, my Self.

Bring on the next adventure. Let us dust off the weight of boredom and malaise that will bind us to mediocrity. Let us live our excitement and passion to the point where we make mistakes and from those mistakes we learn. For Christ’s sake let us learn. Let us learn as we are meant to: as innately curious creatures who crave new and exciting experiences. As explorers of the world. As human beings.

The Denver Daydream

Peru was just a daydream. It wasn’t even a normal night dream where sometimes the dream flirts so closely with reality that life and dream blend to form an alternate existence. No, this was no such dream. In the first moment of being in Denver again, after a year and two months in Peru, I felt like Peru had never actually happened. Peru was an ephemeral glimmer of what might have been had I chosen to leave, had I actually been willing to move to South America.

The experience was surreal. Nothing in Denver was different than when I had left. I could have been gone just a day or an afternoon. All the experiences in Peru, the friends, the sicknesses, the struggle to find a job, the move into a new house, the language development, the food and the discussions with campesinos were fleeting thoughts. I had been tricked. There I was again drinking delicious Colorado microbrews with friends, climbing in Eldorado Canyon, eating giant burritos. It felt natural. It felt like my life. Whoever had deceived me into thinking that I had lived in Peru had done a good job. Perhaps I was slipped some sort of hallucinogenic cactus drink that made me believe in the reality of my trip.

The return was like curling up in a childhood blanket. I felt sedated by how comfortable everything was. There was nothing challenging to face, no arguments to have with taxi drivers or stomach cramps from food. I was sublimely happy and eager to regain consciousness from the daydream.

“I already had a snack!” Baby Hands was still a little curmudgeon who already acted like a child though he’s almost thirty-one now. I quickly picked up on how hilarious his comment was and mimicked him with an almost exact impression. His laugh in response echoed of old times where that back and forth between us happened at least a dozen times each day. His girlfriend Leah, the caretaker of all of our needs was at it again, organizing outings and planning what bars to visit each night. Her planning, which included copious amounts of drinking, left me with a weaker liver but an everlasting smile. And as if the events themselves were not entertaining enough, she would pepper the days and nights with hugs of welcome, expressing joy for the fact that we were all together again. Her title for our group of friends was “the family”, and she was the matriarch that kept us together.

One of our outings was to Indian Creek, Utah, where crags of red sandstone jut out of dry earth. Though the trip was long and was made more arduous by a case of a motion sickness, panic induced broken ankle (that’s a whole other story) the time was passed by reuniting with my friends. By day we would climb parallel cracks in the beautiful rock. By night, as I sat next to my old climbing partner Ethan in the back of Tom’s Tacoma, we would make endless jokes that would deliver cramps as we tried to recover our breathes from laughter. Ethan’s wit was too much to take at times and I thought I would lose consciousness from laughing so hard. The amount of joy created during those campfires was enough to keep me happy through whatever future challenge I might face.

I felt lucky to be able to return when other friends were in town as well. Pete, the guru of big wall climbing and my first partner up El Cap, brought his wonderful girlfriend Kate into our world of sardonic humor. Poor Kate. She handled us well though and as Pete and I passed beers back and forth I felt like I was a climbing bum again…I had slipped into another daydream, this time, away from my Peruvian life. The Denver daydream included Texans that preferred Miller Light to a Colorado microbrew, climbing gyms with ego infused boulderers, and dogs that did not have rocks thrown at them when they barked at you. It included clean streets and a consciousness of safety that was so strong that it elicited fear. It was America again, complete with water fountains and organized traffic patterns.

The Denver daydream grew strong, tossing me into thoughts of impermanence. I felt like I didn’t exist anywhere, neither in Peru nor in the States. I was ghostlike. As I sat down to dinner with my parents and my aunt, everything appeared like a silly fantasy where I could act without connection to any sort of reality. I talked about life and Peru with my Dad, without really feeling the connection to Peru. It was as if I spoke in theory: ‘Had I been in Peru, this would have happened to me’, rather than about facts about my life. My mom offered support as I moved around the city trying to visit friends as much as possible. I felt like I was neglecting family and the excuse of “there’s so much to do”, though true, didn’t seem like a good enough reason. In the end I felt that I couldn’t maximize time with anyone, a feeling that further pushed me into the dream state. I was happy to be able to see my grandmother, if only for a brief period, and to visit other people I consider family though there is no genealogical connection between us. It was an interlude, a rest between adventures. But it was fleeting.

The whole experience begged the question, “What if I had stayed in the States?” I am constantly torn by this question and as I live out this life it seems like that opposing reality unravels itself next to me on its own separate path. I imagine myself either teaching at a school in Denver or as a climbing bum living in my truck. Both potential realities have benefits and also have drawbacks. But the biggest problem I have with both is that they are lives that I have already known and grown comfortable with. The amount of challenge and learning I find living abroad is exponential to what I find living those other lives. It is my desire for learning and challenge that keeps me away from the States, though this trip taught me that the States can still teach me an incredible amount of new lessons. In my time there I rediscovered true generosity and kindness. I connected with friendships that last despite my absence and I found that my home, in its people and places, is still there to support me though I have distanced myself. These are lessons that I take with me into my future travels, lessons that have given me the tools to live this life deliberately and consciously.

I’ve awoken from my daydreams. I’m back at work, back to my routine. But in about two months I’ll be leaving Peru. I’m off to travel for about 6 months before looking for a new job, this time in Brazil. I’m excited to slip into that dream.

SEE SOME PICS FROM THE TRIP HERE

1 Year

I left the U.S. on August 1st, 2008. A year ago.

Even as I write now I know I have no profound reflection of my time here, no epiphany that I have arrived to after 365 days. I am just as lost as when I arrived.

What I have been able to do in my time here, as day after day have gone by, is compare my life as it is and as I desire it to be to a life that may have been if I would have stayed in The Sates.

It seems (as the world or my society tells me) that at this point in my life I am supposed to have some direction, some stabilization. I should be moving with steps in the direction of career, or plan. Yet, daily I realize that I have no desire for stabilization, and that my direction is multi-dimensional.

In a constant effort to create my individual life the only thing that has meaning is following whatever I am passionate about at the moment I am capable of realizing that passion. On any given day I might want to go teach in Brazil, travel through the Andes on horseback, paint and write in Barcelona, be a dirtbag climber in The States or Europe, travel through Japan, China, India. I want to fall in love with beautiful women. I want to be alone in the mountains. I want to finish my projects with my students. I want to start new projects. I want to learn a new language. I want to adapt to a new culture. I want to discover and know true beauty. I want to never have to work again. I want to teach. I want to learn. I want to live happy.

I am realizing that the more I live like this, wandering and teaching, the more I lose my desire to live within the conventional. All of my desires, all that I am passionate about, keep me moving and wanting more. I think of what my future life could be, of all the things I could do or could try to do, and I want to make them all happen. It seems that perhaps I have made a plan then: live pursuing my passion, whatever it may be at the time.

May this first year be the beginning of a life of constant movement toward new adventures around the world. I smile to think of where I might be next year.

-Josh

Better Late than Never

I know, I know. It's been awhile. One of the realities of living in Peru is that it is hard for me to load pictures on the internet. My disability to do so has more to do with my really crappy computer than with Peru, but regardless, posts take longer to create. I have been working on the following post for about a month, waiting for my computer to work, and then waiting the ten minutes for each photo to load. But now you have something to feast your eyes on.

Here's the post about my 8 day trek through the Huayhuash range of the Andes

Hope you enjoy.

Opportunity Knocks..then runs away.

I was hoping that the next post would be to tell of you that I was published online for Glimpse.org. I was waiting through the publishing process in hopes of getting a final draft put on the website. However, I was recently informed that my piece didn't work as a Feature piece, and therefor would not be published. So back to the drawing board.

Below is the piece that I was going to submit.

Quechua Elbow Grease

A dense blanket of fog always comes in midday at Hatun Machay, Peru. The locals know that there is a pattern to the weather: first fog, then cold, then rain. It’s the wet season so it’s fair to expect to get wet. The best thing to do is hide out at the mountain refuge, seeking shelter, honing bread making techniques, or taking up a local sheepherder on a game of chess. There are few other options in the area, a land of volcanic rock outcroppings and small shepherd huts that sit at nearly thirteen thousand feet above sea level. As a teacher in the nearby chaos of Huaraz, Hatun is my destination for escape and relaxation. While there, I try to avoid all forms of forced labor.

In those high peaks of the Andes the rain was normal. The stalled car that we encountered outside the refuge however, was not. While waiting to pick up some locals, a taxista fell asleep with his lights still on. At the time of departure the turn of his key only led to a brief electric click, and then silence. The result was four old Quechua women, wrapped in bright pink and turquoise blankets, getting ready to push the taxi up a hill. The idea was that once at the top they could get the vehicle rolling and bump start it. The rain started to come down harder.

My experience in Peru had taught me that Quechua women, though they sometimes looked frail and weak, were tough as nails. They would barter with unwavering determination in the markets, and in the campo were always seen hauling massive loads of crops on their backs. The four that gathered around the beat up Toyota station wagon were no exception to the rule. They hiked up their elaborately inlaid dresses, revealing their thick, long underwear-like panty hose beneath, and started pushing.

The thought of pushing a car up a muddy road did not appeal to me. But the four old ladies were giving it a good effort and I couldn’t let myself, a fit, self-described ‘mountain man’, just sit there and watch. I came up beside them and lent a hand.

To my right was Antonieta, a shepherdess who I had befriended previously at Hatun when I returned her lost lamb that I had discovered among the rocks. She was one of those souls that you meet in a foreign country that instantly makes you realize how blessed you are to be there. Her hands are chestnut brown and calloused from a lifetime of labor. Her sun hardened cheeks meet stretching crow’s feet that branch out from the corners of her eyes; eyes that are dark and profound. She is beautiful in the same way as the natural stone around her: hard and imposing, but an integral part of the landscape.

Slowly, in the pouring rain, we began the slough of moving the taxi.

Antioneta shouted something to me in Quechua. I failed to grasp the clucking of hard Ks and Gs. The extent of my Quechua only covers the phrases “How are you” and “Pretty sheep”. Since her shouts revealed nothing that my Quechua repertoire could comprehend, I assumed she was saying something along the lines of, “C’mon gringo, push!” Embarrassingly, it seemed that the old Quechua ladies were giving the job more elbow grease than I could muster up. I dug my soaked shoes into the mud and heaved with all my might. The car began to move slowly as the four women and myself treaded the wet earth with the united goal of getting the car to the top of the hill.
I, a gringo in a bright blue GoreTex jacket, pressed against the back of the car between four pink and green bundles of strength and vigor adorned in traditional sombreros. It was a Peruvian cultural experience beyond the expected, yet it was almost quintessentially Peru. I was in the misty rain of the high Andes, among the native people, and dealing with the realities of terrible public transportation. In fact in all my time working in Peru, I had never combined all of those Peruvian cultural elements into one single experience. Suddenly, the pushing didn’t seem so bad. I looked at Antioneta, grunting through the motions of moving the car, and smiled at her. She looked back at me with a stern, fierce gaze and said in Spanish, “Didn’t I tell you to push gringo?”

The trudge was slow, laborious. My expensive trekking shoes, supposedly designed for rugged mountain environments, slipped with every other step, causing me to face plant into the cold wet earth. The old women in their clog like shoes made of old tire rubber and leather, moved with firm footing. I expected that with each of my falls the women would no longer be able to push since my great strength was lacking as a force to get the car to the top of the hill. But they continued, without slowing their pace or wavering in the slightest. I watched their clogged feet walk by as I lifted my muddy body from the ground.

After half an hour of pushing we made it to the top. The taxista jumped into the driver’s seat and Antioneta, myself and the others gave one more good push to get the car rolling downhill. Within a few seconds the car had enough momentum to try and bump start it. The taxista shifted into second, released the clutch, and the car lurched to life, coughing exhaust from its rumbling muffler. We all cheered at our success, and the women gathered their things and threw them into the now functional vehicle.

“Gracias gringo,” Antioneta said to me with a smile.
“No hay de que” I responded, letting her know that there was no reason to say thanks.

The four women said goodbye and hopped aboard the taxi. I turned to reunite myself with the warmth of the refuge. They continued down the hill, disappearing into the mist.

The Real World?

I am very sorry to admit:

1) I work from 7:50 until 6:00, Monday through Friday.
2) I have a two story house and cable television (both given to me for free by the school).
3) I live in a suburban, cookie cutter home neighborhood (because of the free house).
4) I haven't climbed all week.
5) I am on this link
6) I made more money last month than I have made in the past year and a half (yes, I am sorry about this).

It seems I am a member of the real world now. However, the list of good, non-real world things is:

1) I am surrounded by 15,000+ ft peaks.
2) Quechua ladies say hello to me in the campo when I go climbing.
3) I have learned 6 words/phrases in Quechua in order to respond back (then the women giggle at me)
4) The climbing I have found and do get to do is world class, no joke.
5) I now know how to get great deals at the open air market that originally had vendors that would take advantage of me.
6) My Spanish has vastly improved.
7) I am many students' favorite teacher.
8) The school administration still thinks I am a rebel (but is happy to have me).
9) I'm in flippin' Peru!
10) This was a dream I had a year ago, and I am living it.

Not bad. Still happy to be here.

....but my head is filled with a lot of new, wild adventures once this one is over. I can't wait to get them started.

Friend's Visit Peru & Cochamó

I've been out of touch the last few weeks. I guess to live adventures one has to disappear for awhile. I was on summer vacation and was fortunate enough to have friends visit from The States before I went to Chile and Argentina for the remainder of my time off. It was good to get to know this new road, on this new continent, and explore.

In Chile, I was impacted greatly by my experience in a remote climbing area called Cochamó. It was a perfect trip. I have written most about that experience.

Below are links to two parts of my adventure: Friend's Visiting in Peru & Cochamó.

Crew Visits Peru

Cochamó