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.