3/10/06
CUZCO, PERU

Cajamarca is an airy, tile-roofed city that throws water on you during Carnaval. The plazas are full of people slathered in paint and jumping up and down in circles around drums, everyone yelling the same song ("Cajamarca Cajamarca"), over and over, or perhaps nonstop. Sidewalk rowdies bring you into the circuit of a liter of pilsner and a communal glass. When done with the glass you dash the foam onto the street, and then a bashful young woman is being pushed your way for a dance, and the parade is going by whamming on drums and blowing brass and whirling around in gaudy costumes. On the fringes of town you'll find campesinos bouncing in eye-masks and giant straw hats to galloping flutes and drums.

Cajamarca is where the Incas first met the Spanish. In the middle of town is the room where the emperor Atahualpa was held for ransom. It was closed for Carnaval; you had to extract yourself from the city to get touristy. Out in the countryside are ancient burial niches and canals carved into volcanic rock. From gap-walled houses you can hear the peeps of guinea pigs, which sound like questions: "?...??...?" A hotel keeper asked me what I thought of guinea pig (as food), and I admitted that they don't have much meat. He shook his head, smiling, "All the gringos say that."

The road back to Trujillo sways along with a tumultuous river through mountain pastures and rice paddies (rice paddies: disorienting). The queasy nun sitting next to me asked to switch seats and promptly flung her head out the window. From busy hot Trujillo I went to Chimbote, a city that reeks from its fish processing plants. Its claim to scenery is a gray salty hump in the ocean called White Island, surrounded by a thousand rickety fishing boats. South of there is broiling Casma, where you can take a cheap motocarro to the site of Sechín. Sechín dates back 3,500 years and is carved with rapturously gruesome war scenes. In the museum were mummified hands tattooed like jaguar skin.

In Lima I slept off the delirium of an overnight bus. After three visits, I can call Lima a budging, standoffish, incompetent city that brings out the worst of my culture shock. But now I could leave Lima without ever going back, was headed for Cuzco via the mountains. Ayacucho was my first stop, a churchy city formerly held by Shining Path guerrillas. Then there was Andahuaylas, a friendly little town with a huge Sunday market. The riverside street becomes a blue-tarped bazaar with whole pigs laid out on tables, stalls of costume jewelry, cockfight DVDs, men fixing transistor radios, heaps of watermelons, women frying chickens, and anything else that a local could buy or sell. Near town, the terraced stronghold of the Chankas overlooks a quiet lake.

The mountain road to Cuzco is spectacular. It winds through massive green folds over flowering ravines and oceans of clouds. Ridges glow in yellow sunshine while dark snowpeaks jag the horizon. Quechuan farmers stand up from their hoes to watch you go by. Near Cuzco, the bus's violence subsides as the road becomes paved and two-laned. Curves no longer slope outwards as if to tumble you off. Your water bottle is bulging from the altitude, and the scenery is, impossibly, getting even better.

Cuzco is beautiful. Orange from a distance (Peruvian towns look the color of the local clay), it drapes over a bowl-shaped valley surrounded by mountains. Baroque churches light up its center, some built on the Herculean stonework of Inca palaces and temples. It's touristy but comfortably so-- maybe I'm just at the right point in my trip for eating pizza with gringos and waving money around. It's an easy place to lose a week or three, and I'll have to write about it later. Leaving tomorrow morning for four days on the Inca Trail, going to see Machu Picchu.