Making friends and taking a 4x4 adventure

Okay, I realize this is a really long entry. So, in order to keep some short attention span people interested I´ve provided a table of contents with a brief description of each section, which will then appear in bold in the body of the entry in case you want to read further. For a much more complete collection of photos go here. Enjoy!

Overview

Making friends and getting an outing planned: I met some people two Spaniards, Laia and German, as well as a Brit by the name of Tom. Yay, friends! They convinced me to go on a 4x4 trip into the deep and mysterious el Canon de Pato.

My fascination with the Quechua: I never thought I would be so interested in the native peoples of Peru, the Quechua. As a whole very shy and proud, they regard cameras as instuments of evil and so I have very, very few pictures of them. The women are beautiful, but you have to read further in order to find out exactly why this is so, although I admit that I can´t really explain it. I am now reading everything that I can possibly find about these people. More to come!

The journey into el Canon de Pato: My friends and I take a 4x4 journey north of Huaraz and into the deep and rugged el Canon de Pato. The road is narrow, dusty, bumpy, steep and has a several hundred foot drop on one side. If this wasn´t fun enough, the road travels through 35 tunnels on its way to the town of Huallanca.

The sad, sad town of Huallanca: Huallanca is a factory town of Duke Energy, which has a small hydrelectric dam in the canyon. For some reason, the company forced all of the families to leave the village and now only allows the workers themselves to live their full time. This makes for one of the saddest scenes that I´ve ever seen, complete with completely empty playgrounds and ballfields, eerily quiet streets, no women or children, one store with nearly empty shelves that reeks of human urine and an elderly man who runs the story by himself with only one friend in town, constantly missing the families customers that he had once known. I would recommend to never go to this place, it will only make you angry, confused and, most of all, sad.

If you´re interested.......

Making friends and getting an outing planned

The last day and a half in Huaraz has treated me very well. I moved to a hostel with more of a social scene (Albergue Churup), a maneuver that has paid off quite well. My first night there I met a Spanish couple by the name of Laia and German as well as a Brit by the name of Tom. The three of them had met on the bus ride up from Lima. Laia and German immediately invited me to join themselves and Tom on a 4x4 excursion approximately 80km north of Huaraz to a place called Canon del Pato. Initially I resisted, as my share of the truck rental would run somewhere around $25. So, come morning I made some lame excuse about having a meeting with a guide company at 5pm that afternoon (true), but to my surprise they simply promised to make it back in time. Not having a secondary excuse in hand, I said fuck all and agreed to go. Oh, what a fortuitous decision this was.
After an amazing breakfast prepared by the hostel staff (I´m really roughing in town here) we set out to get the car. I was expecting a beat up old Isuzu Trooper or something of that ilk, but instead found that we´d hired a nearly new 4 door Mitsubishi pickup truck replete with rally bars and lights (which as I´ve mentioned before is standard issue around these parts). So, with German behind the wheel, we set off for a day of motoring.

My fascination with the Quechua

Once out of Huaraz the types of people we saw changed dramatically. Whereas in Huaraz much of the population comprises of indigenas (an all encompassing term for Peruvian natives), most of the women do not wear the traditional garb. Interestingly enough, it is only the women who wear distinctive clothing, whereas the men dress like any other Peruvian Joe on the street. Anyway, the traditional dress consist of a broad skirt down to the knees (often striped or in a light pink or blue), full length stockings (often wool and apparently handknit), button up collared shirt with subtle frills down the front, light colored cardigan sweater, large bright colored shawl tied over the shoulders, very bright wool overcoat reaching to the knees and, to top it all off, a broad brimmed (think cowboy) hat with an enormous crown and a feather like decoration or flowers on the side. For style, as if they don´t have enough already, the women, especially the younger ones, will have their hats tilted slight to to the side (think how soldiers in the movies ALWAYS have their helmets tilted).
Unfortunately, I have very few pictures of the indigena women as they are very shy for the most part and tend to regard the camera as an evil device capable of stealing their souls. For example, Laia asked one of these women, who was carrying her baby in a sling, very politely and gently if she could take a picture of her. Not only did the woman say no, she covered her child´s face and began running down the street. Due to in no small part to this experience, I will never even ask to take a picture of these women. The few pictures that I do have so far were taken from a great distance, and I now often wonder if tainted soul will ever be able to rest after having taken such photos.
I must say that the indigena women are absolutely beautiful in a very strange sort of way, despite their quite stocky build and tendency to have several teeth capped in silver or just missing outright. Nonetheless, whatever they lack in looks they more than make up for in sheer presence. It´s just something in the way that they carry and conduct themselves that forces you to sit up and take notice. This is not to mention the deceptive strength which they posses. On our car trip, German pulled over to offer a ride to an indigena woman who looked to be about 70 or so. She was sitting on a massive bag of what turned out to be seeds bound for the grist mill, and would not even acknowledge German other than a slight nod of the head and quick glance. Only when Laia spoke to her did she fully acknowledge our presence. As it turned out, she was going to a market that was on our way, so she agreed to let us give her a ride. She then calmly got up, picked up her massive bag with the greatest of ease, dropped the bag in the bed of the truck, causing a shudder to travel throughout the vehicle, and then cautiously climbed into the front seat that we had opened for her. Throughout the entire care ride she would only converse with Laia and refused to make so much as I contact with the men. When it came time to drop her off, Laia and German tried to help her lift the bag out of the truck, only to find that it weighed somewhere on the order of 80lbs. Then, with an ever so subtle smile, the woman climbed onto the bumper of the truck and threw the bag over her shoulder, easily, and walked off into the market.

The journey into el Canon de Pato

Okay, back to the car trip. After Huaraz we passed through the town of Caraz. Immediately the streets narrowed and crowded to a point that we had to slow the truck to a crawl in order to safely navigate past the numerous foodstands, people, dogs and moto-taxis (the proper name for the three wheeled motorized taxis I mentioned before). There was no direct path through town, so we had to wind through the streets and ask directions several times. The difficult part was that many of the people that we encountered did not speak Spanish, but rather the local tongue known as Quechua or a mixture of Spanish and Quechua that made them very difficult for even German and Laia to understand. Somehow, we managed to make it out of the town, which is perhaps half a mile across, in under half an hour and continued making our way towards the canyon.

Two hours after leaving Huaraz, we reached the the road leading into Canon del Pato and began the descent to the village of Huallanca at its base. I must say that I was not quite prepared for what the road would be like and, despite my initial doubts, was glad that we had such an impressive vehicle in which to complete the descent. The road was very rough, very windy, very narrow and featured an all too close sheer drop into the river below of between 50 and several hundred feet throughout. Surprisingly, I never really worried for our safety with German behind the wheel as he handled the vehicle with aplomb throughout the day. Perhaps the most interesting feature of the road, were, were the 35 tunnels carved out of solid rock that it passed through before reaching the base of the canyon bottom. I´ve taken some pictures of the descent, but unfortunately they don´t seem to capture the sheer magnitude of the place.

The sad, sad town of Huallanca
After an hour or so of constant, twisting and bumpy descent we finally saw the village of Huallanca below. Huallance is not an indigena settlement, but was rather established as a bas of operations for the small hydroelctric dam located there. As we got closer, I spied a playground and concrete soccer field from above. However, much to my shock both were absolutely empty. This was, I repeat, absolutely shocking, as I´ve passed several sports fields and playgrounds in Huaraz and Lima and they were absolutely never empty, regardless of the time of day or night. Laia wanted to turn around immediately once we saw the town, commenting that it appeared ugly and uninteresting. Still, the rest of us wanted to check it out, and besides, there was nowhere to turn around safely besides the town itself. So, we pulled into town, and where greeted by two dogs and two men standing just in the shade of a bodega.

To be contiued........