Perú/Bolivia - Part XV (Cuzco - Inti Raymi)

Cuzco used to be the capital of the Inca Empire. It sits at an elevation of 3,300 m (10,800 ft), about twice as high up as Denver, CO. In 2006 it was found to be the spot on Earth with the highes tultraviolet light level... whatever that means.

At first sight I thought this was an remarkably progressive city, embracing the gay community like no other place I had seen before... that was until I realized this:

gay flag...

...Cuzco flag

I'm sorry, but I hardly doubt I'm the only person who thought that!

Anyway, the day started with a 2km trek from Cuzco city up the mountain to the site of Sacsayhuaman ruins (all the touristas seems to just call it "sexy woman"), as that's where the Inti Raymi show would take place for the day.

This is where I get critical... there were hundreds of thousands of visitors (90% local) who sat around the festival site on the hills around, who were playing ball, eating, and spending a festivous day with the family to mark this festival of the sun that marks winter solstice.
The only thing blocking the view was a horribly massive tribune in the shape on the L, where all the f$%*ing tourists sat. Now get this... the price to sit there was OVER $200!
Although us gringos help the Peruvian economy with tourism, this is just a complete outrage, especially if you consider 44.5% of Peruvians live under the poverty line.¹
Because of this atrocity, the police and even the military are in high numbers surrounding the site and city during the festivities, just in case some locals realize how unfair it is to take away a several century old celebration and milk the gringos with it.

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The dots on the map show the site of Sacsayhuaman, statue of Jesus (Cristo Blanco), and the Plaza de Armas (the main square, and back in Inca times; the absolute center of the empire) with to the south with the rest of the city.









Below, you can see somewhat of what I'm talking about... sectioning off the paying gringos from the locals, and with a good buffer too! The mountain (and crowds) rose up behind me, and wrapped all the way around to the left... this is hardly half the audience.
I apologize for the small size, but once again I have to tell you that I'm working on getting some gallery representation for all my panorama's taken on this trip.. this being one of them. They will look amazing large and in print.
We sat for hours and watched the show best we could, also managing to get sunburnt although the sun only popped out for about 20 minutes... must be something with that UV thing I mentioned... oops.

Anyone order a truck-load of cops?

The infamous 12-angled Inca stone.

The whole wall (make sure to view large).

Church of La Compañia, Plaza de Armas

La Catedral, Plaza de Armas

Perú/Bolivia - Part XIV (The Road to Cuzco)

Once again, we had to carry all our stuff across the border from our bus in Bolivia to our Bus in Peru... I forgot the exact reasons, but without all their emission laws, it seems strange to have some sort of registration issues... although it was something like that.
We filled out some paperwork, got some stamps in our passports and were herded back on to our new bus.
As we headed out of the Bolivian Andes and into the Peruvian Andes, this is where we witnessed the only rainfall of our entire trip, it lasted a wonderful 20 minutes, and that was that.

I honestly couldn't wait to reach Cuzco, as it was the only place we would stay a couple days... close to a week actually, finally, some downtime.
Plus it was the city where I heard many great things from my friend Evrim who had been there less than a year earlier. Not to mention it was THE Inca capital, and the closest city to the incredible site/sight of Machu Picchu.

When we arrived in the city, it was littered with people as the Inti Raymi festival (Festical of the Sun) was in full swing. It was going to be a special couple days.

We got in late, and I went straight to sleep as the next day would be a long one.

Perú/Bolivia - Part XIII (Cerro Rico)

Legend has it, that the Spanish took so much silver out of mountains like this one that they could have built a silver bridge back to Spain. You only have to step in one church or cathedral in Spain and see that there might be some truth to that.
We woke up that morning, and although earlier I had been excited, I felt really sick and unsure if they would have decent bathroom facilities inside the mountain.
I decided to tag along and see how I felt, as I could always abandon the mine shaft when I got there... my thoughts were simple: I feel like death, sick to my stomach, ready to puke, head throbbing, and at any minute I could get a bad case of... let's just call it mud butt. I don't mean to be crass, but I'm trying to put in perspective how shitty I felt (I apologize for the pun!).

Anyway, our guides were awesome, they were these 2 little Bolivian ladies that (although I didn't know this yet) were experts in the use of dynamite.

We were given our suits, and led over to a little street that was filled with stands like the one pictured... apparently it is customary to bare gifts to the miners while visiting their workspace.
Here is the best part, in this image you can see all the gifts they appreciate: crackers/cookies, water, soda, gloves, hand rolled cigarettes (sold in ripped paper and taped together - they are the pink/light blue right behind the guide), now comes the good stuff: pure alcohol (Ceibo), cocoa leaves, and... oh yeah DYNAMITE.
If the life expectancy for a Bolivian miner wasn't in the 30's, I would consider wasting my life away eating cookies and washing them down with grain alcohol, all the while smoking and blowing shit up.
And to think that you have to show ID here in the "land of the free" to buy anything from cigarettes to alcohol, to even getting into a place that sells these things... in Bolivia they sell TNT on the side of the street! Not to mention the alcohol was about $1 and the dynamite + accessories was about $2 (The dynamite is in the box the lady on the right just bent in front of... you can see the rolled up fuses as well as the "agitator" which armed the explosives).

So, you take out the dynamite stick, put it in a bag filled with little things... I think she referrred to it as an agitator, still a fuse in the there...

...and voila, you're ready to blow some shit up.

She then buried it and lit the fuse... boom.

At this point I decided that I would go into the mines... I figured even if I pooped myself, that I should suck up how horrible I felt, as whenever would I have the chance to get back into a Bolivian mine...?!
I left my camera in the bus, and we ventured into the darkness...

I must say, it was quite amazing... they had chapels inside the mountain, and tunnels leading everywhere... of course most were smaller than you average hallway, some the size of a manhole cover.

The thing was... that that stick of dynamite was on my mind... and for good reason. Because every 30 min or so an enormous explosion would rock the entire mountain around you...! Dust and debris would fall around you just as in the movies... and we would all look at each other. Stressful to say the least.

We then got on the bus and headed from Potosi back to the La Paz... thankfully it was [almost] all paved roads from here on out. Although there were gonna be some unforeseen deviations along the way...

This is how they demonstrate in Bolivia... we passed several of these "blockades." So we could drive right by... others took hour-long detours. Many used rocks and whatever they could find, while others blocked the roads with buses, trucks, and masses of people. Yeah, it was annoying.













When we got back to La Paz that night, I went out and did some last minute shopping, as I hadn't been able to check out the city due to the prior bike trip I took... I was amazed and some of the things that were for sale... and wondered what they would think about it at customs in Newark.

Now this is what I call a convenience store... anything from drinks and snacks to leopard skins and llama fetuses. And no, I am not joking.
The dried fetuses are used as offerings to mother earth ("pachamama") and are buried under every house for protection.
So now you know where to go if you need a dried frog (wealth), armadillo (Bolivian form of Brinks security, prevents thieves from entering -could also double a nice Halloween decoration), burnt llama fetus on a bed of herbs (good fortune with a new business), or a simple ceramic statue of a naked couple (improves sex life).

La Paz is a crazy city... the traffic lights work, but they seem to be optional, and as I mentioned before about the imported foreign trucks, there are no laws on emissions... so buses (like the one above) spew out the most intense blue smoke you've ever seen.
That night I stayed awake as long as possible, went to an internet cafe and webcam'd with my girl Melissa for a while, as the next day would be another grueling 12 hour bus ride back in Peru and on to the ancient Inca capital of Cuzco.

I also bought a portrait of Ernesto 'Che' Guevara from an artist on the street (which hangs right next to me as I type). Which seemed to be strangely fitting for Bolivia, considering it was where he was captured and ultimately executed (with the help of the always insightful CIA) in 1967. The airbushed image on fabric, which turned out to be one of the most expensive purchases on my trip (at $5) is also one of my favorite.


¡Hasta luego Bolivia!

Perú/Bolivia - Part XII (Potosí)

Another several hours in the bus, from Uyuni to Potosí, said to be the highest city in the world...
We got to this marvelous little mining town in the late afternoon, my salmonella poisoning was in full effect (although I hadn't realized it yet -I was still truckin').
I didn't really feel like taking too many pictures, but this is what I got:

The image to the right being some of the typical cables hanging overhead everywhere... with the infamous Cerro Rico ("rich mountain") in the background.


Left; San Lorenzo Church relfected by the strange tourism center

Right; a school in session.

Later that evening I went out and took these images:






When I returned to the hotel is when I finally couldn't take it anymore. I was having horrible heat flashes, not to mention the worst headache I've ever had in my life for a couple days straight, not to mention things coming out in both places you can think of, sometime with only 4 seconds notice. I felt incredibly horrible.
The doctor was called, and the only word I understood while he was talking to our guide was the damning word "salmonella."
Apparently I picked it up somewhere around Puno, but as to a straight source, well thats anyone's guess. I was given some prescriptions and told what to eat for the upcoming days (nothing greasy, lots of rice, bread, and water).
He was a super friendly doctor, and what's more is that his "house" visit cost roughly $6! The medication he prescribed (some sort of special and intense aspirin, along with antibiotics) cost more than double what the doctors visit cost. And to think I paid over $200 for some bullshit here in New York City.

From here on out I would feel sooooo much incredibly better, although I wouldn't properly recover for a couple days, the light was at the tunnel.
That was until I realized that the next morning we were going INTO the tunnel... the mountains' mines that is... with dynamite in our pockets.
Literally.

Perú/Bolivia - Part XI (Uyuni salt flats)

Salar de Uyuni / Uyuni Salt Flats

Breath-taking. Utterly breath-taking. No pictures (not even mine!) can convey the shear beauty and wonder this spot on earth evokes. Truly amazing.
But I'll get to that in a second... our first stop was at the ol' Uyuni train graveyard. I had seen pictures and was really excited... I was going to see the actual trains Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had robbed almost exactly a century earlier!!! And I'm not talking about the 1969 film with Robert Redford and Paul Newman... I'm talking about the actual people the movie is loosely based on. And trust me, I can't even begin to imaging how Bolivia looked in 1908...

The train yard was amazing... I got upset we only had about 10 minutes to roam around... I mean wtf!! I just spent a day feeling like I was about to die, only to spend several minutes in a photographers paradise?! Damnit.

It's a great shame that people write graffiti all over the trains, but can't say tourists are high up on the R-E-S-P-E-C-T chain. I know I was/am a tourist too, and we have ALL been tourists at some point, but I think you know what I mean.
Either way, it was time to get salt and dirty...
It is a truly great expansion of the mind to think about the time it took nature to to fulfill what I saw (and what you will see below)... enjoy.

It's hard to see, but the arrow in the image above is pointing to a jeep off into the distance... it's tiny, but it's there! Just so you get some idea of scale.

We first visited a place where they harvest the salt (above left), as you can imagine, it's not much of a process, they scrape it up into little piles to let it dry (see bottom), then haul it off somewhere, do something to it, and it's pretty much done... I mean c'mon, salt is salt.

Some info on the Uyuni salt flats¹:
~The world's largest covereing some 10,582 km² (4,085 square miles), which is roughly 25 times bigger than the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, USA.

~Some 40,000 years ago, the area was part of a giant prehistoric lake Minchin. When the lake dried, it left behind two modern lakes, Poopó and Uru Uru lake, and two major salt deserts, Salar de Coipasa and the larger Uyuni.
~It is estimated to contain 10 billion tons of salt, of which less than 25,000 tons is extracted annually.
~Due to its large size, smooth surface, high surface reflectivity when covered with shallow water, and minimal elevation deviation, makes an ideal target for the testing and calibration of sattelites.

Below you can see a satellite image of the area, the green arrow being the town of Uyuni.


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In some spots, water was still seeping out of the ground, which made me feel somewhat uneasy walking around... but I figured if the the jeeps could handle it, I'm sure little old me wouldn't break through.






We drove for at least an hour to visit an "island." It's not really an island anymore, but you get the idea... you can obviously imagine in the picture below how it used to look tens of thousands of years ago...

After a walk around the "island," everyone got extremely creative...

In the bottle... ...and back out.

And of course the best one for last:

Our group taking it easy on the Bolivian salt flats!
What's funny is, that I put my camera on a 10 second timer, which meant that I had 10sec to press the shutter then sprint over and jump to finish the '!' . We had intended to write something like "Bolivia 2008" or just "Bolivia", but we couldn't figure out how to 'write' the letter 'B'... not that 'S' is all that easy!

The sun was setting (and it was starting to get damn cold), so I planted my Belgian flag and headed on.
No, just kidding, the flag was there already, located right outside the Salt Hotel. Yup, that's right, a hotel made out of salt.

As the sun set, I took my final photographs for the day... it had been a good one, considering I didn't throw up, puke, hurl, have explosive diarrhea, or any combination there of. Tasty.

Left, is most likely the longest human shadow you'll ever see!

And right... well I didn't know if this was the hotel's pool or not, either way I wouldn't dare go in it... unless it was the world's largest margarita or something.

The next morning it would be back into the beloved bus and on to the mining town of Potosí, which was a massive raping station for the Spanish conquest. Legend has it, that so much silver was mined out of the mountain, the Spanish could have built a road with it back to Spain.
Now you know why the great cathedrals in Spain are so lavishly decorated! Though I'm still curious if they are talking about a road thats more like a 3-lane highway or a bike path...?
Either way, I was about to have some mean-ass American-style nachos. Or as I would call them: "buenas nachos."


¹-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salar_de_Uyuni