One kid looks up, the other kid looks down

B has joined us!  Which means that we are supplementing our air-and-space tourism with some paleontological adventures.  We've been digging around in the area of the Jurassic Cliffs, on the south coast of England.  

[A couple of specimens from the fossil museum in Lyme Regis--an ichthyosaur, above, and a HUGE heteromorph ammonite, below]

And I mean "digging around" literally, because there are areas near Lyme Regis where the layperson is welcome to excavate for personal treasures. Some of the fossils are a bit too big to pack into the carry-on luggage....

But some of them are more portable that the giant ammonite above, and we've found ancient life aplenty in the cliffs and along the beaches--belemnites and ammonites primarily.  

It's fantastic for me to be with these guys for a while, and to supplement my endless obsession with mountains with more down-to-earth pursuits. Being with my kids provides its own altitude.

 

Niche sightseeing

When each of my kids graduated from high school, my gift to them was a trip to wherever they wanted to go.  B was very quick to choose his adventure, and we spent several weeks trekking in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego.  E has been more....thoroughly deliberative...in selecting his destination; this summer, as he finishes his Masters degree in aerospace engineering, he's finally decided on his high school graduation trip.  

(A Handley Page Halifax, at the Yorkshire Air Museum)

We've met up now in England, where we are fully immersed in E's favorite form of travel: aircraft tourism.  

(A Vulcan--a Vulcan, people!--at the Newark Air Museum)

Our family have spent a lot of time and effort traveling to see airplanes. We once spent 2 weeks in California visiting 9 different iterations of a single aircraft. So in some ways this portion of the adventure is not such a departure from custom. What's new (to us) is the density of air museums in England relative to the land mass.  Because England was on the front lines of two world wars, there are TONS of decommissioned wartime airfields--small, local endeavors--that now host tiny but passionate air museums or commemorative sites, as well as a few quite huge collections.  

(A near-mint-condition Avro Shackleton, Newark Air Museum)

So while other folks are touring the castles and art and the grand holdings of the imperial basement, you'll find us happily wandering along the national byways looking for airplanes.

(Inside the Shackleton's front gunner bay)

(And we're also seeing some castles)

Fabulous foods of South America

Moving on to the next phase of my globetrotting, but I can't leave this continent without providing an overview of some of my favorite edibles...

Argentina:

This rustic dessert of cheeses, compotes, and fresh and dried fruits at Paso Garibaldi, perhaps the best restaurant in Ushuaia:

All the varieties of perfect empanada from La Marmita bakery in Ushuaia, but especially the tomato and olive:

Bolivia: 

The jawita is a La Paz staple.  It's a familiar concept:  dough baked with melty cheese inside.  But the jawita is unlike any of its South American analogues (the empanada, most prominently) in that it is made with a super thin sheet of very soft enriched dough--so soft that it has the texture and pliancy of fabric.  Before baking, the jawita is brushed with butter and chili powder.  These cost maybe 50 cents each.  The first time I tried it, I ordered one from a streetside vendor, took my first bite as I started to walk away, turned around, and bought another one.

Peru:

These three mango ceviches I made at a cooking class in Cusco.  The rest of the class made ceviche the traditional way, with fish.  To a person, they all preferred my mango options:

This vegan tacu tacu from Green Point in Cusco: a base of beans and quinoa topped with grilled veggies drizzled in chimichurri, and a luscious plantain:

This mango I ate off the tree in Lucmabamba, as big as my head and twice as juicy--which I chased shortly thereafter with an avocado I ate off another tree too messily to manage the camera:

No, I did not eat guinea pig.  But someone I met while traveling did.  Here's how it was served to her, with a pepper stuck right between those little front teeth:

Ups and downs

There are two classic multiday treks in the greater Cusco region--"classic" in the deep historical sense, because each of these two routes incorporate sections of the ancient Inca trail through the Andes.  One of these treks is the Inca Trail; the other is the Salkantay.  

(A section of that original trail of the Incas)

For conservation purposes, the Peruvian government limits the number of people who can walk the Inca trail every season, so you have to plan well in advance to get one of the coveted spots.  It perhaps will not be a surprise to hear that I, wandering vaguely through these mountains, did not plan well in advance.  I don't really care all that much, since both treks spend a couple of days at high altitude and then descend, arriving finally on the last day at a shared endpoint (though they approach it from different directions)--about which more in a moment.

The Salkantay trail takes hikers up first past a beautiful blue lagoon snugged into the base of the Humantay mountain and glacier.

The trail then proceeds the following day up a steady grade to the Salkantay glacier at about 4600 meters (~15100 feet).  Not super high altitude as the Andes go, but definitely some high-altitude views, as Salkantay Peak towers up to about 21000 feet.  

After the Apacheta pass, the trail just drops for about 10 miles, down and down, from above the timberline through the first Andean cedars, through layers of low-hanging cloud and into a temperate rain forest, and then finally to the tropical climate around Collpapampa.  

The fourth day of hiking brings folks to the floor of a valley at about 6700 feet.  That's a lot of downhill, through plantations of mango, coffee, avocado, banana, pineapple, orange... in short, a lot of fruits you generally don't associate with a glacier trek.  It's just a tremendous difference in elevation, and the radical difference in climate that goes along with it is something I haven't experienced before.  From well below freezing to sweating through my clothes in a jungle in just one day.  From that valley floor, there are steep, vegetation-carpeted peaks and exposed cliffs on all sides, and if you squint from below, you can see some structures up on one of those steep places.  

On the fifth day, you hike the last 3 miles of your 50-mile adventure, climbing up a whole bunch of stairs so that you can actually see those distant hilltop structures up close: 

And hello, Machu Picchu. Given that both the Salkantay trek and the Inca Trail end up with this view, I guess it really doesn't matter all that much which direction you approach from.  Either approach provides the opportunity to walk on the stone paths of the Incas, and to appreciate just how vast was their empire--and to admire from a temporal remove the stamina of their running messengers, the chasqi, who ran along the length of the empire like a more agile pony express, a network of relay sprinters covering up to 200 miles a day.  

On the genius of Inca engineers

This is the Zona Arqueologica Moray, sitting at about 11500 feet and about an hour northwest from Cusco in the Sacred Valley of the Incas. I've got my head in the photo in an effort to give a sense of scale but it's not a great visual effect since I'm way up on a bluff overlooking the place and the whole site is massive.  It consists in concentric terraces that go down, down, down into a deep depression of land that is sheltered on the windward side by a tall rock face.  

Moray is pretty much my favorite site in the Sacred Valley region.  There are loads of other structures and artifacts remaining nearby from the Inca period (15th-16th centuries).  But this one kinda blows my mind.  It seems to have been an agricultural lab. In the bottom photo, you can see the peaks of the Andes in the near distance.  On the other side of those peaks:  a tropical ecosystem, filled with all manner of fruits, veggies, tubers, corns, squashes....stuff that doesn't necessarily thrive at 11500 feet.  So these genius Inca ag engineers created this kinda open-air hothouse to train plant species up to elevation hardiness.  Archaeologists have discovered seeds and plant matter along those terraces, and have concluded that the Incas would bring, say, a bunch of corn seeds from the jungle side of the Andes and plant them in the bottommost level of the lab.  Because of sun angles and wind/weather protection, that bottommost level is substantially warmer than the higher levels, and is also the endpoint of irrigation drainage.  So: hot and humid down there, like a jungle. The corn would grow down in there and get accustomed to the climate over a season or two, and then they'd move the corn crop up just one level, getting the plants used to that one level less jungly.  And so on, over a couple of decades, until the corn was growing on the top level, in the standard 11500-foot weather/climate.  In this fashion, the Incas trained up a rich variety of food crops that didn't naturally flourish in the Andes.  

(Look at these cool protruding-rock stairs built into the terraces)

I love everything about this centuries-old ag lab, but especially the foresight and patience of it all.

Montana Arcoiris, Peru

Rainbow Mountain lies about a 2-hour drive from Cusco.  That's not its actual name (that would be Vinicunca), but one can see why it might have become identified more commonly with the nickname:

(16522 ft)

The unusual striations of mineral deposit--irons, quartzites, sulfur, magnesiates--become showily distinct in the morning sun, so while it means leaving Cusco in the very wee hours in order to catch the early light on the slopes, I suppose it's worth it even for a non-early-riser like myself.

The adjacent canyon, to the south and west, is called Montana Roja--again, for pretty obvious reasons:

(photo from my vantage point at 16568 ft)

And the whole colorful area is presided over, on the northeast, by 20945 ft Mt. Ausangate:

There are a whole lotta people who visit this attraction every day, many of them on horses or ATVs, with a high percentage of the naive foot-traffic panting and doubled-over along the 2 or 3 miles up to the viewpoint from the parking lot, a consequence of an eye-popping nature area being relatively easily accessible to unacclimated tourists. 

But this scene is, as it turns out, a recent one, due to historical events that are both mindblowing and sobering.  Because this entire landscape was, as recently as 2013, covered in snow.  The glacier's retreat slowly revealed the stripey topography underneath, and now Rainbow Mountain is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Peru.  Apparently, the window for appreciating its colors is small, and closing, because the longer Montana Arcoiris is exposed, the more it gets seeded microscopically with the flora that will one day cover the soil here: the stripey soil will be hidden beneath grasses.  

This place makes me think once more about the paradox of my outdoor project this year.  I have been thrilled to be in these wild places, but my movements about the globe are certainly contributing carbon to the atmosphere, which is imperiling the very wild places I have come to love by traveling to them. 

The Imperial City of Cusco

As I've moved north along the rocky spine of this continent, I've found that the further I progress into the Andes proper, the more the local culture reflects Andean civilization before the intrusion of conquest.  Southern Argentina is fairly European--the people and food are quite similar to what you might find in, say, Italy. 

But the Central Andean peoples retain quite a lot of their ancient characteristics:  the dress and religion of Bolivia and highland Peru tastes far more of the Inca than of the Spaniard, despite the Spaniard's best efforts.  Which efforts include syncretic attempts to conscript the religion of the Inca into colonialist Catholicism, as in St. Francis's cathedral in La Paz, which features a statue of the gentle saint flanked by two carvings of Pachamama, the earth and fertility goddess:

(She's actively giving birth, and very happy about it!)

In Cusco, Peru--right at the vibrant heart of the Inca Empire, in the very city of the Puma (as the Inca designed it)--the Spanish had to ratchet up their efforts still more vigorously.  On top of every sacred Inca site, the Spaniards built a giant church.  Where the Inca worshipped the Sun, the Spanish threw up the Santo Domingo convent. Where Qolqanpata Palace housed Manco Capac, the first Inca ruler, the Spanish put up the church of St. Christopher.  Where the Inca worshipped the creator deity, the Spanish constructed a giant baroque pile of brick and stone, the Basilica of the Assumption of the Virgin.  So much work in an effort to overwrite the culture that was already flourishing here.  

(Here's the centerpiece painting in the Cusco Basilica, Marcos Zapata's 18thC rendering of the Last Supper. But check out what's for dinner in the middle of Jesus's table:  a local delicacy, the guinea pig!)

But for all these efforts, the conquistadoring Spanish seem to have failed in their ultimate intent.  Because I can report that there is a heck of a lot of precolombian culture that endures here in Cusco and (even more so!) in the surrounding mountains.  In my travels through both Bolivia and Peru, the local people approach the mountains with sincere prayers and gift offerings to Pachamama.  Many people here speak Qechua as their first language; many people who live in the mountains, away from the population center in Cusco, speak only Qechua.  They eat foods that don't really show up elsewhere: the giant corn called choclo, the purple corn drink chica morada, the cuy (the aforementioned guinea pig) They wear traditional clothes--brightly colored fabrics made from homespun llama wool, and prominent hats.  

(Women in this traditional dress are referred to as cholitas)

In Cusco, the sense of ancient past enduring beyond the period of conquest and into the present is made material by the actual endurance of all those old Inca walls.  The whole historic center is an ancient tetris achievement of perfectly shaped stones fitted together with no mortar, so tightly carved that you can't insert a razor blade between the blocks.  

(The walls of Saqsaywaman, the Inca citadel, which oversees the historical center of Cusco from its dominant hilltop position)

I like this permeable present.  In fact, I find I like the parts of these Andean cultures best when the veneer of conquest proves thin and cannot contain the deep and earth-focused empire it endeavored to erase.

(An old Inca portal--the trapezoid shape is the giveaway to its provenance--with a little bit of Spanish balcony action perched on top)