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)

A new champion!

La Paz is surrounded by some splendid mountains.  Mount Illimani towers off to the south at 22000 feet, and Cerro Calvario to the north, above 16000 feet.  Tuni-Condoriri National Park, about an hour's drive north of the metropolitan area, is stuffed with snow-covered peaks.  All of this is seemingly readily accessible and nearby, though it's surprisingly quite a lot of travel rigamarole to get into them.  For starters, it takes a solid hour to drive from the center of La Paz to the outskirts the city, what with all the switchbacks and the traffic thereon.  

I didn't plan my time in Bolivia carefully--it was really a last-minute decision to visit this country.  If I had been more careful and done more research, I would definitely have built in time to do one of the major multi-day Andes treks out of La Paz, in the national park.  But because I waltzed into La Paz with my head all the way up my butt and without a single clue what I was doing, I ended up with time only for a single day-hike, so I decided to climb Pico Austria, which is in Tuni-Condoriri.

(Oh, man, I was thinking at the bottom of this thing...)

And holy crap.  Far from being an effortless jaunt, this relatively short adventure kicked my ass.  To my surprise, Pico Austria has surged past Ala-Kul in Kyrgystan to claim its title as the hardest freaking hike of my life.  It was only about 8 miles out-and-back, most of those miles up a dizzyingly steep slope. The trailhead sits at about 16000 feet in elevation and the trail goes up from there to some distance over 18000 feet.  The trail itself is covered with loose shale that slides underfoot.  More than once I contemplated turning back, but I doggedly kept at it, moving as through molasses, and hit the summit in about 2 hours and 15 or so minutes, but I am telling you that I felt no triumph getting to that peak.  I felt only relief and a humiliated sense of my own weakness.  Neither my previous summit of Cerro Toco (which is a higher elevation!) nor my daily runs in La Paz's 12000-ft elevation prepared my body for the rigors of Pico Austria.  

(Pathetic summiteer, with blue Lake Titicaca on the distant horizon)

Maybe it's for the best that I didn't preserve time for a big multi-day adventure?  Maybe I wouldn't survive it!  I guess I need to start training now for the next time I'm in Bolivia (though it's hard to imagine how I might train more than I have been training, if accidentally).  

Cities and the Sky: La Paz, Bolivia

More than thirty years ago, my poetry mentor Mark Strand urged a book into my hands and told me that reading it would change me forever.  That book was Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and he was right: it transformed my sense of how narrative works, how language constitutes its own drama, how form communicates substantively, independent of the content of words.  It continues to be one of my favorite books.  If you haven't read it, I recommend it to your attention.

I have traveled a fair bit around this planet of ours, even before this peripatetically extreme year.  But I have never, ever, seen a city like La Paz, Bolivia.  

When I say it's breathtaking, I'm not talking about its 12000-foot elevation or its 2.2 million population.  I'm talking about its aerobatic precarity.  Its integration of city and rock, huge slabs of stone erupting into the neighborhoods, or vice versa.  The way the clouds settle overnight into the bottom of the city's basin, transposing the sky into the heart of town.  The way that houses march up the slopes in a consistency of red clay brick.  The way the city's heights and depths are strung together with a moving necklace of gondolas--the Teleferico: the extremities of this city's topography cannot admit a subway system (there are no flat streets in La Paz) so their solution is to connect themselves to and through the sky.  I was thinking of all these things when I desired a city, to paraphrase Calvino.

La Paz changes my sense of how a city works, how its forms govern its content.  It is a city in which the earth and sky seem to be mutually constitutive, each one acting not as a limit on human movement but rather as a catalyst for invention and expansion. 

I think that La Paz will now be forever in my mind one of Calvino's memorable, unimaginable, impossible cities.  

High Plains Drifter

Or, I have traveled a long way to be in Utah, part 5 (reviving the series from October 2024)...

(Valle de Rocas, Bolivia)

The Bolivian Altiplano, or high plain/plateau, resembles the high plains of the Intermountain West.  There's a lot of scrub, and a lot of badlands formations and salt lakes in great basins.  There are random herds of vicuna ranging around, like the Rocky Mountain pronghorn but more abundant and less skittish of human contact.  There are wolves and mountain lions and foxes, and hyperactive tiny life everywhere.  Of course, here, the elevation runs between 13000-16000 feet, so the sun is more intense and unrelenting and the dry air more dessicating than in the western US.  

(Vicuna!)

A strange side-effect of so much familiarity is that I find myself....not underwhelmed, but not overwhelmed either.  I keep coming into contact here with travelers who are absolutely agog, who have never seen anything like this place in their lives, and who are awestruck by the vast distances, the desert quiet, the baroque fantasias in rock erupting out of the flat landscapes.  

But for me, to be honest, it feels more or less like home.  

Which response has this time brought with it a surprising longing for home.  

(Laguna Colorada, a salt lake filled with 30000 flamingoes.) 
(We def don't have flamingoes in Utah.)

I have had such an unspeakably amazing several months, drifting around the globe and feeling myself transformed by a series of dislocations--some profound and some gentle.  And the thing that I am most surprised to discover in the midst of it all is that I am even more grateful for the life that I live in "normal" times:  for my home (my actual house, yes, but also my gloriously beautiful state, which gives me access to all the mountains and rococo red rocks that someone could want, with very little effort or distance required).  For the people I'm fortunate to have in my life.  Even for the (maddening, messy) country I live in, which--for all its manifest flaws--works so freaking well in comparison with just about every other place and is worth our collective labor and energy to sustain. 

(A field of quinoa in the middle of harvest)

After Jay died, I was emotionally wasted.  It wasn't just that I felt cheated by the universe, and that I lived in an economy of scarcity and loss (though that was certainly what I felt).  It was also that--as much as I was glad to be the person who walked with him to the end--dedicating all my hours to the care of someone else had depleted my ability to feel compassion and had made me resentful of relationships, which frankly seemed to me to have become merely a huge checklist of obligations and demands that I could no longer respond to.  I hesitate to say that this year has been healing for me, because I don't wish to make it seem vapid or pop-psyche or whatever.  But this year has certainly given me an abundance of time to be present only to the day, and has reoriented me to what's at hand rather than the past-focused jaggedness of anger and grief or the future-focused miasma of fear and grief.  And in my fascinating isolation this year has impressed upon me that what makes the present most meaning-full is the people with whom I'm so fortunate to share this world.

(Salar de Uyuni--the world's largest salt flat--at sunrise)

I guess what I'm saying is that this year has given me the opportunity to come home to myself.  And that has made it possible for me, finally, to want to be once more fully home.