Peru

Living for a month in the spiritual capital of the Inca empire (1200-1532), 11,000 feet up in the Andes, in a human-sized, truly beautiful city that likes to party(brass bands and dancing in the streets most days), does something to you. The evidence of that extraordinary people is everywhere you look. The massive, hand-carved and angled mortarless stones they polished for their buildings still support the myriad of churches built by the conquistadores on top of the gold-covered temples they pillaged. You see the faces of the Inca in their descendants who live in Cusco and its surrounding villages, and who still speak Kichwa. The history of the devastating collision between the Inca and Spanish empires whispers from the 30 metre high zigzagged rock walls of the fortress Saqsayhuaman, built in the shape of a puma’s head to guard its body, the city of Cusco, stretched ready to spring across the valley below. (The zigzag walls are the puma’s teeth). One stone from the battlements weighs 300 tons, making Stonehenge look merely cute by comparison. Beside the ruins an illuminated Christ figure now stands.

After 300 years of Spanish rule and 200 years of independence, an accommodation of sorts has been reached between the Incas’ descendants and the conquest’s legacy of Catholicism. Hence the Feast of the Assumption is celebrated with Mary being paraded through the streets, followed by hundreds of whirling indigenous dancers in a blaze of traditional outfits. The Church hitches Corpus Christi on to the great Incan festival of the sun, Inti Raymi, the celebration of the winter solstice on 21st June. The dancers wear clothes woven in patterns inherited from the Inca’s weavers – “Meandering River”, “Footprints of the Puma” and “Man from the Jungle”, to name but a few, and still worked on pre-Hispanic back strap looms. Inca weavers were the best in the world. They used 500 threads per inch in their tapestries, whereas renaissance Europe could only manage 85. You even see this accommodation between civilisations in the religious art of the Cusquena school. The artists were often indigenous or mestizo and painted Mary with freely flowing black hair, wearing clothes that gave her the shape of a mountain – Pachamama, sacred Mother Earth. The food at the Last Supper is all indigenous fare. (In fact the meat looked rather like a guinea pig!)

So what was so great about the Inca empire? Aren’t all empires brutal in their conquests and savage towards their colonies? Certainly British and Spanish imperialists are worthy competitors for Plonkers of the Century in the way they wrote off the people they conquered as “savage”. How can the creators of Machu Picchu, the Taj Mahal or Great Zimbabwe’s walled city be described in this way? The Incas didn’t do free-thinking, it’s true. So if you objected to their rule, you were dead meat, but if you accepted it, you wanted for nothing. You were held within a rigid, paternalistic hierarchy where you never became rich (unless you were related to the Inca himself!), but where, also, you never suffered poverty. You were expected to work, but if you were unable to do so, you were cared for. You weren’t free, but nor were you a slave. Gold, silver, jewels weren’t regarded as objects of value, merely as objects of beauty. When the Inca died, his fabulous riches died with him because his houses were sealed in case his spirit might wish to return. His children therefore had to shift for themselves, free from the burdens of inherited wealth.

Here in Peru, as in many South American countries, the inequities caused by imperialist rule linger on with the conquistadores’ minority white descendants holding the reins of power, and the Kichwa and other indigenous nations still lagging behind in terms of access to economic equality. The working class of Lima earn, on average, US$ 200 per month. The Kichwa living in the villages around Cusco earn a fraction of that. A village man, working on a building site, earns 5 soles a day (just over £1). His wife and child, kitted up in traditional clothes carrying a lamb in a knitted bonnet, can earn 10 – 15 soles per day having their photos taken by tourists in Cusco. (Not, however, by the tourists we saw one day, kitted up in their traditional clothes – North Face hiking boots, £250 and Levis, £50 – who refused to pay a single sol).

We were able to visit one local village, Ccaccaccollo (Place of the Rocks), whilst filming with a Canadian crew who were making a short about what happens to your money when you opt for an eco tourism alternative. Here, villagers are learning to ride the consumer-capitalist rollercoaster that has taken over where the conquistadores left off. Many of the men work for GAP adventures, an eco tourist outfit, as porters and trained guides. Seeing how the money the men earned was transforming their village (a primary school and trained teachers), the women asked Planeterra (GAP’s charitable arm), to help them recover their weaving skills. These had been partially lost due to the introduction of synthetic wools and knitting machines. After expert weavers came to the village, the women are now using local mosses, lichens, the bark of eucalyptus trees and various plant extracts to dye their alpacas’ wool naturally. They are producing knitted goods and tapestries in beautifully muted colours that echo the rusts, coppers, dusty greens and greys of their rocky, red-earthed environment. GAP takes tourists up to the village three times a week, so the women can both sell their goods and display their centuries-old weaving techniques. Also on display are their new sit-down looms, bought for the village by Planeterra so that even finer goods can be produced. The women have resolved to buy more modern looms with the profits they make from the tourists. They won’t be sorry to say goodbye to their back-breaking backstrap looms, no matter what a great picture they make with the women sitting in a circle, all bound to the tree in their midst by the straps of their looms. The other end of the loom is tied around their waists. Each time they whack the pole of the loom towards them, you can hear the sickening thud as it hits their stomachs.
Ccaccaccollo women know how to do colour. White embroidered blouses peek out behind layers of clashing patterned shawls, overlaid by the ubiquitous dazzlingly bright carrying cloth (for baby, firewood, alpaca grazing). A hand woven belt, which may have been the first thing they made as a child, holds up a one-size-fits-all black wool knee length skirt, also lavishly embroidered. A red crowned hat with a slanting white brim worn at various rakish angles tops the outfit. They find the plain colours of their tourist visitors too boring for words and, working in twos, the women hurl a skirt over your head (it weighs a ton so inhibits objections!), whilst they wind shawls around you and lasso male tourists with brilliant red and orange ponchos. The village men, unlike their avian counterparts, are a little dull by comparison. But their ear flap hats, which they probably knitted themselves, are prettily patterned and they aren’t afraid of pink fluffy balls dangling from the ends.

One place where, apart from tourism, there has been no accommodation between invader and invaded is Machu Picchu (old mountain). The conquistadores never found it! It was abandoned by the Incas around the time of the invasion and lay beneath its blanket of Andean forest for 400 years until Hiram Bingham of Yale University “discovered” it in 1911. (He also nicked quite a lot of its moveable treasures and Yale University has so far resisted all requests for their return). He was led to the lost city by an eleven year old settler lad called Juan Pablo Alvarez. The Spanish never found it because the surrounding terrain, even now, is pretty impenetrable. The sacred valley of the Urubamba river narrows to a deep, heavily forested gorge just after Ollantaytambo (a small village also awash with Inca ruins), and remains like this all the way to the encircling mountains that protect Machu Picchu from view. To walk there takes four days, three if you have a death wish. It involves mile upon mile of vertical scrambling, hikes over three mountain passes, the highest of which exceeds 12,500 feet and is encouragingly called “Dead Woman’s Pass”. (We took the train). Machu Picchu looks like what all the Andes would have looked like before deforestation – the rolling green roof of the world.

We rise at 4.00am to begin our assault on Machu Picchu. We are aided by a bus which saves us from three knee-crunching hours of uphill slog. We arrive around 6.30am at the entrance. It’s light but the sun hasn’t climbed to the top of the snow-capped Veronicas yet. All we can see is wave after wave of undulating green mountains topped by jaggley white ones and an immense sky. We have reached a place on the planet where it’s impossible to stand on the level and spine-chilling drops to the valley floor are eight inches away from your right foot. It’s not surprising the corkscrew paths are crumbly, they’re over 500 years old. Our feet are wobbling on stones trodden by the Sun’s son, the Inca king himself! Up, up, up we go, hot despite the early hour. The only sound, the rustling of the bamboo forest around us. We emerge from this, just as I am cursing the Incas for their inability to understand vertigo, and we have arrived. At THE place. You know it – you’ve seen it on a thousand postcards and websites – an escarpment jutting out over the entire sacred city and bang opposite the rounded green summit of Huayna Picchu (young mountain) which, now that I see it in the flesh and off-line, had to be the inspiration for London’s Gherkin! But no postcard prepares you for the sheer power, scale and magnetism of what lies around, before and beneath you. Poetry in stone. Nature and architecture pack a combined punch that is staggering and leaves Celine and I in tears. The city, hugged by its surrounding agricultural terraces (andenes), has been hand-carved, smoothed, shaped and polished out of 250 million year old granite, gleaming with quartz. The stones have been so exquisitely fitted together that a blade of grass cannot be slid between them. Looking down, we see the buildings running east-west in orderly rows, so as to maximise the amount of light and so that no building casts its shadow on another. Looking up, we float with the rising mist amongst a ring of mountains. Opposite, Huayna Picchu, to the west, glacial Pumasillo, Salcantay (wild mountain) looms behind us, over Machu Picchu itself, the Veronicas guard the east and below us, folded into foothills, the rainbow flag of the Incas flutters on top of Mount Putukusi.

Climbing even higher, we sit on a rock and watch the sun creep over the eastern ranges to breathe heat and light into the ancient stones. The thought occurs that these aren’t just ruins. This is where people gossiped in the Sacred Plaza, sweated in the terraces, chewed coca, harvested maize, tended their amaryllis (Machu Picchu has its very own species), and perhaps implored the Sun God to, next time, let them build a city on level ground! This is where stonemasons carved the head of a condor between two soaring wings of natural granite to represent the flight into the afterlife. The rising sun of the winter solstice still spills its rays through the eastern window of the Sun Temple onto the altar behind and this is where, at midday on the solstice, the sun continues to hitch itself to the Intiwathana (sun) stone, in which position, it casts no shadow. No, this place isn’t just history – Machu Picchu rocks!