Andagua the road to the past (future?)
Andagua, how do I describe my 3 days in this town on the crossroads of existence? One can set things in motion which half way through begin to seem a mistake. Yet after all, when calculating the challenges against moments connected in some deeper way beyond the normal commerce of human interaction, the equation collapses. I chose to go to Andagua to see a more remote town, in the "Valley of Volcanoes," near a trout stream, and a reputation for being tranquil. What I found was both more and less.

The road to Andagua starts off well enough. The Pan American Highway leaves Arequipa in good condition and as far as the surface is concerned remains a fine road, with a few curves thrown in. The scenery is grand. Desert with irrigated terraces, every field is walled and terraced, whether 100 yards wide of only 20'. Fields we would never bother to level either because they were already tolerably flat to begin with of too steep to bother with, are here all terraced. Water being at a premium, slope is extremely critical to allow the water to soak in father than run off. Yet it is hard to justify the time and effort spent in the narrow terraces with 6' walls and 12' of surface. In the time before the conquest they may have served a different economy as indeed today some of these narrow fields have been left to the gradual decline of time, untended. Yet, their crumbling state points out the time spent in maintaining those that remain in cultivation.

After about 4 hours of good road, the climb over the shoulder of Nevada Coropuno, 21,000' at its summit. Starting at about 2,000' the road changes to gravel more or less, and climbs to 16,500' before descending to 10.500' at Andagua. What would be 45 miles in a straight line is a 6 hour mission improbable. By now it is night and though a gibbous moon is some help in appreciating some of the landscape, most of the landscape is out of sight, though to some degree inferred. Switch back after switchback, the road almost parallel with itself most of the way the bus climbs the mountain. At first there a few scattered towns cut into narrow valleys, surrounded with terraces. I note fig leaves in passing. Higher up the villages give out and the real climb begins. Several times the bus has to back up to get around the corner. Quite nerve racking as you might imagine though only slightly more so than the corners the bus squeezes around without backing up! One isn’t sure even the driver knows how close the wheel is to the edge. Across the wide flattish shoulder of the mountain there is a half hour of relatively relaxed travel, the white snowfields of the massif drifting in the distance as the bus turns left and right. Again on the decent there are several times the bus has to reverse to make the corners and many more time one might wish the driver had. It's 3 AM when we pull in to the Plaza of Andagua

Yanque

The last day before leaving Chivay I took a van to Yanque 20 minutes west along the south bank of the river. I had been told of an interesting garden at a hotel there. Assuming it being a small village it would be easy to find this garden, I asked at an art gallery on the plaza but the artist had only a guess and it turned out to be a wild goose chase. The village was small but the associated area was large. The hotel I got to after a 10 minute taxi and a 10 minute walk wasn't the one so I wandered back in the direction of town. I did find a very unusual prickly Orange flower on a prickly vine, A woman spinning alpaca yarn as she walked along and a group of men hauling 100 lb. loads of firewood 200' down a steep winding trail and a hot spring. But the day was too hot and the road back to town too steep and long for a bath at that point.

The next day I boarded a bus bound for Arequipa. As it stopped at Pata Pampa, I waved out the window at my fellow strandees. I thought they might look up and give me a little wave but no. All the artisanas grinned and waved ecstatically and the younger of the teenage girls ran towards the bus waving and chattering greetings. I aws sad to have to leave without stopping but the bus wouldn't wait.

Chivay area day 4-5
Wednesday morning, I went to the local high school to talk to the Science teacher about the plants I was seeing. I thought that my photos might be of interest to the school and I might find out some of the names and families. There were a wide variety of interesting house plants showing the variety of plant types and various adaptations but no native plants and besides the llareta, cactus, and lupine he was not familiar with them either. The lab was nicely arranged, with tiled stations each with a sink. Among the teaching aids was a pre Incan mummy of a 7 or 8 year old child in fetal pose from a local tomb. There was no shroud and I would guess the tomb had been looted before the school acquired him or her. As the Science teacher had no English and my Spanish is very basic, there was a lot we couldn’t communicate, although scientific names were universal, if pronounced differently. He offered me the chance to return the next day when the English teacher would be back.

I got a bus ride 1/2 an hour towards Pata Pampa to a wetland area called Japo, only 2 houses. My main reason for going there was to see  a bofedal close up. These wet areas occur in many places in the Andes on gentle slopes where springs supply a steady source of water. They are important grazing areas for the alpacas, llamas, and in wilder areas Vicuñas and Guanacos. The main plant is a kind of sedge about an inch high with stiff leaves in a line (comb sedge) which builds low mounds a yard or so wide and 6-8" high, the plants themselves only 1/2 inch. These mounds are very resilient, the tips of the leaves topped with a tough callus and one can walk on them without getting wet. Amidst the sedge (probably Oreobolus species) are other minute plants I am still seeking to identify. There were a couple of the standard adobe houses at the edge of the road and a couple with a toddler, were watching their herd of llamas and alpacas grazing in the sun. I followed the flow of water until it became a stream at which point a path led to a short section of well made stone paved road 6´wide and 60´long, although the 2´stone wall on the low side ran for a couple hundred feet. I felt sure it was the remains of an Incan road no longer used except for the llamas and their herders. The walk back to town was interesting. Most of the time, I found shortcuts between the long zigzags of the highway. Several species of cactus from mat forming to 6´tall were scattered along the mountainside. In one place some creature had made a soccer ball sized nest of branched thorns. What ever it was must have scavenged a large area as the only plant with such thorns was widely scattered. That night was the night I returned to the hot spring with my armed guard. We spent 3 hours in the 30 x 50´ main pool outside. There were people from around the world as well as Peruvians there. I managed to surprise everyone including myself by swimming the length of the pool underwater. Maybe the weight of the water counteracted the low oxygen pressure, at any rate, I felt thoroughly refreshed.

Pata Pampa

Pata Pampa

Monday I became more adventurous and took a bus at 9:30 AM up to the altiplano at 17,500+ feet to an area called Pata Pampa. There is a renowned view of 4 of the largest volcanoes Ampato, Sabancaya, el Misti, and Chachani west and south. Tourist busses stop here for the view and Local art venders all dressed in the embroidered skirt, blouse, vest, jacket and hat renowned in Colca Canyon spread their wares along a stone wall to sell. I wandered off to look for plants in an old crater near by and was rewarded with several interesting finds. The main plant much in evidence is the llareta. A solid green mass often multi humped and growing out of bare rock. All the guide books describe it as a moss but a little research turned up its true identity as an umbeliferae (relative to the carrot)They are composed of tightly packed 1/4" rosettes of leaved solid enough to stand on (if you don’t care about bruising the leaves) and sometimes used for firewood. Ground hugging cactuses were common and in brilliant bloom. Mat forming plants, not as lumpy as llareta were common but not blooming so identification was not possible but I did find a few minute flowers tucked against rocks, one possibly a Portulaceae, and the other a Gentianaceae. A couple of Compositeae were obvious. One I am sure is a celimisea with relatives in New Zealand, the other still to be determined. Walking was a matter of moving slowly and deliberately at least when going up hill. Down hill was no problem and in fact was deceptively easy. But given a slight incline up and I immediately was made aware of my breathing and heart rate. I intended to get a return bus at 2:30 PM but that buss and the 3:45, and the next couple of tourist busses were totally full. I waited in the shelter of a stone wall happily in a warm sun and gradually more and more of the venders (all women or girls) joined me between tourist groups. after 4:00 I was tucked under my space blanket with 2 teenagers One 3 months pregnant, pinching the blanket against the wind, her knee against mine. At 5:15 we heard a bus coming and stood in the road to stop it. The driver reluctantly let the youngest children, a couple of teenage siblings, and me aboard. The 3 women who stayed behind for the 7:00 bus insisted I go and I didn’t resist though I left them my blanket.

Callalli

Callalli
Sunday, after an easy morning hanging around the town plaza and talking with the tourist police in the morning, I took a local van to a town an hour away named Callalli(pronounced Cayayi with a hint of l mixed with the ys) a bit tough for a gringo. This was my first experience of how many people can fit in a regular sized van. I couldn’t count the seats but in counting heads there were 22 people in at one time. Luckily 3 were small children. Needless to say I didn’t see much of the scenery, facing backward behind the front seat in the middle, but I had a nice conversation with the man next to me mostly about how Big Pine compared to the local area. Callalli, like all the local towns has a plaza and a large stone church about 300 years old and a couple hundred adobe houses maybe 15'x 25'. About 10% were abandoned and in various stages of decay. The move to the city is evident but as yet, the 2nd home movement is nil. Some houses still keep the traditional thatched roofs but most have switched to corrugated metal. There was a small Sunday market going on and a side street was full of colorfully dressed women and the more drab men. For some examples native dress by a Native painter that is a link to his website. As i sat next to an older woman, several 7 or 8 year old girls gathered around asking where I was from and what I was doing. I showed them some pictures on my camera of the 2 mesas near town I had photographed and flower close-ups from the day before and the chatted excitedly but when I offered to take their picture the woman told then not to accept. Most people don?t want their photos taken and most of those that do want to be paid. There was a real bus to take me back and the views of the mountains, fields, terraces, and ruins were much more appreciable on the ride back to Chivay.

Chivay day 2
The next day, I stopped in on the Tourist Police and the walked with me to visit a local guide for possible mountain climbing and introduced me to a woman selling ice cream with an optional sweet whipped egg white topping. I just got the ice cream. In the afternoon I got up the strength to try to find a trail up a small stream into the smaller (16,000?) mountains east of Chivay. Following an irrigation channel which surged along one of the main streets I passed a small hydro-electric plant and on through fields mostly brown but some with fava beans and potato sprouts. Apparently the first crop of potatoes had just been harvested. The landscape was desiccated but signs of a wetter season were evident in the growth of lichens, small bromeliads, ferns and mosses; all parched and brittle on the rocks by the trail. Along the mostly dry stream there were moist places with grey leaved lupine coming into bloom. Other plants unfamiliar to me were also starting to flower, mostly shrubby compositeae with white snake root like flowers. At the head of the irrigation system where the stream flowed free, there were 2 species of Calceolaria with their curious puffy yellow flowers. On the way back down I met a couple of young boys, maybe 7 and 9 years old and we walked and "talked" ?till we ended up at the hydro-electric plant. It turned out that their father was working there and he let me look in. It was a small building maybe 20?square with a single turbine he said put out 150 kilowatts/hour. The back up diesel system was 5 times as massive. I noticed some concrete tanks below the turbine house and upon asking was told that the plant also produced trout for the local market.

Chivay intro

Chivay

3:00 in the afternoon, I was in the back of the police pickup truck with the Colonel and 5 other police in the cab. They were taking me 2 miles out of town to put the heat on me.

Actually they were the tourist police and I was to be their guest at the local hot springs! I stopped in on the local Tourist Police office to get information on things to do around Chivay the main town in Colca Canyon. The County seat so to speak. I heard the population is 5,000 but it looks smaller than Marshall. There were 4 Officers including the Colonel and one woman, she spoke some English and became a friend to talk to in a town with few English speakers except some tourists. After several days of casual contact I was a friend.

At 13,000+ feet adjusting to the altitude was difficult. I was doing well when I could get half dressed before taking a breathing break. I did manage to take a walk each day and by going slowly managed to see some great sights. I could just go to the top of my Hostel and see the 3 main volcanoes of the area all near or above 20,000? Ampato, site of a late Incan child sacrifice (Juanita) found in the late 1990s; Sabancaya, most active volcano in South America (no eruptions so far); and Mismi, the source of the Amazon by some accounts and on the continental divide.

The first day, Friday the 28th, Oct.) I went to the local market still with the companions of the canyon trek. There were lots of different fruits, some from the canyon, and others like mango from the hotter coast. My favorite became granadilla, a 3" passion fruit with sweet juicy seedy pulp looking much like a mass of frog eggs! There were probably 20 kinds of potato, and all kinds of dried corn including the almost black purple corn for making a deep purple drink high in antioxidants, chicha morada, as well as a multicolored corn from Cabanoconde. That night I walked to Calera, a hot spring center 2 miles up stream from Chivey. The attendant spoke no English and at first I got the impression that there was no space left. Eventually I got in and was assigned to a 30?round pool inside. There was a couple from Argentina, the husband speaking good English and several Peruvians who seemed to understand my broken and improperly tensed Spanish to some extent. All were very friendly.

Colca Canyon Trek

Colca Canyon Trek

Left Lima on Tuesday the 25th for Arequipa at app. 9,000' with the intention to see the architecture of this old Spanish city. I had a recommendation to look up a trekking guide for a hike (trek) into Colca Canyon, in places twice as deep as the Grand Canyon and the best place to see the Andean Condor. After settling into my hostel, Casa Sillar built over 100 years ago of the local white volcanic rock used throughout the city. It turned out that they had a trip planed the following day and I decided to go against the general rule to spend 3 days adjusting to the altitude, and booked the trip with 3 others and our guide Ion as they didn't know when the next one would be. We left at 6: AM for the 5  hour bus ride, past a vicuna reserve at 12,000' (saw a dozen of these rare graceful cameloid ancestors of the alpaca)Saw my first bofedal, an alpine wetland populated with low dense  mounds of sedge with other minute plants providing dependible grazing through the dry season. The road peaked at 16,000' in a rocky landscape populated by dwarf cushion plants especially the llareta, a bright green mounded member of the parsley family. They are so dense and woody that they are sometimes used as fire wood. A long streatch of the road was unpaved and  so corrigated that at times my feet were doing an tap dance all on their own.

Cabanaconde was our destination. Surrounded by ancient terraces just showing 6" corn and broad bean plants. We had a good lunch and headed off across the gently rolling fields to the canyon edge. The trail down zigzag ed down a desert landscape studded with various cactus, agave, and shrubby asteraceae plants. Dusty and rocky, dropping over 3,000' in 2 hours. We met several small mules with there drivers bringing covered loads At the bottom a new cable bridge 5' wide and 150' long crossed the river, shrunken to a small stream by a massive irrigation project for the coast which takes 80% of the normal flow. After a steep switch backed climb of couple hundred feet we arrived in San Juan a village of about 25 families. After the dessicated trip down the canyon wall, San Juan (as are most of the low canyon villages) is a verdant place where the main crops are various fruits such as avocado, cherimoya, fig, apple, and others unfamiliar to me. They practice a form of permiculture here and trade their produce for the corn, beans, and potatoes grown on the higher fields around Cabanaconde. A small aqueduct followed the edge of the trail and at one point the whole trail was in use carrying a rush of water to lower terraces. We had to cut through an elderly Quechua speaking woman, a bit reluctant to have gringos in her yard and apparently astonished by my beard. The accommodation was in adobe huts with bamboo and thatch roofs (with a layer of blue tarp in between for the tourist's fussier demands for water proof bedrooms. It does rain some in December through May. Looking back the way we had come one could make out only a short stretch of trail the rest was sheer cliffs of columned basalt like the Devil's Causeway but only maybe 16" across but over 1.000' high and in places twisted to show the ends of the columns.

The next day we more or less contoured along the lower part of the canyon through 4 other villages, stopping in one to visit a friend of the guide who showed us around part of his farm, he had been to college and learned grafting and other techniques which he used to improve his plants. He was also the only bee keeper in the canyon. After a about 3 hours we arrived at a small resort called simply the Oasis. Maybe 5 acres of green amidst the dry canyon, with 3 rustic pools filled with water from a spring about 75 degrees (the river was more like 50 so it was a step up. We spent 4 hours relaxing swimming, eating, and taking a short walk to the waterfall still powerful after giving up part of its supply to the oasis. The temperature had dropped and a breeze had come up which helped temper the climb, but 3,700' starting at 6,000' it was the limit of my endurance. The guide took my 15 lb pack for the last hour and a half of the 4 ?? endurance test. On the way up we were passed by several mules going up as well as down. There were 3 crosses for people who died from falling off their mules It was evident that the mules often stumbled coming down on the loose rocks. One particularly well dressed woman, all in the intricately embroidered skirt, jacket and hat that make up the traditional dress here, passed us going up and stopped about 60' above and stared silently at me for about 15 seconds before resuming her ascent. Having barely survived the climb I went to bed with only water and coca tea. I bought a few rolls which I finally had an appetite for at midnight. Did have enough energy to take a picture of a children's parade with candle lit icons including a miniature church, which passed the restaurant.

We arose at 5:30 AM the last day to make it to the condor viewing area. Crowded along the edge of the road were dozens of women selling their native crafts. We went to the edge of the canyon and were rewarded with the sight of several condors including an adult which cruised several times within 100'. On the way back to the bus the woman from the trail was there selling traditional weaving etc. and I had to buy something so to keep my weight to a minimum got 2 pair of alpaca socks. Hard to tell if her statuesque gaze the day before was a sales ploy or a genuine curiosity about the grey bearded gringo.

Cheers Roger

Around Lima

Around Lima It's been an interesting few days in Peru. I arrived Thursday in Lima and and spent 2 days seeing museums and an orchid exhibit as well as circumnavigating a preincan ruin near my hostel. When setting up reservations for accommodation, I ended up calling the wrong place so I had directions for one hostel with the name of the other in my head. The taxi driver tried to take me some where he recommended but I kept to my mistaken address. Don't know what either his recommendation or the one I thought I was going to were like but the one I ended up at is fine and met an American ho is writing a book on Machu Pichu and am invited to look him up when I get to Cusco. At the orchid exhibit I met professora de botanica and am waiting for information on contacting a another botanist about places of special interest. Rather than heading to Arequipa Saturday as planned, I decided to wait for the contact info as this botanist is in Lima. To get out of the city I took a bus a couple of hours north to a fog desert reserve. It was a bleak st reach of highway where I was dropped off and 2 hours walk up hill to the campsite with all my lowland camping gear including 8 lbs of water, as there is no supply there. I would have had to walk another 20 minutes walk further to the information center to store most of my stuff, but a couple from Lima (who gave me a ride the last 1/4 mile) offered to look after it as they had just finished the 3 hour loop trail and were about to set up there camp for the night. I did so and set off for the loop track myself.There is almost no rain here but abundant fog April through November which creates a unique vegetation among peculiarly wind sculpted rock outcroppings. I was surprised to find wild heliotrope, white ageratum, as well as several interesting solanacea, asteracea, malvacae, etc plants in bloom. The couple Pepe and Mili, from Lima and I shared conversation part in Spanish and English by a campfire started with the aid of wood scraps from another camper who just happened to have a big box of wooden Venetian blind scraps from his factory. Camping under a eucalyptus tree, I was sent to sleep by the patter of dew drops which had condensed from the fog. After a short walk the next morning with Pepe when I pointed out the plants he had not noticed (being a marketing major) , I was invited to go with them to a bay 20 minutes away by car where we saw flamingos, as well as other shorebirds. Afterwards they gave me a ride to my hostel door as they lived in the neighborhood. All in all a good start with new contacts. Cheers Roger