I know visiting your country was one of the most kick-butt, everlastingly memorable, awesome experiences of my life, as well as for those that travelled with me. The scenery, the travel, t’was matched only by the sincerity, humbleness and peaceful ethic of the people.
Just hanging out with those indigenous folk we encountered on the Inca trail, talking in linguistically mired but ultimately understandable conversation about the birds, trees, forest, grassland, crops, cattle, snakes, tiered hillside plantings and the river (Urubamba). And jeez… how could I forget… the bromeliads!
Oh yeah, and then there was Machu plus the time I got to help an older gentleman wrestle his dead pig carcass from the aircraft overhead compartment. Tres cool.
Also, cuy, the fact that the peruanos I know hate it when people call them Mexican, that it’s way up in the mountains, that there’s a lot of cocaine and Chinese immigrants, that the only Peruvian restaurant I’ve eaten in was a Chinese / Peruvian fusion place in Harlem, that Shining Path is bad news, and that the emblem has a vicuña on it.
You’re making me reveal my ignorance here; I’m allegedly a Spanish major. I think of Peru as “that little country north of Chile that has beautiful mountains.” I tend to think of the country as more politically stable than other South American/Central American countries such as Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, etc, but I could be completely wrong. I am also seriously considering doing volunteer work there within the next few years (assuming I survive my experience in Mexico.) I would love to know more about Peru though, if you want to share. What do you think is important about your country?
I know that it ain’t easy to drill for oil in the jungle. For environmental reasons, you have to hotshot everything in by chopper. (Rightfully so, IMHO) Basically, you use marine equipment on land, which is a little pricey. Then there are the mudslides. It can take a year to drill to 17,000 feet. And the local tribes (maybe not the right word) don’t like it one bit. Unlike most places in the world that face local opposition to drilling, the locals don’t want to be bought off.
I always think of Machu Pichu and those huge drawings in the desert too. I’d like to go someday.
Llamas and chullos. There’s this really cool tradition of knitting the chullos with yarn that has bobbles pre-crocheted into it, but I can’t find a link to it. Trust me, it’s a very innovative fiber technique.
Sorry, but I have to add near constant sexual harassment to the list (although the other, nice things people have mentioned apply as well). The three weeks my husband and I spent there were interesting, but I never felt safe (and I’ve traveled alone in several other countries w/o problem). I was young and blond, and even with my husband beside me all the time it was constant. Honestly, it kind of put me off Latin America entirely.
Also: Electric shower heads! Not only do they not warm the water (we were there in the winter), they can electrocute you as a bonus! (Yeah, we stayed in REALLY cheap places.)
Lima at the nicest time of year (December), elegant Miraflores, enormous slums, beautiful children, hippy time-warp Barranco, terrifying internal flights, beautiful colonial Ayacucho, traumatised campesinos caught between the two fires of the Shining Path and the Peruvian army, eating cuy (not me though), Puno, altiplano, Ayaviri, soroche, Lake Titicaca, Cuzco, Inca Trail, Machu Picchu, “matachancho”, papas a la huancayna, pisco sours, my Peruvian colleagues’ sense of humour, and last but not least, their hospitality.
Llamas and thick, scratchy woolen blankets. The Andes and natives chewing coca leaves. Very desolate mountains, but not as harsh as Nepal. For some reason, DC-3s figure in my imagination, ferrying people and crops from one remote landing strip to another.
It’s not closer to “castellano de Valladolid”. It’s closer to Maño and Navarro and Vascongado and Riojano, actually. If you can find movies with an actor called “Paco Martínez Soria”, get one: you should be able to hear that his accent is different from everybody else, because he’s speaking maño and the rest speak castillian (even in scenes where he’s with another “aragonese villager”, he always exaggerated the accent more than the rest).
This happens in general in highland areas: I’ve encountered it in parts of Mexico, Costa Rica and Colombia. Guess what, they’re areas where you can’t overturn a stone without finding three Ochoas (basque-navarrese), five Guillenes (aragón) and two Samanes (navarra-rioja). The Spanish settlers for those areas were mostly from the northern part of Spain (the andalusians and extremeños who went to hotter places didn’t like the climate or the exertion required to navigate the occasional uphill), so the dialects that were introduced were mostly those from the northern part of Spain. Any place where they finish diminutives in -ico, think “Ebro river valley” - NOT Castilla. If they greet each other with anything resembling “eu”, “quió”, “quiubo” or “queu” that’s Navarra.
Perú… they don’t like Bolivians much, which is Traditional. You’re Traditionally supposed to throw rocks at the neighbors, y’see. A friend of mine went to a wedding in a village in southern Navarra recently and after the banquet the locals had actually set up a meet with the guys from the next village over to throw rocks at each other and have fistfights; as my friend said “I’d never felt so much like a city guy.”
They had Fujimori. I should know the name of the current president but haven’t been watching the news for ages so I can’t recall it. Macchu Picchu and Titicaca. Pretty woolen hats and blankets. Llamas, which are like camels only not.
Sadly, it’s the completely utterly mad woman I know who moved to Cusco to teach salsa when she’d only been learning herself for a few months. In the time she’s lived there, she’s suffered every kind of disaster imaginable and still believes that young men are attracted by the wizened old crow look she’s been cultivating.
Missed edit window. Many of the things I know about Perú aren’t so much about Perú as about “la zona andina”. Oh, and the guy who’s working for my Middlebro and SiL helping them care for her father (who has ALS) is a widower from Perú. He doesn’t have papers, SiL is looking into what would he need in order to get “regularized”.
I once had a Peruvian friend over for Thanksgiving dinner and he watched with undisguised horror are we all dug into the pumpkin pie. He claims that in Peru, pumpkins are used almost exclusively for feeding livestock and are viewed as a sort of garbage-filler added to the cattlefeed to increase its volume.
