Macchu Picchu

Friday the 29 of August 2008: We woke up at 4:30 so that we could feel at least a little less touristy by walking there instead of taking the bus. So at 5:15am we began our journey to Machu Picchu by climbing at least 500 stairs. At the beginning of our hike it was still dark out and it would have been beautiful to watch the sunrise from the hillside on the stairs if it hadn’t been so foggy. It took us an hour and a half total to make it from Aguas Calientes (the small tourist town in the valley) to the gate at Machu Picchu. When we arrived at Machu Picchu it was still foggy and it stayed that way until about 9:30. As we entered, we were confronted by a guide offering his services to us, so with him and a few other people we began our tour of Machu Picchu.
Machu Picchu is amazing. I can only wonder how these people came up with the ideas for construction and how they made it happen. The thing I found most interesting about Machu Picchu is that it was never discovered by the Spaniards. At Machu Picchu there are multiple temples because the idea of Machu Picchu was a religious one and it was all about worship and connecting with Mother Earth. My favorite spot at Machu Picchu is this room with tons of trapezoidal cubbies in the walls. These cubbies were for holding idols. If you stick your head in a cubby and someone else sticks their head in another one and you both make and aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh sound at the same time you begin to hear the other person’s voice through the stone between the cubbies. It was very weird. Sinclair

Cusco Macchu Picchu

Cusco is a tourist mecca for all those seeking access to Machu Picchu. I find it overwhelming that within 2 blocks you can encounter up to 15 store fronts offering treks to the jungle, rafting trips, mountain biking and something involving small reptiles resembling crocodiles (caymans most likely). 5 minutes after being let out of the taxi we met our first person offering all sorts of services. At that moment, not having any clue about a hostal, having a son about to pass out from a combination of altitude and having thrown up in the airport in Ecuador at 6:00am and a daughter recovering from the same the night before, wegladly accepted his guidance. It was only several hours later after he was still hanging around the hostal that I realized he was waiting for a tip. Dumb gringa! And while I was grateful that he directed us, I soon was wary of the cheap trips he was offering us as being those that are so discounted it means you are sacrificing your experience, but they are not telling you about that!
After the gut wrenching experience of committing to spending hundreds of dollars, we decided to go to Macchu Picchu on our own. In the end, we found a couple of cheaper hostals than I expected so the whole journey was not as painful as it could have been. We stopped over in the small town of Ollantaytambo (one of the hardest names in Spanish for me personally to prounounce). There is a small site of ruins there and while interesting, I now realize that once you have Macchu Picchu’d you can never go back. While I maintain I am NOT like other tourists, we swarmed with the masses over the wonderous site of these amazing ruins. Trying to transport yourself back to that time…..when community was key, organic farming was the norm and people who were lazy got beheaded. Ahhhhh….my kinda livin’!! Cinnamon

Michael´s Farm

Michael was our host on the first farm we visited. It is his father’s farm and he is working to make it a certified organic farm. He will get the permit in Septmeber 2009. He has two pieces of property. One is behind his house and the other is a ten minute walk from the house.
“The Backyard Farm” is a plot small plot of land that was, and still is, overgrown in some spots. When we got to the farm there was a small plot that had already been dug out and shapped for irrigation and was ready to plant. We think that the other volunteer cleared that out the week that we weren’t there(lucky him). There were a couple of compost heeps and another less overgrown plot that was behind some trees. The rest of it was over grown and out of shape. It looked like we were some of the first people to weed in a while.
We only went to the other plot of land one day. That land was more like an orchard. It was pretty overgrown too. There were a few distinguished paths but that was all you could really see. There were some coffee trees, an avocado tree,a chiramoya, and mandarins, but otherwise it didn’t have that much. There was a farm right next to this one that had mandrins. They were all in rows and you could tell some hade put some work into it. Overall, Michael’s farm was overgrown and a small production. Carsen

La Primera

OK-so I got you all excited by saying we had a blog, and THEN, there was nothing on it! How clever of me. We actually have been away from internet for several days so I have an excuse. Our 3 wks in Ecuador has rapidly come to a close, so it seems somehow appropriate that I am just now writing a post from the Quito house of our host Michael. I´m not sure I´ll post pics yet, so you´ll have to be on the edge of your seat for that. The farm is the family farm that belonged to his father. It is right in the center of a little town, Perucho, about an hour and half away from Quito. His family is one of the orginal families in town, so he jokes about being related to just about everyone, unless they´ve moved to town in the last 20 years. The surrounding area and other towns are all farming communties, often negotiating terrain that is so steep you can hardly imagine the dirt doesn´t all run off with one big rain storm. He has about 2 hectares of land, enough to produce some food to sell at the Quito farmer´s market during the height of the season. Unfortunately, because of an extremely wet rainy season, not much was growing when we got there. We did eat a lot of good vegetarian food, but not as much was provided from the farm as we had hoped. However, rice and lentils DO taste better on rural land in Ecuador! Apparently, we missed the Chiramoya season, which is supposedly one of the best fruits on earth, creamy and sweet. Michael is in the process of getting his farm organically certified. While doing that, he is also trying to convert some of the other farmers. We helped work on several other farms, all belonging to relatives! That´s one way to start a revolution I suppose. The biggest polluters in the area are the flower farms. While they employ several hundreds, they do not use safe pesticide management procedures and their use of pèsticides is extremely high. As you might guess, the US is a huge import of Ecuadorian roses, so think twice before you buy that next bouqet. I guess I could write for days, so I´ll try to stick to the highlights. Some revelations - they shovel shit in Ecuador just like in the states! Our most ¨exciting¨ opportunity to experience this was a chicken farm. We got dropped off, just us gringos, and embarked on the task of cleaning a 15´ by 40´ building of slopping wet, 8¨ inch deep chicken business. Oh yeah, there was a handful of dead chickens to boot. After one of the volunteers puked, he ran back down to the farm and told Michael about the conditions. We were NOT required to finish. Yes, we are paying to have this volunteer experience!! I joke, but it has been wonderful. We enjoyed a trip to the coast to an Ecotourist farm called Rio Muchacho. It was interesting because it was a completely different set-up from our host farm. Much more established and because it catered to tourists, there was this strange mix of tourist, volunteers, Ecuadorian staff, and students for a permaculture class. I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out everyone´s role. And, yes, we had another opportunity to move some poo! This time horse and cow. This farm was particularily interesting because they have several active waste reuse systems - grey water, methane gas collection for the kitchen, and various different composting systems. Randomly one afternoon, while Ramijio (Michael´s cousin) was driving us around in his flower farm transportation bus, we stumbled upon a small yogurt and cheese making factory in one of the towns higher up in the mountains. We were so excited we took a field trip back 2 days later to check in on Raquel milking her 11 cows, then helped start to process the yogurt and bag some cheese made the day before. Oh this cheese!! It is called queso fresco and I´m not sure if we can get it in the states. It is wetter than Cotija and more of a fresh mozzerella consitency. Our volunteer teams have eaten 1 to 2 bricks of this a day!! Carsen endured a 7 hour night bus ride where we were stuck in the last 3 seats on the bus with a raging fever. Luckily, that was the ONLY symptom! The busses drive CRAZY fast here and I woke up several times thinking ¨Don´t look, you don´t want to know!¨ When one passed on a hairpin turn I realized praying might be a good practice after all. The the last 2 days saw his fever arise again, followed by me getting it and Sinclair getting a stomach bug. We´re flying tomorrow, so I hope we are all feeling better. Fortunately, we have not had any problems with ¨the travelers plague¨ (you know what I´m talkin´about!) but we´ve had a very conscientious host. Traveling on our own in Peru might present us with some different circumstances! We´ll have more to say about it on the next blog......