Travel Blog Peru - Arequipa (13th-16th July 2019)
[editors note: Writing this on my iPhone on a 7 hour bus ride from Arequipa to Puno, the gateway to Lake Titicaca, the world’s largest navigable lake at 3,800m of altitude, and the source of the sun deity according to Inca belief.]
In the late 1980s I had been on a 32-hour bus trip from Tijuana down to Mexico DF, bursting with youthful energy, curiosity and excitement about my Latin American gap year and all the adventures ahead of me, Mexico with my friends Sigrid and Alberto, Nicaragua (when this young lefty was a sympathiser to the Sandinistas and against Reagan’s Contras, only to be subsequently abhorred by the autocratic fiefdom and dictatorship that Daniel Ortega has turned the country into), Brazil with my friends Kesia and PL, Uruguay with my bro Freddy and his family that welcomed me as if I were their 3rd son, a tall blond to go with the Latin lovers Freddy and Umberto), Buenos Aires with my friends Vicky and Paco.
What would we be without our memories? I hope I shall perish before I become demented. In Lima the other day I flicked on the local tv when we wanted to kill some time to adjust better to the 7+ hour time zone of Peru, and stumbled upon one of my favourite actors and favourite films - Al Pacino in ‘Stand-up Guys’; the dialogues with Christopher Walken (he of Russian roulette fame in the 1970s unforgettable Vietnamese War classic ‘The Deer Hunter’, alongside youthful and Slavic Meryl Streep and macho Italian Roberto de Niro) in the English original are to die for, in Spanish they drew some blancs from my fellow travellers. But when the two bury their old friend in the deep of night — between robbing a car and cruising about town, and fulfilling his last dream of being with two women at the same time, and some new dandy suits, and a midnight surf and turf at the local diner — the former getaway driver of these three classy aging bandits, Al Pacino is asked to say a few words ad memoriam, and says inter alia that one dies twice - once when you take your last breath, and once when the last person that remembers your name goes out. Memories make us who we are.)
Anyhow - on to that Mexican bus ride in 1987, when there was no air conditioning on the old greyhound bus, but instead lots of cockroaches, crying babies, and arid landscapes outside the window flying by. I had been afraid of Montezuma’s revenge, the name given to the many stomach bugs affecting European travelers in Mexico, in reference to the torture of Aztec ruler Montezuma by Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortez, so anguishingly and beautifully captured in the murals of Diego Rivera, the Mexican painter genius better known in the west as the friend of Leon Trotsky when Stalin sent his henchmen after him to Mexico, and as the unfaithful husband of the first feminist of Latin America, Mexican paintress Frida Kahlo, who we discovered and feted in my youth together with Che Guevara - he of the Motorcycle Diaries that I envy him for (watch this space!), and for the endless supply of Cuban cigars, por supuesto! So at the many stops I only ate bananas and gulped down coke to kill the germs ... before Sigrid and Alberto introduced me to the magic of Mexican cuisine, never to look back ..
Well, our Cruz del Sur bus service in Peru is a luxurious jump into the 21st century, complete with luggage check-in, waiting lounge, business class 160 degrees reclining seats, in-bus video entertainment, obligatory seat belts, stewardess, all for less than USD 30 for a 500km trip (NB, however, that the Peruvian minimum monthly wage is a mere 900 soles or USD 275). The girls are over the moon, even if the brilliant and funny conversations of ‘The Green Book’ are dubbed into Spanish and may not be quite as funny as Al Pacino ... but let us finally get onto the subject matter of today’s virtual travel diary entry, en fin ...]
AREQUIPA, Peru’s second largest town, a 90 minute flight south from Lima, is enchanting and airy at some 2,500m of altitude, accompanied by three 6,000m volcanoes that sit like guardian angels atop the city and its friendly, relaxed, flirting, happy-looking people.
A gem of Baroque architecture, founded on the authority of one of the loathsome Pizarro brothers, Francisco, an Estremaduran bastard with next to no education and apparently few gentlemanly instincts, but plenty of avarice and guile to make up for that, who with 27 horses and 160 fighters managed to succumb the Inca empire measuring 4,000km in longitude and possessing at the time of the 1530 AD incursion three standing armies of 35,000 warriors each ... but your narrator is getting ahead of himself. The town is a UNESCO world heritage site today, and no wonder.
Whereas ‘soroche’ (altitude sickness) was the keyword for canyon Colca, for Arequipa it surely must be ‘sillar’ - the white volcanic rock from which all stately homes (‘casonas’) and churches and palaces are built, with the most impressive the Cathedral, in glittering and regal white, crowned by volcanoe Misti at 5,800m above it.
It covers one entire side of the Plaza de Armas, the main square that would be called the ‘zocalo’ in Mexico (where I learned my fist Spanish from Sigrid and Alberto and their welcoming families, in the late 1980s when it was still a country safe enough to travel in, and to learn about the Aztecs and the Maya, some of the other highly advanced indigenous civilizations that preceded the European ‘discovery’ of this continent), filled with arches, fountains, families with children taking pictures from hired photographers (smartphone penetration is thankfully still modest, one of many refreshingly ‘old-fashioned’ attributes of this town and its carefree inhabitants).
Men with typewriters sit on park benches sourrounded by bustle, typing up formal letters to public administrations with carbon copies (remember those?) for clients who either are illiterate and/or have no computer or typewriter themselves. It reminded me of my dad, who loved his Olympia typewriter, never learned to use a computer or mobile phone, and kept writing his correspondence until his mid-70s, once there were no longer secretaries around to write up his multi-facetted and eloquent correspondence, peppered with Latin proverbs and bonmots, from his dictaphone. What once passed for progress and modernity has passed into oblivion without us so much as noticing - so I thanked the Arequipa typewriters for bringing back memories of papa.
Young couples sit on park benches and church steps, gavorting and kissing, like pigeons, with gaiety and abandon, bringing back memories of youth, timelessness, carefree abandon. Local eateries (‘picanterias’) fill the 2nd floor arches overlooking the square, and host us for the evening, as we marvel at the bustle and gusto de vida in full evidence below us, from one corner of the beautiful square to another.
We tap with our fingers the loudspeaker-amplified music by wind orchestra and singers, proffering songs and dance music that appears to be from another epoche, and somewhat parochial in its organised, benevolent form of pleasing the masses streaming through the square on this balmy Saturday evening. Fiestas are ever present in this joyful country, something we are slowly leaning and quickly appreciating.
In parallel, and apparently entirely inocuous to the fiesta, drums are beating and banners being waved, ‘no a la mina’, against resource extraction and mining, a small demonstration doing circles in front of the Cathedral. This conflict, between mining interests and indigenous people, which is about ancient land rights and the environment and water rights and priorities, we also encountered in the Chilean Atacama desert last year. It is pervasive in the Peruvian dailies, with one of the major mines blocked for months now by indigenous and environmental groups; the politics around this tread carefully. It is a minefield, given how dependent many of these emerging economies are still on extractive resources, and how many legacy conflicts from the time of the conquistadores are not yet resolved.
That same cathedral, I erroneously thought before checking the facts, is not in fact the one in which ‘Conversation in a Cathedral’ plays, the 1969 opus magnum by Peruvian Literature Nobel laureate and Arequipa native, Mario Vargas Llosa - who once nearly became Peruvian president and now lives in Madrid and London, writing erudite essays, incl. in El PAíS about the folly of Catalan independentismo. His ‘conversation’ in fact takes place in a Lima bar called ‘The Cathedral’ between the son of a minister in a dictatorial Peruvian government of the 1950s and his driver, and draws on autobiographic elements of Vargas Llosa’s youth at Lima university and in a social group trying to shed light on the dictatorship’s abuses.
(I have always felt that the best writing is partially autobiographic - no stories are as burning and inspiring as one’s own; I thus don’t share the criticism of, e.g., my favourite American novelist, recently deceased Philip Roth, who should have had the Nobel prize just as it is well deserved for Vargas Llosa. In my youth I had read lots of the works by other representatives of the Magic Realism stream of literature famous in post-WW2 Latin America, with Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mexican Carlos Fuentes my key inspiration and envy. In English, only Salman Rushdie comes close to having such imaginary powers and playfulness with words; in my (unwritten) book, that is.)
I acquired a recent novel of Vargas Llosa, something about ‘Travesuras de la nina mala’ (‘A bad girl’), written in 2006 but set on the first pages in 1950s Lima, the flower- and villa-filled district of Miraflores, to be exact, which we also made our first stop on this Peruvian voyage. A blond-headed Chilean girl aged 15 and named Lily dances the newly arrived mambo dance so much better and seductively, that the Peruvian teenager that is the narrator falls for her three times in one summer, enchanted first and foremost by her manner of speaking, her eating of the last syllables of expressions, her mysterious Chilean words full of promise and mystery. His stern aunt disapprovingly murmurs to herself “Bueno, no olvidemos che es chilena, el fuerte de las mujeres de este país no es la virtud!” (‘Well, let’s not forget that she is Chilean; the women of that country are not know for their virtitude!’)
It is a love story that moves through time and three continents - they meet many times but can apparently neither let go of each other nor fully work out their joint lives .... more to come as I get deeper into the promising thread of the novel. (Allegedly it is a rewrite of ‘Madame Bovary’, the 1856 Gustave Flaubert novel about Europe’s first feminist, who became legendary for her voracious love life against all societal norms.)
Most impressive in Arequipa are the monuments to religious fervour. The ornamentally rich facade of the Jesuit church ‘de la Compania’ in the corner of the Plaza de Armas is outshone by the courtyard of its adjacent former cloister, simple and beautiful at once, with its incredible ornate carvings into the hard volcanic rock a work of love and devotion.
A couple of city blocks are taken up by a baroque monastery founded by a widow in 1580, Monasteria de Santa Catalina, a jewel of baroque architecture painted in natural red ochre and turquoise indigo, colours to fall in love with.
Our charming lady guide, Sra Ana-Lis, immaculately dressed with a straw sombrero against the scorching sun and with her composed mannerisms, speaking in this beautifully deliberate and clear Peruvian Spanish that one would not want to call neither ‘espanol’ nor ‘castellano’, sheds surprising light on this institution, so beautiful and scary at the same time - to a father of four daughters that is, three of which are accompanying the pater familias and their mother on this visit.
The second born daughter, it turns out, in the 16th and 17th century would have had a choice between an arranged marriage, or going to this convent - if Dad so decided and had the 100 annual gold ducats to pay for it, proximity to God evidently being a function of wealth (as Martin Luther was to protest when he started the reformation in Europe against the practice of paying to have your sins obliterated from the records; in 1517 mind you, even before Hernán Cortez conquered the Aztec empire in 1520).
Our second born would have been Natalia, who has just completed her Polish matura, is headed to LSE, papa’s alma mater, is happily in love, and is planning a Latin American gap year; would I have sent her off at 12 years of age to this convent? For the true horror emerges in the next half sentence: you can never leave, for all of your life!! (If the novice nuns decide after 4 years at the age of 16 that they don’t want to be ‘married to God’, they and their families are frowned upon.)
[Today in England 11 year old girls are being sent to boarding school — the boys only at 13 as they are slower — and some societies find that just as strange, parting with your loved ones at an early age voluntarily (there is no longer an empire in far flung corners of the world with dangerous deseases and no good schools, but UK public schools thrive ...]
Freedom, me thinks again, including religious one, is one inheritance from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and an attribute of Modernity, that one would not want to miss, listening to that.
But the large monasterial complex is architecturally and aesthetically a marvel - built also from that volcanic rock, sillar, and having survived — believe it or not — 9 earthquakes above 7 on the Richter scale! (Lesser ones are smiled upon in Peru as not worth mentioning.) It is like a little town upon itself, with streets named after the large Spanish towns (Malaga, Burgos, Toledo, etc) and a square in which the nuns engage in barter of their handicrafts, called trueque, a practice still also common among the people inhabiting Cañón Colca, as Omar told us.
But it is high time for your correspondent to check up on ‘la chica mala’, and to marvel at the emptiness of the Peruvian Sierra as the sun sets on this Pampa-like landscape, as Volcano Sabancaya waves one last orange-red extended cloud of volcanic ashes into the dying evening light, and as the bus winds it’s way up towards oxygen-deprived Puno at 3,800m ....
*****
