Caja-mazing

1/8/2009

“Dale! Vamos!” Another sack of rice was heaved up and we were on our way in the darkness. When I said in a previous post that my trips up and down the mountain to Chalaco were “an adventure every time,” I didn´t quite realize what some fellow Alto Piura volunteers have to do just to get to and from their sites. My trip can be nerve-racking, but at least I have a reliable bus service. Patrick and Tristan, who live farther down the mountain but more off the beaten path, have to do a little more work. So next time you wanna feel really alive, I suggest the following: come to Peru, then come to the top of our mountain in Piura, then hop in a ten-ton truck at 2AM, put on your favorite live Phish album on your iPod, lay back on a 50-kilo sack of rice, and just cruise. The funky 25-minute guitar solos combined with the ditches and boulders in the unpaved road will keep your head bouncing like a bobble-head doll for the next 4 hours, and laying there, tuned out in your own private hippie dance and looking up at the southern sky as you descend through the layers of fog (and despite the lack of sleep and penetrating wind), it just might make you so goddam happy you can´t help but laugh to yourself.

Thus began my Fiestas Patrias vacation, which turned out to be a pretty great week. From Piura I headed down the coast to Chiclayo, then hopped an overnight bus up to Cajamarca, the cultural capital of the northern sierra. Now having gone three nights basically without sleep (the second one being a big night out in Piura with some volunteers and local friends), I was glad to have made it to my first destination and get a good meal (the best 4 soles – or $1.33 – I´ve ever spent: fried mountain trout, white rice, and garlic mashed potatoes), and a good night´s sleep afterward.

Earlier that day I had met up with my travel partners, a few other volunteers from different parts of the country, and we had planned out the next several days, which would include some sightseeing around Cajamarca and then a trip a couple hours further inland to Celendín, a sweet little mountain town that, in some ways, reminded me of a much smaller Jackson, WY. In fact, the whole time we were in Cajamarca I couldn´t help but think how much the landscape reminded me of late summer in the western US, with its rugged mountains, pine forests, shaggy plains, and dry, hot days and nights that make you glad you brought your sleeping bag. All it´s missing is the bison and grizzlies. It was stunningly beautiful, really very similar to where I live in Alto Piura, just not as tropical-feeling, and more rugged overall. And whereas the hills up here are almost completely divided into parcels for agriculture, most of Cajamarca´s land is dedicated to cattle herding to support its famous diary industry.

The city itself is a very cool spot, much livelier and much more touristy than Piura. What struck me most was the juxtaposition of contemporary Peruvian “city” culture with the more traditional elements from the surrounding countryside. Where I live there are very well-marked distinctions between the traditional Andean culture, and the fast-paced costa, where the city of Piura lies. When you travel down to the city, you leave behind the traditional foods, dress, and music. In Cajamarca, by virtue of its being a relatively large city nestled in the mountains at almost 9,000 feet, you see the two interacting daily; tiny little women with long braids, straw hats, ponchos, and their unmistakable brightly-colored dresses and sweaters hike into town to stock up on supplies and sell their wares – or beg – on street corners to the Louis Vouitton-toting tourists, both Peruvian and international alike. And during the day, the latter group takes sightseeing trips out to the countryside, passing by the same little women on the side of the road as they speed along to take pictures of the things that the locals consider just part of their backyard. I wouldn´t say it was good or bad, just different that what I´ve grown used to. Seeing the two cultures side-by-side did make me wonder, though, about the fate of the more traditional way of life in Peru; with recent economic growth the country´s urbanization rate has spiked, and within a couple generations the Andean campo culture might be largely lost.

Our first day we hitched a ride out to a spot called Cumbemayo, a series of rolling, golden plains punctuated by these crazy, bulbous rock corridors that look like something out of Stonehenge. Nestled way back in there are a series of canals built (they think) by the Caxamarca culture at least 2,000 years ago. Pretty cool to think that they build these perfect angles in the rock with nothing but…well, other rocks I guess. Too bad the Incas had to conquer them and everyone else in Peru during their short reign during the 16th century. From there we hiked back down to the city, arriving just as the sun set. The skies and and faded colors in the late-afternoon light, again, made me nostalgic for Fall in the States. Nothing a few drinks couldn´t cure, though (although even that took a while to accomplish, and when we finally found a place that we were sure would have some whiskey - the "Cowboay Bar" - it turned out all they had in that category were empty Johnnie Walker bottles for decoration. Who the hell ever heard of a cowboy bar without whiskey? We got up and left in disgust). Day two I set out with my two buddies to check out some other spots around Cajamarca. Some hurried guidebook research and cheap tourist maps told us we might be able to find some cool hiking in the surrounding countryside, but unfortunately we sort-of just ended up walking around the dumpy outskirts of Cajamarca all day. The two sights we hit were pretty disappointing; the Ventanillas de Otuzco are some cool tombs carved into the side of a cliff, but largely unremarkable except for their small size (how´d they get all those bodies in there??), and the Baños del Inca was a far cry from the rustic thermal baths we thought we were going to (actually just a hot swimming pool and some private bathtubs – we didn´t even go in). The highlight was definitely the cheese we had bought before setting out. Guidebooks will tell you things like “Cheese lovers beware, Cajamarca´s dairy rivals that of France,” and I wouldn´t say it´s an exaggeration (although I guess I´ve never really been to France). But I mean, you name a flavor, they´ve probably got it: we bought little chunks of almond, basil and oregano, and a couple other flavors, all of which were fantastic. We also bought a giant wheel of quesillo – unsalted homemade cheese – out in the campo, which I wasn´t a huge fan of. It was like the fresh cheese in Chalaco, just without any taste and chewier.

From Cajamarca we hopped in a station wagon heading out to Celendín, a Peace Corps site that´s a little different than most (a college town of some 30,000). We timed it so that our two nights there would correspond with both the Fiestas Patrias national holiday as well as the city´s Aniversario. Needless to say, there was plenty of fiesta to go around. The first night my buddy Andy and I played a few games of pool with some younger locals in a two-table pool hall we found. It´s a different game in the southern hemisphere, and the pockets are just big enough for a ball to slide into; without a doubt a tougher game than our traditional “eight-ball.” Somehow we won the first game, but after the second had dragged on for the better part of an hour, and we realized that we had scratched so many times that winning would have been all but impossible, we threw in the towel. No one likes to forfeit, especially to teenagers, but they were drinking too, so at least it didn´t feel like losing to kids. Plus we felt pretty good about the first game, so we paid our tab and went looking for more adventure.

Our second night in Celendín there was a huge party in the plaza, with some of the most elaborate fireworks displays I´ve ever seen. It´s pretty common during these types of town parties to have a castillo, or giant wooden structures that shoot fireworks in all directions; in Celendín they had about six of them, all at least three stories tall. A cumbia band was playing to a couple thousand packed into the plaza, most passing around beers or the hot, sweet cañaso drink “calentado” in re-used half-liter soda bottles bought from vendors scattered throughout. Every few minutes one of the castillos would start – literally – spitting fireballs down onto the crowd, which no one seemed to mind. Two of my friends got firework-ash in their eyes. It was the coolest and scariest pyrotechnics experience of my life. It felt like we were in a war zone: a loud, bright, happy, dancing, booze-filled war zone. At one point a tree caught fire right in the middle of the plaza. Someone made a half-hearted attempt to put it out with a garden hose, but quickly thought better. So it just went up in flames, to everyone´s delight. Later that night I danced with a girl who first guessed that I was Spanish, and then Italian. I took off my hat and asked her how many blond Italians she knew. I forget what her response was.

Needless to say, after a couple late nights we were all pretty spent, and the busses back to Cajamarca, then down to Chiclayo and on up the coast to Piura, offered some much-needed – if sporadic – rest. I headed back up “the mountain,” but stopped a couple hours short of Chalaco to stay with my buddy Mark´s host family for a couple nights, because I had JASS work in the towns around his (see previous entry). It was a little weird to be there when Mark wasn´t (his parents had come to visit and they had all taken off down South to see Cuzco and Machu Picchu), but he´s got a great family who I´ve gotten to know pretty well by now. His señora´s greasy cooking, now infamous among the nearby volunteers, and the laid-back town were a pretty good cure for my hangover after a week of partying (although the rats running around in the roof at night were a little disconcerting, especially since there´s about a one-meter-by-one-meter hole right above Mark´s bed). But as Dorothy once said, there´s no place like home, and it was great to finally be back in Chalaco a couple days later.