Mamani Mamani

There’s a painting by a Bolivian artist that captures exactly how it feels to be in the mountains in South America.  His name is Roberto Mamani Mamani and he’s Aymaran, an indigenous tribe of Incas that dwell in modern day Bolivia, Chile, and Peru.  His paintings are simple and yet it’s hard to look away: the dazzling colors and symbols of suns, moons, mountains, mothers and birds, all of the elements of Inca lore almost whisper a secret of the world from the canvas.  It emanates truth.  In this particular painting the pregnant sun takes up most of the sky, almost touching the earth.  The mountains look like they are melting more than trying to climb the sky, curving gently like the lines of a woman ready to be sketched.  Nestled into the crux of the mountains is a grouping of little houses with blue and green and orange roofs, a village who’s insignificance relative to the rest of the universe is apparent.  And then there’s a cathedral, with two rounded bell towers adjoining the grand sanctuary, built by the hands of the Spanish who came to colonize the Incas with intentions of building an empire that rivaled the sun and the mountains, but failed. 

That is how I felt when I was in the Andes Mountains.  The “spine of South America” runs over 4,000 miles, the world’s largest continuous mountain range, and reaches heights of 22,000 feet above sea level, dropping off precipitously to the Pacific ocean off the Western coast.  For those of you who’ve never been subjected to high altitude, it plays tricks with your brain in weird ways.  There is no experience quite like walking along the cobble-stoned streets of colonial cities like Quito, Ecuador, La Paz, Bolivia, or Cusco in Peru, which all rest at 10,000 feet or higher in the Andes Mountains.  To put it in perspective most of them are twice as high as Denver, Colorado - the Mile High City.  You perpetually feel light-headed, with a slight twinge of a headache at the back of your skull.  Even normal activities like walking up a flight of steps or a slight incline leaves you gasping for breath.  But the air is so dry and thin with oxygen that it could take hours to recover.  You always feel a little dizzy, like the afternoon hangover after swilling ten mimosas with cheap champagne for brunch.  Everyone moves slower, gliding along as if in a dream, but that's cool because you also feel that there’s nowhere more important you’re supposed to be.  It’s either cold or hot outside, or both at the same time, and either way it feels like a blessing, not an inconvenience. 

After a few days at 10,000 feet I start getting used to it, and I’ve even lived in a city that high for a few months and loved it.  Getting drunk actually makes you feel better, like it levels out the delicious vertigo.  But any higher than that and my brain starts to disconnect and misfire, or to resemble scrambled eggs to put it simply.  I’ve climbed a couple of 14’ers and did OK but when I tried to ascend Mount Cotopaxi in Ecuador, setting out from the base camp lodge at 2 a.m. with crampons and an ice axe, my mind just didn’t work right.  By the time I hit 17,000 feet my consciousness was fading in and out and I saw flashes of light.  It became hard to string a series of rational thoughts together; when I forgot who I came there with the day before I knew it was time to turn around and head back to the base camp.  I felt like a failure until I saw ten of that only five of our original fifteen climbers reached the summit. 

But when I was in Cusco, the gateway to the hike to Macchu Pichhu in Peru, sitting at 11,000 feet, I felt like I was in that Mamani Mamani painting.  That’s the gateway to Macchu Picchu in Peru.  Everyone comes there for a week or so to acclimate to the altitude, gear up and hire porters.  From there they head out on the Caminar Inca – the Inca train, an improbably windy path through the mountains to the hidden plateau of Macchu Picchu.        

               

In Cusco I was transported to a dream world somewhere in between heaven and earth.  It’s an enchanting colonial town nestled in the Andes Mountains that was settled and fortified by the Incas in the 13^th century.  Cusco was the center of the Inca Empire and also the place where all life originated in their religious lore.  I absolutely loved the vibe; – everything centered around a big park, the Plaza de Armas, that was lined by internet cafes, bars full of Peruvian students and travelers, discos hidden in alleys, tourist shops, hostels, and grand Spanish-era churches.  At night friends met in the park and drank hot chocolate with booze in it, shivering against the mountain cold and sitting on park benches, staring longingly at the thick stars which seem close enough to touch.  As I walked along the city walls I ran my hand over the gigantic twelve-sided keystones that are still held as strong as when they were placed 800 years ago.  Everything appeared to be at a slight angle - whether that was the case or if I was just feeling a twinge of vertigo from the altitude was hard to determine because there were no straight lines on the horizon to compare it to.  I felt like I was pitching on the waves of a submarine under the sea.  Walking up and down cobble stone streets and stone steps all day made my calves ache and so I stopped often to collect my breath and feel the sun on my face.  During the days Shane and I suffered through full court basketball games at the local highs school, which felt like running with mud in our lungs.  In the afternoons we hit a bar in the North corner of the Plaza Armas, Norton Rats, with its old motorcycle theme, where his Uncle knew the ex-pat owner and we could play pool and listen to the Rolling Stones with a couple of pints.  Or we’d sit outside on the balcony and watch the townsfolk sell flowers on the steps of the Church of La Compania as an old man played a wooden flute.  There were good, cheap restaurants in abundance so I tried every local dish I could, even eating alpaca and guinea pig, though most of the food was a variation of their staples; sweet potatoes and corn. 

   

The young women were strikingly beautiful, with hair as black as spilled ink and sultry vampire eyes.  The younger generation is Americanized, working in tourism and aspiring to go to college, but their parents are from a different era.  The Quecha, a term encompassing a few of the indigenous ethnic groups in South America, still dressed in the traditional garb; men wore wool waistcoats and red panchos with woven hats with earflaps, called chullos, even when it was warm.  The women wore bright wool dresses and bola coats decorated with beads, on their heads bowler hats that were brought in fashion by the British rail workers in 1920’s and never left.  Most of the time people wore ajotas, flimsy sandals crafted from recycled tires.  

The indigenous people in Peru and the surrounding countries of Bolivia and Ecuador are poor.  The post-Columbian era tribes were so scattered among isolated mountains communities that until recently there’s never been a need for a common identity or even language they could share.  Some would call them simple and passive, but I would describe them as peaceful and so spiritual that they are blissfully resigned.  Still, life is hard for them; most survive through manual labor and tough agricultural jobs and their life expectancy is short.  Their daily life stsill holds tokens of ancient mysticism and superstition like drying the carcasses of goats or small game and hanging them up as talismans to ward off bad luck.  They’ve born the brunt of not only conquest by the Spanish but discrimination and a lack of rights in modern day Peru, where the education, healthcare, and economic systems have marginalized them, often a boiling point for protests. 

After five days in Cusco Shane and I began our preparations to walk the Caminar Inca, the 88-kilometer (55 mile) roller coaster of a mountain path leading to Machu Pichu.  We visited one of the ubiquitous travel agencies that lined the Plaza de Armas and sat down with them to coordinate our trip.  Most tourists spent a lot of money on ensuring their comfort on the walk, but if you haven’t figured it out by now we’re not like most tourists.  The Peruvian college student working at the guide shop briefed us on what we would need for the trip; a guide to lead us, porters to carry all of our food, water, and equipment, a stock of carefully planned rations and drinking water, cold weather and waterproof gear, tents and sleeping bags, and very good hiking boots.  That all sounded way too easy – and expensive.  We decided to embark on the journey with no guide, no porters, and only our jeans, sweatshirts, and thin jackets to keep us warm.  Our waterproof gear included a plastic tarp and garbage bags.  We did buy llama hair mittens and hats, and rented huge backpacks that we filled with a tent, sleeping bags, a bunch of canned goods, a few potatoes and candy bars, and jugs of drinking water.  My hiking boots were just my brown dress shoes, which had a decent grip on the bottom and doubled as my fancy dance shoes on the trip.  The guy at the guide shop looked at us like we were crazy, and we soon found out why – he was right.  

Our last night in town we kicked it at a local disco and met some really cool Peruvian dudes.  They loved it that we were heading out to the Inca Trail without the creature comforts that the other pampered tourists enjoyed.  We laughed and sang and filled our glasses with beer from pitchers that came to our table faster than we could drink them.  Each time they made us go through the ritual of pouring a little beer onto the floor to bless the name of the Mother Earth in Inca lore, Pachamama.  As we grew quite drunk one of the guys grew sentimental for his traditional Inca ways.  He took off his necklace; a braided rope made of Llama hide or leather and adorned with green stones, and placed it around my neck.  He told us that there was magic in the mountains, and this necklace would give us good luck and help the spirits protect me on my journey.  I wish he had given me toilet paper instead.  

The Incas, or the Quechua as their culture and language are now called, are spiritual people who believe in reincarnation and have a whole pantheon of Gods to appease.  They consider this life a temporary passage to a better existence so it’s important to live by the Incan moral code – “Do not steal, do not lie, do not be lazy.”  Once they pass it’s important that they didn’t die by fire, nor that their body was burned, because this will prevent their spirit from being free.  Their Camaquen, or dead spirit, needs to follow a long dark road in the afterlife with the help of a black dog to see the way.  Only then will they reach their heaven - fields of blooming flowers and snow-capped mountains as far as the eye can see.  

But their theology isn’t all warm and fuzzy; the noble and elite in ancient Inca cultures practiced cranial deformation, wrapping tight cloth straps around infants’ heads.  Their soft skulls molded to the wrappings and left them conical-shaped skulls, signaling nobility and wealth.  It’s well documented that the Incas engaged in human sacrifice, especially with children to appease the Gods during important events like the death of an Emperor or a famine.  They chose children who were healthy and fattened them up for months before walking them up to ritual sites high in the mountains.  The children were dressed with ornate jewelry and costumes and given a special drink, probably containing coca leaves, to anesthetize them to the fear and pain.  The high priests sacrificed them either by strangulation, hitting them on the head, or leaving them on the mountaintop to die of cold and exposure.    

Sugar Shane and I took a train to a village on the trailhead, along the Urubamba River, and strapped on our packs and started the trek up the hillside and out of site of the village.  Looking back at my pictures from the beginning of that adventure I see myself bright-eyed and bushy tailed, clean-shaven and smiling as I began a nice stroll up a mountain.  The “After” pictures looked way different.

The four-day trip on the Inca Trail starts at the ruins of Patallacta at 9,200 feet and climbs steadily by the side of the Rio Cuscicha, or Happy River.  It’s hard to say how many other people were with us on the trial at the same time because everyone is stretched out in a single file line, but there were probably 50 tourists and 50 porters in our little caravan.  The hike was no problem on its own; I was in good shape and acclimated to the altitude, but I underestimated how much our backpacks would weigh.  It added up quickly as we threw in clothes and supplies for a fire and a tent and especially when we put cans of food and water in there.  Water weighs 75 lbs. per cubic foot and we had to bring enough for four days.  On the trail there was no place to collect safe drinking water because every stream, river, and lake could be tainted with animal feces.  My pack probably weighed 90 lbs. on the first day, and walking up the hills felt like giving a petite lady a piggy back ride, which I’d rather be doing than carrying my own backpack.  We were the only tourists carrying our own gear and the porters were somewhat puzzled by us.    

The porters blew right past us, gliding up the steep mountain effortlessly even though they balanced impossibly huge loads on their backs so they looked like figures in a Diego Rivera painting, the weight of their bundles bending them parallel to the trail on the way up.  They wore the traditional, colorful woven llama hair cloaks and hats, and some of them only wore flimsy sandals or slippery black dress shoes.  Each evening when we arrived at a campsite after a hard day of hiking the tourists were met with perfectly-erected tents, sleeping bags laid out, clean water, bottles of red wine, and a great meal of meat and vegetable stew already cooking over the campfire.  The tourists only had to carry a daypack with a small bottle of water and their camera up the trail.  When Shane and I showed up, dog tired, we still had to go through long process of trying to find a flat spot that wasn’t too rocky, throw up our ratty tent, scavege the alpine landscape for some dry wood, moss, or bark to start a fire, and get a paltry dinner started.  Still, we wouldn’t want it any other way – we were giving props by doing it old school; earning our journey to Machu Pichu and paying respect to the mountain, the culture, and Pachamama.  The porters began to acknowledge our journey and even treat us with growing respect.  These guys were barely over five feet tall with packs that easily weighed as much as they did and yet they just flew up the mountain.  They were super athletes, and legends circulated of these Incas running ultra distances, up to 50 miles a day, straight up and down mountains.  They told us about a yearly race where porters set out over a thirty mile course in the hardest terrain with only sandals and a couple of oranges, which they ran in marathon time.  They had been born in the thin air and knew nothing else so their lungs and pulmonary functions adjusted to the altitude, but they also had a little other help; they shared their coca leaves with Shane and I.

Coca is considered sacred and possesses magical qualities in Inca culture.  They’ve used it forever for medicine, religious purposes, and also to lessen hunger and pain if they’re working in the fields or going on a long journey.  The coca plant looks like a blackthorn bush about 7-10 feet high with small green fruit.  It’s harvested for its alkaloids, one of which is converted to powder form and called cocaine.  Needless to say it’s a pivotal plant in South America for several reasons but the porters took the leaves whole and rolled them into a black tar-like gum that they chewed on and spit out the juice.  The gum was bicarbonate that acted like a catalyst to release the narcotic qualities of the leaf.  They used it for a little pick me up from time to time on the Inca Trail, as well as drinking it in tea form called Mate.  They were nice enough to share a little with us because we were carrying our own bags, and indeed it almost instantly alleviated any feelings of fatigue or altitude sickness. 

On day two of the Caminar Inca we walked through the village of Wayllabamba, where the path joined the Mollepata trail.  The village consists of only 400 people who lived in tiny stone shacks with thatched roofs.  Kids ran around smiling and waving at the hikers as their mothers made maize cakes with a mortar and stews with small game over outdoor fires.   Llamas and donkeys milled about, tied to a tree.  Once we left the village the trail went West along the tributary to the Cosicha River and then rose to an impossibly steep climb up the Warmiwanusca, or Dead Woman’s Pass, cresting at 13,829 feet.  The vistas were breathtaking, passing in and out of cloud forests, switchbacks where you could see a panorama of the mountains and valleys below you, dense thickets of jungle with birds buzzing around, and occasionally onto grassy plains where the Incas practiced steppe agriculture to grow potatoes, yams, and maize.  

It’s right there that I learned the most basic lesson on supply and demand.  They should use this example on the first day of every Economics 101 class.  All about the trail there are indigenous women who hike along to sell water and candy bars to the tourists.  Of course everything has to be hand-carried so those items are at a premium if you are running low.  I came to find out that I could have just packed my bag with Snickers bars and that would have supplied me with enough calories and protein for the trip but still light enough to transport.  I was at the bottom of Dead Woman’s pass, readjusting my pack and getting ready for the two-hour intense climb when a lady walked by me selling her stuff.  I bought a bottle of water from her for $1, thanked her, and fell in line to trek up the steep pass.  Everyone was sweaty and exhausted by the time we reached the top.  A parched tourist asked the same lady for a bottle of water and she charged him $3, which he gladly forked over;  $1 at the bottom, $3 at the top; a perfect demonstration of value being dictated by supply and demand. 

The ascent of Dead Woman’s Pass was brutal and most of the tourists, who didn’t even have to carry any weight, fell by the side of the path to rest, panting like dogs in the sun.  Shane and I managed to get up in great time by being steady – putting one foot in front of the other slowly but without stopping to take breaks.  

Unfortunately I got stuck behind a donkey the whole way up.  When you’re in a single file line its important who’s in front of you because you don’t want to be trapped behind an annoying chatty tourist, a fat lady stops all the time, or a pack animal.  I had a nice view of the donkey’s ass the whole way up and had to bear the olfactory brunt of its mid-walk bathroom breaks.  Once we rose and fell from Dead Woman’s Pass we came to a valley at Pacaymayo, where the river drained.  The campground was a field of soggy moss teeming with mosquitos and pools of water.  The porters had claimed the good spots for their clients so the only place left was on the outskirts, right next to a huge bull with big horns grazing in the grass right next to us.  He wasn’t tied up so whole time we set up our tent and made a fire we kept one eye on him in case he decided to charge.  He made a lot of noise but didn’t disturb us.    

And it’s there that I ate the mashed potatoes that got me sick.  I knew it was that because Shane and I had eaten exactly the same things on the journey except for the instant mashed potatoes I cooked up.  I knew the water in the swamp would be bad news but I boiled it over the cooking fire before I put the potatoes in and chowed down.  It must not have killed all of the microorganisms because by morning time I was ill.   

I can think of 4,327,499 things that are more fun than contracting Gardia Lamblia, a protozoa that contaminates water in low areas where grazing occurs, including paying my taxes and getting tied to an ant hill naked and covered in honey.  When we set out on the trail again that morning I knew I felt like shit and was blowing up the little outhouse bathroom at the campground, but I had no idea how sick I would become.  I put on my backpack, which now felt like it weighed a ton, and as we hit the trail I got worse.  Every fifteen minutes I had to run off the side of the path and to get violently ill.  There is no comfortable, convenient place to go to the bathroom on the side of a mountain path; I’ll spare you the gory details but I was so sick that I was getting scared, and seriously dehydrated.  I tried to keep down as much water as I could.  Think about the worst food poisoning you’ve ever had, then strap a ninety pound pack on your back at 12,000 feet walking uphill with no toilet and no running water and you’ll get an inkling of what I was dealing with.  I got sick all day, and soon I had gone through my roll of toilet paper and also Shane’s.  I had to use my extra tee shirt, a bandana, then my boxer shorts, then each mitten, each sock, and then tufts of leaves and grass as toilet paper as the day went on.  There was no one who could help me and it didn’t make sense to turn back because we were more than halfway there.  Even if we could get word to a hospital we were so high up in the mountains that I would have to be airlifted out by helicopter.  I trudged on, my eyes sunken and my face completely void of any color, a zombie falling one foot forward up the trail.  No one wanted to be near me in case I start spontaneously vomiting or worse, and even the smelly donkey kept his distance.  Shane was great as usual, offering to carry more of my stuff and sharing as much of his water as he could.  But I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to make it.  I was facing Death by Diarrhea, an exit so inglorious that you wouldn’t even wish it on your enemies.   I was racked with fever and delirious with dehydration.  I heard a haunting voice in the my brain, “Don’t go towards the light, Norm.  Stay away from the light!”  Grandma – is that you?  Or maybe I would see the black dog soon, who was supposed to guide me along the dark road to the afterlife.  But all I saw in front of me on the path was a donkey’s ass and a butch lesbian couple from Texas with a disposable camera. 

In the midst of all of misery I managed to lift my head and see some beautiful views.  We’d trekked out the other side of the valley up to 12,300 feet, by Cochapata Lake where deer drank and thousands of yellow butterflies fluttered about.  In the afternoon we passed the ruins of Phuyupatamaba, the Cloud-Level Town, and had to climb an almost-vertical buff of 1,500 stone steps.  Mist rose from the valley below and shrouded the mountains.  It was exhausting and I have no idea how I got through it, except my only other alternative was just to lay down on the side of the trail and die of exposure like a child being sacrificed to the Gods.       

And then we were in Machu Picchu, the ruins of an ancient citadel built in the 1400’s for the Incan emperor Pachacuti, who they revered as the child of the sun god Inti.  He and his son, Tupac, the descendant to the crown, ruled the vast Inca Empire from this estate.  It was built on a narrow plateau with an impossible drop-off on every side, completely inaccessible except for one winding mountain path – the Inca Trail.  The inhospitable topography provided a perfect natural fortress for the Emperor and his estate.  The city of 140 structures was divided into upper and lower portions, separated for urban and agricultural usage.  They had temples, sanctuaries, residences, stables, storehouses, guard towers, and public baths.  The water system was an incredibly well designed series of channels and fountains that supplied drinking water, water for people and animals to bath, and irrigation for agriculture to the entire complex, fed by rain water.  

Most of the structures had been built with grass-thatched roofs so only the walls remained 600 years later.  They were built with huge stones carved out of the surrounding mountains and placed together so adeptly that they didn’t need mortar; joined with such mathematical precision that in most places you can’t even fit a blade of grass between the seams in the rocks.  Like Stonehenge and the pyramids, historians and archeologists still are dumbfounded how the ancient Incas transported the stones to their current location.  And just like those sites every stone in Machu Picchu was placed with religious significance, the ritual stones lining up with key astronomical points in the night sky.

But the empire’s use of Machu Picchu was short-lived.  Only a hundred years later, as the Spanish began their brutal conquest of South America, the city lay virtually abandoned.  Some people say it was abandoned because they didn’t want the Spanish to discover it, but a terrible small pox epidemic probably did more to wipe out the population.  The jungle overtook the city and it lay dormant and completely unknown to the outside world until 1911, when an eleven-year old local Quechuan boy guided a Western researcher named Hiram Bingham to the ruins.  

   

I could sympathize with the Incas who had died from small pox.  It was a small victory to have reached our destination and I tried my best to walk around and get the full effect of the different parts of the city, but I had no energy.  I laid down on the grass next to a stone wall, too weak and sick to even sleep, and put my hat over my eyes and just focused on my breathing.  The tourists hopped around gleefully snapping pictures and purchasing postcards and trinkets at the gift shop.  A couple of shiny new tour buses pulled up in the parking lot and unloaded the richest and fastest of the gringo tourists.  I was shocked - I hadn’t realized you could access one side of the ruins by bus without hiking at all.  I resented them instantly; I had earned it and suffered and they just took a three-hour bus ride from their hotel and they were there too.  They had thousand dollar Gortex jackets and hiking boots with metal ski poles to help them walk the fifty meters from the parking lot.  The Japanese each wore three $1,000 cameras around their necks and set up tripods to snap pictures of their countrymen at every possible angle, including with me passed out and looking like death warmed over in the background.  They thought my lifeless form was part of Macchu Pichu, a semi-human remnant of the ancient Inca civilization who was petrified and grown over with moss.  As the tourists stepped around me I gave them dirty looks and asked for donations of toilet paper.

We took a bus down to the village and hopped on a train back towards Cusco.  I was still sick, running into every bathroom I could find, but it had slowed down because I was so dangerously dehydrated.  I don’t even remember getting back to Cusco or getting in my hotel bed, but I came to consciousness a day later.  Shane had found me some antibiotics to try and kill the parasites and I spent the next several days in bed, sleeping and recovering on Gatorade and ice cream bars.  I only emerged when Shane dragged me out of the hotel because he needed a wingman on a date with a couple of Peruvian hotties.  I remember being in the disco with them that night and still having a fever and barely being able to keep from passing out.  I’m frighteningly thin in the pictures we took that night, the bones in my face and tendons in my neck protruding against my sagging skin.  I think I lost about 25 lbs. in the ordeal, getting pretty close to my original birth weight.  Looking back I definitely should have been hospitalized, but when you’re young you think you’re invincible and exercise little caution and make stupid-ass decisions.  Story of my life.  Still, I loved Cusco and I want to go back some day, to drink spiced rum under strands of white lights on the trees in the Plaza Armas and pour some out to honor the Earth-Mother Pachamama.  I want to feel, again, like I was created by oil and brush amongst red mountains, living in a painting by Mamani Mamani.