La Sierra

The Mountains

Amidst a week of doing far too many assignments, my aunt had organised a small trip to the sierra, to a town which is essentially the andes region. Peru has a peculiar topography: there´s the most colonised area, the coast, which is mostly a dusty desert and whose people thrive on seafood (Lima, for example, is on the coast); the andes, whose citizens widely speak the ancient language of Quechua (a language that, still, has no alphabet and is just learned aurally) and takes up a sizeable third of the entire country and is home to Cusco, the Incas, and of most touristy fame; and finally there´s the Amazonian region which rules the last third, and of which I still don´t know much about other that it´s beautiful, still very tribal, being deforested quite rapidly, and the narcotraficants are mostly rife there. Oh and they have peculiar accents that because they speak Spanish, but also the Aimara language.

Costa, sierra and selva, is how we grew up knowing it.

Our destination was the very small town of Matacoto, where my mother´s father grew up and we had still had some relatives, via the more populous city of Huaraz, and later the smaller town of Yungay. The towns decreased in size as we went along, there was no internet in Matacoto at all, to illustrate.

We began with an overnight coach from Lima to Huaraz, a 10 hour trip which I lived through namely because I had already been masochistically sleep-deprived for the past week. My doctor aunt was totally surprised at my capacity to sleep (as some of you know, already) saying I was basically comatose the whole time. She was also surprised that I did not get sorojchi, which is the name for the state of uncomfortableness and headaches that some people get because their bodies are not used to the altitude. I didn´t get it in Cusco either, so I felt pre-tty Peruvian and proud of myself. Huaraz is at an altitude of 3050m above sea level, and I think Cusco was at 3400m.

Crappy internet diagram of the distance between Lima and Huaraz

Since Huaraz is a fairly well known city in Peru, there were a healthy amount of tourists on our coach over to Lima. There were a bunch of (I think) German guys, one of which spoke Spanish with notable capacity, an American girl all on her lonesome, and most interestingly a young man who belonged to some buddhist cult group. It was a fairly cold Lima evening and all he was wearing was a pair of cotton fisherman trousers. His upper body was covered in thick black tribal tatoos, he had face piercings and his head was mostly shaved except for a line of hair that divided his head in two. He looked a bit scary - and his aversion to clothes, also extended to deodorant- but altogether seemed totally interesting.

What struck the locals the most was that he wasn´t wearing any shoes, not only because it was a cold evening, but also because we hardly ever take our shoes off at all, not even in the house. Perhaps only to bathe and sleep. This proved so unusual that the nice, tiny, andean cleaning lady tried to show him some empathy by making a brrr coldness gesture with her arms and saying "¿Sin zapatos? ¿No tiene frio?" ("Without shoes? Aren´t thou cold?") and he politely said "No." My aunt wrote him off as a person with self-mutilating tendencies and returned to checking in the baggage but not before asking if Australianos also like to walk around without shoes and saying "hmm" when I replied yes.

Sadly I didn´t get to talk to any of these fabulous people because not once did I hear them speak English, I was annoyingly protected by my aunt who used the luggage as a constant excuse, and by the time we arrived at Huaraz at sunrise we were all in a pretty bad/sleepy mood anyway. At least the Cult Dude had upgraded his gear to wearing a hoodie (a sensible decision since it was like 7 degrees in the morning!), though he was still living it up sin zapatos.

Introduction

Introducción

I thought for days about what to name this blog. Silla de oro, or, ´chair of gold´, is drawn from a popular saying El Perú es un hombre pobre, sentado en una silla de oro, Peru is a poor, destitute man, sitting amongst a chair made of gold. The simile is true: there is so much natural beauty, music and hope here but equally it drowns in hideous realities of poverty and almost total indifference. The ´third world´is for seven weeks my world and I wish to capture it all. So, welcome to my effort.

Pensé por dias sobre como llamar este blog. Lo que me llamó más la atención fue el dicho ´El Perú es un hombre pobre, sentado en una silla de oro. Es verdad: hay tanta belleza natural, música y esperanza pero igualmente se ahoga en horribles realidades de pobraza e indiferencia casi total. El ´tercer mundo´ es mi mundo por siete semanas y deseo captarlo todo. Entonces, bienvenidos a mi esfuerzo.