Why Peru is different than...well, anywhere else in the world

Posting from a cave in Puno...

It`s not actually a cave, its just that all the Internet places are completely blocked from any view of the sun, or sky or even the street. Its like a cubicle, but way smaller. The tragedy of it is how much time i`ve been spending in these Internet caves.

Why?

Because I´m actually working, and working hard, and I don`t have a computer in my little apartment. I just got back from a four day survey of nearly the entire Rio Ramis, from Crucero all the way down to Lago Titicaca (perhaps useful for those ambitious enough to search for this famed river on Google Earth). Which means the fun part, the field work, is over and the hard part has begun. But before I really dig into Excel datasheets and thought provoking analyses of the social conditions of the rivershed, I`d rather give some amusing examples of just how different Peru is. This ain`t no Quito, which was often a remarkably Western city with all sorts of modern comforts and "normal" lifestyles.

Lets start with the weather, always a popular subject. Extreme. The combination of tropical latitudes and +12k feet elevations produces strong fluctuations. The days are blindingly sunny, with not a cloud in the sky, allowing temperatures to climb (perhaps into the 70`s) and exposed skin to quickly burn (if you`re a gringo). But at some point in the afternoon, shadows become icy pits, a warning sign of the cold to come. By early morning, it is cold enough to freeze over shallow, calm bodies of water.

This produces some really wierd effects. The animals, for one, are all quite hairy. I`ve seen cows that have thick red fur, almost like a dog`s. And the burros are absurdly comical. Imagine a yak`s hair on a tiny burro with a big head. Unreal. Little things like irrigation are complicated by the freezing temperatures. The farmers can only irrigate in the mornings, for fear of residual moisture in the soil freezing overnight and killing the crops.

With this sort of nighttime cold, one would expect hot drink vendors at every corner during the night. Such was my thinking one recent night in Azangaro, as I wandered the streets with my partner and now buddy Hector Flores. We walked all the way through the main pedestrian walkway, lined with countless salchipapas (french fries and diced up hotdog) vendors, but nary a hot drink. Finally, we arrived in the main plaza, where to my relief we encountered an emoliente vendor. Emoliente is odd but delightful, a mix of a dozen or so different syrups and extracts, said to have medicinal properties, along with the wierdly gelatinous linaza. I´m still not sure what that is. As we enjoyed our steaming hot emolientes, I noticed that there was another vendor not five feet away. And two more just across the street. And five more on the other side of the plaza. And a dozen more over there. You get the point.

This brings me to the next oddity of Peru. Clustering. Why in the world are there a dozen hot drink vendors in the plaza, but no food vendors? And why is just the opposite true along the pedestrian walkway that extends away from the plaza? Wouldn`t an emoliente vendor make a killing sandwiched between all those salchipapas carts? I actually asked a vendor why, and was basically given a shrug. Capitalism apparently is not so big here.

Except in the city of Juliaca, of course. Juliaca (population 218,485) is just north of Puno and is without a doubt the dirtiest, dustiest, noisiest, foulest (I should know, I`ve been measuring the river that hosts Juliaca`s untreated sewage) and busiest city in all of Peru. Commerce is king in Juliaca. Night and day, on every single street corner and in the middle of every single street, people are buying and selling stuff non-stop. The traffic is absurd, the streets are clogged with tricycles carting people and goods all over the place, the noise level never lets up. Did I mention it was dusty too? You can see the cloud of dust enveloping Juliaca from anywhere on the Altiplano. Juliaca is what I imagine Chinese cities are like, based on descriptions from Kevin Popper and Erin Noble. Yet South American folk are just about as unlike Chinese folk as is humanely possible.

What`s going on with Juliaca? Turns out that about 30 years ago, it was a sleepy little town with some unusually innefectual, even by Peruvian standards, customs officials. As Bolivia is just across the lake, it became the staging point for all black market Bolivian goods. Cheap Cheap Cheap!! In no time at all, it turned into Peru`s boom town, growing constantly on the fountain of cheap goods coming under the border. One could say that this is a textbook example of inefectual, corrupt officials actually helping development, by not obstructing trade. Of course, it is also a textbook example of the terrible consequences of unplanned, unrestrained urban growth.

On the subject of money...

A lunch consisting of a big bowl of soup and a plate of rice, potatoes and meat costs between 1.5 and 3 nuevos soles (2.8 soles to the Buck). A taxi hired for a day of field work, certainly driving no more than 100 km, costs 230 soles. Whaaaaaaaat? And the guy demands I buy lunch for him and his buddy who`s along for the ride.

I was given a counterfiet 5 sol coin two weeks ago. I have tried to spend it on pretty much every purchase since then. It has been rejected everytime. Who counterfiets a coin worth 2 bucks?

One hour of internet costs one sol. So does two minutes of local cellphone calls.

And finally getting to the subject of food...

It`s an interesting variety of high altitude tubers (they have over 3000 varieties of papas (potatoes), no kidding!), Altiplano grains like quinoa and various maizes, new meats like alpaca and guinea pig, and all sorts of fruits from the nearby jungle. Cool.

Last week, Hector took me along to a meeting of folks who were making a tour of Lago Titicaca, discussing themes of Andean culture and water along the way. I gave a speech to the group on the subject of protecting the water, my first public speech in Spanish! The meeting lasted all day, with many breaks for rituals (usually involving the ubiquitous coca leaves) and food. When lunch time rolled around, a group of women trouped in with sacks of papas, which had been cooked in a big hole in the ground that was heated and then refilled with dirt. They unrolled the sacks, creating a line of papas that stretched the length of the schoolhouse. The smell was delicious, but I wondered exactly how we would eat them, as they were of course fresh out of the earth, and still thoroughly covered in it.

Well, the rest of the folks, ranging from very traditional indigenous people who spoke no Spanish to modern mixed blood Peruvians, just dig right in, quite literally. Earthy potatoes were peeled in seconds with nothing but fingers, and dunked in a clay-based sauce for flavoring. Within one potato, my hands were completely gunked up with a sticky combination of dirt and potato juices. La tierra is sacred for Andean people, and one way of appreciating its sacredness is eating it.

Well, it didn`t get me sick, the potatoes were delicious, if occasionally crunchy, and the clay sauce was actually really tasty. And I ate more dirt than I did since I was a little kiddy in a sandbox.




That`s all for now, more posts on what`s going on with the water coming up!