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!

The Altiplano of Lago Titicaca

I`ve now passed more than a week in quite possibly the strangest environment I`ve ever encountered, the Altìplano on the western side of Lago Titicaca, north of Puno. So of course I`ve taken dozens of pictures of all the strange plants, rocks, and landforms that inhabit this part of the globe.

Whoops, how could I forget, I don`t have a camera. And the recent change of plans with El Perezoso means we`ll be meeting up in Cuzco, and therefore I will not have access to a camera during my time in Puno.

Well, I guess I`d best describe what I`ve been seeing with words. Good lord how I loathe the saying "A picture is worth a thousand words".

The first impulse I have when I´m in a new environment is to compare it to what I´ve seen before. I think it`s a rather stupid impulse, but as Mr. Noble points out, its the easiest way to compartamentalize new knowledge. The problem with the Altiplano is that it doesn`t compartamentalize so easily. The Great Basin, the Great Plains, the Great Lakes and various Great wetlands all come to mind as comparisons.

Looking west from the Altiplano, a jagged series of hills dominates the view. This topography quickly rises to over 1000 feet of relief above the lake, making for a dramatic transition. The hills are a geologists delight; the uplifted Puno Formation (sandstone and limestone) stands out dramatically from the sparsely vegetated hills, tilted roughly at 45 degrees to the north. Occasionally a volcanic cap of basalt can be seen, usually defining the top of a hill, as it resists erosion and is recent in origen compared with the sedimentary rocks. The few trees left are usually Eucalyptus trees, just like we had in good ol` Pomona. As it is now the dry season, the vegetation has turned the hills a stark yellow-brown, remniscent of many parts of the arid American West. However, in places the sandstone ranges from red to orange to purple (the Vermillion Cliffs of Arizona and Rainbow Basin of California come to mind), creating a beautiful multi-hued landscape.

A geologist would now expect a long sloping alluvial fan, composed of the eroded sediments of the hills. But instead the hills directly transition into a completely flat plain. It is as if the Great Plains directly abutted the Rockies, with no transition zone in between. This creates a visual scene very odd, but also attractive to the eye. It is an impressive contrast of flatness and relief. What causes such an oddity? Why, a paleo-lake of course. In this case, it is Pleistocene (Ice Age) Lake Ballivián, which gradually retreated to become present day Lago Titicaca. The lake would`ve continually spread out the sediments coming off of the hills, preventing the buildup of a slope. Give it another 10k years, and we`ll see a characteristic Great Basin alluvial fan.

A brief human interlude on the landscape...

The Andean societies are famous for their ability to survive and thrive in harsh environments, and particularly famous for their asthetic sense of the mountains. The people of this region live very basic agriculture lifestyles, almost entirely dependent on the materials at hand for food and shelter. It is a classic example of human ingenuity in the face of challenging conditions.

Back to the description...

The human touch on this landscape is strong, yet complementary. The hills are completely saturated with Andinas, ancient agricultural terraces. The horizontal lines of the terraces contrast with the sloped lines of the sedimentary formations. They are not used anymore, partly because they were built when Lago Titicaca was still retreating from its Pleistocene high level and there was therefore much less arable land. At the foot of the hills can be found the modern day signs of humans, in the form of houses. Here the houses are almost entirely constructed of sandstone from the hills. The construction materials are extremely local, to the point that a hill that changes from red to purple sandstone is exactly matched in color by the houses at its base.

Yet just a few hundred meters from the base of the hill, there is not a stone to be found. This region is the old lake bed, and is still an active flood plain during the rainy season (January through March, approximately). The soil is relatively fertile, but extremely hard (because its the dry season now). Where it is not cultivated, it is covered in a sod-like layer of vegetation. This sod is either turned over (to oxigenate the soil and prepare it for cultivation) or literally cut out in bricks to make the houses, just like the settlers did on the Great Plains. So if you live at the foot of the hills, you have a stone house. If you live a few hundred meters away, you have a sod house.

This is a very arid environment during the dry season; everything is baked hard as a rock, and the color green is not existent. Yet this same floodplain is intermixed with lush swamps and wetlands, full of birds and exuburant algal growths (not necesarily a good thing from a biodiversity point of view). This is the point where I get overwhelmed and stop trying to categorize this landscape. And we haven´t even gotten to the huge lake, full of totora reeds (which of course are used to make floating islands and houses for the people who live ON the lake) and a threatened but formerly thriving fishery.

Enough writing, back to work, I`m off to conduct a survey of the Rio Ramis for the next four days with my new buddy Hector Flores, an Aymara who was born on an island in the lake. Check out Google Earth, try to trace the rivers from NW Lago Titicaca through towns like Taraco, Azongaro, San Anton and La Rinconada to get an idea of what we`re heading up.

To summarize what I`ve been trying to describe...this is a landscape completely unlike anything I`ve ever seen. I`m in awe of it.