Eternamente en fuga como la ola
Eternally in flight, like the wave*

As this has become rather longer than I expected, I give you a few headings:

-Upcoming Plans
-Emotional Status Report
-Further reflections on Peru
-"How amazing was Machu Picchu?"

Upcoming Plans:

I am preparing for the next destination: New Zealand.
Partly because it looks so gorgeous in pictures, a lot like Oregon on a good day. More practically, because it offers a special holiday work visa for up to 12 months, the longest of any English-speaking country. I have a strong desire to do useful work and not go broke, while continuing on this journey, and to stay somewhere long enough to be something other than a tourist.

So, provided all the paperwork goes according to plan, I fly from Los Angeles the 17th of September, arrive in Aukland the 19th (international date line), and after a few days of orientation, make my way to a lovely farm on the South Island, where I will spend most of October picking peonies and looking for summer work.

Depending on the kind of work I am able to find, I hope to save enough money to finance additional travels in 2005 and '06. Including a visit to Australia, while I am down there, and a substantial amount of time among my friends in Europe.


Emotional Status Report
(with physiological conjectures)

I'm experiencing waves of anxiety, frustration, and grief as I sit in my mom's house planning. I've eliminated most of the usual suspects (sleep deprivation, hunger, thirst, sugar overdose, hormonal shifts, physical stress) and I can only hope it's lack of exercise that is making me this crazy. I'm going to get outdoors for the next few days and weekend, and see if it helps.

Otherwise, I may have to address some of the actual emotional material in my life, and I'm reluctant to open that can o' worms in the midst of logistical chaos.

For example, is it possible that I'm supressing a massive reaction to my parents' efforts at remarriage?
Or to my unconventional employment status?
Can I pull off this travel thing without incurring huge debts, both financial and social, and is it possible that I have not just a sensible resistence to debt, but a pathological fear of it?

Can I handle denying myself the pursuit of long-term romantic relationship (this seems incompatible with solo exploration)
... and how exactly do I feel about the short-term relationships that I have indulged in as a temporary alternative?

What am I doing, anyway? Is this trip really going to help me get perspective and sort things out, or is it a massive distraction allowing me to procrastinate something I should have identified long ago?

How do I react when people want to hear about my amazing, exotic adventures, and I'm in a funk, or overwhelmed, or just plain annoyed at the logistics of it all?


Further Reflections on Peru:

Peru was partly wonderful, and partly kind of distant and brief. I was universally catered-to and spent most of my time on well-trodden paths with other tourists. They were nice tourists, and nice paths, but I can't help feeling that there would be something more ... at once more magical and more real ... if I had stayed past the dry season, got sopping wet, and pitched in with some actual work. Peru was interesting to me ... and beautiful, and welcoming, and strange ... but the parts of it that had a significant effect on my life were not the parts people ask about.

Not Machu Picchu, or any other ruin. Not the vibrant ancient city of Cuzco, with its noisy nightclubs and restaurants nestled in Inca walls and Spanish courtyards. Nor the welcoming tourist-handlers, photogenic villagers, and nagging street vendors. Not the llamas or alpacas or burros, or handicrafts, or music. I could have described those to you, if you needed any description, before I went on the trip.

The things that affected me most are, perhaps inevitably, not very interesting to tell.
Think about it: if it could be conveyed in words, pictures, and personal style, if it would interest and fascinate and entertain you, and make you feel almost as if you had been there yourself, National Geographic would have already told you. Notwithstanding my literary aspirations, they have the resources to tell it and show it better than I can. Having already read the guidebooks and articles before I left home, what was left for me to discover was everything that you can't fit between the pages of National Geographic.

Like the process of embarking on my first conversation in Spanish in a taxi at 3am, or the hour-long lesson in Quechua from a good-hearted young porter named Achillino, while hiking toward the promise of food somewhere ahead.
I can tell you the four words of Quechua that I learned, and even pronounce them correctly ... but I can't begin to convey the taste of the dozens of strange words that passed through my mouth, earning compliments from my teacher, and leaving my mind pristinely blank. How puzzling, how boring, to watch me try to tell you the words I have forgotten! If you know the language, or have heard it, my efforts will be ridiculous; if you have not, no amount of ridiculous effort can convey it.

The language learning was much like the trail: stepping, and skipping, and slipping, and sometimes (when nobody was looking) even crawling, along the endless, the merciless, stairs of the Inca trail.
The most important aspect of these experiences is the one that makes them hardest to tell: their simplicity and Sisyphean repetitiveness. The experience starts as novelty, then you get discouraged with the laco of apparent progress, eventually you stop caring about the progress for hours at a stretch, and just try to amuse yourself and your companions; and then progress happens surprsingly and imperceptibly. It's difficult to convey the triumph without the endurance: to make someone laugh in a foreign tongue, even at your own expense, is to be recognized as having an adult mind even though your vocabulary would shame a four-year-old. It's impossible for you to celebrate with me the thrill of emerging into a new and nameless kind of light-green bush, unless you have waded through the hours of straw-grey grass and dusty dark-green brush. All I can say is that the process becomes a meditation, an experience, in itself.

You will understand this experience better by reflecting on your own experiences in a foreign land, or even in a new sport or social group, than from any description I can give of the ant's trail I made across a few tiny wrinkles in Peru.


How Amazing Was Machu Picchu?

"I've always wanted to go to Machu Picchu," my audience says, in a wistful voice. "What was it like?"
What can I say?

It was beautiful, and overwhelming, and definitely grey. Exploring it was like being the inchworm between the petals of the rose, or an ant among a thousand ants investigating an Escher conundrum.
It overwhelmed not because it was grand, but because I was small, and tired, and it was intricate. It was built to be rested in, lived in, by people who spent their lives traveling and building stairs. I spent my hours in it traveling stairs, and contemplating rest.

The experience of Machu Picchu was colored by my expectations and by the three-day trek to reach it.
At the final approach, the Gate of the Sun, I did not find myself thinking, "Suddenly, I see the fabled city, and all that boring hiking was worthwhile!"

Rather, "Oh, it's the end." No more corners to pull myself toward, wondering if I will find a butterfly or flower, a drop-dead view, the campsite, or (most likely) yet another flight of stairs.

The dawn persistently refusing to cast a single shaft of golden light upon the ruins. We were told it's usually so cloudy you can't even see the ruin, that the wait might be not for sunlight but for a glimpse of the city itself ... but even for my good eyes, (which I admit might have been strained by the days of exposure to high-altitude sun, even with the shades), the city was a grey patch on a dimpled, olive-drab ridge.
The distant mountains, filtering and reflecting the dawn, were more dramatic. You can't get the whole thing in a picture; and the part that you've already seen, the city on its sway-backed hill, looks better in the pictures than it did from my first vantage-point.

So if you want to experience Machu Picchu as the highlight of the journey, then sleep in Aguas Calientes at its feet, read up on legends of the Incas, and take the bus in the morning.

If you want to experience a breathtaking journey, with Machu Picchu the final, disconcertingly busy site that marks its end, by all means take the trail.

Upon reaching the city itself, I was mainly aware of two distinct kinds of fatigue. More significant than the accumulated soreness of the trail, I was under the influence of the sort of stunned, half-starved weariness that tends to obscure my mornings when I rise early.
There was also the confusion of re-entering civilization, in the form of backpack checks, bus schedules, guided tours of the city's temples and paths, maze-like stairs packed with other tourists, and site-police whose thankless task it was to request, in a dozen different languages, that Sir, Madamoiselle, Senorita, etc. would please not stand, sit, or walk on the walls. (The futility of this task becomes more apparent if I point out that to a first-time tourist, which was most of us, the stone walls are nearly indistinguishable from the stairs and ledges upon which we are encouraged to walk, sit, or stand.)

Particularly unfortunate for my own experience of Machu Picchu was the sudden shift from carrying my own food and water, plain and handy, to walking unencumbered. I chose to carry my sketchbook, and leave my water bottle. As our guide led us from temple to temple among the stairs and tourists, my awareness increasingly dissolved into thirst and time. I followed our group around these fascinating and sun-bleached ancient stones, distracted by thirst within ten minutes of iced lemonade, but determined to hear all of our guide's animated descriptions.

I didn't ask for a break, for fear that it would be futile: full restoration would have required about a quart of water, a full lunch, and two hours of sleep. By 1:00pm I could have been fully functional and ready to enjoy ... the bus ride down from Machu Picchu toward lunch and the train. No thanks, I wanted to see the whole thing!
So I pressed on, begged a little water off my travelling companions, and eating a few nuts with a dogged determination not to choke, faint, or otherwise embarrass myself. At one point, the group expressed unanimous interest in a particularly shady bench across from ... I have no memory whatsoever of the temple or view or interesting rock that our guide was exhibiting at that point; it was completely eclipsed by the experience of rest and the prospect of mangoes.
I must have shocked the man, a complete stranger, when I overheard him offering someone a slice of dried mango and responded, "You have What?!?" (In my defense, I had mistaken him for someone from my own group, and the idea that mangoes had been available all this time aroused ferocious desperation.) The stranger fortunately responded generously, and I was able to regain my composure somewhat by offering almonds in return, which the stranger graciously accepted with the accolade, "the perfect food."

So the things I appreciated most about Machu Picchu were: the cool places, the dark streams of water, the thatched roofs, the benches (originally built for royalty to watch the sacrifices and ceremonies), and a few marvelous caves and temples that were early in the tour. The grander, more open temples and courtyards were somewhat lost in the bleaching of my vision by fatigue and the intense light. (Yes, the sun did come out, and most of the clouds disapeared, once we were in the city itself. The light was blindingly white and unfiltered, bouncing around on the white granite stones, pale tawny dust, and bright red jackets of the trekkers.)


It seems almost deceptive to send home postcards of Machu Picchu without tourists, because they ... we ... were everywhere. Taking pictures of each other, and our own shadows, and the odd corners where we could create the illusion of being alone.

Machu Picchu was not the most beautiful thing I saw on the whole trip -- the mist-filled valley after the second pass was more spectacular, the steepest flight of stairs on that pre-dawn morning hike more challenging, the fingers of the weavers more memorable.

As for the philosophical appeal of brutal sacrifice amidst stunning beauty, Machu Picchu had nothing on the Spanish cathederals and churches of Cusco. Built on the bones of Inca temples and palaces, filled to overflowing with beautifully crafted art and artisan relics, they embody a tangible, physical, and emotional legacy of blood, gold, tears, and prayers.
Entering into a church, confronting the paradoxes of my native religion and its assimilation of the local symbols and values, gave me more goosbumps and more qualms than entering the dusty and sun-bleached ruins of an ancient citadel.
The religion of the Andes is alive today in two ways, in the traditions and motifs that were assimilated by the Church, and in the remaining hill-country rituals and beliefs, which are practiced with or without a Christian veneer. We saw more evidence of the ancient religion in the streets of Cusco, or any number of local ruins, than in the famous Machu Picchu. Elsewhere there were people drinking from legendary springs, burning candles, or evidence that someone had offered leaves or shells or water to the spirits of the place. In all the temples of Machu Picchu, we saw ancient ashes, one coca leaf, and the water and stone on which the temples ritual must have been built.

But of course, if you were never Catholic, your experience of the churches would be vastly different from mine. If six hundred years feels ancient to you, and it makes no difference whether the stones have been worn down from reverence or curiosity, you might be more thrilled by the legends of the Incas, and see blood in the shadows where I saw dust and damp.

Machu Picchu means "Old Mountain." It is a misleading name, created by recent explorers in the Quechua tongue as a replacement for a name long-since forgotten.
This mountain may have been old, but the buildings on it were not used long. In the living city of Cusco, the stones are polished to mirror-smoothness by centuries of feet; you can see light reflecting off them in the shadows as if they were wet. Even the wood is scaled with centuries of repainting and splintering dryness.
Machu Picchu is by contrast a stillborn outpost, a place that was built and cherished briefly, and died too young. History deserted it, and nature buried it, probably within a hundred years of its making: childhood for a citadel with such durable bones. The meticulous craftsmanship and creative vision were intended to be lived in, loved, worn by time and hands and feet.
Rediscovered, it has been partially rebuilt, and a few buildings even re-thatched. But it has not been brought to life. Instead of inhabitants, it is now peopled daily by strangers who come to photograph, guard, catalog, and restore it, but who are not interested in living there. By night it is forbidden to enter.
Before it was "discovered," it had as much life; the jungle creatures inhabited it, and a family lived and worked a small corner of its terraces. Now it is exposed, set aside, displayed: a sacrifice, a relic. True, the numbers of pilgrims who flock to this relic are a source of life and livelihood for more local people than the ancient city could possibly house. It has arguably a greater effect on the living as a dry husk, than it did as a living city.

Perhaps this is a kind of life that its builders would have respected. Like one of the sacred mummies that were once housed in its cool niches, it is still and dry and bears no fruit, yet it is full of a power that protects the interests of the living.




(*lines above taken from "Para mi corazon," Pablo Neruda,
in Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair)