Monday 8 February 2010

Peruvian Parricide or “Come to the Dark Side Luke, We Have Pisco Sour”

Part One

It was easy to spot the departure gate for the flight to Cuzco. Two saffron-robed monks; a Caucasian Rasta in parachute pants and a well-worn The North Face backpack; and several middle-aged individuals with Lonely Planet Peru guidebooks, sturdy walking shoes and a see-Machu-Picchu-and-die expression.

My father and I had just finished doing the Lima tourist round. A retired linguist, he had enjoyed himself thoroughly grumbling about the terrible English translations on the exhibits in the museums and experimenting with Pisco Sour, the trademark Peruvian cocktail. Something of a perfectionist, he spent every evening poring over recipe books, squeezing limes, separating egg whites and concocting syrup on the stove, all ingredients carefully measured in a baby bottle borrowed from his grandson.

Pisco is a liquor distilled from grapes and takes its name from one of the Peruvian towns where it has been produced since the 16th Century. The right to produce and promote pisco has been the subject of prolonged international legal disputes between Chile and Peru. Until recently, Chile had successful promoted pisco as its very own and many a promising intercultural relationship has been ruined by the announcement on the part of the non-Peruvian that they had imbibed a delicious pisco sour while visiting Santiago. Trust me, I speak from experience.

Peruvians get very emotional on the subject and some years back the government even made the importation and sale of pisco from Chile illegal. These days the Chileans are making conciliatory noises about “why don’t we market the stuff together?” – a sure sign that they are at the losing end of this particular battle.*

However, this piscotorial petulance is only one aspect of the ongoing bad blood between the two nations which dates back to the 19th Century when Chile won the War of the Pacific (1879 – 1883) against Peru and Bolivia, taking away Bolivia's access to the sea and a lot of land from Peru. Things have never been the same since, with the most recent manifestation being in November 2009 when a Peruvian air force officer was arrested on charges of spying for Chile. Peruvian public opinion was most regretful that execution for treason is no longer an option.

Having paid due homage to pisco, my father indicated his willingness to cast a critical eye on Peru’s other national treasures.

If you are thinking about bumping off an elderly relative in a non-suspicious way I can recommend a trip to Cuzco and Machu Picchu. If altitude sickness in Cuzco doesn’t polish them off the vertiginous climbing around Machu Picchu should do the trick.

Along with long division and degrees centigrade, I have always viewed altitude measurements as fairly useless information. After all, I come from a Caribbean nation where the normal temperature range is between 28° and 32°C and the highest point is 940 metres (and who the hell lives there?). The practical implications of being told that Cuzco is located 3395 metres above sea level escaped me entirely.

My husband however, was clearly nervous about the trip. He minutely inquired about the state of his father-in-law’s health.

“Is his heart OK? Does he suffer from high blood pressure? Don’t forget your insurance card. Walk very slowly and remember to buy oxygen at the airport.”

Yes, they actually sell tinned oxygen at Cuzco airport. I heard one American tourist thinking aloud that she’d like to buy one but was afraid it might be too heavy to carry around. It was, of course, lighter than air.

Having very nearly been put off the entire trip by these solicitous utterings, I was less than happy when, sitting in the plane waiting to take off, my father remarked idly “they’ll have to land at a hell of a speed in Cuzco. At that altitude the air is so thin a plane has to fly extremely fast or else it’ll drop out of the sky.” On the approach to Cuzco the plane did indeed hang a sharp left turn and descend with a stomach-fluttering acceleration. “See what I mean?” said my father smugly as we taxied to the terminal.

Sometimes it is hard to tell which sensations are real and which are brought on by a stimulated imagination. On disembarking I had the impression that I was doing a bit of a moonwalk (the astronaut kind, not the Michael Jackson variety) but I put it down to imagination. Then there comes a moment when you lean down to drag your luggage off the conveyor belt and realise that you can’t catch your breath. Scary. Within an hour my father sounded like Darth Vader and we were both feeling queasy.

Do NOT look up the symptoms of Soroche (altitude sickness) on Wikipedia. You will never visit Cuzco and possibly never climb as much as a sand dune again.

But it’s not that bad. Walk slowly and carry a can of oxygen and you’ll be fine.

Oh, and take Soroche tablets.

And, according to the taxi driver, don’t eat red meat or noodles for the first day.

Oh, and lie down a lot. Not too much vigorous activity.

We had purchased a four-day, three-night tour package consisting of much vigorous scrambling around ruins: a city tour of Cuzco, a trip to the Sacred Valley and – the pièce de résistance – a visit to Machu Picchu.

Archaeologists will tell you testily that the Inca were not the most ancient Peruvian civilization or even the most talented. But they were certainly the most bossy. Like the Romans they subjugated several other communities and moulded them into a vast administrative network with Cuzco as its capital.

I am not going to add to the existing glut of information and contesting theories of Incan culture already available on the internet – look it up yourself. But I did reach a few anthropological conclusions of my own which I am happy to share with you as we go along.

For example, the Inca’s communication and administrative network was so efficient that it is said that despite the lack of wheeled vehicles, fresh fish was regularly brought to Cuzco from the coast 200 miles away by chaski runners. Each chaski would sprint for about 2.5 km before handing over to another. By my calculation that is roughly 129 chaski runners per fish delivery. The fish can’t have been that fresh when it reach Cuzco and would certainly have been well-marinated in chaski sweat – hence the invention of ceviche.

We spent the first day visiting various ruins in the company of an eloquent and sardonic guide with scathing views on the Spanish conquest. Taking us around Qorikancha, the Incan temple of the sun which had been largely dismantled by the Spanish to build the Santo Domingo Church with which it now shares space, he succinctly explained the difference in architectural and construction techniques as the first having been built by the Inca and the second by the incapaz (incapable). The walls of the temple, built 600 years ago with no mortar or cement between the blocks but so well fitted that a piece of paper can’t pass between them, have survived many earthquakes. The church, built in part from slabs stolen from the dismantled temple but stuck together with mortar, has collapsed 4 times since its construction by the Spanish around 1633.

He also pooh poohed conventional notions of the Inca worshipping various deities in a kind of mindless, the sky-will-fall-on-our-heads, fear-of-the-wrath-of-the-gods kind of way. No, everything these canny fellows constructed was geared towards predicting the seasons and weather for agricultural purposes.

They were also expert brain surgeons – or at least skull surgeons.

Enthusiastic practitioners of trepanning, scientists say that their success rate was around 80%, as opposed to surgeons in Europe and America in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, only about 25% of whose patients survived. With a pleasing symmetry, at the same time as drilling a hole in your head, the Inca could fill the holes in your teeth. Stone or cement fillings for the masses and gold or silver fillings for the upper classes. There is as yet no evidence that the Inca also went in for breast augmentation, but a glance around my gym leads me to believe that this practice is ancient and ingrained in Peruvian culture.

Certainly the current enthusiasm of Peruvian women for postponing the ageing process appears to date back to Inca times. Our first day’s ruin inspection tour ended at Tambomachay, an excellent example of an Inca system of aqueducts and site of what we were informed was the Fountain of Eternal Youth.

Unfortunately I am not in a position to comment on the veracity of this claim. Being of a highly suspicious and distrustful nature, I noted carefully that the guide had actually said “If you put the water on your face you will stay as you are for a very long time.” I was suffering from a disfiguring eye infection that day and figured that on a strict interpretation, the fountain of youth might actually be a fountain of the “if-you-put-your-face-like-that-and-the-wind-changes-it-will-stick” variety, known to all parents of grimacing adolescents. At any rate, I declined to take the chance.

*According to legal documents recently found in the U.S. National Archives of San Francisco, California in 2007, it has been proven that at least until 1864, Pisco was considered a liquor native only to the Republic of Peru. (Wikipedia)


Next: Darth Vader shuns the Sacred Valley and I investigate Cuzco by night...