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

Part Two
The story so far...

Having mastered the art of pisco souring, our heroes have flown to Cuzco where they have contracted soroche and embarked on a whirlwind tour of the ancient Inca capital.

After a day of ruin-scrambling, earnest listening and heavy breathing, we returned to the hotel and agreed to give the second day’s planned tour of the Sacred Valley a miss. Instead we decided to sleep a lot and stagger casually around Cuzco to acclimatize ourselves for the assault on Machu Picchu the following day. In the interest of efficiency, we split the duties and my father slept a lot while I staggered around Cuzco.

Having skipped the sacred I thought I would embrace some of the profane and hooked up with a Caribbean friend of mine who had been living in Cuzco for the past six months. She in turn introduced me to a representative cross-section of local gringos. Cuzco has a small, vibrant and variously transient foreign population ranging from long-term enterprising coffee shop and Irish pub owners through guidebook-clutching four-day tourists like ourselves to medium-term backpackers and alternative-lifestyle/mind-altering-substances-seekers. In fact, there is quite a bit of overlap among the groups.

My friend had spent the first few months in Cuzco designing a business plan for a shaman in return for room and board. When her market research indicated that, due to the glut of shamans on the Cuzco market, his business was not viable, she had to move on to other accommodation. Apparently shamans are a dime a dozen in Cuzco, far more than the number of rich Americans seeking enlightenment so, unless you are really good at calling the condor, you have no value added.

The Inca believed in the interconnectedness of sky, earth and underworld, the spirit gods of which were the condor, puma and snake respectively. A vulture, the Andean Condor is the largest flying land bird in the Western Hemisphere. It is considered a symbol of power and health and features heavily in Peruvian tourism. Now I’m a little hazy on the details but apparently some well-heeled travellers pay a lot of money to be taken up some remote Peruvian peak by a shaman to “call the condor”. This, I understand, involves the shaman rubbing his forehead and navel against those of the hopeful tourist, thereby transferring his condor-calling powers. If, after this exchange of sweat and bellybutton fluff, a condor soars into view, the tourist descends empowered and ready to play the stock market with renewed vigor. I can’t imagine a better business model. All you need is a gullible tourist – already addled by altitude sickness – and a crafty Cusquenian accomplice lurking over the next ridge with a Monty Pythonesque condor-on-a-stick.

For those who can’t afford the condor-calling fees, there’s always the mind-altering alternatives. On arrival in Cuzco you are greeted with a cup of mate de coca, a tea made of coca leaves which is good for staving off the effects of soroche. For the average visitor it also provides a pleasurable frisson of naughtiness since 297 grams of dry coca leaf can theoretically be converted into 1 gram of cocaine. In Cuzco you can buy coca flavoured ice cream and drink coca sours without fear of arrest or the slightest enhancement of euphoria. For those in search of more authentic spiritual experiences I was told that the ubiquitous shamans also dispense various psychotropic substances. Ayahuasca is particularly popular in Peru. According to the font of all knowledge, Wikipedia:

"Ayahuasca tourist" refers to a tourist wanting a taste of an exotic ritual or who partakes in modified services geared specifically towards non-indigenous persons. Some seek to clear emotional blocks and gain a sense of peace.

Which is all very well if, in order to gain a sense of peace, you are happy to enjoy Ayahuasca’s ‘purgative properties’ in which “the intense vomiting and occasional diarrhea it induces can clear the body of worms and other tropical parasites”. Nice. Still, I hear Isabel Allende once used it to get rid of writer’s block so I’ll keep it in mind.

Having been thoroughly briefed on the local drug culture, and having marginally enjoyed a meal of grilled alpaca (edible llama), I was taken on a tour of Cuzco by night by a group of medium-term frustrated volunteers. This is a growing demographic in Peru: educated and qualified individuals wanting to see the world while doing volunteer work along the way. Unfortunately, volunteering has become so fashionable that you now have to pay to do it. I kid you not. It has been described as the “gap-year effect” because many middle-class parents with a child wanting to take a year off before going to university are willing to pay for them to do “something useful”. So if you offer your services to an NGO or community group you are likely to be asked to pay US$6000 for the privilege. Many of the group I met had been working in coffee shops and bars to make ends meet and were therefore presumably well placed to reveal to me Cuzco’s reputedly very vibrant night life.

It turned out to be the shortest pub crawl in history.

It wasn’t for lack of nightspots. The numerous discos, bars and restaurants are mainly clustered around the central Plaza de Armas or perched along the steep, narrow stone stairways leading up from Cuzco to San Blas above it. This makes getting from one to another either very quick or discouragingly vertical.

Secondly, I discovered that dancing at 3,600-plus metres above sea level is not a sustainable activity. Two steps and you’re panting for breath. It also doesn’t help that the places are so crowded that what little air your belaboured lungs are able to take in, has already been appropriated by someone else.

Thirdly, the expatriate Cuzco community is relatively small and highly incestuous so every time we approached a likely-looking nightspot one or other person in the group would say “oh no, we can’t go in there. I had/have a thing/fling/affair with/crush on the bartender/manager/performer/bouncer and I don’t want them to think I’m stalking them”.

We ended up on a bench in the Plaza de Armas sharing pisco sour from a plastic water bottle provided by an understanding bartender while the local police patrol strolled by asking “¿Aguita? ¿Augita?” in a nudge-nudge-wink-wink sort of way.

So I was well-rested for the 7.00 am start the next morning. A three and a half hour train journey took us down to Aguas Calientes (Machu Picchu is actually 1,000m lower than Cuzco) where we then took a 20 minute bus ride up the extremely winding mountain road to the entrance of Machu Picchu.

Of course, this is the lazy option. For the more adventurous there’s always the four-day trek on the Inca Trail, but the 10 minute climb from the ticket office to the lookout above the lost city nearly killed both of us.

My father almost died of lung collapse and had to sit down frequently and inhale oxygen from his handy tin and I came close to stumbling off the cliff several times while walking backwards taking photos of his travails. At one rest stop he encountered another tall, bearded, winded individual. “Age or altitude?” the man wheezed. “Both” puffed my father. This obviously Masonic greeting out of the way, they sat together on the narrow Incan step catching their breath in companionable silence while younger, eager tourists flowed past them like ants around a picnic treat too heavy to carry.

Despite the overexposure of Machu Picchu in photographs and publicity posters, it is still truly spectacular when seen live and direct for the first time. One’s appreciation is of course enhanced by the relief of actually reaching the damned place at last. However, just to ensure you don’t get too smug about your achievement, the guide quickly points out Waina Picchu, a yet higher peak, where some 400 people a day line up from the crack of dawn for the privilege of being allowed to climb it. I had no idea the global mental health problem was so acute.

If there was a contest to decide the exact geographical location of the middle of nowhere, my vote would go to Machu Picchu. Surrounded on three sides by cliffs which drop vertically for 450m to the Urubamba River below and with a near impassable mountain at its back, it is a natural fortress and if Hiram Bingham had not been shown the site by a 15-year-old local boy in 1911, he would never have discovered it on his own.

After some confusion involving varying interpretations of the phrase “a guide will be waiting for you with an orange flag”, we were taken under the wing of a stocky weatherbeaten guide by the name of Willy who had an Incan rainbow flag (more recently co-opted by the Gay and Lesbian Movement) and a habit of balancing nonchalantly on the very edge of every available precipice while lecturing to his audience.

Willy was another staunch patriot. Open-minded about the various theories of what Machu Picchu was actually used for (Country estate? Sanctuary of the sacred virgins? Prison? Administrative centre? Agricultural field station?), he had fixed views on Hiram Bingham transporting all the artefacts he found there to the United States and little faith in Yale University agreeing to return them. He kept up a cheerful discussion with the spirit gods as we went along, introducing us all as “Willy’s group” and assuring them that we had the best intentions and would leave them lovely presents in the various sacrificial spots.

My father was a bit disappointed to learn that there is no evidence of human sacrifice ever having been performed in Machu Picchu but, faced with a particularly treacherous descent down the side of the ancient observatory, strenuously declared that he had no intention of being the first. Having made it safely down to the lower level he plonked himself sternly on a large flat stone structure to rest.

This was the ritual Intihuatana stone. The Quechua name translates as “the hitching post of the sun” because it was believed to hold the sun in place as it moved through its annual celestial journey. On midday on the equinoxes the sun stands directly above the Intihuatana stone, casting no shadow. I have no idea what effect my father’s bottom had on this ancient artefact but if he had damaged it, it would not have been the first time. In 2002, during the filming of a beer commercial, a 1,000lb crane fell on it, chipping off a piece.

I don't know what UNESCO had to say about this defacement of one of their World Heritage Sites, but I'll bet Willy's god buddies sent the beer company into receivership, because I am convinced that the severe flooding which took place two weeks after my father sat on the Intihuatana was divine retribution for this piece of posterial lèse majesté.

But it is understandably hard work conquering one of the New Seven Wonders of the World  so we were glad to wrap up the tour and leave Machu Picchu to the four official llamas (not naturally found at Machu Picchu but apparently transported there to provide authentic photo ops and lawnmowing services) and the gaggle of dreamy-eyed backpackers still sprawled on the terraces thinking deeply about life, the universe and everything.

Personally, I was thinking deeply about a cold pisco sour and the dusty but breathable atmosphere of Lima.