001. The Road to 256 Shades

The stones are real enough. You can take a bus to Calango and La Capilla, from the back of the market in Mala, next to the kiosk selling cakes. You may find Wilma sitting beside you, heading to her chacra, her brothers and her mother. Looking out of the window you will see the broad river winding through farmland. The hill sides above are bare and rocky, but look closely and you may see traces of the narrow old track clinging to the cliffs.

If you get off the bus at the corner before the bridge, buy some bottled water from the old woman sitting on the balcony. You will need it. As you stride up the valley, look out for the farmers breaking the soil with mule drawn ploughs. Listen to the rippling water in the high irrigation canals, and the calls of the hawks circling overhead.

The llama femurs will still jut out like coat pegs in the empty rooms of the deserted villages you pass along the road.

And after two hours, three if you stop to explore some of the ruins, you will reach the stones.

If you are lucky or smart, the water will be low, green and slow-moving, in a deep pool. You can wade across if you are careful, placing your feet between the slippery round boulders. The old man may be planting cassava, or cleaning the shallow grooves through which rivulets of water trickle between the apple trees.

And then you will see the stones.

Contents

01a – I arrived on Christmas Eve

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Tales from Lima, Stories from Peru

From fertility festivals to family feuds, from modern crime to ancient waterways, these takes of Lima and around Peru have a unique take on a remarkable country that is part pre-colonial peasantry and part seventeenth century slavers.

Chasing phones in Huacho

Negotiating with the gods

Watering the desert for a thousand years

Keeping it in the family

What is truth?

Fiscals making a living

She looked good in the photograph

Calls for justice over State sterilisation programme

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01 – 256 Shades of Grey – Contents

A good place to start is … the beginning. These pages should link to each other, but if you take a wrong turn you can always come back here.

Chapter 0 0. The road to 256 Shades

Chapter 1a 01a. I arrive on Christmas Eve

Chapter 1 1. To Begin in the Beginning

Chapter 2 2. First Contact August 2016.

Chapter 3                  3. 256 Shades of Grey              

Chapter 4                    4. Rock art in Peru

Chapter 5 5. Inca Domination  

Chapter 6          6. Metalworking and War

Chapter 7                    7. A trip to the Zoo

Chapter 8                    8. The Zoo to Miraflores

Chapter 9                    9. Pilgrimage to Pachacamac

Chapter 10    10. The Spring of Eternal Youth

Chapter 11 11. Metalworking in Mala…

Chapter 12 12. Llama Trails past La Capilla

  Chapter 13               13. The Huarochiri Manuscript

 Chapter 14                   14. How Many Llamas Make a Caravan   

Chapter 15             15. Llamas for Sacrifice 

Chapter 16                    16. Where men became gods

Chapter 17 17. Floods and Huaicos   

Chapter 18                   18. The Hill of Gold

Chapter 19                  19. The Sword and the Cross

Chapter 20               20. The Evolution of Whales  

Chapter 21                  21. Floods in Cochineros

Chapter 22                22. Jaguar People

Chapter 23               23. Return to Calango

Chapter 24 24. Wari Wraps and Checas Chacras

Chapter 25 25, Swallows in the Amazon

Chapter 26 26. Marker Stones in the Landscape

Chapter 27 27. Gary Urton and Chaupi Numca

Chapter 28 28. Sun and Stars at Cochineros

Chapter 29 29. Huarochiri Rituals and Seasonal Festivals

Chapter 30 30. Hallucinogens

Chapter 31 31. Five Day Fiesta

Chapter 32 32. And yet they dance

200 – Sources, references and thanks

Appendices

Appendix 1. The Rock of Paria Caca 2

Appendix 2. How old are the engravings?

Appendix 3. Conclusions and Ruminations

Appendix 4 . Layering and Motifs on Piedra 6

Appendix 5. The gnomon or sun marker on Piedra 6

Appendix 6 – The historical perspective on 500 years of colonial abuse

6a – Where did all the people go?

6b. Rapprochement or Repression

6c. Encomiendas, reducciones…2

6d. Extirpaciones and Avila 2

       10b Desert Signposts 2

And if you want more you can try Short Stories

Chasing phones in Huacho

Negotiating with the gods

Watering the desert for a thousand years

Keeping it in the family

What is truth?

Fiscals making a living

She looked good in the photograph

Edit

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I Arrive on Christmas Eve

For all that it is late December, the sun is beating down and the streets are hot. I have flown in on a Christmas eve, from a European winter. Flying down the Andes from Bogota I look out on grey-red wrinkled mountains, snow-capped peaks standing above them, crevassed valleys turning to green, and then as we come down towards the coast we are in thick cloud, until we drop below and cruise above the beach, with its jetties and container storage yards, fishing boats floating on swirls of dark blue, and dry brown rocky hillsides rising up above the plain. There is a river channel, with ugly concrete sides and a brown swirling current staining the sea.

The plane flies low over flat roofed buildings of board and block, with narrow lanes between, then wasteland, brown and lifeless, then touches down on a concrete runway as the sun sets below the sea.

A taxi takes me to “El Condorcito”, a decent hotel in tourist Lima, at $100 dollars a night. I will start a teaching job in a month’s time, on the edge of Lima. I need a place to stay and the basics.

I take a bus out to La Molina – seven kilometres away, an hour on public transport. And I walk around the streets, looking for signs “alquilo” to rent, posted in the windows. I see a garden shed erected in a passageway, three dryboard rooms on a rooftop with a shared bathroom, and a basement room with a hole in the roof for a skylight. I opt for room with the hole in the roof.

Each morning I walk to the roundaboutwhere photos of the victims of terrorism in the 1980s are displayed on pedestals. I catch a bus to the Panaderia. Pa-na-de-ri-a I say to the bus conductor, and they looked at me in confusion and repeat – A-ve-nid-da-del-Sol? Hi-po-li-to-s?

And the man next to me says a-a-r-i-a and they give him his ticket without question.

The house is in an estate closed off with high iron railings. I can enter through doorways in the fencing, but there is only one access for cars, with a security guard who checks for identification. On the southern side is the main highway, a dual carriageway, with the two sides of the road separated by a broad green linear park, thirty metres wide, running through the neighbourhood. To the north an equally broad road, but more peaceful. It passes a football stadium and a reconstructed Inca building of moulded clay before reaching to a dead end facing a hillside. After several weeks I see that a stream runs down the centre of the green park. Every Wednesday. There are birds.

The school is at the upper end of a residential estate, surrounded by fencing and security guards. The people entering the estate with me in the morning are teachers, gardeners, cleaners, maids. We each show our identification. The students arrive by private car – usually large, high wheelbase, black SUVs with darkened windows.

My challenge as I explore the city is to decode and interpret what I see. And so I start to write.

Forward to 1 – To begin in the beginning…

Back to 001 – The Road to 256 Shades

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1aa – To begin at the beginning

Two streams of traffic cross at the junction and knot. Cars nose across the shared space, inches apart. They thrust themselves between slow moving vehicles and edge forward. They advance two metres and are blocked, as they in turn are blocking. Drivers lower their windows and shout abuse. Forty cars fight each other to a standstill, whilst two empty highways stretch ahead.

And they sit in immovable traffic, pounding on their horns, adding more anxiety and anger to a city already toxic.

They do not use their indicators here. “What’s in it for me?” they ask.

After three months in Lima, looking for a reason to escape from the poisonous grey city, I hear of an ancient engraved stone, of uncertain meaning, in a country village.

“I remember seeing it when I was a small girl, visiting an uncle outside Lima,” Alla tells me, as she puts in front of me a plate of lomo saltado, stir-fried beef and onion.

“It was as high as me, but much longer, a broad flat rock, on a rise looking down on the village. Help yourself to tacu-tacu.”

Continued at … 1aa

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1a – First Contact

“So Mayra, what do you think?” I ask as we sit on a the simple balcony of wooden planks looking out over the river.

“The stone is a star stone. But it is surrounded by a high wall and locked behind a gate. I want to stand beside it and look out over the valley, see the mountains behind, and the stone outlined against the sky. I want to see it under a starry sky at night, or shining in the light of the full moon.”

Pink crustaceans, as thick as my index finger, poke their eyes above the surface of a rich pink soup that fills a deep bowl on the table before us.

“And old Antonio was right about the tasty fish” adds Mayra , licking her fingers and placing another empty langoustine claw on the side.

We had found the restaurant by its blackboard on a corner of the square, with the options chalked up – Chupe de Camarones, Arroz con Camarones, Ceviche de Camarones, Camarones Fritos, Camarones Salteados – under a chalk drawn prawn.

I decided against asking for a steak.

http://lookatsouthamerica.com/2-first-contact/Continued at … 1a

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4. Rock Art in Peru

Sitting at a simple wooden table in the echoing concrete hall of the National Library in Lima, with an anglepoise lamp at my elbow and fifty silent researchers for company, I discover a long history of art on stone, throughout South America, as long as humans have lived on the continent.

America stretches like a giant semi-colon, the length of the globe. It descends from the frozen Arctic of Canada and Siberia, down through the USA, Texas and Mexico, to the narrowing isthmus of Central America and Panama, before broadening into Colombia and Venezuela, Peru and Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Patagonia, ending in the icy Antarctic.

People from South America can be touchy when citizens of the USA talk about America as if it runs from Montana to Texas and Maine to  Florida…

Continues 4. Rock Art in Peru

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5. Inca domination

I have spent the week examining the photographs, looking for patterns, looking for meaning. I have found out what I can about rock art in Peru, in South America, in Mexico and Easter Island. I have researched the history of coastal Peru, the iconography of Chavin, the Moche, the Wari and the Inca. Finally I check out what studies have already been made at Cochineros, and ask Mayra over for a summit meeting. 

She arrives with a bagful of makis and picarones to follow, and I open a bottle of Montesierpe. We take them onto the patio. 

The sun is sinking into the sea off Barranco …

Continues at 5….

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6. Metalworking and war

The waiter brings two glasses of cold beer and a couple of pinkish trotters, and we are quiet for a while as we suck on the knuckle bones and wash down the vinegary juices. Then I push the plate of pickled pigs’ feet to one side and open my laptop, pulling up a photograph showing the first rock panel we encountered, on the terrace of apple trees above the patio by the river. 

““There are images of different brightness on some rock panels, and the brighter images tend to overlay the darker. They could be fading with time. So I asked myself …

continues at … 6.

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7. A trip to the Zoo

Mayra meets me in the Haiti Café on the corner of Parque Kennedy, where white haired men in grey suits sit at the pavement tables reading Gestion and taking an espresso with their crisp pork and sweet onion rolls. We catch a combi along Pardo, standing in the aisle, holding onto the roof bars, catching a view of the lighthouse as we sway round the Plaza Pardo. The conductor shouts “subi subi subi subi!!!!” as more people squeeze on, and then she yells at the rest of the bus to move down and make space. The passengers, already chin to sweaty shoulder, shuffle a few silent centimetres, passively resisting. Racing along Avenida La Marina we alight – “baja baja baja baja!!!” – two blocks west of the Parque de las Leyendas. 

“Before we go haring off in search of secrets,” Mayra explains, 

continues at … 7.

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8. The Zoo to Miraflores

“You can see a thousand years of history in a walk through modern day Lima.” Mayra explains, as we walk besides the dual carriageway that separates the zoo from the Catolica University.

“Just over that wall,” she points to the left, “is the front of the Huaca Tres Palos, where you saw the ramp that lead to the top of the mound.” And over there, “she points across the road, “is one of the best preserved ancient roads in Lima.”

We manage to cross to the central cycle lane, despite the cars that see us and accelerate, pounding on their horns, desperate to dominate. After a brief respite we reach the far side.

continues at … 8.

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9. Pilgrimage to Pachacamac

The bus wails through the suburbs of Lima past mounds of uncollected garbage, where the homeless search for food, and down the Panamerican highway, with a grey sea on the right. We are dropped off at the the entrance and walk in through the bright modern museum, and then up a dusty track that leads through an outer wall four metres thick, to the remains of a great colonnaded court where pilgrims had gathered, up the hillside past the painted temple, its plastered walls still showing faint traces of red and yellow murals, and beyond to the largest, highest building, the Inca statement of dominance, the sun temple.

continues ..9.

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10. The Spring of Eternal Youth

From our lookout point, our mirador by the outer walls of the Inca sun temple at Pachacamac we see two ancient roads heading out from the maze of ramped pyramids below. One heads from the ancient complex across a dusty desert plain and through a gateway in a great adobe wall, headed directly for the ancient centre of Lima 27 kilometres away. A straight line following this road from Pachacamac will take us through the suburbs and straight to the cultural heart of Spanish colonial Lima, past the Basilica de San Francisco, perhaps the second most important religious symbol for the Spanish invaders, and into today’s Plaza de Armas with the Presidential Palace and the Cathedral.

continues at …10.

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11. Metalworking in Mala

I am thinking how to escape from school to visit Yauyos with Mayra, when she calls me unexpectedly one Tuesday night.

” I have to go back to Caracas.”

We have a short tense conversation. The newspapers and TV here largely offer opinions rather than real news. Film footage – empty food markets, people marching, political speeches and handshakes – is rarely put in context. There are many journalists on twitter, appearing to offer first-hand information, but they too seem polarised, and shallow. Alla, I know, calls her family at least weekly. In the last few months, there has been some difficult news. But I have not asked about it. Not because I am not concerned, but because I know she is worried and distressed.

I realise that I have never really understood what she knows, what her family is experiencing, or how she feels about it. I told myself I was not asking, because it would upset her. Now I think it was easier for me to not get involved.

continues at …11.

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Short Stories Collection

Funny, curious, surprising, amazing travel tales in Peru and South America from living through floods in Lima to street demos in Sao Paolo…

Chasing phones in Huacho

Negotiating with the gods

Watering the desert for a thousand years

Keeping it in the family

5. What is truth?

Fiscals making a living

She looked good in the photograph

Pay for the duck say Brazilians

Calls for justice over state sterilisation programme

10 Vulture sky patrol

Floods and Huaicos

The future is bright in Mexico

No stopping the Car Wash clean-up

Fish murals fighting gang warfare

15. Hallucinogens

Llama trails past La Capilla

The Huarochiri Manuscript

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101 – Hallucinogens

  In March 1990 two bodies were found at a rock shelter over the left margin of Matanza river, 15 km from Cusi-Cusi, a small village in Santa Catalina department of north west Argentina.

The bodies had been buried with blankets and them were small cylindrical containers, tiny measuring spoons, flat tablets and short narrow tubes.

Any follower of late 20th century western culture would recognise this – the tubes of choice in the 1990s were rolled up hundred dollar bills, or twenty pound notes, the flat surface was a mirror, cocaine spoons were made of silver, and the little cylinder was replaced by a plastic bag. The spoons, tubes and tablets look like drug paraphernalia.

But these bodies were mummified and buried at the back of a cave. They had skull deformations. Their blankets were of fine alpaca, the tablets were carved in stone and the snuffing tubes were of decorated bone. They were most probably 1000 years old. Inhaling hallucinogens is not new.

Such drug paraphernalia – inhaling tubes, tablets, containers and spoons – has been found throughout the area of the Tiwuanuco culture from 1200 to a thousand years ago, centred on Lake Titicaca high in the Andes.

 

 

 

Continues … 101b

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75 – Gary Urton and Chaupi Ñumca

In the high clear skies of the Andes, people see a great stream of brightness crossing the heavens. Within this are areas of darkness which appear to have the form of earthly creatures, llamas, toads, serpents and foxes. There is a metaphor in the night skies of life on earth, and its seasonal cycles.

Archaeologist Gary Upton spent several years living and working with villagers in the rural community of Misminay, high in the Andes close to Cusco. The results of his conversations and interviews, published in “Animals and Astronomy in the Quechua Universe”, present a deep and broad cosmovision linking the night sky with events on earth through the seasons and, more fundamentally, with the fertility and order of the natural world.

 Gary Urton’s village collaborators told him that they saw a parallel between the Vilcanota river, and the Mayu in the sky. The two ran together, one above and one below, the earthly river taking water down to the sea during the day whilst the celestial river retuns it to the heights at night. The Vilcanota runs from the south east to the north west. The Milky Way, the Mayu, runs roughly north to south. 

Huarochiri, the highlands where the waters of the Rio Mala have their source, is far from the village of Misminay, 450 kilometres as the falcon flies, but the Huarochiri Manuscript narrator describes the same interpretation of the skies as Gary Urton found in the village above the Urubamba valley.

They say the Yacana, the animating spirit of llamas, moves through the middle of the sky. We can see it as a black spot. The Yacana moves inside the Milky Way, the River. It is big, really big. It becomes blacker as it approaches through the sky, with two eyes and a very large neck.”

Continues … 75b

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08 – Llama trains to Cochineros

Walking up the valley from La Capilla on the modern road, you pass through riverside orchards with occasional houses and farm buildings. There are workers in the fields, they are farming their own lands. Behind a simple brick building with a few chickens inside, there is a round boulder as high as a man.

On the south face are animals, perhaps quadrupeds, scarcely identifiable. Lizards climb the rock, low down on the right there appears to be a shark. Looking over the boulder you can see down to the river below, and on the other side, scattered on a flat terrace between the river and the moutain side, there are four or five great black stones.

In August or September, you can descend to the river from the Retama stones, and walk across the stony bed of the river, with the slow flowing water hardly reaching your knees.   Approaching from the south you will see engraved on the rock a curious and beautiful stylised bird, with broad wings and a thin curving tail, and with a round eye and sharp beak pointing upwards. It is a remarkable image that resembles nothing in nature, but is very similar to Chimu images from the northern coast.

….more here….

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256 Shades of Green

It has been eighteen months since I left Peru with Mayra and Amy. We still have not taken a ride on a red London bus, because things happened.

I am all for making plans. I spent years following a vague compass bearing, and random reactions to outside forces left me like a particle of pollen in water, moving, certainly, and putting some distance between me and my starting point, perhaps, but not heading in any particular direction. So I took to plans, late in life, enthusiastically.

Mayra rejects the concept. “There is no point in making plans,” she says, “because something else will happen.”

****************************************************

I returned to Europe, to political stability, a more mature discourse, shared values, to a fortress of civilisation as anarchic populism spreads across the world like a contagious disease.

We all know a bit more about that now.

Here in central Germany, within sight of the Rhine as it flows past vineyards heading north towards the English Channel, it feels civilised and stable.

*************************************************

At first I was wary of the dogs let loose of their leads in the meadows behind the house. Lima dogs were delinquent. You could assess the security of a district by the behaviour of the dogs. In stylish Barranco with its square, it fountain and its marbles statues, there were few dogs, on leads. But four blocks inland around the market the dogs were wild, eating from the gutter. Some had owners, but nevertheless were free to scour the streets for food. More than once I was attacked by a stray whilst walking to school. On a few occasions an owner would appear and call the dog off, but when I looked at them they walked on, shifty eyed. No apology.

German dogs, I have learnt, are largely civilised.

*****************************************

We were full of hope and uncertainty when we left Peru. At Schipol in the Netherlands, we took photographs of each other in the airport, sitting on the squashy pillow men, cast in steel. Then I flew to the UK whilst Mayra and Amy went to visit a cousin in Wiesbaden.

I had barely visited my large, untidy house in seven years. When I left, the quiet town in Wiltshire had a post office, two banks, several estate agents, an Indian restaurant and a fish and chip shop, and seven public houses. Now I found it had gained a nail salon and three coffee shops, but lost a bank. Some of the pubs are struggling.

My tenant, Larry, had been in the house for ten years. I did not know him well, but we had a history. Now I planned to ask him to leave and do some basic maintenance on the property.

I was fond of the original sash windows, more than a hundred years old. But the rear of the house had been taking a battering from the rain and wind off the Atlantic for more than a hundred years. Repeated coats of paint had failed to hide the damage. I wondered if I should replace them with some modern weather-proof PVC. And then there were the floors. New carpets? One landing had a ludicrous cartoon-like print of an iron, burnt into the brown nyl0n, the evidence of a over-hasty early morning preparation for a London business meeting. Or strip back to the bare wood, sanded and waxed? I had tried to do that myself, spending several weekends with a machine with a mind of its own, before backtracking to less challenging task.

I spent four happy weeks sleeping on a camp bed downstairs and making lists. I fixed a leak under the shower, re-mortaring a brick wall, and planted some bulbs for the spring. Then I walked along the canal to a country pub and ate food which might not have matched the best of Lima for gastronomic ingenuity, but scored high on nostalgia – gammon and chips with a pineapple ring, lamb cutlets with mint sauce. It was a lovely October. There were mushrooms in the woods. I spent a day digging up invasive plum tree shoots which were spreading across a former vegetable patch, and .

In early March I flew back to Germany, taking the train to Reading, the bus to Heathrow and then a flight to Frankfurt. I stayed in a hotel close to the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof and then took a train to Kronberg, on the northern side of Frankfurt.

At the time, none of these transport links were important. A few months later, I had stopped using public transport altogether.

At Heathrow, I saw a long line of schoolchildren waiting in line to board a flight to Spain.

At the flight check in, an Asian man in front of me sneezed. I suggested to the German girl behind me that she could take my place. “He did not cover his mouth or nose” I said. “That’s so funny!” she replied, and happily took my place.

It was early October, in the evening twilight. A deer stood in reeds besides the river Kennet.

What is the shape of this book

People, conversations, Jill, Larry, Sue,

Job in germany, move to Eschborn, weird landllord, health threats, garden gone

Escape to Sonnenberg

Political background – UK

German background – Roman limes, Germanic tribes.

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To begin in the beginning

After three months in Lima, looking for a reason to get out of the noisy grey city, I read on a blog that “Calango houses an enormous stone with magico-religious symbols … that performs miracles for women that wish to become pregnant”. Calango is a small village, a little inland from the coastal town of Mala south of Lima. The next  Saturday morning I hail a taxi in downtown Miraflores and tell the driver “I want the bus to Mala!”

He takes me through a grid of dirty back streets on the edge of the town centre, past several blocks lined with stores and stalls selling bicycles and bicycle parts, a cascade of wheels and frames hanging from shop fronts and spilling across the roadway. The ticket sellers calling “Mala Mala Mala Mala…” offer a clue. Within 20 minutes the bus is full and takes me on a 90 minute journey south along the PanAmerican highway to reach the bus station or “Landport”, Termino Terrestial, of Mala.

…read more at Exploration…

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