Hot water doesn’t seem to exist in Cajamarca, and when it’s advertised in a hotel it’s vaguely uncold at best. Every now and then when the need for a bath gets strong, people make their way to Los Banos del Inca on the outskirts of town and pay for a hot shower or a bath. The deliciously warm water comes from hot springs.
Dona Maria, the spunky matriarch of the house where Mariska stays, always jokes after a bath “He bajado de peso” – we all lose weight from the dirt we wash away, and there’s an extra spring to our step for a time. Once that spring is gone, it’s time for another trip to Los Banos del Inca.
It rained all night last night. The rainy season has started already – in this part of Peru, in the highlands, it’s actually the beginnings of winter, while on the coast it’s late spring. Peru has some 27 distinct climates.
It seems that El Niño is coming yet again this year. The farmers need the rain for the harvest, but not excessive rains. The dirt road up the mountain is a muddy mess. The combi filled with teachers (picture about 18 adults in a Volkswagon van with thin tires on a rutted, waterlogged dirt road) chugs along. Now and then (and again and again) many of us have to get out and walk a ways so the combi can churn through particularly muddy areas. We watch the combi hydroplane upstream and trudge through sludge past modest homes to where the roads cuts back on itself above.
Unfortunately, shortly after we scrape a few pounds of mud off our shoes and pile back in the van, it bottoms out on a rock and begins leaking gas from underneath. And so ends the combi rides for the rainy season. So we hike another hour or so ... it’s about 2 hours walking from the edge of town to the school at Chamis. The combi gig carrying teachers up the mountain only started last June – for years the teachers (and Mariska) walked one to three hours up the mountain (and one to three hours back) each weekday, getting paid $150 a month for their hard work. They’re really angels.
Some of the school teachers in the combi. From right to left: Walter, a schoolteacher; Marlene, a sociologist who works with Mariska; and another schoolteacher whose name I didn’t catch.Mariska and I are getting sluggish for the last part of the hike today, so she pulls out some coca leaves for us to chew on. Pretty sour taste. We used the coca leaves and some sugar as offerings to the god of a mountain the other day. These are the same leaves they heavily refine to make cocaine, but in their natural state they’re used to make tea and for chewing throughout Peru. It numbs your senses a bit, gives you extra energy and helps with the effects of high altitude. Mariska told me of a bus ride she once took filled with poor farmers taking bags of coca leaves to market. These leaves weren’t destined to become powdery white lines for U.S. consumption, but for the uses mentioned above. Police boarded the bus at a checkpoint and took the leaves, the farmers’ livelihood. They dumped out babies who had been sleeping among the leaves, laughing. The farmers, mostly women, had some choice words for the police in Quechua, the indigenous language spoken in many varieties throughout Peru. And so the U.S. war on drugs rages on.
Even with chewing the leaves, we’re exhausted by the time we reach the school at Chamis. Fortunately the warm welcome from the children wipes away our fatigue. We do many more art workshops, and enjoy a lunch of rice, a potato dish, an egg and some lettuce with salt and lime at the end of the school day.
The students of Chamis welcome Mariska to their school.Click here to contact Mariska Van Dalfsen and for more information about her art workshops and other programs with children in rural Peru (and to volunteer to help)
Mariska needs to cross the border to Ecuador to renew her visa, and with the promise of warm, sunny beaches, I tag along. Tepsa, one bus company, has old and decrepit buses whose seats can’t recline, even in their old age. We opt for El Cumbe, with a newer fleet and seats that recline into the knees of the passenger seated behind you.
The ride takes us along a winding road and over a foggy mountain pass. I glimpse workers with hard hats hacking away at precarious rocky cliff faces, stirring up dust, their motives shrouded in fog. Now and then precarious dropoffs show through the mist as we descend into a valley that leads to the coastal desert. The valley floor is lush with rice paddies and tropical fruit, in sharp contrast to the barren mountains that jut out of it. In the many small villages we pass through, every building seems to be tagged with political slogans – an election is fast approaching and the political parties must pay homeowners to swathe their homes in this unattractive political graffiti.
Many twists and turns and one rest stop later, with loud ‘B’ movies for entertainment, we reach Chiclayo, and after a four hour wait in a cold bus station with a t.v. blaring Peruvian soap operas, we catch a night bus to Mancora.
Mancora is a sleepy beach town, surf hangout, fishing village and itinerant hippie enclave situated in the coastal desert of Peru 60 miles south of the banana plantations of Ecuador. Forget the rainy season that’s just begun in force in the highlands of Cajamarca – it’s late spring here, sunny and hot but not too humid, and laid back in the way only the continuous rhythmic whoosh of surf on sand can bring about.
Mancora has a subculture of sun-crisped travelers who make wonderful jewelry, necklaces and bracelets with beachcombed shells, stones and other finds, and lay them out on blankets each day on the sidewalks of one block of the PanAmerican highway.
A few examples:
Luis is a beardy Peruvian from Lima with a broad, toothy smile, a protruding gut and streaks of white in his long dark hair. He’s married but hits on various women he meets and has the ability to fall in love within five minutes. He makes large hand puppets with expressive painted foam faces.
Dagma is a blonde German woman with a perpetually peeling sunburned nose and a warm, friendly smile. She makes jewelry, is always barefoot, and sleeps on the beach with a Peruvian who makes swords out of the bones and heads of dead animals the vultures have picked clean.
Gregorio is a dreadlocked Argentinian with lively blue eyes and a scraggly beard. He’s charismatic, a juggler and fire baton twirler who at one point explains much of the recent history of Central and South America as he bends a coil of wire into intricate bracelets.
For these “artesanos” we meet, it’s feast or famine depending on if they sell a piece or not that day. Sell one, and at the local hangout that evening they buy a round, blow it all ‘til there’s nothing left.
The “artesanos” plus Mariska and I posing with their wares.That night we dance salsa and groove to Manu Chao and Bob Marley over pilsner-style beers with our jewelry-making friends. A tipsy reveler tips out into the narrow PanAmerican highway, and suddenly, with the roar of 18 wheels and sometimes an air horn the only warning, a semi truck or a night bus blazes by. There are no signs saying “SLOW DOWN!!!” and no speed bumps on the PanAmerican highway in this sleepy fishing village – and so the dogs and couples and 3-wheeled moto taxis dive for sanctuary when the express bus from Lima to the Ecuadorean border roars through town without pause or reflection.
Mancora’s main street, the PanAmerican highway.I keep adding time to my stay on Mancora’s sun-drenched beaches – if this goes on long enough I’ll have to learn to make jewelry, and spend my afternoons and evenings with my wares spread out on a blanket on the sidewilk with the blankets of other “artesanos” laden with necklaces and bracelets bearing stones and seeds and shells on either side. These seeds were painstakingly and at great personal risk gathered in the Amazon – each stone has a story woven into its necklace – stories that turn the browser into a buyer. When luck is with you and you sell a pice, you leave the bananas and bread behind and enjoy some ceviche or another dish of tantalizingly fresh fish. And then perhaps a few rounds on a night out, a ! bonfire, king or queen for the moment, a life lived for now with the future not extending beyond tomorrow.
A few days later, I take a night bus back to the highlands of Cajamarca to see what other secrets they hold.
The place we stayed in Mancora that I found difficult to leave.
Continue to:
Part 3 - Back to Cajamarca
Part 4 - Amazon Jungle
Part 5 - Cuzco
Part 6 - on the the Inca Trail and Machu Picchu.
Part 1 - Cajamarca
