You won’t believe what those crazy sea turtles are up to now!

January 15 – 16, 2007

From the steamy jungles of the Amazon we ascended some 12,000 feet by plane to Cuzco. The ancient capital of the Incan empire and of its Spanish conquerors, Cuzco is a city of perhaps 400,000 people perched in a high Andean valley. At its peak the Incan empire stretched across much of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Chile. Then the Spanish conquistadors arrived and the rest, as they say, is history. With a small force of soldiers Pizarro did to the Incans what Cortez had done to the Aztecs in Mexico – kill off their leaders, steal their gold, and pretty much enslave the continent. I’d go into more detail, if I could remember any. There was something about ransoming a king for a room full of gold and then killing him anyhow (which really doesn’t seem sporting). But that may well be Cortez and not Pizarro – the stories are pretty similar – so if you care you best look it up.

The bottom line is Spanish bad, natives good. At least that is the party line you get from the guide books and the guides. One of our local tour guides went so far as to explain that the Incans kept their empire together by making the locals happy with liberal applications of coca and fermented beer. Then the Spanish arrived and systematically erased all record of what great guys the Incans were. Far be it for me to defend the Spanish (the inquisition, for instance, was a bad thing, though I am quite fond of both gazpacho and flan). And bear in mind that – on this topic particularly – I have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. But it does seem that there are some one-sided judgments being made. After all, the Incans and the Aztecs didn’t get where they got by being pussycats. They were ruthless conquerors, relied on slave labor and practiced human sacrifice. Just ask Mel Gibson. One reason their empires fell so easily is that there were subject peoples eager to join the Spanish against them. Another reason was that European diseases killed off as much as 80% to 90% of the population. But you can’t really blame that on the Spanish. My point (and yes, I have one) is that history is largely a series of big fish getting gobbled up by bigger fish, and all the fish have teeth. If you are being gobbled, it is little consolation if it is by someone from your own continent with your own skin shading, rather than creepy white dudes from across the ocean.

To conclude this pontification, I’ll plug the book “Guns, Germs & Steel”. That is a fascinating (if ferschlepta) analysis of the factors that determine who gobbles whom. That is, why did the Europeans conquer the Americas and not the other way around. Curiously, one factor is simply that Eurasia runs east-west and the Americas north-south. This meant that advances in Eurasia could quickly spread along corridors of similar climate, while advances in the Americas remained localized and were unable to bridge the tropical zones of Central America. So the Mayans had a written language but no large domesticated animals. The Incans had the llama and alpaca, but were reduced to communicating through knotted strings. Had they been able to compare notes, things could have worked out quite differently.

The Incan period in Cuzco remains visible in the elaborate stone walls throughout the city. Though they built entirely without mortar and didn’t know about the arch (the most perfect shape prior to the invention of the VW bug), the Incan constructions were so solid that they have survived through earthquakes and neglect, while much of the later Spanish construction has crumbled. The Incans built their more important structures with huge blocks – some up to 30 tons – carved in irregular shapes but all fitting together like a three dimensional version of Tetris. The work that must have gone into fitting each stone – some with as many as 12 edges on a surface – is mind boggling. And adjoining stones sometimes combine together to make figures, such as llamas. All this is explained as devotion to the gods, as well as a raw display of wealth and power, but I know a serious case of obsessive compulsive disorder when I see one.

The Spanish arrived and, perhaps embarrassed by heathen works more impressive than their own, demolished a good deal of what the Incans had built. They kept much of the lower foundation walls though, so Cuzco has the curious appearance of being an Incan city on the bottom and a colonial city on top. One marvel of Machu Picchu is simply that the Spanish never found it and there is a rare opportunity of seeing an Incan city as originally built. The Spanish of course were no slackers (they had the benefit of using the remaining natives that hadn’t died off from disease as slave labor, and they recycled a lot of the Incan stones). They built some impressive churches, plazas, convents and the like.

Cuzco is a fun city to visit. It has great historic architecture, nice hotels and restaurants, and good shopping, all set in the dramatic setting of a mountain valley. The criticism I’d make is that it has that artificial feeling of a city sustained only be tourism. The stores sell variations on the typical tourist crap, the restaurant menus are as likely to be in English as Spanish, and the cute girl with the elaborately coifed llama you meet on the street is a set up hoping to charge you a buck if you take her picture. You are accosted several times per block by someone trying to sell you something – one useful purchase is the t-shirt that says “no gracias!”. It also seems to be a stop on the “hippy trail”, a stopover between Marakesh and Katmandu populated by scruffy backpackers who missed the memo notifying them that the 60s are over. What is missing is a sense of being in a real city, with real people leading real lives. So I found myself missing Quito which, if I ever get around to blogging, I will tell you is a lovely real city, also set in an Andean valley, with a marvelously preserved colonial city center (alas, not much Inca stone), a modest level of tourists and real character. Cuzco is a museum piece, but as a museum it is a nice one.

Our main activity while in Cuzco was discussing the consistency of our stools. As mentioned in a prior post, most of our tour group contracted salmonella infections while in the Amazon. We have differing theories about which food was the culprit, though with only 6 hours per day of electricity and limited refrigeration it is perhaps not surprising that some food might spoil. It could also be that the kitchen facilities were staffed with feces hurling howler monkeys, and they neglected to post a sign reminding them to wash their hands before leaving the restroom. In any event, the blood tests confirmed a good percentage of us with salmonella, which sounds nasty, but judging from our well documented research on stool consistency, is basically equivalent to travelers’ diarrhea, Montezuma’s revenge, Atuhualpa’s wallop, the Aztek Two Step, what have you.

As I have noted previously, among the greatest joys of travel is the people you meet, and we had a great group on the Amazon, Cuzco, Machu Picchu excursion. So a special Walkabout Shout-out to Donald and Doreen, Linda and Erin, Harold and Kathy, David and Samantha and Allen. If you are tuning in, please drop Kathy and me a line and stay in touch. We met up in Lima, traveled together through the Amazon and in Cuzco, and – though we split up at one point when David and Samantha and I took the Inca Trail and the rest of the group toured the Sacred Valley, we reunited in Machu Picchu and for the return trip to Cuzco. Together we shared some of the most awe-inspiring scenery to be found on this small blue planet. But what truly brought our group together was a small microorganism commonly found in undercooked eggs and poultry. We pooled our various pharmacopeias aimed at intestinal distress, engaged in discussions deep and profound on the comparative benefits of different types of Imodium (taken daily or following each movement?), Cipro versus narrow spectrum antibiotics and bathrooms of choice in central Cuzco. I can think of no nicer group to share a case of the runs with, and if you have ever traveled in the third world you know that is high praise indeed.

“So what about the sea turtles?” you ask. “Your post title hinted at some steamy turtle action. Like I give a flying rat’s derriere about how many sides an Incan stone has? Bring on the hard shell action!” For shame! Shame! Isn’t it just like you to take something as beautiful as the act of love between two sea turtles and treat it as cheap and tawdry? Listen closely, since I’m only going to explain this once. When two turtles really, really care for each other… Oh never mind. Ask your mother.

Your faithful correspondent,

Walkabout Dave