Huaraz :: Peru
A whole lot of hard core Catholicism going on.
Places: Lima & Huaraz.
Coolest thing I did: Accidentally discovered that Good Friday is much bigger than Easter Sunday here and managed to see all the churches at peak usage.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: Lima has some fairly good surf beaches right in the city. Unfortunately lots of surfers were coming out tangled in plastic shopping bags and such like.
Lima surprised me. I'd been warned by many people who passed through it recently that it's a bit down at heel and full of poor people, but with the centre of gravity of the hostels being based in the swish Miraflores district I didn't really get that feeling at all. The taxi from the airport took me along the coast, which goes quickly from massive docklands to piles of concrete and garbage that most afternoons you can see being added to by dump trucks. However you follow the lower road (at the bottom of massive cliffs) along for a while that that gives way into a series of stony beaches with really long lines of waves coming in cleanly, and about a million surfers trying to take advantage of them. There was one that I was watching out the taxi window who managed to track along the same wave for something like 30 seconds. Unfortunately there is also a lot of evidence that garbage does get dumped directly into the water.
I know Lima must have the same poor districts surrounding it that every other Latin American city seems to have (a result of the rise in farm productivity meaning a massive migration of poor country people to the cities) but I didn't really see any of them during the 3 days I was there. Miraflores could be any of the richer areas of the Colombian cities, including possibly the world's most well situated shopping centre. The LarcoMar mall is built right into the cliff face that faces out over the Pacific, so you can drink your Starbucks latte that costs what most people make here a week and get a lovely view out at surfers showing themselves incapable of lining up for waves and smashing into each other.
So I arrived in Thursday night and took the Mexican bartender's advice in the hostel to try and get out, as Good Friday was probably going to be fairly tame. I went to a place called Help, which only opens once a week and is pretty much full of Peruvians trying to acquire gingos, and thus visas. I nearly missed it however, as the taxi industry here seems to be totally unregulated and the bloke who was sitting in the car with "taxi" written on it obviously had little idea where he was going. On the way home it took 10 mins, on the way there, an hour as we slowly circled in on the place with the driver stopping at every policeman to ask for directions. At least it's all negotiated before you start, with meters being non-existent, but it would have been nice to have gotten there before the line got around the block.
So knowing I had limited time, and not knowing exactly what would be open after Easter I took the brand new bus service (which has stations like a train and it's own bus lanes - same as in Bogota) to the downtown core. I was again surprised at just how clean and ordered everything was there, but I'm wondering if there had been a big spruce up for Easter. The main square is dominated on one side by the cathedral and the whole place was packed with people who couldn't fit into the building for one of six masses of the day, so we could hear the story of Jesus y Maria over loud speakers. There's some tradition involving palm leaves woven into little fans I don't really understand, but it seems like you go around each church and touch the statues and icons with it, and cross yourself a lot. They also dress up all the statues of Jesus and the saints in purple robes for the big day, which I'm told is something that carried over from the indigenous religions that were co-opted by the Catholic church. When the Inca Empire was conquered by the Spanish the Indios were so impressed by how big the victory was they just assumed that the Spanish had better Gods, so pretty much started worshipping them alongside the old Gods.
It's fairly easy to see why they would have been impressed. A bloke called Francisco Pizarro came to Peru on this 3rd attempt with about 150 men and managed to capture the Inca emperor, ransom him off for a room full of gold and then kill him anyway. This led to the initial total capitulation of an empire spreading from southern Colombia to northern Chile and Argentina, mostly because the Andean world-view of the time was totally smashed by this little party of white blokes showing up and killing their incarnate God-king. It sucks when that happens.
My other big cultural outing was to the neighbourhood of Pueblo Libre, which hosts most of the cities museums and is not yet integrated into the new bus system. I went to the private Museo Larco, and the far less impressive Museo de Arqueologico which are a few blocks apart and led me to walking through the ultra flat, wide streets that strangely reminded me of Downtown LA, with all it's short buildings and car centric amenities. However that makes perfect sense when you realise they're both in really active earthquake zones and the buildings probably have a habit of falling over in the same way if you build them too tall.
So the Museo Larco is the work of a private family of collectors who set up their finds in an old Vice-Royal mansion and have done a much better job than the poorly funded official Museo de Arqueologico nearby. It's a good way to see stuff from all those ruins I expect to be traipsing through over the next few weeks, and unlike the MdA all the cards are translated into English so you know what you're looking at (the very few translations in the MdA are pretty funny due to Google-translate levels of accuracy but not that informative). Taking in a massive sweep of the pre-Colombian cultures (the Inca only being the last in a long line) the highlight for most people is the porno pottery, which is kept in a separate room in the garden from the rest. Basically every way that humans, animals or some mix of can copulate is depicted somewhere in the gallery, and rather disturbingly there's also a fair bit of mating between skeletons, who represent the dead. This was all made complete for me by the group of US collage-aged girls there on a school trip giggling uncontrollably, their unimpressed looking teacher and their deeply reddening local guide.
One of the better documented cultures in the collection were the Moche, who held sway over the North Coast of Peru about the same time as the Roman Empire were reaching their peak in Europe. They're interesting because they were a fairly blood-thirsty bunch, who took human sacrifice to a new level. Andean cultures have always had a bit of a problem with earthquakes and the El Nino cycle, which with short lifespans and poor science they could not have accurately predicted, so the priests built up stories about the gods being angry and demanded sacrifices to restore the natural order. This repeats itself in all the El Nino exposed cultures from Mexico down to Chile, and each one has had it's own way of dealing with it. Or sometimes not. The collapse of each empire tends to coincide with an El Nino period and elevated levels of war and human sacrifice.
In the Andean world view human sacrifice was more powerful an incentive for the Gods to stop messing everyone about than animal sacrifice, and due to the caste system the higher up the food chain the people being sacrificed were, the more powerful the results. Of course, the priests were never going to say "hey, let's sacrifice a priest!" and it was probably a career limiting move to suggest sacrificing the nobility so the Moche priests decided that the warrior caste could fight it out, in probably one of the most practical examples of applied Darwinism in human history. They'd pick a couple of high caste warriors who would engage in ritual combat with clubs until one of them managed to get the other one's helmet off and grab a fistful of his hair. The loser had his throat cut ceremonially after that, so you were left with a stronger warrior caste and hopefully some happier Gods. It probably also made for very good viewing in the days before TV.
Not really wanting to spend a whole lot more of this trip in cities I took an overnight bus on Easter Sunday to the town of Huaraz, about 8 hours north of Lima with the intention of doing some trekking in Cordillera Blanca range, which has come highly recommended by everyone who has been through this part of Peru I've spoken to. It's the first time since Argentina at high altitude (the town lies at just over 3000m) and I'm feeling a little out of breath. I'm taking it pretty easy, due to me foolishly ignoring all advice and having a massive Saturday night out in Lima (it was someone who I'd never met like an hour earlier's birthday, so how could I refuse) and then backing it up by playing drinking games before my night bus. I'm hoping that I have a hangover and not altitude sickness, but only a good night's sleep will tell. The advice on avoiding it is don't drink too much, drink lots of water and be well rested, none of which I managed to do.