(As part of his research for a book he’s writing on microfinance, Bob Harris took a trip through the Peruvian Andes, including Cusco, Lake Titicaca, Machu Picchu, where he studied the architecture, refused to try corn-and-human-saliva beer, imbibed in coca tea (“maybe the best damn thing I ever drank”), and visited with people who live on floating islands made out of reeds. His photos and comments are fascinating. — Mark)

We begin in transit, killing time in the
Lima airport. I hope you’ll enjoy the titanic clashes of
cultures…

The
culture shock of being faced with difficult, obscure
translations…

… later on, inscrutable symbols
beyond an outsider’s comprehension…

… and the
occasional midnight bathroom scorpion:

Our arachnid friend was in the town of
Ollantaytambo. In the loo of a sweet little guest house. Right
by the toilet, middle of the night, exactly like in my
nightmares when I was little. The joys of travel.

I
probably should have asked for a non-scorpion room.

Anyway, let’s get some standard tourism out of the
way. Here’s a sight famiiar to anyone who has ever visited the
travel section of a bookstore:

This
young lady is one of many who eke out a living in tourist areas
by posing for pictures for one nuevo sol (about 35 cents USD).
You’re surely seen guidebooks with a similar image on the
cover.

I wonder how many guidebooks and magazines
actually pay their subjects more than $0.35 for the profitable
use of their image? (Come to think of it, what should I have
paid for this free online use? I honestly have no idea. My
bargaining skills in Quechua being non-existent, I gave her
considerably more than her usual rate. I hope it was enough.
But I also hope I didn’t accidentally incentivize a job that
doesn’t develop other skills that would help her improve her
life. I mention this because seeking a solution to such
questions is what my next book is largely about.)

Speaking of Quechua — in which “Rimaykullayki” means
“hello” — it’s the living language of the Incas, still spoken
(with major regional variations) by about 7 million people
throughout formerly Inca lands from southern Colombia to
northern Argentina. In Peru, it has official status, so some
Andean street signs are multilingual — here’s “Avenue of the
Sun” in Spanish and Quechua:

Of
course, it’s not just the languages — you see Spanish sitting
physically on top of Inca pretty much everywhere you look.

Historians currently peg the beginning of Inca
civilization’s greatest expansion roughly around 1493 — just
months after a Spanish sailor named Roderigo de Triana first
sighted the New World from a ship called La Pinta.

(As
a side note, Roderigo dutifully shouted the news to his
captain, Christopher Columbus, who promptly claimed that he
didn’t see anything. This may have been because the
expedition’s financiers had promised a huge reward to the first
person to see land. Sure enough, a little while later, Columbus
announced that he himself finally saw land, and he was given
the reward. Roderigo soon converted to Islam, moved to Africa,
and disappeared from our elementary school history books.
Columbus went on to become substantially less nice to the
people he was about to meet.)

After Columbus came
firearms, armor, smallpox, and eventually Francisco Pizarro,
who executed the last Inca emperor in 1533. When the
conquistadors reached Cusco, the grand Inca capital, they made
a point of de-Inca-fying everything, plopping their Spanish
stuff right on top.

The results are abundantly visible
all over the place:

The Spanish building at top center was
for many years the local Archbishop’s palace — constructed
directly atop the walls of the palace of the Inca emperor.

Down the street, here’s what was once the site of the
Temple of the Sun, one of the holiest spots in the Inca Empire
— until the Spanish razed the original edifice and built the
Church of Santo Domingo atop its foundations:

The
surviving Inca stonework here has to be seen to be believed.
For example, major earthquakes in 1650 and 1950 severely
damaged the Spanish structure, but the Inca bits remained
almost perfectly intact. These windows, for example, still line
up perfectly, even after the whole building around them fell
twice:

Back
at the old archbishop’s place, here’s the famous 12-sided
stone, only the most rococo of thousands of massive,
ludicrously shaped rocks that jigsaw together so well that you
generally can’t even slip an index card between them:

The Incas moved and shaped these
stones, most of which are bigger than you are, and then built
hundreds of such walls — all of course with no power tools, no
known use of the wheel, no draft animal bigger than a llama,
and no written language beyond intricately knotted cords.

How huge did Inca stonework get? Here’s Sacsayhuaman,
a fortification in which some stones are up to 20 feet high and
may weigh nearly 200 tons:

Sacsayhuaman was intended to protect Cusco. Right up until the
Spanish cornered the defenders inside, slaughtered them, and
then began quarrying the non-huge rocks for imperial
construction projects.

After executing the Inca
leaders, selling the survivors on Christianity involved a
different form of building on existing foundations. Take a look
this small slice of the main cathedral in Cusco:

In Inca mythology, the most powerful
earth deity, Pachamama, was frequently represented by a
triangular shape symbolizing the mountains. Coincidentally
enough, on the local Catholic god guy… a big triangle for a
halo. (Pachamama, being an earth mother, also led to
representations of Mary wearing garb so voluminous as to become
triangular herself.) Mary and Joseph, meanwhile, have big spiky
sunburst halos — which just coincidentally resemble Inti, the
Inca sun god.

There’s tons of this sort of syncretism
all over the place. Here’s the Last Supper as portrayed inside
the cathedral (cribbed from the web, since photographs are
forbidden):

In Cusco, the Last Supper seems to have
included potatoes (unknown outside the New World before
Columbus), a homebrew corn-based beer called chicha to drink
(see below) and local chinchilla instead of lamb as the main
dish.

Let’s take a minute to digress on local
beverages. Chicha is a local corn-based homebrew beer as
ubiquitous as it is kinda gross — the fermentation is
accelerated by enzymes in the maker’s saliva:

That
colorful plastic on a stick is the local signal that the
occupants inside — puh-tooey! — have just brewed up a fresh
batch of corn-and-spit beer. Mmm-mm.

Nasty as it
sounds, it’s also cheap as… well, corn and spit. So for poor
folks with no better way to enlarge their livers, its a cheap
buzz, and for the homeowners, it’s an easy profit.

In
some neighborhoods around quitting time, there can be almost as
many chicha flags as there are buildings:

Since
I’m not doing one of those Man Eats World-style cable shows, I
didn’t try chicha myself. Sorry to disappoint. Just, well, eww.

Besides, I was too busy getting buzzed on the coca
tea:

Just take
loose coca leaves, add boiling water, let steep, add sugar, and
drink. Maybe the best damn thing I ever drank.

It
tastes sort of like sweet spinach, but with the stimulant kick
of good coffee and an analgesic effect I’d place somewhere
between naproxen and vicodin. (I have a bad back, so I feel
confident in my ability to scale analgesics.) One pot, and
pretty soon my head felt better, my feet felt better… hell,
my childhood felt better.

Seriously, it’s fantastic
medicine for that altitude and climate. Too bad putting a
handful of those leaves in my pocket could get me arrested back
home, thanks to the War On Some Drugs.

Anyway, back to
the cathedral. Let’s step back into the square for a wider
look. Check out the flags:

On the right, the national flag of
Peru. On the left… a rainbow flag, remarkably like pride flag
used by the North American gay community since the 1970s.

Here, it’s not a gay thing. It’s simply the Cusco city
flag, said to be inspired by banners flown by Incas fighting
the Spanish. There’s spotty evidence for the claim, and Cusco
only adopted the flag in 1978 — the very same year Gilbert
Barker designed the gay pride flag in San Francisco. Still, in
Cusco, rainbow = Inca, flag-wise.

Does this lead to
confusion? Oh dear god yes. In moments of broad comedy that
sound more like an episode of Family Guy
than real life, I’ve been told that American tourists are
sometimes shocked on arrival to discover that the entire city
of Cusco is so totally Out. Others pose happily in front of the
flag, demonstrating solidarity with a culture they are
misunderstanding completely.

The city of Cusco
periodically discusses just changing the whole thing.

Moving on…

It’s all well to criticize the
Spanish destruction of the Inca empire, but let’s also disabuse
ourselves of any assumption that the Incas were morally
superior. After all, they probably didn’t get to be the most
powerful empire in the hemisphere by asking nicely.

Let’s move a few hundred miles south, to Lake Titicaca
near the Bolivian border, and meet the Uros people, who were at
one time oppressed and even enslaved by the Incas.

Lake Titicaca is at about 12,500 feet
— about 2.4 miles up in the air. By comparison, Denver is at
5280 feet, altitude sickness starts affecting sensitive people
at just 8000 feet, and the MacBook I’m using is only rated by
Apple to function up to 10,000 feet. (Above that, the thin air
can supposedly cause a dynamic imbalance in the spinning hard
drive.) Lake Titicaca is, in a word, somewhat high.

As
a result, it’s one of the most vividly colorful places on
earth. You’re missing almost two and a half miles of air that
normally stand between you and the sun god, plus you’re near
the equator, so Inti is bashing you pretty straight on. So the
blue is BLUE. The green is GREEN. My camera couldn’t possibly
do it justice. The colors are so bright they almost vibrate:

And
on this beautiful lake — several kilometers out, just, like,
floating out there — live several hundred
members of the Uros, a people whose culture predates the Incas.

Roughly half a millennium ago, the Uros were under
such frequent and violent assault that many finally fled onto
the lake itself, building floating pontoon islands out of the
lake’s abundant totora reeds.

Centuries later, many of
the Uros are still there. Floating on their reed islands.

They’re still raising their kids in reed huts,
paddling reed boats, and constantly weaving and re-weaving the
whole kaboodle, since water and weather are constantly eroding
most of their world.

There
are anywhere from about 45 to 60 of these islands at any time,
generally housing from 2-5 families each, depending on
population and who is getting along with whom. (A bad family
spat, for example, may lead to the construction of a new
island.) The island in the above picture was abandoned shortly
before I arrived; the elderly couple who had previously lived
in the house on the right had recently passed away.

The islands are squishy to walk on, something like
trying to stride across a mattress. If you stomped, you could
put your foot right through the matting. So you walk carefully.

Say
hello to Olympia. She and her husband were born on one of these
pontoons, are raising their children out here, and will
probably live much of the rest of their lives in the same small
hut:

Olympia invited me into her home and
showed me around. (She surely does this with travelers almost
every day.) The whole hut is probably about the size of your
living room.

Here’s where they cook, just outside:

These
are their three daughters:

It may not be clear in the photos, but
everyone looks kinda sunburned. A scientific survey completed
in 2006 determined that this general region receives the
highest jolt of UV radiation of any continuously inhabited
place on earth. And nobody here can afford frequent sunscreen.

I brought (as any traveler should) pencils and paper
as gifts for the kids, since school supplies are way expensive
for these folks; their only income is from selling crafts and
trading fresh fish, handicrafts, and other goods with
non-lake-dwellers. Speaking of crafts, that handwoven mat that
Olympia is sitting with, above — that’s currently sitting on
my couch here in L.A., awaiting a frame. It’s gorgeous, it
tells the story of the Uros, and it was the biggest thing she
had for sale. I will treasure it.

The fishing is done primarily with what
the Uros call “plastic boats,” since they’re not made of reeds:

But they still make traditional reed
boats like the one below, which took five men two months of
labor to build, and lasts only two years before the lake water
eventually reclaims it:

These boats
are more for making a few bucks by taking visitors like me out
for a lap. Fair enough. Cesar here manned the oar and was kind
enough to share a few more details of life here:

He’s 25 and commutes by boat to the
lakeshore city of Puno for school, medical care, and other
things most first worlders take for granted. He’s also not
actually a full-blooded descendent of the Uros — nobody here
is. Over the centuries, the Uros eventually intermarried with
neighboring Aymara-speaking peoples, and the Uros’s language
disappeared long ago. Uros traditions continue, although it’s
all getting harder to maintain as the living standard on the
shore continues to lure people away.

The government is
now heavily subsidizing the Uros, partly for humane reasons,
and partly because they’re increasingly a tourist attraction.
As my own presence here confirms. This is strange to
contemplate. Another generation or two (if not already or very
soon), and people may only live here to attract visitors,
reducing an entire centuries-old culture to little more than a
publicity stunt.

I’m trying to imagine what it would
be like to have all of your traditions and culture, handed down
for hundreds of years, collapse into a tourist trap that
rapidly — to grow up while that’s going on, and then wonder
who your children will even be. I’m trying, and failing, to
imagine that.

I hope that buying the beautiful weaving
from Olympia will help her family and support her work, and not
encourage her to continue an unnecessarily hard way of life
they will someday maintain only for show.

Moving on.

Further into the lake (and with a beautiful view of
the Bolivian Andes), is the island of Taquile:

Thanks to physical isolation, Taquile
has yet another distinct culture. Possessions are generally
collectivized — even the sheep feeding on the Inca-era
terraces:

Family
lineage is identified by color-coded clothing:

Conflicts on the island are resolved
every Sunday in lengthy group discussions in the main square:

Too bad Copenhagen couldn’t be
organized this smoothly. I can think of some people who could
seriously learn from Taquile.

Heading back to dry
land, however, things got less inspiring for a while.

The nearest airport is in Juliaca, a city just
slightly larger than Akron, Ohio. Not the most enticing place
I’ve been. To give you an idea, this Peru tourism website,
whose whole point is to make things sound as appealing as
possible, has this
to say about Juliaca:

very unattractive…
[it] competes with Chimbote on the northern coast for the title
of the most unpleasant city in Peru. Most of the buildings in
the city are very ugly… the bitter cold winds make being out
at night almost unbearable…”

As a bonus, cars, 3-wheel cabs,
motorcycles, pedicabs, bicycles, and pedestrians compete in a
downtown oddly bereft of traffic lights, so everyone just sort
of shoves their noses in and pushes. I’ve been in third world
traffic from Cairo to Bali to Kuala Lumpur, and this was as
hostile as anything I’ve ever seen. Before becoming congealed
in traffic, my taxi driver almost ran over a dog, a teenage
school girl, and an elderly woman, all within a two minute
period — accelerating, honking, daring them not to dive out of
the street. This seemed to be the etiquette; other drivers did
the same. When I asked him to please slow down and not risk
hitting people, the driver pulled the car over and began
yelling abusively.

Hokay.

According to the
locals I spoke with, much of the economy is built around
contraband of many varieties — Peru and Bolivia maintain no
border controls on Lake Titicaca, creating an enormous
smuggling route for anyone trying to get stolen or illegal
goods from the rest of South America into Peru for sale or
export. And Juliaca is the hub.

For what it’s worth,
the lone cop I saw looked like a total prop:

Yes, the cop stayed in a little box on
the sidewalk, blowing a whistle and waving at traffic that
barely paid the slightest mind. Yes, the box was provided by
Inca Kola. And yes, a man is about to urinate on the wall.

It’s not really a law-and-order place, I guess.

On Christmas Eve of last year, someone threw a tear
gas grenade into a nightclub here, where 1200 people were
dancing in a room built for half that many. In the confined
space, five people were asphyxiated and 10 were severely
injured in the rush to flee. The police never found out who did
it, but it’s believed to have been a prank by some teenagers.
For fun.

Outside, neighbors who lived near the
nightclub took advantage of the situation and tried to set fire
to the building, the better to rob the panicked, fleeing
survivors.

Afterward, seven people were arrested for
trying to steal valuables from the dead bodies.

Tough
town, this Juliaca.

A couple of years ago, a poor man
was discovered stealing cooking fuel here. A mob tied him to a
lamppost with wire and burned him alive.

A couple of
months before that, the mayor of an outlying village was
accused of corruption, and the entire town beat him to death.

That said, they do have a giant slide:

So there’s that.

Let’s get
back on the road, shall we?

Here’s the Altiplano,
Peru’s answer to the South African highveldt — a high plain
often seemingly as flat as a putting green for as far as the
eye can see:

Occasionally you hit a speed bump at a toll station. These are
accompanied by the following warning:

The
sign is meant to communicate that the large bump may destroy
your suspension if you don’t slow down. My crappy Spanish,
however, always interpreted the sign more literally — as
Spring Break.

Cool! Turns out
it’s Spring Break in Peru every 50 miles or so.

Moving
on.

This is the central wall of the Temple of
Wiracocha, a pre-Inca ruin 80 feet high and 100 yards long.
Prior to the Spaniards doing to the Incas roughly what Juliaca
does to propane thieves, this central wall supported a church
the size of an entire football field, surely one of the largest
structures on the continent when the Spanish arrived:

The sheep is a comparatively recent
addition.

Further north, we pass Cusco and enter the
Sacred Valley, a vast fertile swath along the Urubamba river
that was to the Incas what California’s Central Valley is to
modern supermarkets.

It’s gorgeous. Depending on your
altitude, the Sacred Valley can look like anything from the
most fertile bits of Appalachia…

… to a drive through the back roads
of Utah:

Next stop, Moray, site of what may have
been a massive Inca crop laboratory, 14 stories deep and 150
yards across:

The theory goes that all those
concentric circles create different microclimates, with the
center several degrees warmer than the outermost rings. Many
scientists now believe that in addition to using the center for
various religious rites and sacrifices, the Incas also used the
entire area as a microcosm for the terraced hillsides
throughout the valley — and a laboratory for determining which
grains would grow best at which altitude and direction of
exposure to the sun.

I would not have thought that an
Inca crop lab would be so cool. But then, I’d have also said
the same about this Peruvian salt mine:

Normally,
somebody says “Peruvian salt mine,” I’m not thinking, wow,
cool. But this was:

About 600 years ago, the Incas
discovered a natural spring that provided a constant trickle of
extremely salty water. With some careful terracing, they
created this massive field of 3000 evaporation pools. The trace
mineral content varies from pool to pool, with distinct
applications in agriculture, animal husbandry, and human
consumption.

If you own one of the plots, you get to
the actual salt by just walking out onto the terraces and
harvesting it. This feels a lot like walking on snow when it’s
80 degrees outside:

The
only similar experience I’d had was crunching around the
Gilmore Girls set during a Christmas
episode being shot in Burbank in October. But if I’d lost my
footing there, I wouldn’t have gone careening down the side of
a mountain.

Moving on.

Nearby, here’s
Ollyantaytambo, site of an Inca fortress the Spanish never
conquered:

At its feet, the town of Ollyantaytambo
is among the best-preserved Inca villages in Peru:

Many of the residents of Ollyantaytambo
speak Quechua, retain some elements of traditional dress and
custom, and live in Inca-built dwellings along Inca-built
streets, eating potatoes and corn grown from hybrids and
techniques pioneered by the Incas. It’s pretty damn Inca here.

If you’re planning a visit, the Casa Del Scorpion
guest house is just out of camera range here to the left.

Watching the train to Machu Picchu chug past these
half-millennium-old terraces was oddly jarring — like watching
two widely-spaced centuries overlap right before your eyes:

Speaking of Machu Picchu… let’s go.
(Warning: my words are going to completely fail. So will my
camera. Most of these pictures will look just like every other
picture of Machu Picchu. Some things — Iguazu Falls, the
pyramids of Giza or Teotihuacan, the Grand Canyon, etc. — are
just they’re too big and wonderful to encapsulate in a
snapshot.) 8000 feet in the air, in the saddle between two
bullet-shaped mountains far enough into the Peruvian jungle
that neither cars nor planes can take you to the spot…

… there’s a 550-year-old ruin larger
than Times Square. Constructed entirely of rocks that seem to
have no earthly business being there.

Archaeologists
aren’t even sure what it was for. Possibly a retreat for the
emperor Pachacutec. Whatever it was, the Spanish never
plundered it — heck, they never even found it — so the whole
thing is unusually pristine.

The place is often
overrun by tourists, but if you look closely, you’ll see that I
lucked out and almost had the whole deal to myself. It was a
random Thursday at the beginning of the wet season. Must be a
good time to visit.

The view above is taken from a
small building theorized to be a sort of observation post, now
known as the Caretaker’s Hut. Here’s a look back up from what
would be street level, were the town still active:

To give you a sense of scale, each one
of those terraces is about 5 feet high. So climbing up to the
hut from here is like taking the stairs on a 20-story building.

Here’s the most sacred spot in the place, a stone
called Intihuatana (“hitching post of the sun”):

Despite its simple appearance, it’s
oriented to point directly at the sun on the winter solstice,
with the travel of its shadows subsequently providing an
excellent guide to the seasons. This stone and the temple
around it may have been the center of all Inca social and
political planning.

And here are what seem to be the
primary caretakers, keeping the grass neat with their grazing:

They also line up single file to use
the stairs, which was more civilized than any human act I saw
in the entire city of Juliaca.

A lot of tourists don’t
want to visit during the wet season, but if you like dramatic
shifts in mood, it’s the way to go:

And when the mist clears, rainbows
appear in the valley below:

500 feet
over the rainbow would be a good place to end this entry…
except there’s one thing even more beautiful that I want to
show you.

It’s the real reason I went, the main thing
I was visiting in Cusco, and the actual subject of this chapter
of my book on microfinance. (The rest is just window dressing,
really.)

Here’s the loveliest place I visited in Peru:

Arariwa may not look gorgeous, but it’s
a microfinance institution that brings financial resources to
the working poor throughout the region — craftspeople not
unlike Olympia, say. Plus farmers and tradespeople and small
businesspeople of every kind.

Microfinance is changing
millions of lives — so much so that its biggest pioneer,
Muhammad Yunus, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.
Unfortunately, it’s not yet very well known in America. So for
my next book, I’m taking all the money I made swanking around
doing luxury travel reviews last year and putting it to good
use — funneling every dime into backing a bunch of loans*
(1036 as of today; eventually I hope to do many thousands) in
more than 40 developing countries. I’m using Kiva.org as my primary
investment platform so far, but I’ll be checking out include
Babyloan.org,
MYC4.com, and MicroPlace.com, among
others. (They’re all a little different, but generally in the
same ballpark.)

And I’ll be spending much of 2010
following the results in a half-dozen interesting places, then
writing about what I see, learn, and occasionally fall off of
or getting bitten by on the way.

That’s the next book.
Peru was just my first stop.

About 35 of my Kiva loans
are to borrowers hooked up via Arariwa (“guardian of the
harvest” in Quechua), and while I was in Cusco, I met some of
the good folks at Arariwa who get the money to the people who
need it, teach them how to handle it, offer health and
reproductive information, and devote their lives to equipping
the poor to, basically, not be poor anymore.

Want to
know what was really gorgeous in Peru? People like Clotilde
here, the head of education (and caretaker of a gazillion other
things) for Arariwa, and one of the sweetest people I’ve ever
met:

Clotilde
here kindly opened her office, offered her time and support,
arranged for me to visit with a few borrowers, and put up with
my crappy Spanish. You just can’t ask for more than that.

(Also, a grateful shout-out to Kiva Fellow Sheethal
Shobowale for introducing me to Clotilde, shepherding me around
more than once, and frequently making my Spanish comprehensible
to others. This was all above and beyond. It was a privilege.)

I’d just like anyone reading this to get the feel for
how real and cool and normal and important this stuff is. And
in a way, how totally ordinary. Clotilde is an exceptional
person — but I also think everyone reading this is in their
own way, too. (Yes, I get how sappy and contradictory that
sounds. Deal with it.)

And that’s it from Peru. Next
stop will probably be India and Bangladesh in a few months.
Will send more from there.

Thanks for reading! May
your chicha be fresh, your island well-thatched, and your loo
scorpions slow-moving.

*Sticklers may want me to
clarify that a “Kiva loan” is typically the refinancing of an
existing loan already made by the local lending institution. To
which I say, whoopty. It’s still helping to get food on the
table where it’s needed.