Good Friday in Lima...and Good Saturday, too

    Lima is an awful lot like Toronto, but with triple the population and no meters in the taxis. We were told that there were ten million residents and climbing (some say 12 million), but there are no jobs and not enough infrastructure to support the new ones arriving every month. They keep coming anyway, and the shantytowns will grow. The lifestyle and prices in Miraflores are similar to prices in Scarborough, for meals at least; it's an area favoured by tourists. Meals and prices in other neighbourhoods are more Peruvian, and Lima residents are extremely friendly, even the cab drivers who, once they agree on a price which might have been a little less than they first proposed, are very cheerful and talkative.

    We're staying at the Buena Vista hostel for two nights. We lucked out: the owner of this hostel has often stayed for free at Apu Lodge, and vice versa, so we explained that we'd been volunteering there for six weeks, asked him for a discount for our stay, and he let us stay for free! It's a lovely hostel with a pet parrot named Lorenzo who is quite a character. A parrot is called a loro in Spanish. There are lots of wild birds in the city.  We can hear flocks of parrots, morning doves, and "zap-zap" birds.

    We went out to see the Catacombs and the Archaeological Museum today, but both were closed because it is Good Friday. Instead, we saw crowds of people in the Plaza de Armas, a.k.a. Plaza Mayor, celebrating their religious festival and a long weekend off work. The San Francisco cathedral was open, however.  The religious have to walk a long way today, visiting seven different churches to represent the seven words spoken by Christ on the cross; they buy a little decoration of creatively woven palm leaves, sometimes with flowers, crosses and miniature statues incorporated, and have them "blessed" in each church. Then they wander up the hill outside of town to watch the re-enactment of the crucifixion. 

    We found that the Museum of the Inquisition as it manifested in Peru was open, and free, so we wandered in and took some photos of that.

    Some Tripadvisor comments say that the public transit in Lima is "broken"; however, we found a great bus line up the main thoroughfare, called the Metropolitano. It looks pretty new, clean and comfortable, and there's a central hub underground which suggests that it will soon branch out from the main line. We paid 18 soles to take a cab to the square (cab drivers jack up the prices during "Holy Week", and on Good Friday), but only 4 soles to come back on the bus. We stood because the seats were filled, but it wasn't crowded or uncomfortable.  We'd got on ahead of the crowd going home from the Plaza Mayor, and the passengers were friendly and helpful. They have a very confusing system of buying a "tarjeta" which then has to be recharged for each ride, but any number of people can ride on the same tarjeta, so other riders are quick to step forward and let visitors ride along on their tarjeta as long as they cover their own fare. This way the visitors don't have to purchase a tarjeta themselves. I hope that when the system matures the administration will consider ways to accommodate short stay tourist visitors as well.  They could provide daily, week and monthly passes like Toronto's system does for visitors.

    The only downside to the Buena Vista happened Saturday morning, when an small army of loud, inconsiderate young Frenchmen woke each other up at 6 a.m. by banging on doors and clomping up and down the stairs.  They talked excitedly over each other all at once at the top of their inconsiderate voices in the courtyard at breakfast just below our window. They were so boorish I thought they might be Germans or Americans at first.  I'd forgotten that these days it seems that Germans and Americans who actually travel are more aware of their earlier reputation. They are now more sensitive to foreigners and fellow travelers than the French, who rival the young Israelis in obnoxiousness when the Israelis take their free year of travel after their three years of compulsory military service. There's a great stereotyping synopsis - not nice of me, but I couldn't help reflecting that Peruvians would be like whispering monks at that hour of the morning, and the gentle Quechua people would never be that rude.

    Here's our hostal in Lima, Lorenzo, and our last days.

    We weren't allowed to take photos inside the Franciscan monastery during our tour of the building and the catacombs below it. I'm not really sure why - there are tons of photos of it online already anyway, so here's a link to some of those images. They've estimated that 25,000 people were buried there.

    The really horrifying thing about the Franciscan monastery wasn't the bones, however. It was the library, which looked like something out of Hogwarts, with dust everywhere and spiral iron staircases to the upper levels. There are 20,000 books on the shelves, some up to 500 years old, all rotting in the open air, with bookworm holes visible in the spines. There's been no attempt to protect them or share them with the rest of the world. Unbelievable.

    I built a photo album of the pre-Colombian ceramics we saw in the national museum of archaeology, mostly for Laurence Wright who directed us there.  Many other people will be amazed at their quality.  Deborah was, having been a potter herself.  For erotic Moche pottery, you'll have to view Google images, because we chose the national museum over the Larco museum  where they are housed.  Warning: this is a PG, X-rated link to how people had fun 2000 years ago, which, as it turns out, is not much different than today.

    The red eye home to Toronto through New York was comfortable. Once again, LAN came out ahead in spades over American Airlines, in terms of food, service and comfort. I'd never hesitate to fly that airline.

    Here in Toronto, it is snowing lightly, but forecast to warm up again in a couple of days with warmer weather blowing in from Edmonton. The internet was back on by the time we got home, but we're renegotiating our contract, and getting the phone service turned on.  We had to call Bell on Skype, which felt strange.  We dealt with four months of mail, got the vehicle insurance coverage restored, and took care of all our first-week-back details and chores.

    And that's was it.  We've "done Peru".  

Goodbye Ollantay, Hello Sexy Woman

    We spent a day at the Sun Temple complex in Ollantaytambo. I had 260 photos that I whittled down to 212, and then reduced that to a smaller number to put in my photo album.  The rest stay on my hard drive. After all, how many photos of rocks piled up can I post, no matter how cleverly carved and piled they are?

    Two days later we said our goodbyes and got to our hostal in Cusco, the Pakcha Real, by noon. We met Daniel again, and learned that it might not be worth recommending the place to others. They play games with you when you tell them you expect to pay what's on the website.  This is our second visit, so it has happened twice now.  They make excuses for why online information hasn't been updated. Daniel quoted 8 soles for a taxi ride to the airport because he was trying to get us to pay for it ourselves; last time it was 12, and the "official airport taxi" rate (no different than any other taxis, except that they are a group that have formed a price-fixing cartel that no authority seems to have the ability or the will to bust up) wants 40 soles. This place is a minefield for travelers on a budget.

    Before we left Ollantay, we bought a ten-day "boleta", a $100 ticket for two of us that allows entry into various archaeological sites, art galleries and museums, and a folkdance performance. We used it first for Ollantaytambo temple and Moray, and then for sites and museums in Cusco. We're pretty used to the altitude now; Cusco is higher than Ollantay, at 3300 metres, but this time we're able to scamper back up the hill or the stair-streets to our hostal at a pretty good clip.

    We had a very good meal at "Jack's" in San Blas, toured a couple of museums which are fairly pathetic, mostly because of their inability to maintain good exhibits and to write decent explanations. Oddly, in a town which gets so many good English writers and fluently bilingual tourists, their English captions are worse than the worst Google translate you've ever seen. 

    In the contemporary art museum in Cusco we enjoyed viewing paintings by Amilcar Salomon Zorilla, a former Peruvian ambassador to the U.S.  He used to have lots of fine Inca images in paintings on his website, including depictions of the fourteen Incas and a series of temple virgins, but his website has disappeared and it is difficult to find images of the paintings online.

    In the evening we went to an arts cultural centre and watched an hour long show of folk dances from different provinces of Peru. It's amazing how many different traditional costumes there are. Photography was difficult - they move too fast, in low light - but I got a few cute shots.

    We went to the Sun Temple site of Cusco, called Sacsayhuaman, and sometimes spelled Sacsaywaman. When Spanish speakers say it, it can sound like they're trying to say "sexy woman" in English, so even the guides call it that on purpose. We got there as a hop-off from a city tour in an open-topped bus, but it took some convincing for them to let us get down there and catch the same bus the next time it came around. It was worth it, though - we saw some other sights and saved cab fare to Sacsayhuaman, and while we were there we lucked into watching a crucifixion by a number of school kids. They crucified a high school kid, probably wished it was a teacher, but there you go...they got him popped up on the cross in the rain and cold just before our bus had to leave.

    When we came back down to town we visited the regional museum which has fourteen galleries and slightly better captioning for the exhibits than we saw the day before. It was a much better museum, though, and no matter what, in English or in Spanish, every museum has something different to see and think about. 

    We also visited the Popular Art museum, which is small but really enjoyable. Then we watched The Name of the Rose in Spanish in the City Hall cinema for free - I was hoping for The Mission, but that came on next and we were ready to leave by then. We had supper in an East Indian Korma restaurant on Tandapata, our street: I had curried alpaca. Could have had tandoori guinea pig as an appetizer. This must be the only place in the world where you can have your choice of those two dishes.

Next diary entry: Good Friday in Lima

Yachay Wasi, Helpx Farewell, Moray and Salineras

    On Friday Louise took me to Yachay Wasi, the little schoolhouse where her daughters study. It's a private school with only four classes, two of which are renting space; class sizes are 14 2/3 yr olds, 16 3/4/5's, 17 in the State sponsored "Prenoi" (early childhood education) that rents a classroom from them, and 9 in Nina's 6/7's, who are another private school that also rents a classroom. There are Yachay Wasi's in every town by the way; the name translates literally as "school house" in Quechua.

    Two of the teachers joined us later at the lodge for a farewell party, mostly for Gemma and Cesar, but also for Deb and me. Deb, Gemma and Monica made a nice pesto with basil, spinach and pecans, and Gemma made Spanish potato, onion and egg omelettes ("tortillas"). The beer and Pisco flowed freely, and Maf, a teacher originally from Botswana, brought his guitar and entertained us by playing and singing.  He got thoroughly drunker than anyone else, even diminutive Gemma, who keeps up with the men but is half their weight and size, and suffers for it the next day. 

    Maf claims to be 4th generation Botswana, descended from French and Portuguese (the Frenchman likely a criminal escaping the law in the late 1800's, he says, and his family name was changed - he doesn't know from what), and he still has family there. His Dad is tight with Ian Khama, he has a stepmom, and one of four remaining brothers (originally there were six of them) lives there doing "entrepreneurial things", he says. Another one lives here in Lima, and is a journalist. He claims to be Jewish, but I don't think he's terribly sure of that either, and he gets drunk like an Irish poet. He played and sang "Oh, Botswana, Oh, Mama Africa...", with good guitar playing and guitar-slapping rhythm work, even when he was thoroughly pissed.

    On the morning after, I got up make sure all traces of our party were cleaned up before the breakfast guests came down, but Gemma and Cesar had already done a pretty good job before they went to bed.  Ruth was only ten minutes late, so after sweeping and making coffee, my job was done except for schmoozing with the guests when they came down. Deb and I ate our own breakfast and, with Mike and Monica, we headed off with Moises in his private car to see Salineras and Moray. 

    In the Maras valley there are warm salt springs. We're high in the mountains, but there is limestone around Cusco.  A long time ago this was an ocean bottom that got up-thrust with the rest of the Andes, and as it evaporated, it created a fantastic salt reservoir. The city of Cusco was once a lake that eventually, slowly drained away. At Salineras a spring from the hillside runs underground through the reservoir and picks up salt in very high concentration, and then emerges. There are 5700 individual pans where the water is evaporated to give salt. This has been going on for thousands of years, since long before the Incas, of course, and is posited as one of several reasons why the Incas chose first Ollantaytambo, the "House of the Dawn" of the Inca Empire, and then Cusco as the centre of their empire, which spread out in four distinct provinces from that point.

    Moray is a fascinating agronomic laboratory, a place where the Incas grew and adapted different kinds of plants to different altitudes and conditions, creating hardier corn varieties, etc, in a controlled environment where they could select the sun's angle at various seasons by planting at any point of the 360 degree circular terraces, as well as the depth into the sheltered funnel of terraces. Scientists have measured a temperature differential of 10 degrees Farenheit between various points of the terraces. The improved seeds from plants here were a precious and valued gift from the Inca to the leaders of other subjugated indigenous peoples around the empire. Here's are our photos of Moray, Salineras and some surrounding mountain peaks.

    One of the most readable and succinct books about the Incas, with great photos, is one sold outside the Temple here, by Fernando and Edgar Salazar. 

Next diary entry: Farewell Ollantaytambo

Fresh Helpx blood, and a trip to the Kiya Survivors School

    A friend writes, "loved The Doors of Ollantaytambo and The Dogs of Ollantaytambo. May we now have The Women of Ollantaytambo, please? Be sure to keep the nudes tasteful..." Well Don, there's occasional toplessness here, almost always in the form of unselfconscious nursing of infants when they get cranky; other than that, I suspect you're out of luck for nudes.

    On Sunday evening at 5 p.m. the power went out - a tree had fallen beside the flood-weakened river bank and taken out the power lines to the whole town and the upstream communities as well.  The hydroelectric station is downstream from us, near Machu Picchu.  I'm convinced that the river walls are weak because the rocks are locked in place with concrete masonry instead of stacked up free-floating rocks like the Incas would have built. We read by candlelight and had a longer sleep than usual. The power came on again at about 10:30 Monday morning. Good thing, once again, that we had no guests in the building. Four guests arrived on Monday, all of them exhausted by airline delays and heavy rain while being driven down from Cusco.

    Before Ruth got here on Monday morning (late again - I think she's been on time for work twice in six weeks) the milk lady came with her daughter.  I got Deb out of bed to make that purchase because I wasn't sure how much to buy and what to pay.  I did the dishes from the night before - it had been too dark to see if we were getting them clean, so we just left them until the morning.

    The day went well, but for the most part we sat and waited to meet the guests, who were delayed. The first couple had not arranged their train tickets in advance, so they raced down to the station and were lucky enough to get a mid-day train to Machu Picchu.  

    The second couple arrived five hours overdue, and included a young lady in a miniskirt and platform sandals.  I don't know where she thought she was coming to. I was sure she'd twist an ankle on the cobblestones. They went down to the plaza for dinner in the evening with no raingear, and the power went out again. The town was plunged into pitch darkness, and they had to walk home up an unfamiliar street between stone walls, on cobblestones, with a ditch full of running water on one side. Cesar and Gregorio went to look for them in all the restaurants with a flashlight, while I set up candles along the path and at the front gate.  Then the rain began. Cesar and Gregorio couldn't find them, and came back alone.  Fortunately the power came back on a half an hour later, including the recently repaired streetlights on our "street", so they were able to find their own way home, somewhat soaked and bedraggled. They had to get up at 5 a.m. the next morning to make it to their train to Machu Picchu.

    We make lots of friends here at the lodge - people who travel do that - and we swap email addresses, business cards, and invitations to visit each other. Mariane, Thomas and son Calvin gave us a bag of Calvin's clothes for Kiya Survivors, and invited us to stay at her apartment in Costa Rica if we ever travel there. They actually live in Tampa, where she is completing a doctorate in gerontology. She speaks fluent Spanish, having grown up in Costa Rica, and Thomas is German, so Calvin is working on becoming trilingual. 

    The power went out for the third time in a day just after lunch, shutting down the internet router; Gemma had a small fit: "I hate this place! Join the 21st Century!!" That was her second fit of the day - the first one was bigger, she tells us, when the hot water cut out in the middle of her shower while her hair was full of shampoo; which had also happened to Deborah this morning. The air was blue from both ends of the lodge. But the sun was shining and it looked gorgeous outside, so I teased Gemma about how enchanting Ollantaytambo is. 

    Ruth worked hard cleaning today, while Pancha did the biggest weekly shopping trip, which happens every Tuesday. The new Helpxers, Mike and Monica, arrived - I put their travelling blog link in my last entry. We spent a few hours giving them an orientation to the lodge, village and region.  We walked with them down to the plaza to introduce them to some of the choices of places to eat, and we arranged a trip to Moray and Salineras for this Thursday with the four of us in the car. Then we took them to Puka Rumi to have dinner together.  They were a nice couple.

    On Wednesday we visited the Kiya Survivors school, which by all outward first appearances gets ten out of ten for a responsibly run charity. The staff and volunteers seem committed and cheerful, and the grounds and facilities are marvellous by Peruvian standards. Kiya is a UK based foundation, but Alan Harman's Alma Foundation funds their Outreach program, and one of their newer programs in Life Skills. We spent an hour or so doing some last checking of the receipts for the year and then Julia gave us the receipt book to deliver to Alan when we get back to Scarborough. Here's what we saw.

Next diary entry: Farewell to Apu Lodge

Visiting Juan Carlos

    Juan Carlos and his mother live just up the hillside in the Patacancha valley at a place called Mores, about five kilometres from Ollantaytambo. Juan Carlos has autism (undiagnosed but obvious to anyone with experience in autism classrooms) and Downs syndrome. The Kiya Survivors discovered his presence and have been working with his mother to get him ready to attend school a couple of days a week. They visit with supplies of milk and soy/kiwicha flour, and they've built a little toilet to get him trained in how to use one - he used to be dressed in skirts and relieve himself wherever he felt like it. The mom and any other family members who were there would go up into the fields to do their business, but now they all use the new toilet.

    Yordi Angles Garcia Usca, Juan Carlos' nephew, is a handsome young man of twelve and in grade six; he lives with his grandmother because his mother has a new husband who doesn't want him, if I understood that correctly. Iris the social worker took some simple school supplies and books for him, and handed out toothbrushes.  A female cousin was also visiting today. Mariane and Thomas from Tampa, who were staying at the lodge for a couple of days, had given us some clothes that their son Calvin had outgrown, and some of those were the perfect size for Yordi, who was very grateful to get them. I believe the rest will go to other Kiya children at the disabilities school.

    The family cooks in a small hut that is built on the foundation of an old Inca or pre-Inca fort, and they farm terraces with rock walls.  The walls are overgrown and falling down, and a little difficult to distinguish. They have a second building closer to the road which has a board floor and two newer beds for sleeping, as well as farming equipment and sacks of produce that the Mom, who is about fifty, takes to market in town once a week. She has ducks, a house full of guinea pigs, and two sheep up the hill that she gathers wool from. She spins and dyes the wool with natural dyes, and probably weaves with it also.

    The washroom is rudimentary, but has a water source for flushing and cleaning, and a covered septic drain. Plastic pipe takes water to a shower head as well. Cold water, of course, and not potable. The water coming from the irrigation ditch, which is where they used to hike to get their water, and is merely strained of larger debris by a plastic pop bottle with holes in it that has to be replaced on a regular basis. 

    I had a short discussion with Miguel and Julia about how easy it would be to build a covered concrete capture and settling tank, or even a wood board one lined with plastic sheeting.   There's a natural three-sided hollow in the hill that's the perfect size already, right under the pipe.  They could scoop or pipe the clear water off the top and filter it through a $30 ceramic filter to provide clean drinking water to the family, so they wouldn't have to bring their drinking water in, and wouldn't have to waste hard-to-gather fuel on boiling water, assuming they actually boil their drinking water.  

    The final step before ingesting that water would be to let it sit in the sun in clear plastic bottles for 6 to 48 hours depending on what you're trying to kill and the weather conditions, in the concave valleys of the bright galvanized corrugated roof panels they've put over the new toilet, to kill any remaining micro-organisms, molds and fungus. Ultraviolet light is used in high end purification systems to kill bacteria and micro-organisms, and the UV levels up here are the some of the highest in the world.

    We discussed adding black piping, a black vinyl solar shower bag, a black five gallon plastic can, or even just large plastic bottles painted black, to have passive solar heated shower water. The water is all gravity fed, so there's no need for pumps of any kind.  It's just a question of adding a bit more tubing and some valves.

    Iris tried to visit a second home on the way back, but they were not at home. We got home in time for lunch, and then I spent the early afternoon editing and captioning my photos and writing this blog entry, most of which also doubles as a report for Alan Harman of the Alma Foundation. 

    Back at the lodge, Gemma taught me something.  She's been working on adding higher resolution photos to Booking.com, where the lodge gets at least 20% of their bookings. She's managed to increase the lodge's rating with Booking.com from 67% to 100%, after working at it over the past week, and that translates into being presented to customers at a higher level on the website. Expedia.com accounts for 30%.  Agencies only book one night at a time, and direct bookings account for the other 50%. They don't seem to get any business from three others that they have to continually monitor anyway - Hostelworld, Hostelbookers, and Despegar - probably because Apu Lodge is priced higher than hostel-seekers are looking for, so they'll be dropping those services. All good to know, in case we want to buy our own lodge some day and market it on the internet.

    A few days ago I made a photo album of The Doors of Ollantaytambo. This morning, in a fit of whimsy, I took photos of dogs top create another photo album: The Dogs of Ollantaytambo. I took some other random shots around town, and of the school.  The new term was supposed to start at the beginning of March, but as we were warned before we even came to South America, there are an inordinate number of days when the children are not in school for one reason or another - religious days, fiestas, teacher inservices, strikes, contract signings - making it difficult to volunteer in schools here...this time, after only two days, the teachers all went away for a whole week of "inservice", and they're only back today - but the kids were not required to sit in the classrooms and learn anything to make up for the time they'd missed; instead, it was a "fiesta" day to celebrate the return of the teachers. Am I impressed? Not so much...no wonder countries like this have such a hard time pulling themselves up to First World standards.

    The bakery here is interesting. It's a community oven. The baker has dibs in the morning, builds the fire and spends the morning baking up batches of fresh, flat little buns about the shape of small cow patties.  People from all over the village step inside to buy the fresh buns at about 6 1/2 cents each until they run out.  After that anyone else may go in and use the oven to bake a cake, or whatever else they desire. However, today the baker decided to take the day off and go to Cusco, with no warning, no notice.  The consequence is no fresh bread, for residents or tourist guests at the many accommodation homes throughout the town.  There's no oven at Apu Lodge to whip up some biscuits or bread, because Louise took the good stove to her house - we only have a tiny little two burner propane stove, good for frying eggs and making soup.  How lucky it is that we have no guests this morning!

Next diary entry: Kiya Survivors

Knocking off the Conquistadors

    Deb and I walked to a place that tourists never go, unless they hire horses just for a pleasant ride along the terraces. It isn't in the guidebooks, but it is in one of the history books I've read over the past month. It's where Manco Inca's warriors tried to knock the Spaniards off their horses as they approached the temple city of Ollantaytambo along the Rio Urubamba, coming from Cusco.  It is probably the site of the first and only devastating defeat of the Spanish in battle by the Incas. It fits the description better than the main temple site. 

    This is the battle site described in the Wikipedia account, in the sections titled Battle, and Battle Site. The site should be famous but is ignored by local guides and unknown to most tourists who just come to see Machu Picchu and race home.  The walk to get there is along a beautiful stretch of treed terraces overlooking the Urubamba valley, with hummingbirds and rock waterfall features that are part of the aqueduct system irrigating the terraces. It should be developed as a municipal park and alternate destination for tourists. I didn't even know it was there until I stumbled on it and suddenly recognized where I was from the description I'd read. There are no plaques or signposts. I'm hoping I'll get a chance to guide a visitor or two there myself before I leave, and enjoy their astonishment.

    I have finished the last of the books on my reading list, an older (1997), dryer Penguin book by Nigel Davies called The Ancient Kingdoms of Peru, which covers what is known about the pre-Incan cultures, of which there were many, stretching back thousands of years. A lot of the ruins we call "Incan" were built by earlier peoples in the same areas who were conquered by the Incans and incorporated into the Empire. The empire has been compared to the Roman Empire, but in some ways the Inca seem more like "the Borg". Many cultures gave up without a fight as the Incan Empire expanded - "Resistance is futile", say the Borg. If a culture resisted, they were brutally defeated and their citizens marched off en masse, thousands at a time, to other parts of the empire for resettlement and indoctrination.

    This was part of the Incan administrative genius for empire building and social engineering - cruel, but effective. People could be slaughtered for any number of reasons, and that included regular child sacrifice.  How did parents and communities ever come to accept that?  Free trade was discouraged and carefully controlled, in favour of economic "vertical archipelagos".  The system remained stable because nobody starved.  Today's New Agers are impressed with the Incas as the first "socialist" or "communist" society, a mystical society with no writing but with skilled astronomy; they conveniently forget the brutality and repression, the extremism of the Emperor cult, the constant need to sacrifice people and animals to the Inti and other gods. 

    It was not a time and place I'd have wished to live, no matter how impressed I am, like everyone else, with the stone building technology.  As one U.S. soldier from Kabul said when he was here two weeks ago on a break with his wife, "It's amazing what you can accomplish if you have enough slaves." Yeah, that kind of cuts through some of the mystery, doesn't it? 

    Apparently it took 50,000 men 20 years to build the temple I looked out on as I wrote this, and the town between me and the temple. I don't know where they were all housed at the time, but from what I've read their diet was poor, and the commoners in Cusco lived a squalid existence. The military, the luxury goods craftsmen, the priests and administrators, and the Emperor all ate well.  It more closely parallels the Soviet Socialist experience than any sort of New Age enlightened socialism or Christian communism.

    Not that the indigenos were any better off under the Spanish, mind you...

    We're getting fresh Helpxers shortly. Mike and Monica from Eugene, Oregon, have been travelling and blogging in S. America since last September, but they've started at the bottom and worked their way up, staying in hostels and travelling like locals, and riding in some of the amazing trans-continental buses.

    Deb and I held the fort alone, this time all day, with the help of Gregorio and Pancha.  Gemma, Cesar and Carlos have a day off to experience the magic cactus, with Louise' blessing (I didn't have Deb's blessing to join them!).  Louise and Ruth are both went to Cusco for the day. We only had one family of four for breakfast, a pretty nice family from Houston. The son, about ten, had a steel-trap memory and was a bit of a rainman.  We talked about why people built in high altitudes here, and I mentioned the desert between the Andes and the coast, and common diseases of the forested lowlands, in particular Leishmaniasis, known as Uta in South America. "Oh," said Thomas, "that's caused by sandflies, isn't it?" His astonished mother said, "How did you know that?" "It was on a TV show about horrible diseases that we watched together a few months ago", replied Thomas. Later I mentioned that we had 1800 species of birds here, second only in number to Colombia. "Cool," said Thomas. "We only have 600 species in Texas."

Next diary entry: Visiting Juan Carlos

Life at the Lodge

    These photos illustrate life at the lodge and around the town of Ollyantaytambo.  

    Our days have settled into a familiar routine. I get up just before seven unless there's an "early breakfast" scheduled for people trying to catch the early train to Machu Picchu. "Early breakfast" set-up happens the night before and I just inspect for any missing items, and host the breakfast, often starting at six. "Regular breakfast" set-up begins at 7 for a 7:30 sitting and I usually get most of it done before Ruth arrives fifteen minutes late. She used to be an hour late, sometimes two, but now Louise is back and has read the riot act to her, so she's shaped up a little. Usually Gregorio arrives on time, and helps by cutting fruit and other little chores. Some mornings he brings in the fresh buns; on other days if he hasn't arrived, Deb has run out to get them.

    After clean-up, I have my own breakfast and shower, and then check our portfolio and read the equity reports quickly before we hold an English class for Gregorio and Francesca ("Pancha"). We've started pushing Gregorio forward at breakfast to ask whether the guests want "fresh squeezed orange juice" (he does the squeezing), and whether they want "two fried eggs or two scrambled eggs" (he does those, too). I hover, in case he doesn't fully comprehend their answers to his questions - for example if they use unpredictable vocabulary such as "one egg, easy over", if there are multiple orders of different types and amounts of eggs, or if they speak too quickly or indistinctly.

    Ruth invited Gemma out for a walk last night. They ended up at a disco, and were gone five hours, precipitating a spat between Gemma and Cesar; but while they danced, Ruth told Gemma she had been pilfering, after having denied it vehemently during her meeting with Louise. However, she insisted on sharing the blame with Pancha, and I guess she figures that makes her only half-guilty, somehow...thinking like a kid. Seems like a dumb move, the kind a cop would seize on to wring a confession.  

    We haven't connected with any local schools even though their vacation period is officially over next week.  Some are in class already.  We may choose not to. A small amount of volunteerism mixed in with the days of a snowbird seems comfortable, at the moment. We only have two weeks left here, and some of that time will be used to see other Inca ruins and sites of interest. 

    Next week we'll go out on a field trip with Kiya Survivors. I've learned about one school here that is staffed entirely by foreigners, mostly Spanish and French, and including one male teacher from Botswana. When people ask the administrator why there are no Peruvian teachers, she explains that she tries to hire them, but they never arrive on time for classes, and have to be canned - I guess they keep "Peruvian time", like Ruth does. When I was growing up we used to talk about "African time", but we were quick to forgive because most Africans didn't have clocks and didn't know how to tell time by minutes and hours; but here they do, and everyone has a cell phone. If you ask them the time and it is 7:26, they won't round to 7:25 or 7:30. They'll tell you that it is precisely 7:26; yet punctuality just doesn't seem to matter to most of them. Gregorio and Pancha appear to be exceptions rather than the rule.

    Before and after English class, Deb can usually be found helping the staff with laundry, or sweeping the kitchen and dining room.  I often do the breakfast dishes. Not that we're supposed to do those chores, but it helps out, especially if we're taking time out of their mornings to make them sit through an English class. Then I read - mostly Incan and pre-Incan history over the past month. 

    One thing I'm pondering lately is the appearance in mythology of several S. American cultures of a Moses-like personage, sometimes a poor but powerful prophet and religious leader in a modest but flowing robe and a long white beard, with a tall staff, sometimes made of gold. In Incan mythology the first Inca ruler, Manco Capac leads his people (as Moses did) on a journey from the Island of the Sun in the middle of Lake Titicaca, through an underworld tunnel (an echo of the parting of the Red Sea).  They come out in the cave of Pacariqtambo in the Valley of Cusco. As he goes he plunges the gold staff into the earth looking for soft, arable land. Moses' staff turned into snakes; here snakes are revered as representing Mother Earth, Pachamama, and they are a sign of knowledge. The guardian of the underworld in the Old World was a two headed snake; and the two headed snake is an important cultural icon in pre-history here, on friezes, pottery, and textiles. 

    These are pretty interesting myth parallels. It reminds me of the fact that all of the miracles and legends of Christ in the Bible had already existed in pre-Christian religions and cultures, including healing the sick, virgin birth, crucifixion, and turning water into wine.  In the middle east those stories were all in the same part of the world, where they could be easily overlaid from one religion and region to the next. How did they spread to central America?  There is some evidence of foreign visitors and even one who became a ruler of a pre-Incan coastal kingdom, arriving here in pre-historic times with, presumably, other stories and customs which might have influenced the mythological traditions here.

    Eventually the Incas arrived at Cusco, where the staff sank into the earth, and it became the land of milk and honey, at the doorway to the "Sacred Valley", and the new capital of the Incan empire.  It is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the Western Hemisphere.  The Spaniards built right above the Inca foundations and sometimes simply took over their palaces. 

    After lunch I usually nap, and sometimes in the afternoon we go for a hike in the village, looking for interesting photos. Later in the day there are usually new guests to meet and greet.  We provide an orientation to Ollantaytambo and the surrounding sights. In the evening we often sit and chat with Gemma, Cesar and Carlos; I usually make a bowl of popcorn and sometimes we have a drink of Cusqueña beer or Pisco - a Peruvian clear grape brandy, named after a city in Peru, that they use to make the famous "Pisco sours" with a sugar syrup, lime juice and beaten egg white. Deb read that we're supposed to include a dash of Angostura bitters, but we don't have any of those. Sometimes we just use fresh squeezed orange juice and make "Pisco screwdrivers".

    Today there is a family of four at the lodge: Mom, Dad, son and daughter about grade 8 age, who are eight months into a year-long round-the-world tour.  They keep a travel diary, like I do.  They're heading back to Cusco this afternoon - and others are flying in this morning - right in the middle of a city-wide strike. 

    Strikes are a very common phenomenon in Cusco, which some have called "strike city". All transport gets shut down, taxis can't get past the city limits, and the police swarm the airport - because 5000 teachers once decided to make that the locus of their strike and tried to burn it down. What the airport has to do with education, I don't know; it appears to be simply another selfish and short-sighted case of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Tourism is the major industry here. It supports public works, schools and teacher salaries as well as the rest of the city's economy.

    A while ago there was a strike over the price of drinking water. It was supposed to be a one day strike, and there were about a thousand people marching and yelling and beating drums, but it stretched over into the second day. However, on the second day there were only about a hundred official protesters - everybody else had turned it into an impromptu family holiday, and they were playing soccer on the streets where no cars or buses were allowed to pass. At noon the strike leaders assembled in the plaza for their heroic official photos for the press, and only then was the strike officially pronounced over. The populace has zero regard for the tourists who've spent an awful lot of money to come and enrich the people who depend on their foreign currency, and who will miss connecting flights as a result of the strike action.

    Two ladies arrived at the lodge. They'd planned to include a trip to Pisac on their way to the lodge from Cusco airport, but they got sick in Lima. The price including Pisac, which is a short distance in the opposite direction, is 180 soles; the price directly to the lodge is only 100 soles. The driver, a new one for the lodge, which usually has a list of five regular reliable drivers, was unsympathetic, claiming he could have had a different fare with someone else if he had known.  He wanted them to pay the full 180 soles even though he only drove them directly here from Cusco airport. He tried to ask for a compromise price of 150. In fact, you can get a car from the airport to Ollantay for 60 or 70 soles, so he was still asking for double the normal fare, and the lodge's usual drivers are already well paid for their trips at 100 soles. Ruth and Deborah were hemming and hawing with him over that, but fortunately Carlos arrived for his afternoon shift just in time, and he put a stop to the bull****. He simply handed the driver a 100 soles note and sent him on his way, with no further discussion. Deb says the driver was too shocked to argue...and maybe suddenly realized that if he expected to be on the lodge driver short list and get regular business from them, he'd better be reasonable with our customers.

    The drama wasn't over, though. The following morning, Juvenal, the driver who hadn't been able to get us through to Patacancha on our second try in his taller Mercedes van, even though other cars and combi's were going through, phoned to harrass Ruth about the lost trip to Pisac. He claimed the driver had been one of his drivers (he must be quite an operator!) and that he'd put 90 soles ($36) of gas into the vehicle and therefore only made 10 soles profit on that trip! Of course, the gas he used to come directly to Ollantay was about three gallons round trip, maximum 35 soles rather than 90, so the remaining gas is still in his tank for use for the next fare; and he could have picked up another fare to go back the other way as well. His argument is, to use a polite lawyerly term, "without merit" - and in the vernacular, he's "full of it".

    Carlos can instantly recount many problems he's had with taxi drivers being obstinate and overcharging, including one issue he had trying to get fair service for a disabled customer of the lodge the precious year. Taxis here, even in the capital city Lima, are not metered, they ignore the advertised and posted fares if they can get away with it, and with tourists they usually can. They have a terrible reputation even with the locals. In the "collectivos", 11 passenger vans that often carry up to 7 extra people standing in the aisles, you may not be as comfortable but you will at least be more likely to pay the standard, much lower fare.

    You just can't trust Peruvian kitchens. Deb and I went for pizza at a high end restaurant that's been recommended, but that's been closed for the month of February. Unfortunately, they must have used ingredients that they'd had in their frig for the whole month they were away.  We had terrible gas and other bowel problems overnight. There are no serious hygiene standards and no restaurant inspectors here that I'm aware of.  If there were, they could probably be paid off - in fact they would probably insist on it. The Sacred Valley is a little piece of paradise, which you can often tell more from my photographs than from my text, but there are various kinds of trouble in paradise. It's not all sunshine and roses.  If it were, I think we'd seriously consider having a winter property here.

    We went to Heart's Cafe, which had recently re-opened. The night before, we'd heard, someone had robbed them. We quizzed the waiter, and he said someone - probably from a nearby village - had broken in through an upper window, climbing along the roof, but there was a waiter still working on the ground floor who chased the robber out. The village is abuzz, because this sort of thing happens in Cusco or Lima, maybe even in Urubamba, but never in sleepy little Ollantaytambo. While at dinner, though, I appreciated our location at Apu Lodge, as the traffic lumbered up from the bridge to the plaza and from there to the road out of town. We're a long walk up a pedestrian-only walkway, and although we endured twelve hours of amplified birthday music and raucous P.A. speeches from a neighbour a few days ago, we are spared the noise of traffic and the music from the bars in the hostels for backpackers down at the plaza.

    The owner of Heart's Cafe lent me a thick Spanish language course called Repaso.

    Deb and I hiked to Rumira, a neighbouring village. Our main purpose was to view the "piedras cansadas", the "tired stones". There are three of them along the side of a road which, six hundred years ago, was the ramp up which these stones were dragged (on wood rollers, presumably) to become part of the unfinished Sun Temple. In the photo album you'll see how far they were dragged from their quarry seven kilometres away, across the valley and through a river.

    I collected a photo of "tree tomatoes" in the wild, and one of the Peruvian Torch in the lodge garden, one of 13 columnar cacti from which mescaline can be extracted. The most famous one is the San Pedro cactus.

    On the night I wrote this entry, we had almost a full house, and the volunteers were manning the lodge all by themselves. Carlos' wife 'Toinette is ill with a possible liver infection, and he has called in sick.  There is no paid staff who can be called in to replace him. Cesar and I made a trip to the plaza with the luggage tricycle and came back with five suitcases for three older ladies. We'll have another family of three for early breakfast. They're very nice, originally from Costa Rica and now live in Tampa, Florida, so they speak both languages fluently. After they've left for Machu Picchu, we'll have another seven to ten people for regular breakfast. However, Karina will be in tomorrow - Sunday - and she's a good, reliable kid.

    At around 9:30, a rounded pebble about the size of a very small potato ("but very much harder!" says Deb) came through a glass pane in our front door while our guests were seated at breakfast. Gemma was fit to be tied, because it just missed her while she was standing outside having a smoke. We suspected a couple of kids from one street over that we've seen playing with a slingshot, but we couldn't spot exactly who did it. They might have been shooting at birds, and possibly didn't even take aim at the lodge building. We don't think it's personal, unless someone has some sort of grudge against Louise, or some sort of jealousy. Gemma was rattled, though, and will probably begin smoking out back in the laundry area instead.  Of course, then a much bigger rock may tumble from the rock face. At which point, we'll just have to suggest that she quit smoking...

    Daz came in for a visit with his wife Chris this afternoon. They live and work in Urubamba.  Chris teaches English to Louise' staff two afternoons a week, but they were Helpx volunteers here at the lodge some time ago. Daz told me that a rock actually did fall from the vertical face behind the lodge while he was here, and when it hit another rock at ground level it shattered like a fragmentation grenade.  A large shard went through a back window. Fragmentation hadn't occurred to me - that increases the danger considerably. He said that another much larger rock fell into the neighbour's yard while he was here, as well.

    Little "nightcap" events: a guest fell in the "aqueduct" (a polite word for a ditch) down the side of the path coming home to the lodge, in the dark. She was attacked (she said) by a dog. We'd always found the dogs pretty calm in this town, quite capable of co-existing with humans, even in narrow alleys - they just accept each other and each goes about his business with no fuss. There was just once when one seemed eager to have an aggressive bark at Deborah; and I did read one review where a man claimed to have been bitten while wandering up "the wrong alley".

    Finally, while we were having supper in the kitchen, Louise's ex Arturo's door opened suddenly - his room has a door that opens onto the kitchen. A busty girl stepped into the kitchen, wearing some sort of nightie and corset, but she didn't get very far - Arturo's hand leapt out to grab her by the arm and yank her quickly back into his room!

Next diary entry: Knocking off the Conquistadors

Ollantaytambo doors, Araqhama, and second attempt to reach Patacancha

    Carlos got bad news from Louise. She had decided to let him go...gently, I guess, to give him time to get on his feet somewhere else. Ruth had her hours cut back and some accounting responsibility was removed; she was put on notice that her contract might not be renewed at the end of May. 

    Gregorio got a well deserved raise, and maybe Pancha did too. Louise asked us to spend an hour each morning tutoring them both in English. Pancha wasn't too interested in expanding her horizons that way, but Gregorio seemed keen in spite of being a little shy. We built a version of our Meet & Greet skit that is tailor-made to the lodge setting.  We had Gregorio greeting me as I came in the door, introducing me to the breakfast items and inviting me to sit down, asking me for my choices about fresh squeezed orange juice and whether I wanted my eggs fried or scrambled. We got Pancha started on duolingo.com, but it was slow going - she had no keyboarding skills yet.

    We tried to get through to Patacancha again, this time in a very nice, tall, new white Mercedes tourist coach, but we still couldn't make it - we got to a place with water somehow soaking the road even though it hadn't rained for two days, as if a spring might have opened up at that spot. There was a guy who'd been standing there with a shovel for ten days doing nothing; an hour's work would have filled the deepest muddy ruts with rocks which are right at hand, so that vehicles could get through and past the wet spot. We got stuck and had to push the van out. The driver was nervous, he didn't know how to rock the vehicle the way we learn to get out of snow in Canada, and he didn't want to gun it through even though other vehicles had made it, in case he got stuck again or damaged the vehicle, so we had to come home again. 

    I managed to take a few good photos of majestic scenery along that gravel road that are in the album for this diary entry.  They include the medieval looking Doorways of Ollantaytambo and some shots from Araqhama, a "suburb" of Ollantaytambo just across the river, south of the entrance to the Temple Hill complex. 

    Along the road to Patacancha we saw a donkey train, and homes destroyed by the recent flooding, with young volunteers from N. America and Europe helping the villagers to dig out, although I didn't get a chance to photograph those.

    The following comments are from Ian, one of the Kiya Survivors managers who lived and worked here:

    "The Peruvian Andes are home to some of the South America’s largest glaciers, sitting majestically on the high mountain peaks the Incas once worshipped.  Indigenous Andean peoples still pay homage to them. Unfortunately, climate change has taken a toll. Elder community members point to black rocky peaks and speak with nostalgia of when they were a brilliant white. Younger men and women simply shrug their shoulders and signal how quickly the ice of their beloved Apus has quietly receded.

    "In recent years however, the disappearance of the Peruvian glaciers has not been so quiet. The increasing pace of melting ice in the Peruvian Andes is believed to be impacting the rain cycles in the region, which can have potentially destructive consequences for the many communities which depend on agriculture for survival. Two weeks ago, as is unfortunately becoming more and more common here in the region of Cusco, the Patacancha and Vilcanota rivers flooded nearby communities due to unusually heavy rainfall. Over one hundred families lost their houses and an untold amount of farmland was destroyed along with its yet-to-be harvested crops.

    "In the communities of Patacancha and Qhelqanqa, where the Alma Foundation has on-going projects, the impact of the flooding has gone without measurement and relatively unreported by the press and local authorities due to their distance and isolation from larger and lower altitude communities. The road to Patacancha, which eventually leads to Qhelqanqa, was washed away in three separate locations during the flood, cutting off access to the communities except for on foot. Fortunately, both communities suffered little damage to their houses - but unfortunately much of their very important potato crop was lost.

    "In Patacancha, a large mudslide was stopped from destroying part of the school and the trout farm thanks to a wall built last year by the Municipality of Ollantaytambo through the Alma project. There was some loss of baby trout due to flooding of the farm’s pools, but overall the project will be able to continue as planned.

    "In Qhelqanqa, the school did suffer some minor flooding, and the extent of the damage has yet to be investigated by municipal engineers. The Alma greenhouse was not affected by the flood.

    "The impact of the loss of the potato crop is yet to be seen. In both Patacancha and Qhelqanqa, potato is planted mainly for consumption purposes. Nevertheless, there is good news. Patacancha and Qhelqanqa both still practice traditional communal ownership of land. Therefore, though the communities lost all of their farmland near the river and other areas due to flooding and mud slides, much of the potato crop planted in higher altitudes along the mountain sides can be salvaged. Thanks to traditional communal ownership, the surviving harvest will be divided amongst the entire community to ensure that no one will go hungry."

Next diary entry: Life at the Lodge

Peak Experience...Machu Picchu

    We left before dawn and rode the train to Machu Picchu Pueblo, which is the new-and-improved name for Aguas Calientes. From there you take the bus up a single lane gravel switchback road called, almost as a joke, the Hiram Bingham Highway (Hiram Bingham was the "discoverer" of Machu Picchu, one hundred years ago.) With the drivers riding their brakes and clutch and giving their gearboxes a work-out all the way up and back down, the coaches are an accident waiting to happen. They should have installed a cable car system years ago like the Teleferico or any decent ski resort.  It was proposed a long time ago, but they can't come to agreement.

    It was cloudy when we arrived. I was going to be one of the first 400 daily visitors who are permitted to climb Huayna Picchu, at the north end of the high alpine saddle that Machu Picchu is built on, but it was a little daunting - it takes anywhere from 40 to 90 minutes depending on how busy the path is (you have to wait for the person in front of you) and how fit you are - and I was concerned about getting all the way up and not able to get my shot of the ruins through the cloud. Deb wouldn't have gone on that climb with me anyway, and I was secretly relieved at not having to call my own bluff, so we hiked to the Inca drawbridge instead, which not many visitors do (the guides won't take you there), and took spectacular photos.

    I normally take 50 or 60 photos before editing them into a slideshow; on rare occasion, over a hundred. This time I took 244, and that was just in the morning, until heavy rain started around 1 p.m. Then I spent two days editing them and selecting which ones to put into a slideshow that'll be meaningful to someone who hasn't been to the site or absorbed enough Incan history to appreciate what they're looking at. There are three photo albums: Getting to Machu Picchu, The Royal Retreat of Machu Picchu, and the third one is about the Inca drawbridge, the llamas of Machu Picchu, and a few final amusements.

    We met some lodge guests at the site, Jeff and Rita, a young Chinese couple from Shanghai. Jeff's a young lawyer with U.S. citizenship who's lived in New York since he was six. He works for a law firm based in Miami which has a Shanghai office that does arbitration work, mostly in Hong Kong. Rita is Shanghai Chinese, works in Marketing for the same company, and speaks excellent English and even better Spanish - she got a degree in Spanish at university. They were in Lima for a conference, trying to develop relationships with Peruvian law firms, and decided to take the opportunity to see Machu Picchu. We spent the afternoon together and then had dinner and walked home together.  They are a lovely couple, and we now have a contact in Shanghai. We invited them to visit us in Toronto if they ever get the chance.

    After all that hiking and an eighteen hour day, we slept heavily back at the lodge, but I woke up at 6:20 on Friday morning, worried about the guests who would need breakfast and whether the staff would be late. I showered and walked out into the kitchen just after seven, and miracle of miracles, both Ruth and Gregorio were there and already working! I helped with breakfast and with guest questions, and Deb spent the morning going through reservations with Ruth, helping her compose replies in English. In the afternoon she did laundry and then spent many more hours checking reservation details and emails on the computer.  She found quite a few oversights that she followed up on with further emails to prevent future catastrophes.  She stayed pretty busy all day. Ruth left at 1 p.m. declaring that she has an English exam in the afternoon. 

    I met new guests who arrived early after having spent two days at Machu Picchu. They were going to spend the day sightseeing in Ollantaytambo, and sleep here at the lodge for one night. I went over the map with them describing what they could see and do, sent them on their way with a sense of confidence and direction, and then I put my brochure rack back together. Gregorio had followed up my varnishing job with two more coats to darken it, and it looks pretty good. Still, after all that, at nine in the evening Carlos asked Deb and I to set up the self-serve early breakfast, which is actually his job before he leaves for the day. Gemma and Cesar were a bit steamed that he asked us to do it, because they have been doing that for him for two months now and they know he should be doing it.

    Gemma is pissed off at Kim. We met Kim at Puka Rumi last night when we were there for dinner - she was already famous to us when we first arrived, for coming in drunk and leaving all her taps on when she discovered that there was no water for her shower.  When the water came on the following day her shower emptied the tank again - the tank that we had laboriously hand-filled for most of a day with rainwater and jerry cans brought over from Pancha's house - before we realized what had happened. Kim was buying dinner for a male friend - not a regular; the lodge staff say she doesn't have a regular guy and they haven't seen this one before - and said she planned to stay at the lodge for the next two nights. "I'm embarrassed to show my face there after the water incident," she said...but she didn't seem very embarrassed.

    She is a friend of Louise's, runs some sort of charity foundation, she says, and also teaches yoga and works in the reception of a hotel in Cusco now, apparently. She stays at the lodge for free sometimes when the lodge isn't full, but Gemma finds her insincere and annoying. In the wee hours, Kim and her male friend began enjoying a banging session that included loud screams from Kim - I'm reminded of a scene from "Porky's", I think it was, where a girl is likened to a collie dog because of the howls she emits in the throes of passion. Gemma was woken up, and apart from being disgusted, she became concerned about the other guests on her floor. After enduring the noise for a few moments, she put on her orange construction boots and stomped loudly on the floor above Kim's ceiling!

    Kim didn't mention anything the next day, and didn't apologise. She breezed into the kitchen with her male friend, well after breakfast had been served and cleared away. She didn't deign to introduce him to the rest of us, but he has a gigolo musician look to him, I've gotta say, and he didn't step forward with his hand out to introduce himself, either. 

"I think it's time for breakfast," Kim said, and they proceeded to help themselves to eggs and other breakfast items, creating new dishes which they left for someone else to wash.  There was steam coming from Gemma's ears, and she and Cesar left the kitchen and sat in the dining room so they didn't have to be in the same room with her. "She can buy her boyfriend dinner at the best restaurant in Ollantay," Gemma said, "but she can't pay anything for bringing her friend here and both of them eating Louise' food!" The rest of the staff are awkward around Kim and laugh at her behind her back; even Deb can't look her in the eye, now.

    Deb was trying to compose email responses to reservation inquiries on a Spanish keyboard. "I can't find the colon," she fretted. "Hmm...well, there's only one solution," I had to suggest. "You'll have to perform a colonoscopy."

Next entry: Village details, and second attempt to visit Patacancha

Crazy lodge details; sweat lodge ceremony; Deb's attempt to reach Patacancha

    These are photos of the diversion Deb experienced trying to get to Patacancha, to the weaver's village and to Alan's Alma Foundation trout farm.

    On Saturday I got up at six to put on the coffee and squeeze fresh orange juice.  I got two guests breakfasted and off on their early train to Machu Picchu, then cleared their tables and began the regular breakfast for Dick, Christine and Cecilia. 

    Carlos slept over in the lodge last night, and came into the lobby early to observe Ruth arriving at 7:40 (early, for her!), while Christine was already downstairs waiting for her breakfast; Gregorio, who usually does the eggs for the guests, arrived a few minutes later, so I did the egg orders too. Carlos isn't pleased, he's pacing and trying to figure out what he can do about it. The soup ought to be hitting the fan right about now, but no one has any actual "managerial authority", so I'm guessing that this sort of behaviour has been going on for so long that no-one will really be able to do anything about it until Louise shows up...if then. One positive thing about Carlos, though: he appreciates an effort to go the extra mile, and makes a point of thanking you.

    Pancha was actually a half-hour early, however. And Christine had been up quite early, running around with her binoculars spotting birds. I was reminded of how badly the lodge needs a comprehensive Audubon Peruvian bird book, and stakes beside the flowers in the garden to identify them to older guests who are delighted by that sort of thing. Keeping an extra pair of birding binoculars would also be smart - many of the older, more well-off, often retired guests arrive knowing that Peru is second only to Colombia in having more species of birds - over 1800 species - and more colourful birds, than any other country in the world.  They really want to see those birds when they've travelled so far to see them and are escaping winter at home. Having everything on hand that they need to spot and identify some of those birds right here at the lodge would keep some of them for an extra night, perhaps as much as an astronomy tour would, and would result in word of mouth advertising and recommendations for the lodge.

    After doing a four hour breakfast shift, I read for the rest of the morning, napped after lunch, and then hiked around the village looking for fresh corners of interest for guests, in addition to walking down to the market to help Gemma and Cesar carry the shopping - which Ruth and Pancha should have done during their morning shift, having had only one room to clean today, but they didn't. I welcomed our five guests back from Machu Picchu and Ollantaytambo archaelogical site, served them beer.  I've sold ten beer in three days; sometimes all you have to do is offer, i.e. plant the thought in their heads.  I spent a couple of hours giving them a chance to express their excitement to someone, show the photos they took, and discuss Incan history and architecture. A pleasant day, for them and for me.

    Sunday morning was a little crazy.  Dick, Christine and Cecilia went to mass promptly at 7 a.m. - a time which was, as all times Peruvian, only a suggestion, even for the priest. While we were waiting for them to return for breakfast, an older blonde lady from Texas breezed into the lodge at 8:10 a.m. asking for Arturo, Louise's ex who still lives in a room off the kitchen. He'd had a busy night - we'd heard a girlfriend giggling loudly from behind the door to his room .  He wasn't ready to get out of bed, even to answer our knock. The lady turned out to be a photographer who'd had an 8 a.m. appointment with him, and she was pissed. "They tell us to wait 15 minutes for a Ph.D.,", she said, "and these guys certainly aren't Ph.D.'s!" Then she turned on her heel and stormed back out of the lodge. Still, she showed up later that evening to participate in his sweat lodge ceremony, so I guess she wasn't that furious after all; or he made a charming apology, which seems equally likely.

    Dick, Christine and Cecilia made it back from mass by 8:40 for breakfast, almost an hour later than they'd expected.  We served up a good breakfast.  Poor Ronny grabbed their luggage and waited for them in the plaza. He had a 9 a.m. appointment to drive them to Cusco, and if he parks in the plaza for more than 15 minutes he'll get ticketed.

    Right after breakfast, Cecilia said her goodbyes and raced to the plaza to say goodbye to other friends without checking to see if her account was cleared. Dick and Christine stepped forward to pay for their final charges according to the accounts book, which Ruth had written up in a very confusing fashion.  She was away, and hadn't left any notes to help with final check-out.  Gemma thought Cecilia had run away without paying for her final night. Dick volunteered to pay for Cecilia, but Cecilia called from the taxi later to say that she had paid in full, and had also paid half of the room for Dick and Christine on their first night. So it looks as if they've overpaid; but there is another wrinkle: Cecilia had asked for fresh towels on her second and third night, and hadn't turned in the used ones.  When Karina (the girl who only comes in on Sundays) went into her room right after breakfast to collect the linen, all five towels were gone! Who packs wet hotel towels in their luggage? So bizarre...

    We helped with breakfast, serving and hosting, and then tried to help Gemma sort out the Strasser accounts by feeding her what we knew of the charges that should have been applied and discussing what a proper accounting system would look like.

    The good news (for us, not for Louise) is that we had no guests for two nights. Deb went to Patacancha to take photos of the weaving, and Alan Harman has invited us to have a look at the trout farm there which is one of his Alma Foundation's projects.  It had been threatened by the recent flooding. There was only room for one more in the car, so I volunteered to stay home and ask Deb to photograph the trout farm, since she has a great interest in the weaving.

    As it turned out, they couldn't get through to Patacancha by car.  

    Julia of the Kiya Survivors Rainbow Centre brought us her books and receipts to audit, and a week later we went on a field trip to view another part of their operation. We got our Machu Picchu train tickets. An odd wrinkle: you can reserve online for Machu Picchu entry tickets on a Sunday, but then you have six hours to show up at the bank (and there's no branch in Ollantaytambo) to pay for them, or you lose them - but the banks are not open on Sunday! You can't simply pay online and print out your tickets. So we had to reserve again on Monday in order to give Carlos the number he needs to stop at the Banco Nacional in Urubamba on his way to work tomorrow, in order to have the tickets in our hot little hands well before Thursday. What a crazy system.

    We put some dining room tables and chairs out on the lawn and had beef ribs cooked in the "horno", the big pizza oven looking thing in the reception area.  We could hardly chew them - what is it with the shoe leather that passes for beef in S. America?  For side dishes we had rice, salad, guacamole, choclo (very large kernel, starchy corn on the cob), and homemade lemonade. And Cusquena blond beer, which is only costing me $1 a bottle at the lodge's wholesale price. We decided to chip in on a bottle of rum and lemon-lime pop for the evening, and we spent more time dealing with messed up accounts.  I did online research into simple accounting systems that might be suitable for small B&B's, while Deb finished the laundry that Karina had started.

    As we were discussing accounting and I was just wondering whether our bandwidth would allow me to Skype Mom, Arturo burst in completely out of the blue and invited us to join his sweat lodge ceremony.  It seems that he didn't have enough paying customers to create a large enough circle, and wanted the event to look as properly attended as possible. No mescaline or peyote involved, much to Gemma's disappointment and Deborah's relief, but I did endure a traditional N. American campfire/sauna, and got a good sweat on for two hours without even having to exercise. 

    The only difference between this expereince and a cedar sauna in Toronto was the guy banging a drum in pitch darkness over your head, singing traditional songs and chants, and invoking mother earth and the ancestors. None of it seemed terribly Peruvian, let alone Incan, except that the prayers were in Spanish and the singing was Quechuan (which is a vocabulary well-rounded out with Spanish words as well). Still, there's lots of New Age Tibetan and Ayurvedic stuff happening here, so why not a N. American "spiritual" sweat lodge ceremony?

    Every so often the flap would open and glowing red rocks from the fire would slide in on a shovel and be added to the pit in the centre. Water was periodically tossed onto the rocks, and sometimes thrown around at the circle of guests - imagine cold water hitting your chest in pitch black, unannounced.  It was refreshing, but still a shock, even the second and third time. The hardest part was sitting cross-legged on leafy sticks for two hours, hunched over so that my back and head would fit the contours of the sapling and blanket construction. Arturo encouraged us to sing, but Deb could only think of campfire songs in English - My Grandfather's Clock, or On Ilkley Moor Bar T'at - which would have fallen as flat as my ability to participate in Spanish ones; a few people did finally engage in some tepid response singing after more than two hours had passed and I had already decided I'd had enough and removed myself to enjoy the remains of the fire outside, which was much more pleasant.

    Sitting in a pitch black circular tent with total strangers, some English, some Spanish, makes it a little hard to open up.  It's not a very social setting, I'm afraid, in spite of Arturo's exhorting that this was to be an experience of brotherhood and sisterhood and opening your heart and all that. European tourists in Canada are absolutely thrilled with the traditional campfire experience, including weiners, "s'mores", hot chocolate and other beverages, ghost stories, jokes and harmony singing of traditional campfire songs; somehow the sweat lodge experience doesn't hold up in comparison. Maybe with "medicinal enhancement", it might. 

    As I've mentioned before, I'd love to run a small Rocky Mountain tourist lodge with traditional campfires and music, lendable instruments on the walls, and a menu of the most amusingly traditional menu items: Peter's River Chili, hash, pancakes, baked beans with ham in molasses, cook-your-own hot dogs on a stick over the fire, and so many more. With mountain hikes and trail rides, horseshoes and other daytime activities that European visitors never get to experience, it would be quite a happy place.

    On Monday we had light rain, but I began the day by washing a kitchen full of dishes, Deb did the fresh bread run, and when the others emerged we had breakfast. Deb left in the car for Patacancha with instructions to take photos of the trout farm and chat with anyone who happened to be around. They were to leave at 8, so we got up early to be ready, but Ruth, as usual, didn't arrive until 8 (and brought Samir), and they actually didn't get out the door until 9. That's 8, Peruvian time.  Mark Adams, the author of Turn Right At Machu Picchu, has a Peruvian wife and in-laws. He tells several amusing stories that illustrate their sense of punctuality, including a Peruvian friend who is an executive at a major corporation and was to be married at 4 p.m. in Lima. He told his own mother the ceremony would happen at noon...she came puffing into the church, red-faced, at ten to four - and was on time for the ceremony!

    Gregorio also didn't come in until 8, but apparently he has nothing to do today - no guest breakfasts, and it's raining, so it is not a day for a gardener or for varnishing (although the dining room floor certainly did need refinishing). He and I held down the fort alone. He surfed the net all morning, doing Facebook and whatever other activities interest him while I write my diary.  He's my back-up in case I can't handle a phone enquiry in rapid-fire Spanish. When the rain stops, I hoped to finally varnish my new brochure rack, which Gregorio had said he'd do for me on Friday while he had the varnish brush in his hand doing other woodwork around the lodge exterior, but he didn't.  When we asked him about doing it a few days later he said he'd be too busy.  "Busy" is defined as sitting in front of the computer, snacking and chatting with a friend who has dropped in to visit. I generally admire Gregorio's work ethic, but not that morning; I came travelling with one backpack, and that didn't include a set of clothing I can get droplets of varnish on. 

    They told me Pancha wouldn't come in at all, but she jogged in at exactly 10 (shift starts at 9!) and immediately left again, to do some fast shopping.  I had done a lot of her work already, sweeping and washing up. By 10:35 she was off again, at a run, to a meeting of some sort at the municipality offices. I read and studied Spanish most of the day, and manned the reception, and of course any English enquiries, until Carlos returned at 2.  Carlos was usually punctual.

    Deb was back by noon. They couldn't get through to Patacancha - too much mud on the road for driving or even walking. She brought me some photos which I added to the slideshow. I varnished my own brochure rack.  After we took him to lunch and walked back, Gregorio disappeared for the rest of the day even though the sun had come out! He stayed only long enough to provide me with some varnish but no thinner to wipe the darn stuff off my fingers when I was done. Gemma suggests that he was depressed and sometimes just goes off somewhere and sits. His mother died this past December.

    Carlos asked me to try to find some Cusco hotels and tour agents for him to follow up on and make connections with, but I can't figure out what he's doing with his own paid time today.  As far as I know, he only had one email to answer, and then had to review the reservations books since December, at Louise' request. This marketing research is something he ought to have been doing for himself, quite frankly.  He was the only one who really knew what he was looking for, and which businesses he'd already contacted. He left at 7 p.m. because "there are no guests in the lodge", but he expected us to cover the final two hours of his shift that he was getting paid for, which was only a seven hour shift to begin with, as well as doing his marketing research for him. The staff were all left with strict instructions not to take advantage of the presence of Helpx volunteers. I had already done more than my requisite hours cleaning, varnishing and minding the shop until he got back.  I considered that maybe I'd do some research for him as part of the next day's shift assignment. Maybe.

    Gemma and Cesar, used to Spanish wages, were offered jobs in a local bakery by a friend they'd made since they got here...at one Euro an hour. That's about $1.30/hr. That's not even the average minimum wage in Peru, and they can sell in fluent Spanish and English, as well as cook and bake, and keep cash and accounts professionally, without mistakes. For shame...that's the Italian baker I mentioned in a previous diary entry, with several ventures on the go, who charges $2.50 a slice for pan borracho. He'd hoped to take advantage of a young travelling couple, knowing that they were running out of cash. They refused, of course. By mid-March they'd be off to the coast of Ecuador to work two hours a day farm-sitting for a couple of weeks, and then visit Colombia before heading home to Spain and hopefully a job in France that pays enough for them to save toward their next trip - possibly the Philippines, next winter. 

    On Tuesday Ruth arrived at 8 a.m., only an hour late. The power went out at 9:30 and was out until after four. I took my brochure rack apart and added little wood strips at the back of each shelf so that no-one would push the bottoms of the business cards and brochures and make them fall down behind the shelf. The staff were suddenly in high gear: Louise would return on Friday, so they were suddenly cleaning the kitchen, the windows in the reception, and cleaning out the frig. After I washed Pancha's load of dishes for her - and she said "thank you"! - we spent the afternoon moving furniture around in the reception, trying to dream up a better arrangement.  After hours of discussion we couldn't find anything better than we'd had already, except that I'd moved my new brochure rack to the opposite wall. Hmmph.  What a waste of time.

    On Wednesday Gemma talked a local artist into letting us hang her paintings on the lodge walls, with tags that show the name and price. One has been sold. It's a great way to decorate a B&B or a lodge. Last night we walked down and selected a new one that will grace a space we've created on the wall. It looks great - a cheerful, colourful painting of Quechua women in the flower market. I think I'll put a photo of it in my slideshow. Unfortunately, it looks so great that I think it'll sell quickly. Good for the artist, not so much for the lodge.

    Ruth (in at 8, again) had several confusing emails from English speaking clients, including one who was arriving at the Cusco airport in an hour. The driver Ronny was already at the airport waiting for him, and learned he had to wait another hour. Deb and I figured out the email, looked at the AA site to find the correct arrival time, and helped Ruth compose email replies in English that make sense.  Her English is about as good as my Spanish, woefully short of begin able to correspond, although I use Google Translate as a starting point for my attempts. I was reminded of how critical English speaking Helpx volunteers are to the lodge, where precise communication of travel details can make or break a trip.  In spite of the template email replies they have in folders on the computer, there is always some new wrinkle that just isn't covered by a cookie-cutter response.  Even Carlos' templates are sometimes poorly constructed in writing, although his spoken English is fairly good. Deb spent an hour constructing a new template response for Ruth, related to a hurried purchase of tickets to Machu Picchu, for which they need to receive money in advance from the client. The whole exercise is an impromptu English lesson as well, as Ruth typed out and learned to spell all the words Deb dictated to her.

    Ruth left even before lunch, ostensibly to pay an electric bill (how long could that take?) in Urubamba. Work continued on my brochure rack, which had its third coat of varnish. We expected Julia from Kiya Survivors at 11 a.m. and she finally showed up at 1 p.m. just as lunch was being served, so after a quick bite, we spent a couple of hours verifying receipts and checking balances. She turned out to be a bright, highly organized young graduate from Vancouver who grew up in Edmonton, so it wasn't the same as the accounting we reviewed in Malingua Pamba, but we still managed to find a half-dozen discrepancies which she went away to correct. She intended to take us to one of her projects next week, and give us the corrected copy to deliver to Alan Harman upon our return to Toronto.

    For the rest of the day we met the incoming guests and explained everything we'd learned that would be helpful to them about booking Machu Picchu, and other local attractions they can choose from. One group of three was there for five days...doin' it right!

    My morning was brightened by discovering and reading the reference that Pam Gilbert left for us on the Helpx site:

    "Steve and Deborah are an awesome duo! We have never had such an incredible pair and SO impactful. They transcribed and translated Water Board meeting notes for our Engineers Without Borders-Denver Chapter and Rotarian Project(s); inaugurated duo lingo.com; provided photo documentation of things needing attention which we were able to turn to our advantage; researched and reported on all of my requests; and positively impacted and improved our educational goals. They are worth their weight in gold! Sincerely, pam CEO/Founder".

Cool, eh?

Next entry: Machu Picchu, a peak experience

Trivial lodge and staff details; some weirdness; and a trip to Urubamba

    We went to the Urubamba market. This diary entry is long, and includes thoughts and events of an entire week.

    Monday was a quiet day. We cleaned up after the early morning self-serve breakfast, and had our own breakfast. After sweeping up a bit, we went for a walk looking for lumber stores. Gregorio had said there were two, but no-one else in town could point them out.  We heard about two other ones, including a carpenter who is supposed to be somewhere in our street, but neither of those seemed to exist either. I was keen to create a second rack for the extra brochures and business cards, one that I could order into more logical and useful categories, but I wasn't keen to try to rip, plane and sand a board into strips in order to make it, especially with Gregorio's hand tools, a low workbench and no clamps. Carlos wanted to send me to Urubamba, where we might find the wood we're looking for. 

    We also talked about a hot water systems expert to invite to the lodge, and about a solar preheater which would make use of the extra third "emergency" tank, a thermostat to keep guests from scalding themselves while blinded by soap and unable to find the cold water tap, and a regulator to distribute the hot water equally throughout the building so one can choose to have a low-flow shower without it going cold on you (which would also save a lot of electricity for the pump, and propane). We also talked about a faster internet solution than the small router and Claro rocket stick that brings in their internet signal.

    Since we couldn't find the pre-cut lumber - or any lumber store, for that matter - in Ollantaytambo, we settled for expensive coffee and slices of "pan borracho" - the baker uses his old chocolate bread, soaks it in wine and layers it in chocolate pudding. It's a cheap invention, he saves the unsold product and turns it into something he sells for much more; at $2.50 a slice (fresh hot buns in the morning are only 5 for a sol, or 8 cents each), it didn't jibe well with my Scottish nature, but it was a treat, and we treated Gemma as well.

    I've tried two kinds of local "beer" and wine, one made from a mix of strawberries and corn and the other from "Inca berry", which is like a sweet dark blueberry with tiny seeds. The first wasn't very good, the second way too sweet, and neither of them very alcoholic. The third kind, "chicha", is made from yellow corn.  It is familiar to those of us who grew up in Africa where they make and drink maize beer everywhere. However, I can see a business opportunity for a great tourist wine called "Inca Berry Wine". There's a shed at the foot of the garden here that could be a winery. A spare room in the lodge could be organized as a nice gift shop, selling local crafts, "Inca Berry Wine" and "Inca Berry Jam" - the name alone is an instant seller.

    The lodge could be making and selling their own soaps, as well - or look into providing liquid soap dispensers. They cut down used bars and put them back in the rooms, and are very sparing with what they provide; it looks tacky. Better to melt down the used bars if you're going to reuse them, and put them into an Apu Lodge mold, which looks much classier, and you can box and sell extra bars in your gift shop as souvenirs with various other themes. Hummingbird feeders on the back wall for guests to pre-focus their cameras on could lead to a hummingbird motif on some of the soaps as well.

    I never run out of ideas...

    On Monday evening we had a "pisco sour" workshop (Cesar went out and brought back his own bottle of Pisco to use for that), learning to make them, and then sample them...several glasses each, mostly with lime and egg white, but we experimented with the slightly sour breakfast oranges as well.  Gemma didn't emerge from her room until 1:15 on Tuesday. It was raining on and off. Deb did a laundry, and then we just chilled and read books, expecting some guests to arrive at 4 p.m.

    We spent a couple of afternoon hours creating special posters in English and Spanish (I felt very useful, all of a sudden, since I'm good at poster ad copy) to try drawing customers from the train station and various locations in the plaza; Carlos will run them past Louise by email before we post them as a ten day trial.

    Our guests arrived, a Peruvian family of four. The husband was pleased to practise his English with us. They wanted a pizza. The one place that delivers is closed on Tuesdays; the next was "too busy" to make one (during low season?); the third is "moving". Finally Carlos finds one who agrees to make the pizza and even to deliver it; it finally arrives, after a few additional phone calls, 45 minutes late - and there's no "30 minutes or it's free" guarantee here!

    Carlos also discovered that the driver who is supposed to pick up a difficult booking tomorrow, a slightly paranoid guest who asked for confirmation details several times, did not receive a text message from Ruth, which is the normal procedure, to confirm her arrival time and flight number. He's thanking his lucky stars that he listened to his "feeling" and made the phone call to the driver. Unfortunately with the older cell phones that they use, there's no facility to send a cc to the lodge to confirm that notice was given. Carlos describes previous occasions where he has wanted to hire excellent drivers only to discover, sometimes at a distressing moment, that they don't actually know how to receive and send text messages on their cell phones, and perhaps also don't know how to read them.

    On Wednesday, the headlines read, "Helpx Saves The Day!" Deb shook me awake at 7:15 a.m. with the words, "Wake up, the family is coming down for breakfast, their train ticket is for 8:20, not 8:45, and there are no staff in the building!" Cesar was already up, he'd heard them moving around, so we dived in and got the show on the road. Oddly, Gregorio wasn't here either. He hadn't squeezed the oranges the night before as he usually does before he leaves for the day, so we did that.  We cut up fruit, set the table, and served everything. The family left happily at 8 a.m. just as Ruth breezed through the door saying, "Oh, I don't know what happened! My alarm clock didn't go off. I woke up at 7 a.m. wondering what was going on!" She wasn't here until 8 a.m. yesterday as well, but of course there weren't any guests for breakfast then. On other days she has come in as late as 9 a.m., which is the time Pancha is supposed to arrive. And of course, Ruth raced out by 12:30 for her English class. Mind you, Pancha lives closer; perhaps she should be paid to arrive early enough to be the breakfast lady, instead.

    I cleared the table and we had our own breakfast; then Cesar worked hard after breakfast, sweeping the dining room and washing dishes while Ruth simply checked the email.  Gemma is ill with a cold. I have to find a way to tell Pancha that she needs to mop more than the small area in front of the kitchen sink, or at least find me a mop; there are dried coffee drops on the tile leading into the kitchen that have been there for a week.

    After getting up to create breakfast on our own with Cesar, Deb and I went to Urubamba with Gregorio to change money, and to buy various things for the lodge, including wood strips for the new brochure rack. We got back at noon, and Deb did the midday sink full of dishes with Gemma. Then they spent an hour trying to balance the three cashbox account books. That should be enough hours for today, but "Cecilia" is coming with her "padrino", and the staff are all a little anxious about her, including Gemma.  The lady was rude and dismissive to Gemma on the phone, so they decided that Steve, the patient charmer, should have the first crack at making her happy. She was booked for three nights...I hope it won't be too difficult to keep her mollified.

    Louise has put the kibosh on Carlos' proposal to advertise to travellers arriving on the train; Ruth can barely restrain her delight - she loves to see Carlos shot down, partly because he's onto her pilfering game and has locked horns with her over it before.  There's some prejudice involved too, Carlos claims; he's a "white" Spaniard, and from Bolivia, while all the rest of the staff are indigenous and local. I wasn't sure Louise would go along with it, given what the other staff have told me about her philosophical approach to marketing the lodge; the "half-price" seemed to throw her right away, even though the whole lodge has been completely empty most nights of the past week. She asked him to create a more detailed corporate marketing analysis and proposal, way beyond what is really necessary for a simple one week trial at a little B&B; I guess she is just stalling, making him spin his wheels. Carlos is really keen to make something happen, to develop new marketing ideas, and to create revenue instead of operating at a loss during low season.

    I didn't see his email to her, but Louise did not comprehend the "one week trial" nature of his proposal, and worried that the posters might stay up for weeks or months despite the fact that we dated the posters and intended to take them down on March 2nd.  We'd even sent her attachment copies of the posters. Carlos has drummed up business before this way, as a guide and a tour agency employee in La Paz, but Ruth and Gemma explain that Louise will think that it will somehow cheapen the reputation of the lodge to lower the prices. I can understand that she's reluctant to attract backpackers, although they also spread word of mouth to parents and more well-to-do clients; but she doesn't even have a sliding scale for the agencies for high, low and shoulder seasons, with a break-even approach during low season and an enhanced commission for the tour agency operators.

    This should all be worked out and adjusted as required on the website, and Carlos should have produced photo-booklets for agency staff to flip through, for agency personnel to sell the lodge from their end, and should have visited the Cusco ones in person, at least. Certainly in all the years we've travelled and in the hotels I've worked in, that has been a "best practices" marketing approach, but it hasn't been adopted at this B&B. Quite apart from wanting to cover costs on at least a break-even basis, the more annual revenue she can show on the books, the more she can ask for the lodge when she sells it, of course. And the more revenue she can accrue in low season, the more improvements she can make to the hot water system and other elements of the lodge, to increase its value to customers and to prospective buyers. Gemma says "high season" will run from March to December, mind you; but I'm sure that includes shoulder seasons on both sides as well. They can't have zero occupancy for three months and 100% for nine months, that wouldn't make sense.

    Gemma was too ill - and in the middle of a scrap with Cesar - to review Ruth's purchases yesterday. Deb isn't willing, doesn't want to get involved in that even with Gemma's help. She says it simply isn't the role of a volunteer to police the paid staff, and she's right, of course. 

    Gemma and Cesar suddenly realized that Carlos brought his family to eat at the lodge while we were away at the Peach Festival, and took 20 soles from the cashbox to pay for the groceries for the meal, pretending it was to feed the staff and Helpx volunteers; there was some left over for our supper, but really the money covered the meal of five family members at lunch. They tell us that Louise isn't happy with Carlos because he spends his time here sending emails and trying to create business on the side, including his astronomy tours, when he should be focused on the more mundane nuts-and-bolts of lodge business. He wants to make things happen, and he is ambitious to have a larger role for himself, and more creative autonomy. Perhaps she considers some of his ideas hare-brained. He has a need, as a young guy with family history, and now a young father, to carve out a larger success for himself. 

    Mind you, there's also the suggestion from Gemma that Louise has asked Carlos to do certain things that he hasn't done for her, so I'm sure I don't know the whole story. Gemma likes him, but she describes silly, absent-minded mistakes that he's made that she and Cesar have caught and corrected. I've seen that he leaves early, leaving them in charge of reception...not that there are any guests to be received on those days when he does it, mind you, but it seems wrong for paid staff to leave their shifts early and leave the lodge in the hands of volunteers.

    It is certainly an even more convoluted situation than I'd first been able to appreciate. Anyway, I have my wood strip offcuts now, they only cost $2.50 for enough wood to make a second brochure rack, so I'll start on that tomorrow.

    There is an older gentleman and his Spanish companion interviewing Arturo at length in the lobby for about an hour now about whether he is a true spiritual leader and a fully realized being that the older gentleman could trust to explore the spiritual energy and experience that he is searching for.  The older gentleman wants to share his own spiritual awareness with Arturo in a two-way exchange, and doesn't believe that such things should have a dollar figure attached.  Arturo is trying to figure out how to get around that odd objection! He's explaining that there are lots of wise people in the "Sacred Valley" who've been through the experience of unconditional love that the gentleman seeks to achieve. The gentleman has had two ecstatic experiences in his life already, which he identifies as the experience of samadhi, and wants to know what the catalyst or trigger is, and how to achieve it at will instead of by accident - he wants to live in a state of perpetual bliss, I guess. 

    Arturo explains that he's a "medicine man", and I think he's getting around to volunteering mescaline as his trigger or tool to achieve samadhi. Ah yes, now they're discussing peyote and the San Pedro cactus...and the hallucinogenic experience, about which the old man says, having tried LSD in his youth, "that's not what I'm looking for - I'm looking for an authentic opening of my heart".  I'm left wondering why people are always so willing to believe in the Emperor's new clothes. And why he's asking a peyote pusher in the Andes for samadhi instead of a guru in India. The old guy finally decides that Arturo is not the genuine article, or at least not quite what he is looking for, and leaves.

    Cecilia finally arrived, with her friends from the U.S., a couple named Dick and Christine Stratton. Nice people - Christine and I watched and talked about hummingbirds, talked about the living museum in Arizona that we'd both been to, and about the Hooded Siskin that she could see with her binoculars up the rock face behind the lodge.

    On Thursday, for the second day in a row, Helpx Saved The Day! But this time it was only me and Gregorio who created breakfast for Cecilia and the Strattons. Deb was ill, and Ruth, true to form, didn't show up until 8:45. She's supposed to start work at 7 and have the breakfast ready for 7:30. She came breezing in and introduced herself to the guests, greeting Cecilia like a long-lost friend - they have a "thing" in common because they are fellow Peruvians, and Cecilia's rudeness to Gemma was based on the fact that she was a "Spaniard", and what could she possibly know about how things work in Peru? 

    Ruth's explanation for being so late was that she had to wait "fifteen minutes" for a car that had room for her; but of course, she was 105 minutes late for work, and she didn't offer an explanation to account for the other hour and a half. It seems like Gregorio, who lives right next door to her in the small town not too distant, often covers for Ruth by arriving early and doing the breakfast set-up. He's a rock, a very solid employee who never stops working at something, whether inside or outside the building. His current project is varnishing and painting the door from the street, sprucing up the sign, the lintel, etc. It improves the "curb appeal" quite a bit.

    I've had great conversations with Dick and Christine last night and this morning - they're a fine couple who are interested in religion (Catholic), charitable foundations, Incan history, and birds - Christine is thrilled with the hummingbirds, especially the Giant Hummingbird, which is a bit drab, but as large as a cardinal.  We watched it together when she first arrived, since it is another one of the "Twenty Hummingbirds to See Before You Die".  Cecilia turns out to be not such a problem, at least for me; she's more of a problem for Dick and Christine, actually, because they have organization issues with her that have more to do with a lack of clear thinking than with language difficulties. Cecilia actually lives and works in Virginia now, in the U.S.

    I took them to the pathway entrance to Cerro Pinkuylluna, which is down our street but hard to identify if you've never seen it before. It looks like the entrance to one of the homes or lodges. I offered them the umbrella but they didn't take it; while they were up the hill and I was having my own breakfast, it began to rain. I went up the hill after them with the umbrella, went to the ruins to the left and to the right, but couldn't find them. I guess they came down and went somewhere else in town with safer footing. By 11:30 a.m. I'd planned to begin sanding and preparing the wood strips for the new brochure rack - when the rain stops, because I have to work out back in the yard,.  There's no indoor workshop space. On the other hand, I'd already put in a full morning, and I would be hosting with them in the afternoon as well.  And I would walk them to the train station at 3, because they're overnighting in Aguas Calientes.

    I returned to find Cesar and Gemma helping Pancha with all the breakfast dishes, while Ruth simply surfed on the lodge computer all morning. Deb had already done the room from two nights ago this morning, and the laundry for that, and Pancha went to do the shopping and record the purchases by herself. When there are no emails to respond to, Ruth should be on her feet watching for ways to help the guests, and looking for other useful, helpful things to do. I decided to nap, and delay starting my brochure rack until tomorrow, hoping for a dry, sunny morning.

    I also have more neighbourhood hiking to do in order to tell guests who stay more than one overnight what they can see and do while they are here. There's a real job to be done selling the town of Ollantaytambo itself, actually - I don't know if there's a commercial association to develop partnerships and ideas to attract guests to stay more than one night in the town - I haven't seen any evidence of one - but there should be. [Later, Carlos told me that there had been, and described it, but it doesn't exist any longer - the president, a lawyer who tied up the group in procedural issues, died; the vice-president - Louise - didn't want to step up into that role, and neither did anyone else, apparently. Carlos said the group had met and talked a great deal, but hadn't actually accomplished much.]

    Organizing a group like that would be an important role in this community that would benefit the whole community; and related to that, producing a little monthly newsletter in paper and online to be delivered to each of the businesses, carrying small ads for each business who wants to support it, to increase referrals from other business owners, and to treat the tourist service in this town as a team effort. In many tourist centres, this kind of publication is designed for hostel, B&B and hotel guests as well, to be left in their rooms along with a decent map.  It helps them design their own travel experience, and the publication is financed by the ad revenue from local businesses. 

    There are few people in this town with the English writing skills to carry a newsletter like this forward, so this could be a great adjunct activity for Apu Lodge, and the lodge could feature its own ad prominently, at no cost, and send copies of its newsletter to important referral tour agencies in Cusco, Lima and other cities, and even to tour agents internationally, to use as conversation guides with customers. It could appear every two weeks on the Apu Lodge website as well, for foreign visitors to read. 

    This would really build the long-distance profile and awareness of the lodge, its facilities, and the attractions of the largely unknown "only remaining living Inca village" that surrounds it, overshadowed as it is in international tourism consciousness by Machu Picchu. The goal would be to encourage travelers to stay one extra night and spend an extra day exploring this other regional royal estate of Manco Inca (one of only four or five, which includes Machu Picchu, and not counting the Incan capital, which was Cusco); if successful, room occupancy and revenue could as much as double. Carlos' craving to lead daily Ollantaytambo walking tours to both English and Spanish speaking visitors would fit perfectly into that vision.

    By Friday, Deb had been ill for two days, but was now back on her feet. There were no overnight guests, and consequently no paid staff at all in the lodge when I woke up. Ruth arrived at 8:50 a.m.; the other staff trickled in at 9:15 and 9:25, and there were only four buns left at the bakery, which were gobbled up before I got any. Seems like a pattern; Gemma says they've kept these sort of hours ever since Louise left for Scotland. Cesar and Gemma don't get up this early in the morning if they're not scheduled to be on duty, so Deb and I had the place to ourselves and got our own breakfast. I squeezed fresh orange juice, made coffee...but it took until after 11 before the giant oven at the bakery two blocks away disgorged a second round of buns. 

    Mind you, Pancha was always here when she was supposed to, and we've always been fed a lunch. It was raining again, so I won't be able to begin my brochure rack project yet.  It looks like another day of background reading. Ruth spent her morning doing English with Deb and playing with her son. Gemma says she asked for help with her Excel accounts yesterday, which are a mess, but Gemma refused to be drawn into that quagmire. Yesterday Carlos wanted me to speak to Ruth about arriving so late and leaving Gregorio and me to stage and serve the breakfast, with "his full authority"; we're not sure what authority he has, since neither of them is officially a manager, each is jealous and can't stand the other.

    I finished Last Days of the Incas and feel considerably more knowledgeable.  I was preparing to read a final couple of books, not as substantial, and as soon as Deborah felt well enough we'd make our own pilgrimage to Machu Picchu.  I'm now aware that this site isn't as solely significant to the history of the empire as most visitors believe. Nor is there much reason for the apparent New Age magnetism of the site. It is, however, the best known architectural fascination from the only one of six world-wide civilizations to blossom and thrive in high altitude, before the Spaniards, along with the Portuguese, closed the entire South American continent to all other visitors, including scientific ones, for two hundred more years. 

    There were only twelve Inca kings in a line of succession that began at roughly 1200 A.D.  The 9th and 10th created the actual Incan empire, which lasted only 90 years before being smashed apart by the Spaniards. Until then, the elite 100,000 Incas, through a succession of effectively only four emperors, conquered and ruled an empire of ten million inhabitants with 700 different languages over a 4,000 kilometre empire with forts and storehouses, royal retreats, agricultural terraces and stone-paved roads. They were in turn controlled like puppets by only 168 brutal and illiterate entrepreneurial Spaniards, who smashed the empire apart in only five years, is another sad and astonishing twist of the tale.

    I'm glad we volunteered to stay here at the Lodge for a few weeks. I watch other visitors arrive for an expensive flying visit to satisfy the "Machu Picchu" item on their "bucket list", without being able to make the time to absorb much of the geography, landscape and natural environment, and the cultures of the Sacred Valley.  To many N. American visitors these weirdly costumed people just look like aliens, and they completely miss the history that is dotted all over these peaks and soaked into these valleys.

Next: more lodge details and a sweaty experience