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.
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