I´m proud to report that the very first thing I did after walking out of the Cuzco airport was to buy a bag of coca leaves from a vendor in the parking lot. This traditional remedy for altitude sickness has been recommended to me by various Peruvians and travellers (pretty much everyone I´ve asked), and I´m not sure whether or not it was chewing the coca leaves that did it, but so far the altitude hasn´t seemed to affect me at all. Despite all the controversy in the united States surrounding drug trafficking, it´s not at all hard to find coca leaves here (they hardly resemble cocaine, which is refined), and they sell it in various forms, including coca tea and coca candy. The coca leaves basically taste like chewing on green tea, but the tea made from the leaves is more mild, and delicious. No, I have not yet gotten noticeably high from it. :P
Right now I am sitting in an internet cafe in Ollantaytambo, a quaint little tourist town about an hour and a half drive from Cuzco. Our group is staying in a hostel here for our week-long orientation before we move in with our homestay families in Cuzco. On the drive here, I got a chance to take in some of the landscape. Let me just say that I had a romanticized image in my head about what this place would look like, and the reality is similar to that image except even more breathtaking. Imagine this: roads lined with small adobe huts with a backdrop of rolling hills, expansive fields, and the most enormous mountain peaks you have probably ever seen. As many different shades of green as you can imagine, offset by the deep red-brown color of the earth in places where the land breaks off. Every so often, a clifftop stuck with a giant red billboard advertising ´Cerveza Cuzquena¨(the Cuzco brand of beer).Indigenous women in traditional clothing walking along the road with babies wrapped in colorful shawls on their backs. Children playing outside the houses, people tending to various livestock (pigs, donkeys, llamas, bulls, sheep, you name it). A few boys on the side of the road squirted our bus with water guns as we passed, because it is currently the holiday of Carnival, during which time the tradition is to squirt water and/or throw water balloons at everyone and everything that passes.
The city (village?) of Ollantaytambo is also a gorgeous place. It is a small tourist town smack dab in the middle of a valley, surrounded on all sides by towering green mountain peaks. The whole place seems so miniature compared with the surrounding mountains that it´s not hard to see why Quechua people believe that the mountains are animate beings that watch over them. It is also called ¨The Sacred Valley of the Incas,¨ and another tidbit is that part of The Motorcycle Diaries was filmed here. Imagine a tiny town, probably about half the size of the Middlebury campus, with stone, mud and cement buildings and narrow cobblestone streets. Now add to that picture an occasional man or boy leading a bull through the street by a rope, and a handful of indigenous street vendors selling traditional (or ¨traditional¨) crafts to tourists from all over. Now add to that scene a slew of giant trucks, vans, and tour buses that plough through the narrow streets at all hours of the day. Just as you think you have narrowly escaped getting run over by a bus, a speeding motor-cart type things whizzes by--apparently the purpose of these things is to transport incredibly lazy tourists around the city. It´s got character, this place--last night a few friends and I, exploring, wandered into a bar playing Manu Chao that had an upstairs room furnished with blacklights, a hammock, a wooden swing, and a wooden pole that you could use to slide back down to the regular bar.
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