Qoyllur Rit'i 6/1/07-6/4/07

My trip to Qoyllur Rit’i was quite an adventure—getting there as much as Qoyllur Rit’i itself. On Friday afternoon Jenny and I met up in Cuzco with Nicolas, a professor from the school I taught English, and 3 hippies that we hadn’t met before: Violeta, a Chilean woman, who was dating an indigenous man from Apurimac named Basilio, and Violeta’s friend Ariel, also from Chile. Nicolas was kind of the leader of the journey and both Jenny and I had only a vague idea of what the plan was before we left. From Cuzco we all took a 5-hour bus ride to Ocongate, which is the name of a region in Peru and also a small community in which we stayed with a relative of Nicolas the first night. Immediately Jenny and I could see that we were with an interesting group of people. After eating a scrumptious dinner of boiled potatoes with the family we were staying with, there was kind of a spontaneous group bonding hour/ceremony which involved a lot of coca chewing, incense, tobacco smoking, Argentinian mate, a very strange twangy European instrument that Violeta played with her mouth, and everyone except Jenny and me saying a personal thanks to the Pachamama (mother earth).

We finally got to bed and woke up bright and early the next morning to begin the next segment of our journey. The plan was to travel to another remote community called Haku, stay there the night, and then travel with them to Qoyllur Rit’i the next day. The first stretch of the journey was three hours on a truck, which also was carrying, among other things, a bag full of (live) chickens and some sacks of potatoes. The ride was incredible; it would be futile to try to describe the natural beauty of the mountains, yet again, but I’ll just say that even for a relatively non-spiritual person such as me, it’s hard not to think that the mountains in Peru are gods. The landscape changes every moment, from jutting, rocky, snow-capped peaks to smoother, colorful mountains, dusty places that look like desert to places filled with fog that apparently comes from the jungle. And embellishing the landscape is a smattering of tiny sparkling freshwater lakes. Riding on the back of a truck with a bunch of indigenous people and hippies added to the surreal quality of the trip.

When we arrived at our destination (nothing more than a bend in the road) we all sat down on the grass to share a meal. Jenny and I had brought our own food, mostly essentials like cliff bars, peanut butter and cheese, but one thing we had to get used to during the trip was that everyone’s food was communal food. It’s a beautiful tradition in collectivistic societies and something that it’s really hard for Americans to get used to even if you tell yourself to be generous. So, we ended up giving away most of our food (except for the peanut butter, we just could not part with it) and eating mostly potatoes and coca leaves for the majority of the trip. There is also a specific way of offering and chewing coca leaves. Everyone sits in a circle and the leaves are usually set in a pile on a blanket in the center. Then everyone starts searching in the pile for the best coca leaves to make into k’intus, which are made up of three leaves. Once you find three good leaves, you put them together from smallest to largest, hold them with both hands, blow on them as an offering to the earth, and then with both hands, offer them to someone else in the group. When you receive a k’intu from someone, assuming they are a Quechua speaker, you say “Urpillay sonqoy,” which means roughly, “Thank you from the bottom of my heart.” Then you chew the coca leaves and eat them. On this trip I ate the most coca leaves I have ever eaten. They don’t make you high, but if you chew a lot of them they make your mouth feel kind of tingly and numb, and they also decrease hunger and help with altitude sickness.

After lunch Nicolas announced that we would be walking the rest of the way to the community of Haku. He said it would take two hours of we walked fast, three if we were slow. Factoring in that most of us were not used to the altitude and a couple of us, including me, were having some problems with it, and that the Peruvian sense of time is just not as exact as ours, the walk ended up taking over six hours, and we arrived in Haku just as the sun was setting. That having been said, it was probably the most beautiful hike I have ever been on in my life. When we arrived we were greeted with flute music by the members of the community, and of course, offered a bowl of boiled potatoes.

The next morning Jenny and I discovered that we would actually not be going straight from the community to Qoyllur Rit’i, but rather backtracking the entire way we had walked and part of the way we had come on the truck. Nicolas announced that since I was having trouble with the altitude and slowing us down, I would, along with a couple other people, be riding a horse. Or rather, sitting on top of a horse while its owner pulled it along by a rope. I wasn’t complaining about that. The journey back took about half the time it had taken us to get there, and the entire time the men in the community led the group with flute music. Every once in awhile we would stop to rest, the women sitting in one circle and the men in the other, and share potatoes, coca leaves, and whatever anyone else had to offer. When we got there, Jenny and I and a couple Quechua woman hitchhiked to where we needed to go in a passing van. The rest of our group staid to wait for a truck.

When we arrived at the town in which the road to Qoyllur Rit’i begins, to our surprise our fellow travelers led us not up the mountain but to a field with a circular rock wall (probably a corral for animals), which we were to use as a campsite for the night. This was a problem for Jenny and I because Jenny and I had been planning on returning from Qoyllur Rit’i the next day so that she could catch a flight to Lima. We came to the decision that we would have to go up to Qoyllur Rit’i that night or we would never get there. However, it was difficult to communicate this with our group members, considering that the majority of them were Quechua-speaking women who were busy preparing potatoes for dinner, and the only man who had come with us in the van had temporarily disappeared. We waited about two hours for Nicolas and the rest of our friends to arrive, but they were busy doing God knows what in the town. When Jenny and I awkwardly tried to explain to one of the semi-Spanish-speaking men that we were going to go to Qoyllur Rit’i that night, by ourselves, he didn’t quite understand and insisted that we rest for “a moment.” We waited ten more minutes and then told the men that we were going to the town to find Nicolas. It was already dark, and of course, the insisted on leading us there, which made an already awkward situation even more awkward. On the way we saw Nicolas and explained to him and a few other people why we were abandoning the group. They kind of looked at us like we were crazy but let us go. Realizing we didn’t actually know where exactly the beginning of the road to Qoyllur Rit’i was, we wandered around the market area for awhile looking for someone that looked friendly enough to ask. At one point we were laughed at by a group of pointing young boys, and I can’t deny that we must have looked ridiculous: two gringas in identical big poofy alpaca hats that all the tourists buy, each carrying a giant backpack, nibbling on a piece of bread, and looking lost. Aware of how idiotic we looked, we asked a woman vendor where the road to Qoyllur Rit’i began, and she pointed us in the right direction. By the time we began, it was already after 7, which was actually fine because at this time of year there are constantly people going up and down. On top of that, the road is wide and well-kept, and once the moon came out, it was bright enough to read a book by. The whole walk uphill took two and a half hours, which was shorter than we had expected.

Now comes the hard part: attempting to describe the spectacle that is the festival of Qoyllur Rit’i. It’s kind of like the Peruvian equivalent of Woodstock, except much colder and minus the drugs. The actual shrine of Qoyllur Rit’i is just a big cross that people light candles underneath, but the most important part of the festival is the dancing. Each community that comes has its own dance group, and there are several areas in which there is constantly some group dancing all day and all night, for the entire duration of the festival, which is over a week. The dancers start in one place and then move to the next, and the next, and so on. The whole thing is a raucous of music and explosions (not fireworks, but something else that just makes a really loud noise and a bunch of smoke). Then there are hundreds of tents set up which people generally avoid sleeping in because it’s much easier to keep warm by moving around. The backdrop of the whole thing is the snow-covered mountain peaks of Ausengate.

Jenny and I arrived there at around 10:00, by which time it was already freezing. We hadn’t had room to bring a tent so instead we just had sleeping pads, mats, and a couple of tarps to put over us and protect us from the frost. It probably got down to somewhere in the teens or 20’s at the coldest point of the night. We stayed awake and moving around as long as possible, watching the different dances and drinking sweet, hot “ponche” made from a powder of dried “haba” beans. When we finally went back “home” to sleep under our tarp, we kept being woken up by the explosions and dance groups that marched right by us with their bands and sometimes also horses. At around 4 am, we had an interesting encounter with a Quechua woman who was trying to tell us something that I couldn’t quite make out, except for the words, “Where did they come from?” It seemed as if we had taken her spot on the frozen ground. I couldn’t figure out how that could have happened seeing as none of the campsites were marked. Every so often the woman would pause in her Quechua tirade and try to connect with us by saying “Hi” in a very heavy accent. In any case, I was resolved not to move, seeing as I was not only exhausted but bundled up in my sleeping bag and freezing. Eventually the woman left us alone, and somehow Jenny and I made it through the night. We watched impatiently, shivering, as the sun came up over the mountains. After walking around a bit to see some more dances, which had not even let up for a second throughout the night, we started back down toward the town.

Of course, our bus ride back to Cuzco was not without incident. About ten minutes into the drip, the bus driver hit another car. There was only some minor damage to the back bumper of the car, so everyone in the bus waited for about twenty minutes while the bus driver negotiated with the other driver and eventually gave him 50 soles to repair the damage. After that, I’m not really sure what happened, but we kept stopping for 15 or 20 minutes in different places, and it seemed the two drivers wanted to fight. Then the whole bus went into mutiny and got off the vehicle, and finally a police car arrived and resolved everything. Add that drama to a really really hot bus (we couldn’t open the windows or the dust from the road would come in), street vendors periodically hassling us and selling boiled potatoes to people through the windows, and a bunch of rowdy passengers yelling at the driver to change the music, and you’ve got a real Peruvian experience.

But in order to really understand the music issue, I’ll conclude this entry by describing the horribly formulaic music I’ve been subject to in pretty much every public vehicle all these months. Most of Peruvian radio plays a random mix of songs from the 70’s and 80’s along with some hits from a few years ago, but the stations that cater to people from the “campo” (rural areas) is, as Jenny aptly observed, the Peruvian equivalent of popular country music. The genre (I believe it’s called “chicha”, but I could be confusing it with something else) has its roots in traditional Quechua songs called huaynos, but all the lyrics are in Spanish, and the arrangement is usually limited to a very high-pitched kind of harp, Andean flutes, electronic drumbeats, and a handful of strange synthesized noises. “Chichas” are always sung by women and the lyrics always have something to do with gender relations. They are usually along the lines of “Stop cheating on me, it hurts”, but they can also be cheesy love songs, such as “Remember my cell phone number, so that you can call me whenever you need to cry.” Every song starts with some electronic drum beats the singer singing some of these incredibly trite, usually unrhymed lyrics in a tone of voice that is best described as energetically desperate. As far as I can tell, there is only one melody for the verse portion of every single chicha song. Every verse is followed by a short chorus and every chorus is followed by the same 5 synthesized notes (again, the same ones for virtually every song) and a very odd noise that I can only guess must have been stolen from the noise of the twisty thing on the “Bop It” game (for those fortunate enough to have had a “Bop It” during their childhood). After two or three choruses and verses, the music continues and a man’s voice comes in, shouting things in roughly the same tone of voice is used in radio car commercials in the United States. Somestimes the man’s voice just repeats the main points of the woman’s song, emphasizing its triteness, or sometimes he enters into a very, very short argument with the woman, which consists of he contradicting her and she restating the message of her song, which automatically proves her to be in the right. Every so often the man will follow that up by yelling out instructions to the audience, such as “Men, raise your hands! Women, turn around, smooth now!” Just for good measure the chorus is repeated a few times. Then another song comes on that is barely distinguishable from the last. And that’s when you start adding to the song by banging your head against the wall.