Eco Truly Park

While staying in Lima I took a side trip to Eco Truly Park, about an hour north of the city. It´s kind of an organic farm slash hare krishna (a branch of Hindu) commune, which was of interest to me partly because I found it online while I was looking for volunteer opportunities (they have some kind of volunteer program) and partly because I then figured out that my friend Carlos lived there for a couple years. While traveling there by bus, the 3 hectare farm suddenly comes into view from the road above: a kind of spacy looking cluster of dome topped adobe buildings surrounded by a lush green organic farm. I was expecting the experience of staying there for a night to be an interesting one, but I don´t think I was quite prepared for what I´d find. Mostly I was surprised by just how religious these people were. They´re kind of like evangelicals who instead of going door to door, just wait for tourists to show up at there little commune park. One of their goals is to live at peace with humanity and with nature, which no one can deny is a pretty noble philosophy, although it may be considered a little ironic that their idea of being one with nature is living in a closed in organic farm in the middle of the desert, next to a touristy beach and at the end of a serpentine road lined with dilapidated adobe houses. The park was founded 18 years ago by some German guy, and he also founded similar parks in almost every other South American country, although the one in Peru was the first.

The first thing I got there was to take the guided tour, which was supposed to take 45 minutes but ended up being almost 2 hours long. My tour guide´s name was Govinda. The first thing he showed us was a plaque with the main rules of the faith. No eating meat, fish, or eggs. No drinking or drugs. No illicit sex. To name just a few. Next he explained a bit about the methods and philosophy behind the organic gardening, which I actually found pretty cool. Since they don´t eat meat or eggs, they manage to be almost self-sufficient. Next we were led to the "Yoga Planetarium", which, contrary to what I had assumed, is not a planetarium where you do yoga. It seems they define yoga as a word describing the general practice of the Hindu faith, one of which is hatha, or physical, yoga, but which also includes things like meditation, chanting, or just telling someone about the holy krishna. So, the Yoga Planetarium is a series of temples in which these things are practiced... a kind of landscape of Vedic practices, you could say. Once the tour finally came to an end and after a few minutes of chanting, I asked Govinda why the krishnas eat dairy but not eggs. His response was that a monk had once told him that eggs are like the menstruation of chickens. After thinking about that for a couple minutes I realized that it´s kind of true, but that still didn't really seem to explain why eating eggs would be forbidden. Is milk not the lactation of cows? I suppose the argument goes something like this:

Preposition 1. Chickens often lay unfertilized eggs.
Preposition 2. Human menstruation contains unfertilized eggs.
Preposition 3. Menstruation is gross.
Conclusion. Eating eggs is impure.

Well, that was my interpretation, anyway. For the duration of the tour, the other people in my group (mostly Peruvian tourists) kept saying "Wow! That's so pretty! That's so profound!" They seemed genuinely impressed by everything. Then when I asked them afterwards if they were planning on having lunch at the park restaurant, they said, "No! We want to go eat a lot of meat."

A few of the people who had been at the park longer remembered Carlos, but not by that name. I kept describing him as "Carlos Hasti, the artisan" (using his first name and the first part of his sanskrit pseudonym) and invariably they responded, "ooohhhhh, you mean Hasti Gopal?" It was pretty hilarious. Once they all found out that I'd previously been in touch with William, the volunteer program director, they started treating me more like a volunteer than a tourist, even though I was only planning on staying one night. Over lunch I asked someone, "What do people here do after lunch?" "Would you like to do an art workshop?" he responded. I said sure. Before I knew it some sculptor guy with a sanskrit pseudonym I couldn't pronounce had put me to work drawing letters for a sign for the art gallery that he would later carve out of wood. After I'd finished he made me do it over because he said the letters needed to be smaller and farther apart. Then he disappeared somewhere, and after waiting about 10 minutes to see if he'd come back, I assumed he wasn't and left. It turned out the krishnas had called a surprise emergency meeting, which ended up lasting about 3 hours. During this time I mostly talked to a middle-aged Brazilian guy who had just arrived as a volunteer, who spoke to me in a combination of Spanish and Portuguese and thought everything at the park was "perfecho."

When the meeting had finally ended, over a bowl of esparagus soup I talked to a guy about the dome-like structure of the temples, which are for some unknown reason called "Trulys" and are an anti-seismic structure, the architectural design of which comes from Italy, of all places. One kind of cool thing that the guy told me was that a couple of previous volunteers from the park had started a project to bring "Trulys" to some of the people affected by the recent earthquake in the Pisco region. I was glad they were doing something like that, because when I saw they were constructing some more Trulys to serve as "miradores" above the park, I couldn't help wondering if it wouldn't be more useful to help pay for some of the villagers to renovate their houses. These people struck me as kind of a funny combination between being proponents of universal love and at the same time really withdrawn from the world in some ways. The whole time I was in the park I kept thinking, "Hmm...would it be sacreligious for me to leave for a few minutes and take a walk on the beach?

After dinner everyone went to bed early (yes! my kind of people) and at about 4:30 am, a rooster that had attacked my foot without provocation the day before started crowing. At 5:00 William knocked on my door to tell me that they would be starting meditation and other yogic activities, if I wanted to come by. A little before 6 I arrived at the temple, to find a monk dressed in the traditional orange robe sharing some of the teachings of krishna, mostly directed at the Brazilian, it seemed. It was a bit too early in the morning for me to be proselytized to, but there were a couple things that caught my attention. The German guy who founded the park had gone to the United States in the 60's, during the era of "hipismo", and taught the druggy hippies about a drug that was an upper that you would never come down from: the hare krishna mantras. Later in his speech the monk started talking about Coca Cola, and how it is bad because it creates a desire in people that isn't really a service to humanity. Interesting modern application of the teachings.

After that I was going to participate in a yoga class, but my stomach was feeling a little iffy so instead I headed to the bathroom and then to my room to rest. When I emerged, the krishnas gave me some kind of tea called "mate de paico", which I'd never heard of, but which is supposed to help with your stomach. I don't know if that was what did it, but I soon started feeling a lot better. I still pretended I wasn't feeling that well though because I wanted an excuse to go back to Lima instead of doing another "art workshop" or something. As I was leaving one of the girls asked me when I was coming back. "I won't have time in this trip," I said, and thought about adding, "Maybe in my next life." I didn't say that though.