What We'll Miss...

     In less than a week, we will board the plane and start our journey to Peru and Ecuador; and from what I've been reading, I must tell you that there is a lot we will miss, not only the people and pets who we'll leave back home, of course, but within the country of Peru itself.  For one thing, Peru is big, as in three times larger than all of California (whereas Ecuador is about the size of Colorado).  Needless to say, what we'll be seeing during our visit there will be only a glimpse of the country.  Let's face it, when you travel to a place that has canyons that are nearly twice as deep as the Grand Canyon, and has the largest navigable lake in the world, there is a lot to see...but we'll miss those.  It was the same with South Africa and Alaska, two large countries of which we saw a lot in our opinion; but of course it was also just a small glimpse.  Think just of your block, your neighborhood, your city, your state.  How much overall have you seen and perhaps even more, gotten to know?  Just as with neighbors, stores and restaurants come and go and soon --such as when you return to your childhood home-- everything seems to have changed.  So, we recognized that we would be fortunate to see relics of the past, stonework that had survived centuries, as had a few traditions in both culture and clothing.  But things were changing.  As one guidebook mentioned, the large influx of Japanese residents moving to Lima over the years has led to a new form of cooking called Nikkei, a Peruvian-Japanese blending of sauces and ingredients.  Sounds tasty, and interesting.  But we'd likely miss that...

Photo of Colca Canyon: Machu Picchu Tours

     So what else would we miss (and bear in mind that at this point, our plane hasn't even left the US yet)?  Of course, that deep Cañón Del Colca which Lonely Planet described this way: It’s not just the vastness and depth of the Colca that make it so fantastical, it’s the shifts in its mood.  There are more scenery changes along the river canyon's 62-mile (100km) passage than there are in most European countries; from the barren steppe of Sibayo, through the ancient terraced farmland of Yanque and Chivay toward the cruising condors riding warm air currents, into the steep-sided canyon proper beyond Cabanaconde that wasn’t thoroughly explored until the 1980s.  Of course we shouldn’t turn a blind eye to the vital statistics.  The Colca is the world’s second-deepest canyon, a smidgeon shallower than its near neighbor, the Cotahausi, and twice as deep as the more famous Grand Canyon in the US.  But, more than that, it is replete with history, culture, ruins, tradition and –rather like Machu Picchu– intangible Peruvian magic.  Of note, the Colca is indeed lined with the terraces of ancient farmlands, showing that earlier civilizations flowered both high and low in this area.  But no matter, we'd miss that...that plus the Inca Trail.

Photo: Peru for Less

    Wait, we were going to see Machu Picchu so wouldn't we be on the Inca Trail?  Ah, but the Inca Trail is long and strenuous (and it's just one of many such trails which lead into the site; that said, tour organizers tend to favor just one as a rule, the multi-day journey on "the" Inca trail -- bear in mind that the Inca built a network of nearly 25,000 miles of trails so there are countless areas to visit).  Hiking the Inca Trail was a dream of ours way back when we were young and ambitious (and relatively broke) but these days, the thought of doing four or five days, some days with a 4000' elevation gain at altitudes over 10,000 feet, well that seemed destined for those a bit more fit (and young).  We can say that where we live, we do sometimes hike from 7200' to 9000' with a gain of 1800' and are beat doing that; so the idea of hiking up another 2200' and at an even higher altitude puts it literally out of our reach, so to speak (don't feel bad since not everyone makes it, as so humorously told by bloggers Jeremy & Lia), and it IS steep in many places, as in drop-off steep.  Again, my younger solo days found me hiking places such as Angel's Landing at Zion National Park with relative ease but no longer, despite --the last time I tried it-- watching parents with 10-year olds pass me by while I pretended to tie the laces on my boots.*  So no matter how many trekking companies may tell us that even we old folks would make it, I'm afraid that I'm with my wife on this one and will gracefully (and perhaps wisely) miss "the" Inca trail as well.  Besides, they only allow 500 hikers per day on "the" trail (Machu Picchu itself allows over 10x that number of visitors each day...what??).

Photo of some Nazca Lines: Peru Hop

     So, another big part of Peru are those famous (and debunked) alien landing markers which made Erick von Daniken (and many others) quite wealthy, although try landing a craft on a cat, or any of the other off-shaped images recently found last year, said NPR.  If viewed from space, those famous Nazca lines are pretty hard to spot at all, said NASA.  And nearby is the lesser-known town of Palpa where even more figures reside.  Said National Geographic: The lines are found in a region of Peru just over 200 miles southeast of Lima, near the modern town of Nasca.** In total, there are over 800 straight lines, 300 geometric figures and 70 animal and plant designs, also called biomorphs.  Some of the straight lines run up to 30 miles, while the biomorphs range from 50 to 1200 feet in length (as large as the Empire State Building).  The lines are known as geoglyphs – drawings on the ground made by removing rocks and earth to create a “negative” image.  The rocks which cover the desert have oxidized and weathered to a deep rust color, and when the top 12-15 inches of rock is removed, a light-colored, high contrasting sand is exposed.  Because there’s so little rain, wind and erosion, the exposed designs have stayed largely intact for 500 to 2000 years.  Scientists believe that the majority of lines were made by the Nasca people, who flourished from around A.D. 1 to 700.  Animal symbolism is common throughout the Andes and are found in the biomorphs drawn upon the Nasca plain: spiders are believed to be a sign of rain, hummingbirds are associated with fertility, and monkeys are found in the Amazon -- an area with an abundance of water.  "No single evaluation proves a theory about the lines, but the combination of archeology, ethnohistory, and anthropology builds a solid case," says Reinhard [Johan Reinhard, a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence]. Add new technological research to the mix, and there’s no doubt that the world’s understanding of the Nasca lines will continue to evolve.  But not only in those desert areas.  Move over to the nearby Amazon rainforest (which surprisingly accounts for only half of "the" Amazon), and large earthen mounds are also being discovered, some of which required moving 10,000 cubic yards of dirt to create, and all that done with only stone tools; in a wet and often flooded area (which then turns quite dry and almost becomes parched), this is quite an accomplishment although most of the massive collection of mounds still remain hidden beneath trees and deep vegetation.  Ah well, it also didn't matter since we would be missing all that as well...

     And Ecuador was no slouch either, even if it was the fourth-smallest country in South America.  As the Culture Smart guidebook wrote: ...this compact Andean nation punches above its weight in terms of diversity...Squeezed between Columbia and Peru, Ecuador is named for its location on the Equator.  It has some of the highest and most active volcanoes in the world; steamy Amazon jumgles in the east; a Pacific coast dotted with beach resorts; and, out to the sea, the jewel in the country's crown -- the fabled Galapagos Islands. [And] Scientists have now firmly established that Ecuador --not Mexico-- is the true birthplace of chocolate.  Hey, their volcanoes are 18-20,000 ft. up (the tallest is 20,702 ft.).  And the Amazon part?  That's 49% of the country!  But no matter since we'd only pop into the capital then be heading 600 miles west to the Galapagos Islands, a collection of 127 islands which were named after what else...horse saddles!  Wait, what???

Portion of restored Qorikancha temple.  Photo: Wikimedia Commons

     But hey, why dwell on the negative and what we'd miss?  Any time you visit a place you're going to miss stuff (just think of Disneyland).  And did I mention that Peru was gigantic?  The capital city of Lima alone has over 30 provinces (roughly speaking, LA is 800 square miles vs. Lima's 500, although Lima's population is nearly twice that of LA.).  If we were lucky enough (and hungry enough), we would be diving into a few causas or anticuchos while there, and maybe even say "yapa!"  We'd soon find out.  But in the meantime, who knew that Qorikancha (which we'll actually get to visit) was once the richest temple in the Inca empire, lined with 700 sheets of solid gold, all of which was taken down as ransom for Pizarro (he had captured their ruler) and melted down.  Or that the "island" of Wat'a (only recently found via LIDAR) may have been the "template" for Machu Picchu, even if it is located 5000' higher, said Newsweek (we'll miss that one).  Or that Lima itself was once entirely a walled city?  Or that those famous llamas and their smaller alpaca members are all part of the camelid family (which is apparently why the Inca not only shunned the wheel, but built so many of their trails with steep and narrow steps; for the camel-like creatures, slick and muddy stones were no problem (the Spanish with their horses, on the other hand, found the "roads" nearly impassable).  And finally, those "backward" MesoAmerican natives who early Europeans (and some early archeologists) believed lived a simple life and were barely civilized?  New discoveries show that early MesoAmerican mathematicians developed the concept of "zero" well ahead of Europe, the Greeks and likely even Asia (although the debate over which civilization actually gets credit still floats back and forth not only among Sumeria and India, but within MesoAmerica itself -- Olmec, Inca or Maya).  What IS known is that MesoAmerican mathematicians were very forward-looking, their "long count" calendar stretched out for 63 million years, said Smithsonian.

     There would be much to both learn and to miss, which is perhaps why I jumped into reading some philosophy.  I had always heard those names --Plato, Sartre, Confucius, Socrates-- but as with the Maya and Olmec and Inca (not to mention the dynasties or empires such as the Ming, Ottoman, Mongol, Byzantine or, one of the largest in history, the Umayyad...what??) I found that little of it had actually sunk in.  And what better chance than to have someone try to sum it all up in 90 minutes, or at least one philosopher at a time, which became the work of historian Paul Strathern.  Okay, I spotted the books at the library sale but who knew that most of those philosophers (at least the four mentioned above) lived into their 70s and 80s (in my younger days I remember reading that the average life span back then was only 30-40 years)?  Or that Phidias (sadly, I proclaim my ignorance in never having heard of him) created one of the Seven Wonders of the World (the Statue of Zeus in Olympia), and lived for 8 years after his creation of the Parthenon.  Or that Lao-Tzu was basically unimpressed when he met Confucius mainly because he taught the way of "man" while Lao-Tzu taught the way of "nature;" or that Buddhism only arrived (from India) after both Lao-Tzu and Confucius had already spread and left their philosophies.  

     So jump to a few movies of late (how's that for switching subjects?).  The newer Woody Harrelson film Champions features him in the usual role, an arrogant coach who thinks he may be better than he is, which is when he gets a court order to teach special needs teens.  Only he's the one in need of being taught (it may shatter your image of young people with Down's Syndrome).  A similar uplifting comedy, Work It, was dazzling in its sequence of disabled people break dancing; losing a leg or being on crutches seem to leave these athletes unfazed as they spun and flipped and danced far better than most (and horrors, a senior citizen actually does hip hop).  And The Ride, a true tale of a troubled teen (with an Aryan tattoo on his neck) that is given a chance at adoption by a mixed-race couple (the BMX bike sequences are impressive).  But one film which stuck with me was yet another subject I knew little about (okay, nothing)...ballet.  422 is a documentary of the creation of a production for the New York City Ballet by a dancer low on the totem pole but given the assignment, IF he can pull it off in 2 months.  But the 2014 film goes way beyond watching dancers or the young 25-year old working with them and figuring out his choreography (yes, he's only 25 years old), and takes you into the world of lighting and costumes and orchestration and sound, and how each part will affect the principal dancers (such as if a skirt would affect her dancing or his ability to grip her for lifting, etc.).  Would the blue lighting prove to be too strong for those audience members seated in the middle rows?  And could a half turn be added at the end of a move so that the dancers didn't land in an awkward position?  But after seeing all of these movies and being exposed to worlds I knew little about, it all seemed to me a bit like the pattern of history.

     Charles C. Mann closed his book with this: It is easy to tweak academics for their earnestly opaque language, which I am doing.  Nonetheless the philosophers' concerns are understandable.  The trees closing over my head in the Amazon furo made me feel the presence of something beyond myself, an intuition shared by almost everyone who has walked in the woods alone.  That something seemed to have rules and resistances of its own, ones that did not stem from me.  Yet the claim that the forest was shaped by people does not seem to leave room for anything else, anything bigger and deeper than humankind.  I'm guilty of that, arriving with my version of history, my version of events, my version of my family, even as I continue to discover just how little I actually know...but I'm still willing to learn, or re-learn.  So now it's my turn to conclude and to end all this speculation and worrying about what my wife and I will miss.  It's time to drop it all and to go into this trip almost blank, to make room for new thoughts and new ideas and new people to teach me, even just by observing.  My hope on this trip is the same hope that I have for each of us, that our journeys and our experiences and our families all envelop us like a forest, making us not only imagine how things were (correctly or incorrectly) but more to imagine how things might be.  As Mann wrote in the final sentences of his epic tome: If there is a lesson it is that to think like the original inhabitants of these lands we should not set our sights on rebuilding an environment from the past but concentrating on shaping a world to live in for the future.  So it is with this grand adventure we sometimes simply (and naively) call life: may we continue to approach it with an open mind and an open heart.  For while we all may have missed a few things on our travels, we may still find bright skies just over the horizon.  

*An explanation of how these fears become stronger and seem to move into our heart (palpitations) and gut (queasiness) comes from neuroscientist and associate psychiatrist Arash Javanbakht in his book, Afraid.  Many of his reasons were summed up in an article in The Conversation.  You can also view a quick video of this happening (fear of heights) on the Inca Trail.

**You say to-may-toe, I say to-mah-toe.  Again it boils down to the indigenous Nazca or the invading Spanish version, Nasca.  All that said, the Inca --as with so many invading and "victorious" parties-- also destroyed the languages and records and temples of those they defeated, as did those conquering rulers before them.