July 12: Pisac

On my final day in Cuzco, I took the bus out again and made it to the market town of Pisac. And market town it was, indeed. The trading post covers the main square of town with the ruins a short hike up above. A line of manual taxis were lined up at the bus stop, ready to tote people (or their goods) to the square.I started on the steep uphill climb and ran into surprisingly few tourists. Notably, however, a Peruvian was following me up the mountain and steadily gaining as my lungs began to flag. After a while I gave up trying to outpace him and met Michelangelo (no kidding, that was his name) who was basically a big ol’ Peruvian mystic. He was young, with an acne scarred face and shiny black hair, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and carrying a panpipe. We chatted a bit about the town of Pisac. Michelangelo pointed out the farmers threshing quinoa down below and I asked how their agricultural commerce worked. Michelangelo said a ranchero owned most of the land and paid the townspeople’s wages but allowed the people several plots for communal work to feed themselves as well. He also pointed out a hillside riddled with holes and told me that the mountain had once been an Incan burial ground but huacaros had long since looted the artifacts.I asked him what he would do at the ruins and he said he would be a tour guide to the busloads of tourists arriving at the front side. (I apparently took the back way up. A long driveway also winds up the mountain for the bus tour hordes.)

Then he asked me if I wanted a tour. Now, I was all about spreading my comparative North American wealth to these enterprising young people on this trip, but I was flat broke this day. I had enough money for my bus ride home and my hostel back in town. And the closest ATM was miles away back in town. I apologized profusely and said I couldn’t pay him – I didn’t have enough. So Michelangelo took me on a tour for free. He said he had to go that way to get to the front entrance anyway, and why didn’t I just walk with him? So I did. He showed me the ruins of guinea pig storage rooms, grain storage rooms whose roofs were being rethatched, and another fountain that has worked for hundreds of years.He walked me up to a rock overlooking the ceremonial center of the site where we ate lunch together. His consisted of a banana and four tangerines. Mine consisted of bread, chocolate covered saltines (which are AWESOME. They’re called “Chokosoda” and they are muy tasty), and a pepito melon. He gave me a tangerine and I gave him my junk food and some bread. I thanked him for his kindness and then he asked me if he could let the mountain bless me. Um, excuse me? I hadn’t even sneezed. I asked him what he meant and he said his ancestors were Incas and he knew some Incan ceremony that would fill me with the mountain’s spirit (or maybe fill the mountain with my spirit – I never got very far with Spanish prepositions) and would make the walk back to town easy. How do you turn down the very surreal experience of being blessed by an Inca?

So Michelangelo touched my stomach and then did some fluttering motions with his hands, cupped them together and blew in the direction of the mountain. It was actually a bit more involved than that. He did the fluttering hand thing while walking around me in a circle, and sort of brushed me off a bit at the same time. Very strange. Nice kid but very strange. We air kissed cheeks like the French and then he proceeded to play his panpipe after me while I climbed out of sight. And he kept playing. I must have heard that music for a full five minutes while I made my way back toward town. I felt like that was a suitable way to end my stay in the heart of the Incan empire. Slightly odd with an air of theatrics in a setting older than time itself. Much like the Incan religion must have been. Tomorrow I fly to Lima.