Dave Meader's Peru Trip

The people of the Andes have been using local plants for thousands of years as medicines, and the use of local plans for medicine is still quite popular.   For example, coca leaves (from which cocaine is derived artificially) is used naturally in teas, as chew, and in other medicinal ways.

Tops of San Pedro cactus, Used to Make The Drink

Two other plants are the ayahuasca vine and San Pedro cactus.  Ayahuasca is a hallucinogenic, producing visions for those searching for insight.  The San Pedro is sometimes called a psychotropic, like ayahuasca, but tends to produce “heightened sensation” rather than hallucinations.   Another way of saying it, though pretty darn superficial and ignorant, is that ayahuasca enables seekers an intense 5-6 hour ride through dark visions (which I think is kind of like Jung’s Shadow) while San Pedro enables seekers through a gentler 12 hour ride through light visions.  I have no doubt I’m misrepresenting these two ceremonies, but that’s how I understand them now.

Nick and Dave, Heading To Victoria's in Urubamba

Anyway, this last weekend I did the San Pedro ceremony.  A new friend of mine had visited a shaman the week before to check her out, and after I heard what she had learned, decided it was one of those things I had to try on this journey.  I did what research I could, learned what I could, and felt it was safe and had potential for learning insight.  So on Sunday morning, the three of us left Cusco for the hour long taxi ride to Urubamba (just $2.50 each!) and made our way to the home of the shaman, a woman from Michigan, of all places, named Victoria.  Her friend, Ezekial, a local man steeped in numerology and Andean spirituality, joined us.

Nick, Stacey and Dave - Ready to Go

Victoria and Ezekial, Where We Began

It was a beautiful day – sunny, warm, sweet smelling in her front yard filled with flowers, fruit trees and other verdant and aromatic plants. We spread out a quilt in the grass, sat down, and she told us about the ceremony, the plant, what to expect and answered our questions.  When I did my research I had learned that San Pedro is a form of mescaline, but she explained that she had cooked the mescaline out of the batch we would be drinking.  She explained it like this.  The San Pedro plant is an intense cleanser, that cleanses the liver, which in turn cleanses the blood, which in turn feeds the brain and all of our cells with purer energy and more oxygen.  All four systems in our bodies – physical, intellectual, spiritual, and emotional – benefit from this cleansing.   For those who know about such things, San Pedro works directly on the heart shakra.  I asked what to expect and she replied, “don’t expect anything.  Just see what you notice.”    I did know that it would take about an hour or so for the San Pedro to “kick in” and that the ride would last about 12 hours.

Prior to coming to the ceremony, we three also fasted from a list Victoria gave us – no meat, fat, flour, caffeine, dairy, citrus or spicy foods.  Oh, and no sex, which was the easiest to comply with here.

Jug o' San Pedro

Once we had all of our questions answered, we each drank about 2 cups of a warm amber liquid that looked and tasted like gourd tea.  I found it pleasant enough, but others found it bitter.  No one hurled though, at least at the first cup.

Then we sat back and talked and waited.  I have never taken any drug stronger than weed back in my youth, and one reason was that I never trusted that any supplier would care enough about me to give me something safe.  But I decided to trust Victoria after hearing her story.  It did help some knowing that her medicine had no mescaline in it, but still….I’m in the Peruvian Andes, around 10,000 feet, on the outskirts of a town named Urubamba, drinking a liquid that is supposed to elicit visions, brewed from a cactus with the name San Pedro.   Plus, I’m in the Sacred Valley, full of ancient spiritual power, near the place known as the “navel of the world”.  And I’m downing this tea like it was chamomile.  So I drink and sit back…and wait.

Bottoms Up!

After about an hour, I DID feel something.  Colors were clearer, my vision was sharper, and I became fascinated with how the plants looked.  Not hallucinations or visions, but just able to notice more of what was naturally around me.   We also did a lot of talking, and I noticed that I was speaking faster than normal, or at least it seemed that way.  I also noticed that I didn’t use complete sentences as much as I usually do.  Then I noticed that I was vibrating a lot, yet when I held my hand out it was steady as ever.  Victoria explained that because of the cleansing my body was able to move energy faster and with less effort and what I was feeling was that energy vibrating faster than usual.  My friend, a nurse, took her pulse and saw that it was normal.  It sort of felt like you do when you have too much caffeine, but when I have too much caffeine I can’t focus very well – I get all ADHD-ish.  With the San Pedro, I was able to focus deeper and longer than normal.

This was all about the 2-3 hour mark, when we took another gulp of the San Pedro.  I was feeling pretty good, yet wanted to see if a bit more would enhance what I was experiencing.

Front Porch, Great For Sitting and Noticing

Sometime around the 4-5 hour mark, I (in reflection) shifted to another place that was very mellow, not feeling the need to speak but sometimes doing it.   I felt my creativity come out, and we 5 talked about a WIDE range of topics – personal histories, numerology, Andes religion and history, how modern society separates humans from nature, the ability of the world to absorb pollution, the balance and integration of yin/yang (left/right brain, masculine/feminine, heart/mind), lunar calendar vs. GrecoRoman calendar, worshipping Pacha Mamma (mother earth), how a gringo like me can show respect to Pacha Mamma when I visit Machu Picchu next week (make a sacrifice of good wine and show proper reverence and intention for the visit), the disintegration of the family, how we Westerners misinterpret “poverty”.

(Quick aside on this last point:  Ezekial, who is from both Peru and the US told a story of a friend of his who sent his daughter to a “poor” community to learn to appreciate what she had.  The daughter came back with an entirely opposite view.  She came back saying, “They have 3 dogs, I only have one.  They have rabbits, goats and chickens, and I don’t have those at all.  They live with their entire family all day, I only see you and Mom at night at dinner, sometimes.  They have lots of cousins to play with and aunts, uncles and grandparents to talk to.  My cousins live far away, and I hardly know them.  They sing songs and tell stories around a fire every night.  We watch TV or work on the computer and don’t talk.  They use free plants to stay healthy and recover from sickness.  We have to go to expensive hospitals.  They laugh a lot, and we don’t.”  I paraphrased this a bit, because I did NOT take my iPod recorder with me, but most of this is what Ezekial told me and it’s all in the spirit of what he was saying.)

The Fireplace, I'm Sorry I Didn't Take A Picture When It Was Burning

After dark, we moved inside and Victoria and Ezekial lit a fire in the fireplace that blazed for the next 8 hours, making the room comfortably warm.  As we all laid back on mattresses wrapped in locally made wool blankets, we got even mellower.  However, we also laughed A LOT.  Mostly it was because my other friend was just a funny guy.  Ezekial, a self avowed left brainer, after a few hours, claimed that he had never laughed so much during a San Pedro ceremony, and that his liver hurt.  Which I presume was a good thing.

Time seemed to float by and it was soon midnight, when Ezekial brought out cookies and cheese to break our fast, followed an hour later by a really delicious soup.

We eventually fell asleep around 2:30am, and woke up around 10am the next morning, with no effects other than a little soreness from sleeping on the floor.

So, what did I “get” from my San Pedro ceremony?  I’m still thinking about it.  I didn’t see visions of who Dave 3.0 could be.  There was no epiphany.  There were no hallucinations, or terrifying trips through the Dark side.  It was really very pleasant.  Throughout the evening, I got a lot of affirming feedback from the group that my opinion and perspective on and questions about all those topics (above) were, at least, shared by them.  Victoria, as the shaman, says that she usually has to sing out mean spirits that attach themselves to her “clients”.  However, late in the night she looked at Ezekial and announced that none of us three HAD any mean spirits attached to us.  She claimed we were all healthy. When I asked why we didn’t have mean spirits when it seemed that all her other clients did, she just said that we three have lived pure lives and hadn’t created any weaknesses or ports for mean spirits to get into us, even though they are around us.

So I got THAT going for me.  Which is nice.

At the very least, my San Pedro ceremony provided a beautifully relaxing 12 hours with really special people.   I envision a time when just hanging around with friends for 12 hours talking, relaxing, laughing, reflecting, without trying to prove anything, project anything, gain anything, in a totally natural environment fed by natural foods, breathing pure air, drinking pure water from a mountain stream – when that kind of experience was normal and frequent.  When did I last have that?  When did I last hang around with friends or family where there was no alcohol, caffeine, high fructose syrup, TV, artificial light, noisy traffic, people not listening to each other, or busy schedules requiring an abrupt departure?   I honestly can’t remember.  Maybe when I was a Boy Scout and we were camping?

If nothing else, my San Pedro ceremony showed me that such an experience is something I want to create in my Dave 3.0 life.  I don’t need San Pedro to do it, but my San Pedro ceremony showed me, or perhaps reminded me, that I have been going through life somewhat blind to what is surrounding me.  And that whatever I HAVE been doing, as good and healthy as it was, isn’t the same as the scene I just described.  I want more of that.  I want to experience the kind of connection with my family and friends as I had this weekend with 4 other people I didn’t even know 10 days ago.   So there’s another feature of Dave 3.0!

And that is what I learned from my San Pedro ceremony.

Walking Home in Urubamba

I’ve been doing a lot of touring so far, and if you want to see lotso photos, go over to http://picasa.google.com/dkm6266.    What I want to do here is focus on just a few features of Incan  and Colonial influences that I see around Cusco.  This first one is about Incan stone walls.

Incans built lots of temples, villages, monuments, and fortresses in the area around Cusco.  Cusco, in Incan lore, was where the first Incan, Manco Capac, after being born in Lake Titicaca with his wife-sister, drove a golden rod into the ground.  Because the rod disappeared into the earth, Manco realized this was the navel of the world (qosq’o).  Thus, Cusco became the capital of the Incan world.

The Incans built these…uh…buildings to honor and worship various gods, goddesses and beliefs of their spiritual tradition.  These buildings, terraces and walls exist today because they were made of stones cut so well that mortar was not needed.  They were also designed and built to withstand the many frequent earthquakes that still hit the Andes today.  So all of the following walls you see are about 500 years old.

Inca Stones Close Up

Royalty: The first design was for buildings either to be used by royalty, or to honor royalty.   This was the ultimate design and took the most skill and labor to create.  Huge stones, many weighing several tons, were cut from quarries, and shaped to fit with neighboring stones.   The seams of the stones were designed to match the contours of the nearby terrain.

500 Year Old Wall, Still Used Today

These walls are so sturdy, that the Spaniards expanded with second floors on top of them, and today, modern buildings still use the original walls as foundations.

Fortresses: The second design was for fortress walls, and tended to use much bigger stones.  Some brought from quarries miles away.  And “miles away” here does NOT mean a friendly flat plain – it means grueling paths cut into and around very steep and tall mountains.  Notice that the stones and lines are not nearly as uniform as the stones used for royal buildings.  But, still, a lot of effort went into these stones.

Zig Zag Walls Meant For Defense Against Spaniards

Irbe, My Tour Guide

Holes Cut In Stone Were For Logs to Push The Stone Into Place

The cuts in the stone above were made to enable logs to push the stone into place.  Again, for a fortress this aesthetic was fine.  For royalty, such visible “tools” were not made.

Mummies Were Placed In Notches

Memorials: Incan religion believed that when you die, you get reincarnated.  This meant several things had to happen. First, to keep your body in as decent condition as possible, your family mummified you.  This was a pretty simple affair.   After you died, your gut was removed, you were cleaned, and then you got a concoction of leaves, herbs, and other botanicals put into where your gut used to be.  Then you were folded into the fetal position and placed in a notch in some memorial wall or graveyard.  The fetal position was chosen because that’s how you were going to be reborn, so to make it as easy as possible for the rebirth, you were stored in the “ready” position.

Me as Mummy In Fetal Position

Second, you had to be ceremonially fed, watered and generally looked after.  If you were lucky enough to be royalty, you were stored in a big temple with lots of attention.  As you moved down the social ladder, you got less and less attention, and were stored in more modest notches.   When you reached the level of farmer, or laborer, you were most likely put into a hole in a cliff wall, and didn’t get so much attention.

Mummies Filled The Side of This Hill

Depending on the level of the mummies, different memorials got different kinds of stone work.  For the first photo above, it was pretty good.  It’s own enclosed wall, stones that fit well, but not nearly as nicely engineered as for royalty.

Pisac House

Homes: Again depending on who was living in the home, you got different kinds of stonework.   This example is where a lesser royalty, like a regional governor, would live.  Notice that they used some mortar.  (parts of this picture are renovation, I think).  Stones are still carefully and permanently placed, but they didn’t do much carving or shaping of the stone, just mostly used what shape the stone came in.  Still, pretty impressive for a region with lots of earthquakes.

Agricultural Terraces: These had the least sophisticated stonework but are still pretty amazing given that these terraces are looking good after 500 years of earthquakes and lots of rain.

Terraces of Pisac

Stepladders from One Terrace to Another

Colonial Church On Top Of Incan Walls

The Spaniards: As part of their conquest policy, the Spaniards destroyed all the Incan buildings they could find.  However, they were no dummies; even though they destroyed a structure, they often kept the Incan walls and simply built their own buildings on top of them.

Temple of the Sun is BiG

Temples: Stonework at temples was of the highest quality because it represented their worship of their gods.    For example, the Temple of the Sun at Ollantaytambo, planned to use 6 huge slabs, with carvings made once installed.

To make these stones fit perfectly, they used a sort of tongue and groove technique, with a male tab cut into one stone, and a female groove cut into another.

Notch Cut In Rock For Tight Fit

These particular rocks were brought from a quarry 5 miles away, across at least 2 different mountains.   It’s not clear how exactly they did it, but Marcel my tour guide said that the best bet , which has actually been tested in scale, was that they put each multi ton slab on logs, and upwards of 150 men pulled the rock over specially made paths that had slight inclines.

Unfortunately for the Temple of the Sun at  Ollantaytambo, the Spaniards were on the way and the Incans abandoned work on it before they could finish the carvings.

Unfinished Sun Temple at Ollayamtambo

Cusco: Today in Cusco you can still see different kinds of walls built by the Incans 500 years ago.  Pretty darn amazing.

Informal Wall on Left, Royalty Wall On Right.

I’m using the Lonely Planet Peru guidebook, and am not going to repeat what they say about Cusco, just my own reflections about it.  However, I do want to set the historical stage for what today’s and tomorrow’s tours are all about.

This place is STEEPED in ancient history, with people still living and venerating the way Andeans have lived for centuries.   VERY briefly, a history.

Pachacutec

At the time of Pizarro’s foray into South America with 175 conquistadores, there were upwards of 11 million locals here, up and down the Andes from Ecuador to Chile.  Around 1100-1200, the Incans gained power over other tribes in the region, by conquest of their own.  In the mid 15^th century the ninth Incan King, Pachacutec, began a period of unneighborly conquest and expansion, and built Cusco, Machu Pichhu and other jaw-dropping future tourist stops.  With every new conquest he gained a new labor force.  It wasn’t slave labor, but more like subsistence labor.  Incan leaders would “offer” conquested tribes food, shelter, clothing for their families in return for labor building the Incan infrastructure.   I haven’t yet been able to get out of anyone what happened to those declining the offer, but evidently most accepted it.  Life was hard, and maybe the promise of regular food for the family was worth the tradeoff.   At one point, 100,000 Incans held sway over almost 10 million non-Incans.

(Note to the cynics, ITSJs, and Enneagram 1’s out there…no, I don’t have proof.  No one does.  This is based on speculation because Incans didn’t write things down.  ¡Lo siento!.  Live with it.)

Francisco Pizarro

Pachacutec died, others took over, two brothers of one fought for the Top Dog spot….other things happened.   Then Pizarro and his 175 soldiers showed up finding a native population decimated by European diseases brought earlier, and a civil war between the brothers.  He exploited the situation, and with just 175 soldiers managed to conquer the 11 million.  I’m not sure what the over/under spread was, but if you were on the Spaniard side, you made bank.  More things happened -slaughter, starvation, disease, civil war – and within a century, only 600,000 of the original 11 million were still alive.

To conquer the people, The King’s Man In Peru stripped them of their culture and tore down any Incan temple he could find and replaced all the gods, icons, etc. in the name of his brand of Catholicism and the Colonial project of rebuilding everything proceeded apace (even after Pizarro was killed by grumpy locals in 1541).   Machu Picchu survived because it had largely been forgotten about by everyone involved by the time the Spaniards kicked in their destruction and rebuilding projects.  So they didn’t know it existed.

So what we have around Cusco, archeologically speaking, is a lot of 500 year old ruins, but we also have lots of existing walls and foundations on top of which the Spaniards built Colonial structures.  You can walk around Cusco and see 500 year old stone walls.  Which I talk about in my next post!

Well, I learned a few things on my flight from Lima to Cusco today.

1. Peruvian Airlines is the only airline here that does NOT charge a hefty surcharge for foreigners.  LAN Airlines would have charged $484 for this 1 hour flight (roundtrip), but Peruvian Airlines charges only $140.  Booked the day BEFORE the flight.    There is a two tier structure – with foreigners always paying more.
2. I have sort of made a Concession to Adventure by promising myself that if I EVER booked on a discount airline and felt at all uncertain of that airplane’s likelihood of making anything but a soft landing, then I would forego the fare and walk off (this is for you Mom!).  Having no expertise in evaluating an aircraft for real, I’m restricted to proxies.  Here are the things I’m looking for:

• Is the pilot wearing goggles?
• Is there anything hanging or dangling off the aircraft?
• Is the airplane a model I’ve seen in Indiana Jones movies?
• Do the flight attendants have a disturbingly peaceful, resigned look on their faces?
• Do they skip with the safety announcements?
• Does the priest, in full regalia, sitting near the entryway NOT have a boarding pass, but is willing to talk to passengers in hushed tones?

Sporty B-737, Nearly Empty Too1

I am happy to report that none of these proxies were answered with a YES, and I am quite happy to recommend Peruvian Airlines for those traveling in Peru.  Nice clean Boeing 737, peppy crew, pilots wore cool aviator shades.  Easy flight, on time.  Better than most flights I’ve taken in the US.

1. I also learned that airlines do not depart to Cusco after 1:00pm.  I can’t get an official explanation, but a local told me that’s because the wind and clouds coming into Cusco airport, amidst the Andean mountains at 11,000 make the landing too dangerous.   Taking off has the same issue:  last Peruvian Airlines flight departs at 11:40am.
2. 

   Lima / Callao

   The change from arid hot flat Lima to wet cool mountainous Cusco is just astonishing.  Amazing what just an hour’s flight can do.  I went from flip flops, shorts and a t shirt, to jeans, 3 layers and a rain jacket.

Your Intrepid Reporter

This is your opportunity to give me, your intrepid Peruvian reporter, ideas about what you want me to explore, investigate, experience and write about.  Or take pictures of.  Or muse upon.   Just add a comment to the end of this post, at any time during this trip, and I’ll do my best to deliver!

Most of the kids I’ll be teaching speak almost no English.  In Lima, they speak Spanish.  In Cuzco…I’m not sure.  Spanish is the national language, of course, but the local indigenous language, Quechua, is also apparently spoken widely.  I’m going to take my chances with Quechua, but I definitely can brush up on my Spanish.  I’ve had 5 years of it in high school and college, but it’s been awhile.  So here’s my strategy!

Rosetta Stone – you’ve seen the ads!  And YES, I too want to meet an Italian model like that hopeful Midwestern farmboy.  How that’s going to happen by learning Spanish and going to Peru is unclear.  I’m using Rosetta Stone and I like it.  Using mostly point and click on your computer, I’m relearning vocabulary not by rote memorization which I did long ago, but through repetition, dozens of little modules.  You can choose if you want a balanced approach, or want to focus on speaking, writing, reading.  I’m almost through Module 2.   It’s kind of expensive, about $700 for the full thing – fortunately, I have a wonderful friend in Heather Lockert who has lent me her’s (for more from Heather, see today’s other post on Medical Preparedness).

Books – I’m also going through three useful workbooks.  Spanish Verb Tenses, Practical Spanish Grammar, and Advanced Spanish Grammar.  I like the approach and being a visual learner, they are a good complement to Rosetta Stone.

Dictionary -  For now, I’m using my Droid with the Word Magic Translator app.  I’ve been warned that the Droid will be a prime target for pickpockets, so I’m not sure if I’ll be carrying it with me as I cruise around.  Might have to get a regular paper back book too.

Radio – I’m also listening to Peruvian radio on the internet, especially Music from the Andes. I certainly don’t understand everything yet, but I think it’s important to get my brain, and listening bits of it, familiar with sounds and cadences.

Approach – For awhile, I’ve been aiming at learning with these materials about an hour a day.  That has actually been….spotty.  However, I’m inspired by the realization that I will be on the ground, in the classroom in just 6 weeks, so I need to get my butt in gear.  So, 45 minutes with Rosetta Stone, 15-30 minutes with the books.

Do any of you have any more bright ideas about how I can learn Spanish faster / better?