The road from Nazca to Cusco is long, desolate, and spectacularly beautiful. It transitions from a dry, hot, and mostly lifeless desert ecosystem to a cold and wet mountain ecosystem filled with vicuñas, vizcachas, and alpacas. After riding in an oven for so long, I now had to ride through a giant refrigerator. The top is particularly beautiful. I passed by dozens of small, natural lakes filled with fish and exotic waterfowl and backed by snow-capped mountains. Except for the obvious exception of the road, most of this area is untouched by man, left to the whims of nature.
The road keeps climbing and climbing and then climbing some more after all of the previous climbing. When I finally topped out I rolled over 14,900 feet only to discover that the top was a actually a large rolling pampa and I topped out over 14,900 feet four mour times over some 40 or 50 kilometers. It was sleeting and snowing at the top but the frozen precipitation didn't stay frozen so I didn't get to travel through quite the winter wonder-land that I wanted to. Being that the pampa at the top was so large, I ended up camping at 14,600 feet which is most definitely cold.
The next morning something disastrous happened: my tent broke. Like almost all tents, my tent has collapsible poles which form an exoskeleton to the structure of my tent. Without the exoskeleton intact the structure fails and this was, alas, exactly the problem that I faced. I was still in the middle of nowhere when my tent failed but I thought that I could McGuyver a solution to this problem so I wasn't too worried about my situation, yet. That day, I finally reached the point where I descended more than I ascended after only 250 kilometers of mostly uphill riding. I still couldn't reach civilization though. I was still at over 13,000 feet with a little more climbing to do when it started to rain so I decided to figure out how to make my tent stand. I ended up doubling over a bicycle spoke and a piece of fence I had clipped off and inserted them into the broken pole with the hope of erecting some semblance of a shelter from the cold rain. Inside the tent, I covered my sleeping bag with a large plastic tarp I had acquired and hoped that the tent wouldn't collapse from the wind that was making it lean to one side. Getting wet and getting all of my winter gear wet in this kind of environment would lead to disastrous consequences.
I was able to tough out the night and stay dry but I knew that I was going to have to do something about my tent soon or I would have to catch a ride to the nearest city and try to find a solution there. When I made it to the small town of Challhuanca, I finally made it to a place with ferreterias and internet, let alone electricity and plumbing. When I was able to check my email after a long absence from civilization I discovered some very unpleasant news. Someone had, somehow, stolen my debit card number and was using it to make cash withdrawls in Virginia, unbeknownst to me. The bank had, in response, frozen my bank account and filed fraud documents so I could recuperate the money that was taken from me. This was especially worrisome to me not because of the identity fraud but because my debit card is my only convenient access to my bank account and I was running low on cash after going for a long time without having access to an A.T.M. machine. To make matters worse for me, the simple hardware solution I had devised for fixing my tent only made the problem worse and rendered my tent completely non-functional. I had encountered a problem which I couldn't fix on the fly and I had to do what I least like to do on this trip which is hitch a ride.
The ride from Challhuanca to Abancay was mercifully cheap, only costing $3 for almost 150 kilometers of road. Defeated by the force of entropy, I had to accept the boxed-in view of beautiful mountain scenery from inside a cramped van instead of the panoramic views I was so used to. In Abancay, I was able to contact the bank and my mother and clarify exactly what was happening with my bank account and whether I could still use my card in A.T.M. machines. Fortunately, I was able to get more cash out of A.T.M. machines. I just couldn't use my card for credit card transactions. As Abancay is not a good place to deal with the ongoing banking and tent issues. I caught another ride to Cusco since it has more developed tourism infrastructure and is the location of a U.S. Consular office. I have been stuck in Cusco for about a week and a half now, impatiently waiting for a new debit card and replacement poles for my tent. I can't wait to get back on the road again.
As a tourist who has had the unique opportunity to pass through parts of Peru with absolutely no tourism infrastructure, I have seen what I think is the authentic Peru. All the tourist areas like Cusco, Huaràz, Nazca, Huacachina, and parts of Lima have these superficial façades of luxury that are hard to find elsewhere. Moreover, the people in these areas seem to smile at you as if their smile were only part of an elaborate mask. In all of my travels thus far, I have discovered that one is much more likely to be assaulted, robbed, or conned in these areas than outside of them.
The tourist areas stand in stark contrast to the countryside. The people in these areas are poor but they seem like they are but a stones-throw from sainthood because they are so honest, friendly, and uncorrupted by civilization. I saw many people dressed in indigenous clothing and living a way of life similar, no doubt, to how they have lived for thousands of years herding alpacas. When the herd would get to close to the road the alpaca shepherds would hurl a rock towards the edge of road with a sling weapon which they have probably used for thousands of years. The people in the mountains are mostly bilingual, speaking Quechua amongst themselves and Spanish among strangers. There were places I stopped to eat something where large groups of children would come stare at me in amazement. This was annoying but in all fairness to the kids, I was probably the first blue-eyed devil they had ever seen in their lives. Now that I am in Cusco, I miss travelling through the countryside. I have to worry that people I encounter are just masked conmen trying to liberate me from my money.
I don't mean to say that Cusco is a shithole or anything. There are some very nice restuarants that are very cheap compared to the U.S. or Europe. There is also a small measure of authenticity to the city. One can go to the central marketplace and purchase not only San Pedro cactus but also pure powdered mescalline and ayahuasca. I haven't found any fresh milk yet but I am still looking for it. In the countryside, the milk is so fresh and unprocessed that Bessie is mooing out back and you can see curds floating in the top. Once I, finally, hit the road again I hope to pass through more places that are similar to the small villages between Nazca and Cusco.
My thirtieth birthday is fast approaching at the end of this month. I am not exstatic about the prospect of turning thirty but aging is a fact of life. Like many thirty-year-olds I am taking stock of my life and the world around me. So many of my friends are getting married and having children that it is kind of alarming. I remain blissfully single. I have come to several conclusions about what kind of paths I am going to pursue from this point in the road. Since I generally prefer travelling of the Odyssian variety rather than the wam-bam-thank-you-mamn variety I have decided that I don't have enough time to get married, have children, and get a soul-crushing job in corporate America and a house with a white-picket fence. I will never work more than 40 hours a week from now on. All the time wasted while working is better wasted travelling or pursuing your passions. In some ways, I am a little boy who refuses to grow up. In other ways I am a fully mature grown man. While America was spending money like a junkie with a stolen credit card, I was saving money. I paid off my college debt a week before I graduated from the money I earned while working the entire time I was in school. Yes, I have no personal career ambition but I don't have to since I have no debt at all. My ambition is to live as stress-free a life as possible and to spend as much time as possible pursuing my passions. The American dream was never a dream to me but always a nightmare even before it was exposed as the sham that it is. Rather than focus my energy on consuming resources I am going to pursue leisure and savor every last moment I have on this planet. I am only hoping that the prolonged recession that we are going through helps people realign their priorities away from consumption and towards leisure. It would be nice to feel like I am part of a community rather than feel like an outsider as I do now.
One of the things that I am extremely passionate about is music. For me music is a holy, sacred thing. To me, all of the modern commercial pop acts aren't just making bad music. They are committing blasphemy by soiling the airwaves with the audial flatulence that they have the gall to call music. I love the way good music inspires people across borders. It has no respect for the artificial boundaries that humanity has created. I love it when someone in some far-flung corner of the globe hears music from another part of the world and wants to recreate the sound and then make it their own. Rock and roll may have been born in the United States but it, in no respect, belongs to it. In that same respect, I have to say that I am completely inspired by Latin music in general but more specifically cumbia. I think I am going to make it a point of mine to spread my love for this beautiful music as much as possible. I am even thinking of trying to start a cumbia band when I return to the states a couple of years from now.
My minor obsession with cumbia has caused me to spend countless hours online trying to find out information about my favorite cumbia bands and the evolution of its sound. Sadly, there don't seem to be a lot of good sources for information about cumbia online. I have, nonetheless, been able to get to the point where I feel that I have a pretty good understanding of the roots of cumbia and I would like to share that with all of my loyal readers. In the interest of brevity, I will shortly discuss some of the better known pioneers of cumbia through the 1970s.
Cumbia had developed over centuries on the northern coast of Colombia but was considered a lower class music until the great maestro Lucho Bermudez recorded in the early 40s what was the first comercially successful cumbia named Prende la Vela. It was through the efforts of the first generation of cumbia bandleaders and composers that cumbia became more than just a regional music. Besides Lucho Bermudez, other noted musicians and composers from this first generation of cumbia include Jose Barros and Pedro Laza. I think I should point out that Colombia was an important center of Latin music at the time and still is. Lucho Bermudez was from Colombia but he lived in Mexico and Cuba where he met such Latin music greats as Perez Prado and Celia Cruz. Sonora Matancera, the famous Cuban group where Celia Cruz got her start, recorded at least one composition by Jose Barros.
Cumbia was still relatively isolated to Colombia until the sixties when groups like Sonora Dinamita and Los Corraleros de Majagual toured Latin America, spreading cumbia's popularity. I like the name of the Corraleros so much that I want my band's name to be Los Fumaleros de Ganjamual. By the end of the decade, Peru had taken the cumbia and created a very new sound. As far as I know, the Peruvian cumbia bands were the first such bands to use an electric guitar in cumbia. The sound of Peruvian coastal cumbias sounded like a fusion of surf music (The Ventures and Dick Dale not the Beach Boys) and cumbia. Los Destellos is probably the best known of these Peruvian cumbia pioneers but there were many other bands providing their contributions to cumbia.
In the eastern part of Peru, there was yet another sub-genre of cumbia that was created during the sixties. It is the cumbia amazonica of Juaneco and Los Mirlos. I still can't verbalize the difference between their music and that of the other Peruvian cumbia bands but it is definitely different than the rest.
Cumbia, to this day, continues to grow and branch off into new music but its sound still has links to the early days of the cumbia. Discos Fuentes, which was responsible for the recording of a large majority of early cumbias, is still in operation today. Like all music, there is a lot of bad, commercialized cumbia out there but there are also many groups that are still producing a lot of good music.
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