Casa Ollanta, Ollantaytambo. 20.49.
I’m feeling much restored after a full day’s rest. As fun as it has been to have an extremely active holiday – chasing condors, salvaging boats and traveling the length and breadth of Peru – I definitely needed a break before the long journey home. After all, I will soon be back to the grind of lesson planning and curriculum design, so an ease-in to normality isn’t such a bad idea.
It was not an entirely unproductive day. I checked in to my flight back to Lima, packed my rucksack with the things I’m not going to need anymore and bought some supplies. I also managed to do a little wayfinding for tomorrow’s hike up to the Inti Punku – and it is as well that I did so, as the main road to the only bridge across the Urubamba River is out due to maintenance work. There is a side street that leads there by another road, but it took a couple of attempts to find, which will save me some time tomorrow morning.
I scouted out the route ahead with the zoom lens (which I probably won’t take with me tomorrow, as it is a pretty monstrous ascent). It looks to be a fairly straightforward climb, though it does zigzag a bit past the first slope. High up on the ridge, only just visible against the white sky, was my target: the Sun Gate itself. Google and AllTrails estimate a three to four hour climb, making it a seven hour round trip, there or thereabouts. An early start, then. I will need to be prepared. Plenty of water, sun cream, a few snacks and – most importantly – I will need to take it slow. I’m a regular mountain goat on mountain trails back in Europe, but we’re already over a thousand metres up here, and I’m not foolish enough to race up the trail at this altitude.
I sat up on a boulder just beyond the trailhead for a while and watched the world go by. The PeruRail came chugging by, moving at a crawl along the ancient rails. No wonder it takes so long to reach Aguas Calientes, the town at the feet of Machu Picchu, some fifty kilometres to the west.
I was curious about the cost of getting to Aguas Calientes, even if I had no intention of seeing Machu Picchu itself, if only because the famous Inca citadel lies within the same cloud forests that form the border of Manu. In short, I wanted to wind the clock back a week.
The train is clearly half the experience, as a one-way ticket price starts at 84$ for the unsociable hours, rising into the hundreds if you end up on the luxurious Hiram Bingham train. Tickets for Machu Picchu itself – for the curious – aren’t actually as expensive as the train fare, but they do need booking months in advance. When I checked the website, the earliest available slot was the 6th June. So it clearly can be done for considerably cheaper than the tour companies suggest. This is good to know, in case I ever get the urge to see the place one day… if there should ever be an ebb in the flow of the hordes of tourists. Somehow, I doubt that day will ever come.
The animal spectacular that was Manu, Paracas and the Pántanos de Villa is over. Ollantaytambo is full of exotic people, who have traveled from all around the world to begin their journey toward one of the new wonders of the world, but it is not exactly teeming with exotic species. Or perhaps I’ve simply acclimatised so quickly that the exotic has become normal.
I can now map my surroundings by sound. The birds, I mean. When I first arrived in Lima, I was lost. It was like being in a country where you don’t speak the language. After three weeks, however, my hearing has adjusted, and I can tell most of the common species by sound – in particular, eared doves, rufous-collared sparrows, Chiguanco thrushes, tanagers and hummingbirds. As such, I was able to identify a different hummingbird this morning on my way out, purely because it didn’t sound like a sparkling violetear at all.
I suppose it’s the same trick that I have always used with accents. I’ve recently stopped trying to alter my Spanish accent to the Peruvian, largely because it makes my Spanish sound less Spanish and more gringo. I didn’t grow up learning to use the letter S in place of the letters C and Z and I won’t start now.
Changing my accent isn’t something new. I do it all the time, even in English. The register I use varies wildly, depending on my location. The accent I employ when I’m dealing with parents at work is very different to the one I use when hailing a taxi, or when I find myself in the north of England. A friend of mine once said I was the only southerner he’d met who made their accent more northern – the reverse is a lot more common.
I may be a language teacher, but I’m not really a proper linguist – not in the strictest, grammarian sense. What I am is a pretty decent mimic, which makes accent acquisition relatively straightforward, and a good accent can mask a number of errors. But I’m done trying to adapt my Spanish out here. It’s taken years and a lot of listening to get my castellano to the stage where I can dupe even native speakers into thinking I’m a Spaniard, provided they hear me before they see me, and I’m not about to let go of that gift over an awkward desire to blend in.
I haven’t got as much reading done out here as I’d planned. I’ve been so busy during the days and I’ve fallen asleep within minutes of my head hitting the pillow each night, which hasn’t exactly made for good reading time. I fell asleep listening to Witi Ihimaera’s Whale Rider. It didn’t grab me like I hoped it might. Tonight I’ll give Michelle Paver’s Rainforest a try. She never misses – and now, perhaps, I will be able to picture the world she describes with my own memories.
Wish me luck on the hike tomorrow – I’m going to need it as much as I will need the oxygen! BB x
The Book of Barnabas 