Travel – Page 3 – Deidre Adams

Peru, Part 9 – Between Puno & Cusco

I have to backtrack just a bit, because I forgot some good photos from the road trip to Cusco. The one time we didn’t have a private van for just our small group, we traveled in a stylish tour bus with luxurious seats and beverage service. This was the restroom for the bus station, probably the nicest one I saw on the whole trip.

We stopped in a small town called Pukara. This was the first time we saw “toritos,” pairs of small pottery bulls that adorn the rooftops and other parts of most houses in this region. They keep the house safe and bring health and well-being to the occupants.

Pukara (“fortress” in Quechua) is an important archaeological site. They have a small museum, Museo Litico Pukara, where we saw some some of the ancient sculptures from the site. Wall signage describes the devoradores (“devourers”), sculptures which are holding heads and were at one time interpreted to depict rituals of human sacrifice, although some now argue that no one knows if that’s truly the case. Another sign describes Pachamama:

It is an ancient custom of the peoples of the Altiplano to hold rituals, both throughout the year as well as on feast days. An example of a ritual conducted frequently would be the rite of fertility known as the Pachamama, or payment to the Mother Earth. For the peoples of the Andes, their cosmology was intertwined with many aspects of their daily lives.

Another sign describes the arrival of the Spaniards and the building of a Catholic church in the center of the ancient ceremonial center. Then they began the “extirpation of idolatries,” a campaign during which colonial authorities “destroyed or defaced most of the monoliths and effigies considered to be pagan idols.”

After more time on the road, we stopped for a nice lunch and met more llamas. Did you ever see the movie The Emperor’s New Groove? (About the only later Disney movie I really enjoyed.) For one thing, I now know why there was a character in the movie named Pacha. But more importantly, if you saw the movie, you would be familiar with the character Emperor Kuzco (played by David Spade), who is a self-absorbed young king who gets turned into a llama. When I saw this guy (below), I realized from his antics that whoever animated Kuzco had spent some time studying llamas.

I was about to take another picture of him, when he decided he’d had enough and proceeded to charge me:

At least some of the animals in Peru have better manners.

January 30th, 2013|Travel|3 Comments

Peru, Part 8 – Cusco

Cusco collage - ©Deidre Adams

I must apologize for the big gap in posting. Not that it’s any excuse, but I took so many pictures in Cusco that in sorting through them, I completely lost the ability to edit and became somewhat immobilized. The last couple of months, I’ve been spending every available minute in the studio and have a lot of new work to show, but I still want to talk about a few more Peru topics because this trip made such a big impression on me.

Cusco is such an interesting place, I could easily spend a couple of weeks just there. The architecture is a mix of Spanish colonial and the solid, surprisingly modern looking blockiness of Inca stonework. Cusco was the capital of the Inca Empire from about the 13th century until the Spanish conquest in the 1530s. (Lest you feel too sorry for the Incas, though, note that they built their own empire through the conquest of others who were there before them, a time-honored tradition throughout the history of mankind.) The Spanish destroyed many of the Inca buildings, but because the cut stone architecture was so well built, they kept the foundations of many of them and built their own structures on top of them.

The Spaniards destroyed the Coricancha (Temple of the Sun), once the most important temples in the Inca Empire, whose walls and floors were once covered in gold. They used the foundation to build their Church and Convent of Santo Domingo.

Although many theories have been proposed, we don’t know exactly how the precise cutting and fitting of the stones was done. We do know that it was a painstaking process, and the results were walls with such perfect joins that no mortar was necessary, and famously, the stones are “so closely fitted that a knife blade cannot be jammed between them.” (Inka Architecture.) Examples of this stonework are ubiquitous in Cusco, and more fine examples can be seen at the nearby Sacsayhuaman complex.

César explains the history of the Inca stonework

Other attractions in Cusco include many fine restaurants, museums, and plenty of shops for the tourists. For a shopping experience with more of a local flavor, the San Pedro Market offers an abundance of goods that are a feast for the eyes as well as the stomach. We visited early in the morning, before it was officially open. Things were quiet, and many of the vendors seemed to be trying to catch a last little snippet of sleep before the onslaught of shoppers.

There was also a special section of the market that gave me a bit of a fright. I’ve separated these photos out so as not to catch anyone off guard.

[Show thumbnails]

Finally, here are more of the many sights of Cusco.

January 29th, 2013|Travel|2 Comments

Peru, Part 7 – Alejandro Flores

Alejandro Flores shows local plant he uses for natural dyeing

In 2005, Taquile was added to the UNESCO Proclamation of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, a list that recognizes the function and values of living cultural expressions and practices, and seeks to raise awareness of the need to safeguard them. The criteria for inclusion on the list includes “proof of excellence in the application of the skill and technical qualities displayed” as well as demonstrated “outstanding value as masterpiece of the human creative genius.” Taquile was selected for its “cultural space … and its textile art, which is produced as an everyday activity by both men and women, regardless of their age, and worn by all community members” (Taquile and its Textile Art).

Alejandro Flores Huatta is one of the more well-known textile artists on Taquile. He was selected by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian to assist with curating the “All Roads Are Good: Native Voices on Life and Culture” exhibition in 1994. We didn’t know any of this before our visit, but during our boat trip over, Susan talked with another passenger who happened to have one of his weavings with him, which Susan admired, and thus began the quest to find him.

Although it seems that Alejandro gets the credit, the weaving business is a family endeavor. During our visit, Alejandro set up the loom, but then it was his wife who proceeded to sit down to do the actual weaving for the demonstration. Another family member finishes the fringe on the ends of the woven pieces and handles the money when a visitor makes a purchase.

The traditional process of weaving is low-tech and labor-intensive, involving solid color stripes with an intricately patterned center strip that makes the addition of each row of weft very time-consuming. It can take many days to complete one piece.

As is typical on this island where it’s the men who are known for knitting, Alejandro himself is a knitter. The Taquilean technique is different from the usual I’ve seen. The men feed the yarn from around their necks and instead of their fingers, they use their thumbs to wrap the yarn around the needle to create the stitch. They are amazingly fast in the execution of their complicated patterns. After putting on his glasses, Alejandro proceeded to demonstrate the technique for us.

Textile Arts of Taquile Island, Peru explains the traditions of the caps worn by the men:

During the latter part of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century, unmarried men wore a finely-knit cap (ch’ullu soltero) with a colored base and white top, without earflaps. Married men, especially those who had completed community service, wore a red and navy blue striped knit cap (pintay ch’ullu), filled with design motifs along its length. Some men wore a ch’ullu oreja (also called ninri ch’ullu), an Aymara- or Lake Titicaca–style knit cap that has earflaps, which usually includes numerous multicolored rainbow-like rows.

The Flores family is unique on Taquile because their weavings are done with fibers colored only with natural dyes. Alejandro showed us the materials used to make the dyes, along with samples of the dyed wool. This one is cochinilla (cochineal), which comes from an insect that lives and feeds on the prickly pear cactus.

Alejandro demonstrates the color by crushing one of the dried insects

Starbucks Coffee recently stepped into a big controversy by using cochineal to color their strawberry Frappuchinos, but what people didn’t know is that it’s been used for centuries to add red coloring to textiles, cosmetics, and yes, even food. This great article from Business Insider has more on the process.

Unfortunately, our memories didn’t serve as I’d hoped, and I haven’t been able to discover the name of the small orange-flowered plant at the top of this post or the green-leaved one (below, in the image gallery). If anyone reading this happens to know, I’d love it if you’d leave a comment.

The naturally-dyed woven pieces made by the Flores family have a distinctive color palette. This is the one I decided I had to have:

(click for full image)

The family doesn’t sell their work in the local cooperative store in the plaza, and neither do they export it as far as we could tell. They don’t label the pieces, either, so it would seem they don’t make a huge effort to promote it anywhere. We thought that they must do a very nice business simply through word of mouth, but in researching for this post, I discovered that Alejandro Flores is just as well known for his hospedaje (lodging house) as for his textiles.

November 24th, 2012|Travel|2 Comments