We woke up very early and headed out the door without
breakfast at 6am. The intention was to
get through the pass before they closed it up to continue working on it. When
we got to the pass there was a bus that was stuck and Ivan (our driver for the
time here) had to guide him through. After we got through we had a 2 hour ride
to the town of Maria Ana (if I understood it quickly where we had a quick
breakfast of bread and butter and jam and coffee or tea. After breakfast it was back on the road again
to Kuelap.
Kuelap is a fortress and residential and worship area from
pre-Incan times. The guide named Leita said the fortress was begun around 2400
years ago and the culture that lived there survived through the Incan times
into the Spanish conquistadors and failed when the conquistadors became
involved. The culture called the Chacha in Quechua allied with the Spanish
because the Incans were sort of enemies mainly on the principle that the Incas
practiced human sacrifice and the Chacha did not. The conquistadors basically
forced the culture to convert to Christianity and the high priests and those
that refused to convert were slaughtered. They found evidence of the
slaughtered being left behind in their rooms with head wounds like they were
massacred in their beds then the area was set on fire.
The main temple of the fortress did not have an actual door
but was built like a vase or glass and they used wooden ladders to get in and
out. The guide said she has worked on the excavation and was inside it though
visitors of course cannot. She described it like being in a wine bottle.
The place opened up for excavation in 2004 and mainly it
receives Peruvian visitors and those foreigners tend to be German or French she
said. I will say the place was incredibly impressive. Almost on a par with
Machu Picchu. There were hundreds of
residences and basically they have done very little work to restore the
location with only one replicated building.
After Kuelap we went back to the same restaurant we had
breakfast in and had lunch which consisted of a soup with vegetable then a
chicken leg with rice, plantain, potatoes and salad. We had lemonade to go
along with it. It was a local restaurant rather than a tourist restaurant and
the food was great.
After lunch it was back into the car for another couple
hours of driving, this time to Karajia to see the sarcophagi. The location is about a kilometer out of a
small town and as soon as we pulled in we had to walk and some locals tried to sells
us horse rides. They even followed us down telling us that we would need them for the way up. The walk down was
very muddy and it was getting very hot with the sun on our backs as we made our
way to the sarcophagi. I didn’t have a
lot of understanding as to what was going to be there but Daniela had seen
pictures of them in history books and on TV.
When we got down to the ledge where we could see them, there were 6
sarcophagi in a row on a very narrow but sheltered cliff on the mountainside.
They believe the people mummified inside them were very important with the most
important one having the red markings on the sarcophagus. They know there are mummies inside because an
explorer was able to rappel down and look in without disturbing them. There were apparently 8 up until two years
ago when a significant rainstorm knocked two of them down. They were destroyed
in the fall unfortunately. According to
the guide her grandparents grandparents told through oral tradition that there
used to be 130 of them but an earthquake destroyed most of them many years
ago. Aside from the 6 on one side there
were 4 more of children on another cliff face.
It was interesting to see them.
When we were done looking we had to climb back up to where
the horses were waiting and we decided to pay for the ride back because it was
very muddy and mostly uphill. The fun part was when the woman handling my
horse, named Felipe loosened the strap from the saddle while I was on it
looking over a wonderfully steep drop so she could adjust the saddle’s
position. Daniela rode a female horse named Rosa who was taking along a
juvenile horse through the trip. We
climbed up and got off the horses after a couple pictures then it was back into
the van for another hour and a half ride to the hotel.
We got back around 6:30pm picked our dinner menu and then
went to the room to relax for a bit and clean up a little. For dinner I had the
criole soup and spaghetti Bolognese and Daniela had a salad of potato like
vegetables and bacon followed by eggs and rice. We each had ice cream for
dessert though Daniela also had a small bit of brownie. I had coffee and she had tea. During dinner we met a Belgian couple who
were going to visit Kuelap then Gocta over the next two days. Daniela speaks
French and I think they were thankful for the conversation not in Spanish. I do
not think either of them spoke even as little Spanish as I do. She helped do some translation for them.
After dinner it was off to bed for the evening. We were both
exhausted. I think all the shaking from the dirt mountain roads were beyond
tiring.
The pictures from today can be found here.
No comments:
Post a Comment