A sip of Incan culture; Experiential course contrasts traditional and present-day Perú
By Rebecca Allen
Part 3
Inca
health tea: This tea, brewed from the coca plant, combats altitude
sickness and gastrointestinal ailments, and acts as a harmless, caffeine-free
stimulant. Our Western hotel in Cusco (altitude 11,100 feet) provided
this complimentary tea in the lobby around the clock. On the Inca Trail,
our guides served the tea with every meal because of its medicinal purposes
that helped us acclimate to the high elevation. The indigenous people
of the mountains drink this tea with the regularity that many Americans
drink coffee.
Peru's indigenous people manage to maintain many aspects of their traditional culture: terraced farming, woven ponchos, steep mountain paths for transportation and avenues of communication. This is a unique contrast with the city dwellers who profit from tourists by remembering their Incan ancestry, but who simultaneously dismiss today's mountain people as worthless.
Each morning on the Inca Trail, a porter would stand outside our tents offering hot tea. It was difficult for many of us to be waited on in such a way. Our group was shocked when Cesár, our guide for the Inca Trail, announced that 60 porters would accompany the 28 of us on our 26-mile, four-day trek. Each porter can legally carry 25 kilograms; each of us could turn over eight kilograms of our personal belongings for a porter to haul up and down the steep mountain passes. Along the way, the porters saw the same ruins, climbed up and down the same Dead Woman Pass and slept under the same brilliant Milky Way that we did. But we probably did not eat the same food and neither did we speak the same language, though there were some shared attempts to communicate in broken Spanish. Our soft feet wore heavy hiking boots that rubbed blisters by the second day; the porters literally ran down treacherous rocky paths wearing sandals made from rubber tires. Interacting with the porters was a challenge, though not for lack of interest or will. They seem to accept the role forced upon them by Perú's aching economy, and they perhaps grow weary of small talk with gringos, people from the United States.
We
joked that one of our few marketable skills as a group was to sing.
The name of the last campsite where we stayed on the trail translates
from Quechua to mean "cloud city," and after watching the
fog fill the valleys below us, we sing all the hymns we know under the
stunning southern sky. Someone murmurs to me that the porters have never
heard four-part singing before. We end with "Praise God from Whom,"
and the next day, we arrive at Inti Punco, the Sun Gate. Machu Picchu
perches below us, ancient and serene. Hundreds of years have not destroyed
the unyielding beauty of these stones. Like the people of Perú,
they contain stories both told and untold, stories of contradiction
and paradox and possibility and survival. We stood taking pictures and
congratulating ourselves as the porters ran past us, into the valley
toward those ancient stones.
