Machu Picchu: Baksheesh works here, too

Today, a guest blogger: Dana, who just had an amazing four-day, off-the-grid expedition out of Cusco with about a dozen others from her group. The $100 trip involved some mountain biking on Day One, then hours-long mountain hikes on Days Two and Three. The end of Day Three put Dana's splinter group in Aguas Calientes, the town at the base of Machu Picchu, and the terminus for the Cusco to Machu Picchu train. On Day Four the entire group visited Machu Picchu -- but only an early-rising, adventurous subgroup got tickets to climb Huayna Picchu, which is the peak you see in most Machu Picchu photographs. The ruins sit on a flat area between two peaks, Machu, which is never photographed (you stand on it to photograph the famous gumdrop peak), and that gumdrop peak, Huayna, seen here.

Dana and I Facebook chatted for an hour today, and I'm just going to copy and paste her excited, uncapitalized, typo-ridden, run-on entries here. I could feel the wonder of her journey through the keyboard:

"hellllloooooooo. omg the past four days were amazing. o can't believe what i did mom. it was incredible and i cannot imagine not having done the trek and feeling the same way about the trip.

it was insane. very hard. but amazing.

and machu picchu was amazing.

and we climbed huayna picchu. we left our hotel at 330 am to do it. we bribed the guard with money to open the gate an hour early to hike up to machu picchu and get to the opening before everyone else. and we were the first one there. first 400 can do huayna.

and then when we got in to macchu picchu we were so lucky because it was deserted and really special, because we saw it empty for like 15 minutes before all the tourists came in. when i saw the first ruin on machu picchu i lost my breath and my eyes teared

and then three day trek before it was so crazy ahhhhhh

i wish you could have seen what we did

and the trail was crazy.

it made the whole trip worth it

i didnt shower for 5 days

It was amazing. And Machu Picchu was so perfect. I spent almost an hour just sitting on a ledge by myself and I watched Huayanapicchu go from dark to completely illuminated in the sunrise. It was magical. I'm currently gearing up to spend 11 hours through the night on a bus to go to Arequipa. SEE YOU SOON. I LOVE YOU."

www.LoriHein.com

Global Voices: Bookmark this

Dana's heading into the final weeks of her summer semester in Peru, and the group is scheduled to head to Puno for a few days of Lake Titicaca exploration. Whether they'll be able to go -- or get out if they get in -- is in doubt, as Aymara miners have been protesting a mining concession granted to a Canadian company. The protests, put on hold for a week to allow Puno residents to vote in Peru's June 5 presidential election, which placed socialist Ollanta Humala in power, were at times violent, and had effectively shut down and cut off Puno. Hundreds of tourists were stranded but did manage to get out. The road between Cusco and Puno, the road Dana's group will travel on, was blocked. Two days ago, the protesters resumed their demonstrations.

Dana's university isn't giving the students much information, so I've been trying to find current, reliable reports. A lot of what I've found are old stories reposted with new dates -- very confusing when you're trying to figure out what's happening right now. I've been reading Peruvian newspapers online, but my Spanish isn't honed enough to pick up tone and nuance, and nuance counts here, along with fact.

A few minutes ago I stumbled upon Global Voices, and I recommend that anyone with an interest in knowing what's going on in places large and small, known and obscure, all over the world, bookmark this site. I'll be visiting at least weekly.

Using a team of volunteer bloggers and translators, Global Voices aggregates news and blogs from citizen journalists worldwide. The number of countries covered is staggering, and the posts are translated into many languages, increasing the accessibility of the information. I spent an illuminating half-hour cruising the site and decided to use it as a trusted news source after I clicked on the "Sponsors" tab and saw the many respected organizations that help keep Global Voices going.

I sent Dana the Global Voices link to share with her trip leaders, as I think the site's Peruvian bloggers have their ears closer to the ground than Dana's college officials.

www.LoriHein.com

Fearless in Switzerland

A few days ago Dana and 15 of her friends had planned to jump off a cliff and paraglide over the Pacific Ocean in Miraflores, the upscale Lima suburb where she and fellow students are living for a few weeks of their six-week Peruvian edu-adventure, but Lima's crappy winter weather took the wind out of their sails. Which made momma happy.

But my relief was short-lived, as I've been informed via Facebook that the group has scouted a paragliding venue near Cusco, their next destination. Instead of jumping from a cliff and sailing over an angry, gunmetal ocean, Dana and company, when they can find a few hours off from language and culture classes, will be leaping off a mountain and sailing over Andean foothills and brown valleys dotted with Inca ruins made of really hard stone. Oh, I feel better now.

Dana's fearless. She's been a sassy ball of chutzpah since she was born and has often demonstrated this trait while traveling. Like the time she jumped off a bridge in Switzerland.

We were in Bern, a medieval idyll built astride the fast-moving, glacial-blue Aare River. The Bernese use the Aare as a natural waterpark and a big patch of grass near downtown as Mazili Beach.

People hike from Mazili up a trail to a bridge in the woods, jump off the bridge, then float down the Aare, grabbing onto metal bars at intermittent concrete exit ramps, where they pull themselves out.

The water was too swift-moving for my liking, and I told Mike and the kids I didn't think body-surfing it was a great idea. They looked at me, stripped down to their bathing suits, left me holding everybody's clothes, and followed the population of Bern up the trail to the bridge. I followed and planted myself a bit downstream from the bridge.

There were a few dozen people on the bridge when Mike, Adam and Dana marched onto it. Mike and Adam stood by the railing, looked over the edge, then backed away. Dana looked at them like they were wusses, climbed over the railing to the narrow ledge on the bridge's outer side, and jumped off. I screamed at Mike, "Get in there with her!" Mike and Adam duly ejected themselves from the bridge and were whisked away by the current. Happily, they were able to steer their bodies in Dana's direction, and I soon saw my family's bobbing heads rush by me.
I ran to the nearest exit station and jumped up and down, pointing to the grab-bar. I was petrified they'd miss it -- and succeeding off-ramps -- and get carried over the waterfall that lay downstream. When they saw me, they aimed for the ramp, joined hands, and Mike grabbed the bar. They emerged from the Aare dripping, laughing hysterically, and primed for more. Off they went up the trail and back to the bridge.

For the next hour, I sat on a rock on the riverbank and watched my family float repeatedly by. Sometimes it was hard for me to pick them out from the rest of the river-surfing crowd. Hundreds of people were in the water at any given time. Most used their bodies as their craft, but others whooshed by riding on tubes, boogy boards and rubber rafts. One family zoomed by atop a giant, inflatable plastic zebra-striped couch.

www.LoriHein.com

Phone home? LOL IDTS

Dana's heading to Peru soon for six weeks of intensive Spanish language study. I've been trying to zero in on the best ways for us to stay in touch while she's away and, after many hours of research, here's where I'm at: Facebook gets a like; cellphone gets an unlike. The phone stays home.

I've heard so many horror stories about people getting monstrous cell bills after using (or not using; more on that in a moment) their phones abroad that I wanted to find a foolproof usage method that, if Dana stuck to it, would guarantee that our bills would be merely high, but not heart-attack-inducingly high. I can't find one. With international calls and texts there are many potential layers of cost because multiple steps, carriers and middlemen are involved, and all of them add their charges to your bill.

Even if we disable the data capability on Dana's phone, and make a pact to text rather than call, I realized that just bringing the phone to Peru with international mode enabled invited big bill trouble. Even if you don't read the texts -- or emails, if you stay data-enabled, or listen to the messages in your voice mailbox -- you get charged for them being delivered to your handset. And turning your phone off is not the answer. If international-enabled, the phone still receives and stores emails, texts and voicemails, and you're charged for their transmission.

Dana's a typical 19-year-old with scores of contacts programmed into her phone, and texting is right up there with breathing. I told Dana to tell people not to call or text her while she's in Peru, but that isn't a secure enough plan: she will forget to tell some people; she will tell people by texting them as she's leaving, opening the door for dozens of "hav a gd trip" texts that she'll read in Peru; people who don't know she's gone will call or text her; people will call or text her a week before she comes home to ask when she's coming home; and on and on and on. The possibilities for hundreds of costly messages to make it to Dana's phone during its six weeks in Peru are endless. And the temptation to respond - expensively - is high.

So, no phone. It stays in a drawer in Boston until Dana gets home.

I've come up with a master communication plan that uses the Web and landlines in Peru. Here's how we'll stay in touch:

Dana can access the Web at her host families' homes, her school and at Internet cafes. We'll email, but we'll also do some real time text, audio and video chatting via iChat (we both have Macs), Skype and IM. Whenever we're online we'll set our computers to "available" in all those applications. Dana got an International Student Identity Card (ISIC) to take advantage of discounted airfare to Peru, and one of the bonuses is 60 free minutes of Skype voice credit, so in addition to Skyping online, she can spend up to an hour on talk time to my mobile or landline. In addition to her Mac, she has an iPod Touch, which she can keep in her purse all the time, even when she goes out at night, and if she happens to find herself in a hotspot, can get online to chat or send/read email. All free.

I'm also getting Dana an AT&T Virtual Prepaid Calling Card. You order online, AT&T sends access codes and dialing instructions immediately via email, and you're good to call. To enable Dana to speak with a US-based, English-speaking operator when she makes a call, I looked up AT&T's USADirect Peru access codes. From a local line in Peru, she dials that code and gets an operator who then takes her calling card info and puts the call through. She can use the AT&T approach from any landline, even her host families' home phones, and we pay the bill. (Before you buy, read the AT&T website carefully. The prepaid cards' minutes and costs are based on the cost for "state-to-state" calls; international calls ding the card at much higher rates, so delve into the details to understand how many calls/minutes you'll get when the cardholder is calling from a foreign country.)

To enable Dana to use the AT&T prepaid card from a Peruvian payphone, I'll give her money for a local, Peruvian phone card, available at shops and kiosks all over the country. Those cards "turn on" a payphone or a phone at a Telefonica del Peru outlet, then she punches in her AT&T info, the call goes through, and the card gets dinged.

Finally, we're gonna be Facebook friends. We're not Facebook friends on our existing accounts and don't want to be, but we're going to create second Facebook accounts under variants of our names, and we will be each others' only friend. We can chat freely, for free, and nobody except Facebook will know we're there. We can post and message and "talk," and we'll delete the accounts when Dana gets home. Mark Zuckerberg, I love you.

I shared my masterful, mostly free communication plan with Dana over sushi the other day. She was clearly impressed. "Wow," she said, "you've really been thinking about this."

Yup, AAMOF.

And kiddo, you can always send a postcard.

LoriHein.com

Machu Picchu: Just a pile of rocks

Dana's heading to Peru and Bolivia this summer for a semester of intensive Spanish language study. She and the other students from her college will live with Peruvian families in Lima and Cusco. The kids will spend four hours a day in class, but there will also be plenty of sightseeing. Machu Picchu, is, of course, on the list.

Most travelers set out for Machu Picchu from Cusco, a chocolate-brown city where Spanish colonial architecture sits atop ancient walls built by the Inca. Cusco is in the foothills of the Andes at about 11,000 feet, an altitude that creates oxygen deprivation problems for visitors who don't or can't take enough time to safely and gradually acclimate. I trust that the folks running Dana's university program will ensure that the students go slowly their first few days in Cusco and that their day trip to Machu Picchu is scheduled for the back rather than the front end of their Cusco stay.

Otherwise, somebody's bound to miss Machu Picchu. Somebody will be decked by altitude sickness, or soroche, and the excrutiatingly painful headache that is arguably its least pleasant and most frightening symptom. I've experienced brain-beating soroche in both Cusco and Lhasa, Tibet and a milder version in Quito, Ecuador. When your head feels like a crazed, invisible hand is attacking it with a hacksaw, sightseeing, even to one of the world's major wonders, is out of the question.

Mike and I went to Peru on a package tour that spent three days in Cusco. Luckily for me, the Machu Picchu excursion fell on the third day, by which time my soroche had passed. Each successive Cusco day brought a visit to increasingly spectacular Inca ruins. My Day One misery kept me in bed at the Holiday Inn while my tripmates visited Ollantaytambo, which I will always regret having missed, but by Day Two I felt human enough to join the tour of spectacular Sacsayhuaman, spread across a hillside overlooking the city. By Machu Picchu day, my head didn't hurt one bit -- although my stomach was nauseated and roiling from the juice of all the coca leaves I'd chewed to help dull my headache. Mike had bought me a giant plastic bag of coca leaves from a sidewalk vendor. Both natives and tourists chew the stuff all day.
One member of our tour group -- I think his name was Ed, so I'll call him Ed -- wasn't as lucky as me. Ed's soroche seized him on arrival in Cusco and didn't let go until the morning of our departure on Day Four. Ed missed Ollantaytambo, Sacsayhuaman, the rich sights of Cusco itself. And Ed missed Machu Picchu.

Early in the morning on Machu Picchu day, the day that was everyone's raison d'etre for traveling to Peru in the first place, we unafflicted tourists gathered in the Holiday Inn lobby bubbling with anticipation and excitement. The tour leader did a head count: one shy. Sadly, Ed was evidently still abed.

Then he appeared. Ed hobbled down the stairs, entered the lobby, sat in a straight-backed wooden chair, leaned his head against the wall, and began to cry. Some of us cried, too. Then we left without him.

Machu Picchu was spectacular beyond description. To see it, stand in it, revel in the knife-like, velvet-green peaks that surround it is a powerful, enduring experience.
But the glory of the experience was tempered by the knowledge that Ed, who, like us, had traveled a quarter of the globe expressly to stand in this remarkable place, wasn't there.

When we got back to the Holiday Inn, Ed was in the lobby, in the straight-backed chair, and his sad, expectant face knocked any residual joy out of us. An unspoken pact united everyone in the group. When Ed asked, "How was it?" we made our faces long and mumbled, "It was OK" and quickly dispersed to our respective rooms.

We didn't speak of Machu Picchu for the remainder of the trip.

www.LoriHein.com

Wampsutta, monkey meat and other Thanksgiving thoughts

Unless you're a Native American, Thanksgiving is a happy feast day. In Plymouth, not far from where I live, there's food and celebration. But if you look deeper, you'll also find members of the Wampanoag tribe gathered for their National Day of Mourning, held since 1970 when Frank James, a Wampanoag known as Wampsutta, was disinvited to speak at a Thanksgiving dinner when organizers discovered his speech was about the real history of relations between the so-called pilgrims and the native people whose land they landed on. Read James's speech here. No mention of turkey or fixins'.

Thanksgiving. Giving thanks for the blessing of being able to get together with others to buy, cook and eat way too much food, store it as leftovers, and, a week later, figure out what to do with the still uneaten remains. (Pitch it. If you freeze it, it will still be there next Thanksgiving.)

Allow me to use Thanksgiving as a segue into a travel post by sharing with you some of the things I've eaten around the world: monkey stew in Peru; yakburgers in Tibet; boiled, mashed manioc root softened (I swear) with human spit in the Amazon; roasted guinea pig in Ecuador; octopus in Greece; rotten black eggs in Hong Kong; gelatinous green yolk balls in Taipei; tea brewed with coca plant leaves in the Andes.

OK, I didn't really eat the manioc mess -- I pretended to take a taste as the bowl was passed around -- it was probably still full when it returned to the hands of the Yagua Indian woman who'd made it. But all of the other dishes were at least marginally palatable. Some, like the monkey and guinea pig, were culinary treats.

I can't say that for the eel chunks in broth that I was served on a train from Hong Kong to Guangzhou. And positively foul were the snake bits I found hidden in half the dishes on nearly every lazy susan set in the middle of the table in most big-city Chinese restaurants. The Chinese habit of sneaking slices of slithery serpent into my food made me turn to the Power Bars and canned beans and tuna I had in my suitcase. Otherwise I might have starved.

www.LoriHein.com

Peru: Jungle moon

We walked through the Bora indian village in the Peruvian Amazon, passing thatch-roofed, wooden huts on stilts where women tended to steaming cauldrons of mush made from manioc root and men stretched and strung whole, tanned hides of wild boar to cure in the sun.

As we neared the village's central grassy field, used for community gatherings and soccer games, children began to appear from the trees, all headed for the open-sided school that sat on a concrete slab at the field's far end. Older siblings led younger ones, and a few teenage girls shepherded younger brothers and sisters toward the school while carrying their own babies in slings on their backs. At the school, the younger kids took places at the wooden desks and benches under the open-air structure's corrugated green roof, and the older ones left to tend to chores -- fishing, washing, cooking, hunting.

We sat outside the school awhile and watched the teacher, who came to the village by boat a few times a week from the city of Iquitos downriver, as she led her class in Spanish grammar lessons.

As we walked away from the school, the kids started to sing. To the tune of "Have You Ever Seen a Lassie?" we heard "Vamos a la luna, la luna, la luna..."

We stopped and listened. A dozen small voices singing from a remote jungle school: "We're going to the moon, the moon, the moon..."

Did they know, I wondered, that man has been there?

www.LoriHein.com

A song left in the jungle

Mother Nature’s been taking the U.S. on a wild ride lately. Drought and wildfire in the Southwest and flooding rain here in the Northeast. The kids are out of school now, and they’ve commandeered the computer in my office, so I’ve set up my laptop in the kitchen, which has two glass doors and a large arched window. I write a little, but mostly I stare out at the rain. It’s become a permanence, a fixture. The rare sunny day feels odd, unfamiliar, something you vaguely remember but need time to get to know again.

I sit and type and watch the sheets of water fall beyond the kitchen door. Sometimes the sheets are faint, gray, quick cascades of small, staccato drops. Sometimes they're denser, whiter walls of fat water. These make an eerie but pleasingly fulsome sound as they wrap around the house and build to a thick, wet crescendo.

The kind of crescendo we listened to from the thatch-roofed verandah and open-sided gathering room of our jungle camp on Peru’s Momon River, an Amazon tributary. We’d made it back from a late afternoon nature walk seconds before a pregnant beige sky let loose a rain so heavy it made the brown Momon boil and the piranha jump and flip and the hammocks strung on the verandah twirl and spin into gnarled knots.

We watched the rain for hours. In the jungle, you make your entertainment, or you take it from the nature around you. The whipping, deafening skywater kept us rapt.

With rain still falling at dinnertime, we gathered around the long, wooden communal dining table and shared a pot of monkey stew. Afterward, the camp’s full complement – a group of some dozen tourists, guides and camp staff – stayed gathered on the verandah. We shared stories over bottles of local beer.

One of the cooks had a guitar, and he sang a few gentle Peruvian ballads. Then he asked, “Can anyone sing an American song?” I took the guitar and played “Leaving on a Jet Plane.”

Before I finished singing, the cook left the room. He returned with an old cassette tape recorder. “Please,” he said. “Please play again. We would like to keep your song here.” I reprised, and after I strummed the final chord, the cook rewound the tape and played a bit of it to make sure he’d captured the music. He then clicked the machine off and held it to him like a treasured thing.

Sometimes, when the rain falls heavy, I think of that wet, wonderful night and marvel that I left a song in a faraway jungle. That my voice might still be heard from time to time above the swooshes and rushes of the brown Momon is an honor. A treasured thing.

LoriHein.com

Peru: Celebrating the summer solstice

This year in New England, my corner of the world, winter yielded early to spring, which has unfolded fully into summer. The summer solstice heralds the season’s official calendrical arrival, but the days are already long, hot and bright. I wake early now to spears of gold light penetrating my slatted blinds and dawn bird song sifted and scattered by my window screen.

For ages, humans have waited, yearned, prayed for the sun’s seasonal return. They’ve made offerings and built temples to it, devised formulas and calendars foretelling its reappearance, and charted its apexes and nadirs in their skies. They’ve organized their lives, planted their crops and undertaken their voyages according to its place in their heavens.

Each year when summer spreads its rays of light and heat across my bit of Earth, I think of the great granite slab that rests atop Machu Picchu in Peru. Machu Picchu is a place of a lifetime, and every inch of it brings wonder. But the gray rock altar, hand-hewn centuries ago into strikingly powerful geometry, especially touched me. The mass sits on a cliff edge thousands of feet above the brown-green Urubamba River, and it seemed to me to be reaching, communicating beyond its stone roots into the sky and past the place where Earth’s air ends.

Indeed, the monolith’s ancient Inca carvers intended nothing less. The rounded stone spur that rises from the altar’s base is called the Hitching Post of the Sun, Intihuatana in Quechua. Here, Inca astronomers performed ceremonies to ensure the sun’s permanence. Through Intihuatana, they predicted with precision key dates, times of year and planting seasons. During solstices and equinoxes, Intihuatana’s edges align with significant geographic and geologic features in the surrounding mountain landscape, vivid proof of the Incas’ broad awareness of, reverence for and connection to the natural world they inhabited.

To celebrate June’s summer solstice, descendants of the Inca will celebrate Inti Raymi, the festival of the sun, and ancient places like Cusco and Machu Picchu will fill with natives and visitors gathered to thank the sun for continuing to shine.

Many will hike to and stand beside Intihuatana, "the place where the sun is tied," to contemplate the invisible tether that hitches a brilliant, distant life-giving orb to silent rock.

www.LoriHein.com

Peru: Puttin' on the Ritz

A river cruise from my tourist camp on Peru's Momon River, an Amazon tributary, took me to a Yagua (Yahua) indian village.

I didn't enjoy the tribal dance staged by the men in the village because their body language told me they didn't enjoy it.

The Yagua danced, sold paintings on bark, and passed around cups of a thick, beige, beer-like brew that bubbled in black cauldrons suspended over wood fires so that tour companies would keep bringing money-toting visitors. These intermittent interruptions by outsiders earn the Yagua enough income to let them stay put in their rainforest, away from the tumbledown bustle of Iquitos, the large, faded city upriver that was once home to Dutch rubber barons.

I left the dance circle and found a thatch-covered porch on stilts. On it sat the village's grandmothers, mothers and babies.

I always travel with food, usually a stack of Power Bars. They're flat, compact, they don't melt, and you can live on them if you have to.

On this day, for some reason, I had a stash of Ritz crackers in my pack instead. With their mothers' permission, I gave a cracker to each baby. They licked off the salt and gummed the crackers and bounced their legs and feet happily up and down.

That day's food supply proved fortuitous, as I doubt the babies would have known what to do with a Power Bar.


LoriHein.com

Orlando left hanging

Orlando was special. Of the staff at the Amazon Safari Camp, upriver from Iquitos, Peru, Orlando (above), was the one whose job description was to interact with the tourists. He spoke flawless English, was gracious and sociable, had a quick wit and knew everything about the great river and its surrounding jungle world.

He dressed like a city kid in jeans, football jerseys and running shoes, and he flashed a wide, white grin that charmed and disarmed. He took us along the Rio Momon, an Amazon tributary, in a sputtering wooden boat splashed with peeling turquoise paint and covered by a canopy of dried, gray tree fronds. We visited the villages of the Yagua and the Bora and watched young brown boys standing on the prows of shallow dugouts spear fish from the muddy water. We looked for snakes in the trees and took in the tumbledown hubbub of Iquitos, a shabby, backwater river port that had long ago lost the luster of its boom days as a Dutch-controlled center of rubber production. Orlando took us on daytime tramps into the rainforest to scout plants and animals and to swing on vines, and he took us on nighttime tramps to gaze in awe at the Southern Cross.

Orlando loved his rainforest world, and his relationship with it was a deep, reverent drink. A communion. But he wanted very much to leave it.

He wanted to come to the United States. In each new group of visitors to the river camp, Orlando looked for a connection, a contact, a sponsor, a benefactor, a bride. A ticket out. He romanced the single ladies and displayed his intelligence and business acumen to the men. Our group numbered about a dozen, and he focused his emigration efforts on a lovely wisp named Chris, from Denver, traveling with her mother and brother. When they thought no one was looking, Orlando and Chris would scramble up a muddy bank and disappear into the trees. Not, we presumed, to scout plants and animals or to swing on vines.

When our visit was over and Orlando deposited us at the ramshackle Iquitos docks from where we’d make our way to the airport for our flight to Lima, Chris smiled the smile of a free-spirited woman who’d had a good time on vacation, and Orlando smiled the sad smile of one who’s come to know and expect rejection. We all hugged Orlando and shook this beautiful man’s hand, and we left hoping he’d find a way to display his talents and gifts on a stage larger than the banks of the Amazon. We left him reluctantly.

A few years later, as Mike and I were painting the walls of our house, the phone rang. I answered, and the caller, a man, asked for Mike. “Tell him I’m busy,” Mike called from the living room. He was up to his elbows in paint. “Get the number, and I’ll call him back.” I asked the caller for his name and number, and the voice said, “It’s Orlando. I’m in Chelsea.”

He’d made it out of the Peruvian jungle. We talked for a minute. Orlando had married an American and lived in Chelsea, a blue collar suburb north of Boston. He was a half-hour drive from us. That he’d saved our number all these years stunned me (but shouldn’t have). In the chaos of dropcloths and paint cans and furniture piled in the middles of rooms, I found a slip of paper, wrote down Orlando’s number and told him that Mike would call him back and that we couldn’t wait to see him.

Painting done for the day, we decided to call Orlando. Invite him and his new wife over to see slides from our Peruvian adventure. (“Yes! That’s your husband swinging from vines!”) Welcome him to America. Embrace him with the same warmth and graciousness with which he’d embraced us when we were in his country.

We looked for the slip of paper I’d written his number on, but we couldn’t find it. We looked for days. We didn’t know Orlando’s last name, so we couldn’t call information for the number. We’d sit, with a sick feeling, knowing he was waiting for our call, and we’d get up and look again.

We never found the number. Whenever we think of Orlando now, the memories are bittersweet. We met a good human being who reached out to us, and he thinks we turned away, left him hanging.

The Hitching Post of the Sun

These days, I have to spare my old bones and joints some wear and tear if I want to survive marathon training and make it to the starting line in one piece. (Seven days to go. Please point your telepathic antennae my way and send all the good karma you can muster. I’ll need it.) So, a few times a week, I trade road or trail running for pool running. I look pretty goofy as I slide, encased in bright blue Styrofoam, into one of the fitness center pool’s two swim lanes. My aqua jogging belt is nearly as big as my entire torso, and my Styrofoam booties look like blue bricks strapped to my feet.

There have been occasional glory days during this New England winter, when our piece of the world was pure and hushed, draped in glistening white, adorned with crystalline icicles and tree limbs transformed into elegant, lacy works of art. But for the most part, our winter was long and mean. And dark.

I go to the pool in the morning and, for months now, have been doing my laps while gazing out the pool area’s windows into an inky sky still peppered with the last stars of the night shift. There were mornings when the moon looked in at me as I pushed my way through the water. Being in the pool with the other early risers, nearly all senior citizens, was like being in a secret, liquid club. We took our exercise under fluorescent lights, gazing out at a twinkly black world that would just start to wipe the sleep out of its eyes as we hit the showers.

A few weeks ago, something changed, and we all felt it. The power of the sun. Tina, the lifeguard, turned the fluorescent lights off, and the pool was lit only by golden morning rays. Fingers of light. The sun’s long, radiant arms stretched through the windows and into the water and onto our grateful faces. In the pool that day, exercise became universally secondary to tilting one’s face into the sun, eyes closed, and savoring the heat of the embrace. “It’s so wonderful!” cried one woman in a flowery bathing cap that protected her hairdo. “It’s like being on vacation in the Caribbean!” Her friend nodded and laughed, “It is! Let’s enjoy it, then, because it’s probably as close as we’ll get!” The two women left the circle of seniors doing aerobics to the Beach Boys' Help Me Rhonda and stood still, smiling, in a shallow corner of the pool, bodies turned toward a floor-to-ceiling window, savoring their quick trip to the sun.

That day was a herald. The sun was telling us he’d be back soon to warm our corner of the earth. We were to get more snow – we still might – but that day, we were on the receiving end of a promise that spring was making its way back to us.

For eons, humans have waited, yearned and prayed for the sun’s seasonal return. They’ve made offerings, built temples, devised formulas and calendars foretelling its reappearance and apex in the sky. They’ve organized their lives, planted their crops and undertaken their voyages according to its place in their heavens.

I thought of a great granite altar I’d seen atop Machu Picchu in Peru. Machu Picchu is a place of a lifetime, and every inch of it fascinates and brings wonder. But this gray slab of rock sitting at a cliff edge had particularly touched me. It seemed to be reaching beyond its stone roots into the atmosphere, trying to communicate with the sky. Indeed, its ancient Inca carvers intended nothing less. The rounded stone spur that rises from the altar’s base is the Hitching Post of the Sun, Intihuatana in Quechua. Here Inca astronomers performed ceremonies to ensure the sun’s permanence and predicted key times of year and planting seasons. During equinoxes and solstices, Intihuatana’s edges align with significant geographic features in the surrounding mountain landscape, hinting at the Incas’ broad awareness of and reverence for the world they inhabited.

In June, at the summer solstice, the descendants of the Inca will celebrate Inti Raymi, the festival of the sun, and ancient places like Cusco and Machu Picchu will fill with natives and visitors gathered to thank the sun for continuing to shine. Many will stand beside Intihuatana, "the place where the sun is tied," and contemplate the invisible tether that hitches a life-giving orb to silent rock.

Perhaps I’ll be in the pool that day, lifting my face to the rays reaching through the windows and into the water.



Where shall we go next?


Book proceeds are still going to tsunami relief. The next donation will go to UNICEF, but I will investigate other organizations needing assistance in the wake of the March earthquake and will keep you informed by updating the January 2 post. Thank you.

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