Turtles

The Green Turtle, or La Turtuga Verde in Spanish, lives in the Ocean, and on the Galapagos Islands of Ecuador.

Hi Robbie!

In answer to your question about turtles in Peru: Yes, there are indeed turtles in Peru and Ecuador! Both countries have sea turtles along the Pacific Ocean coast, and there are at least thirteen different species of river turtles in the Amazon Rainforest, which makes up a large part of Peru, and about a third of Ecuador´s land.

I´ve only spent one evening by the ocean in Lima, Peru, and while I was in the Amazon Rainforest in Ecuador, we didn´t see any turtles. Many of the animals are afraid of people, and are difficult to spot. I was surprised about this, because I thought we would see the jungle animal life everywhere. We did see some monkeys, caiman (they are like small crocodiles), tarantulas (on the lodge floor!), and lots of really beautiful colorful birds.

You can learn more about turtles at National Geographic Kids.

A Walk to Torre Torre

Huancayo, Peru

If you follow Avenida Giraldez to the northeast out of Huancayo, the bustling traffic turns to dusty gravel roads, earthen shacks, sheep, stray dogs, and poor shantytown villages. The trail heads uphill through stands of eucalyptus and wildflowers to the red rock formations known as Torre Torre.

Calling all kids...

...(Or old kids): What would you like to know about life in Peru and Ecuador? Click on the Comments link at the bottom of this post (or any post) and type a question for me, and I will do my best to answer it in pictures and words. You will get the most interesting response if you make your question as specific as possible. Students: this is worth a BONUS point! (on your summer grade).

Images of Huancayo

Huancayo, Peru

Here are some images I shot in Huancayo the last couple of days. Enjoy!

Bringing Art to Los Niños

Huancayo, Peru

Today after weaving class, I accompanied my fellow student, Leslie, to the Aldea Infantil el Rosario orphanage here in Huancayo, where she has been volunteering for the last couple of weeks. Last week she studied spinning and dying wool with natural dyes. This week she´s teaching it to the kids at the orphanage.

Today they were dying yarn with red onion skins that had been prepared by yesterday´s group, and they prepared a new dye for tomorrow's group - with eucalyptus leaves.

The kids loved it, and for young lives that have been filled with sadness, they were quite full of love and life. They loved my camera, and went crazy taking photos of each other (these are their photos).

Staring into 25,000 Pre-Inca Faces

(15 July)

Lima, Peru

El Museo Larco

Mochica. 1 - 800 A.D. Apogee Epoch Warrior wearing elaborate headdress, a necklace and a shirt of metal plates

Don Rafael Larco Hoyle was born in 1901 to a wealthy sugar hacienda family in Peru. He became intensely interested in exploring the archaeological record of ancient Peru, and became an avid collector of Pre-Colombian ceramic pieces. Larco´s thousands of artifacts eventually ended up in a museum in an old viceroy mansion on Avendia Bolívar in Lima, where I am standing one hour before closing, staring up and down and across the endless shelves of the storage room at over 25,000 faces preserved in ceramics from several Pre-Inca civilizations across Peru.

I stare back over two thousand years at faces of endless variety - sad, forlorn, confused, tired, enraged, on the war path; some appear to have African facial features, others appear to be wearing a Spanish nun´s robes. They sit, frozen in time, still figures on a dusty shelf, until you look them in the eye, and their world comes to life before you, the ocean breeze and the buzz of traffic seeping through the open window.

Weaving in Huancayo

Huancayo, Peru

I arrived in Huancayo early Monday morning by bus from Lima. My teacher is Margarita, a little old indigenous lady from one of the local villages here in the Montaro Valley of the Central Andes. She and Mercedes come at 9am to teach me and Leslie, my fellow student who comes from Australia by way of living in Japan for the last three years.

Margarita

Margarita and Mercedes are native speakers of Quechua, the indigenous language, but they also speak Spanish with a thick accent, which is hard to make out. We manage to communicate in Spanish, but the learning process is largely visual and tactile. As a teacher, I always find it important to periodically put myself in the student´s shoes again - to remind myself of what my students face when they are struggling to understand or learn something new. Knowing absolutely nothing about this process, and having limited communication abilities, I am definitely finding myself in those shoes!

We are learning a method using what is called a Backstrap loom. What we are producing is a little thin belt or wristband that is woven tightly with thin yarn or thread in geometric designs. The backstrap loom is so called because it is stretched between a post on one end, and the weaver´s waste on the other. The loom is tightened by leaning back, and loosened by leaning forward. The mechanics of how the colored threads are manipulated on the loom is quite complicated. Our first lesson started yesterday with Margarita and Mercedes rather quickly stringing the colored thread on the loom for us. It was all happening very quickly, and I was panicking to keep up with what was going on. I was sure I would never be able to follow along, and that this was all one big mistake.

Once the loom was set up, and the weaving process begun, Margarita handed the reins over to me. There are several steps to the actual weaving process, which repeat over and over. There is a step where one has to reconfigure the order and layers of the colored threads, which gets very complicated. She began by showing me each step at a time, and having me do it. I was entirely lost in the process, but followed what she showed me to do. After an hour or so, the rhythm began to take hold of my fingers, and little by little, the process began to reveal itself. After our second class this morning, I am nearly finished with my first piece, and tomorrow we will go over the setup process, so I can learn how to begin a new weaving on my own.

The ladies are quite fun, and I joke around with Margarita a bit - mostly about what a blockhead she has to teach. Yesterday as we were working, Leslie was making good progress, and she remarked to Mercedes that "That one is learning" (meaning Leslie), but that "This one can´t do anything!" We all had a good laugh, and I think that was the point when they realized that Leslie and I could understand what they said in Spanish. Now they speak mostly in Quechua.

Weaving in the Jungle

(13 July)

Rio Napo, Ecuador

On our last morning in the jungle, at my request, Dennis takes us out to a little hut down river

where he teaches us how the natives weave using palm leaves and branches...

A Shaman Cleansing

(11 July)
Rio Napo, Ecuador

Wednesday night offers the opportunity to visit an indigenous shaman for a cleansing ritual, which is supposed to rid the body of evil spirits and impurities. It will cost each person $5 to go, and the catch is that one person must be willing to be cleansed. Harvey, Jason (another Spanish student from Ohio), and I are the only ones who go, and Jason offers to be do the ritual.

Now, this shaman happens to live, very conveniently, a quarter of a mile downstream from the lodge, and shows up once a week - my guess is - to perform more rituals for tourists than for natives (who don´t even live in the close vicinity). I´m doubting the authenticity of this, and feeling awkward about the exploitative nature of viewing a ritual like this out of sheer curiosity, and I imagine the shaman does not particularly enjoy the position of taking money from tourists to give them an exotic little demonstration of what is, for his people, something ancient and sacred, but he accepts the lucrative opportunity as an unfortunate reality of contemporary life here.

...So we paddle through the night until we reach the wooden plank that leads up to the shaman´s hut. It is pitch black except for the stars. Dennis asks us to wait outside as he goes in to greet the shaman. We are signaled up to the hut. We have woken the shaman and his wife, who slept on a thin foam mat in the black night air of the hut.

The shaman shakes off the sleep, picks up a small bottle of something, swishes its contents around in his mouth for a moment and spits it out the door of the hut. His wife hands him a stick of dried leaves. He says he must wait 5 minutes for the medicine to take its effect. He sits on a log stump, and asks Jason to sit cross-legged on the floor in front of him. He asks Dennis to turn off the flashlight. Everything goes completely black. I think of the animals and tarantulas lurking around us in the night, I think of Dennis´machete that he carries everywhere, then I make peace with the blackness, as the deep and ancient drone of a tune rises up from the depths of the shaman´s throat. The song repeats itself rhythmically to the steady swishing of the dried leaves, as the shaman beats them back and forth against Jason´s head.

Drifting back on the dark water, I feel uneasy about the whole thing. I've satisfied my curiosity, but at what expense? So that I can touch the breath of the ancient rites in the black night air, this man comes to perform what he knows is a farce of a request, and in turn, earns the dollars he never needed before to get by in this strange new world. We briefly talk about what we thought of the whole thing. Floating in the canoe, we are drifting souls down a river where we don´t belong, but to which we are compelled by our thirst to know the secrets of the world. On a Wednesday night one week from now, and for many more after, another boat of curiosity-seekers will paddle off into the dark night to visit a hut for a shaman´s cleansing. On the way back, some of them will look up to the stars and search for their place in this complex web of cultural interaction. How are we different from the Texas Oil man on the airplane to El Coca who comes to take the black oil from beneath jungle?

Dos Puntos Rojos

(9 July)

Rio Napo, Ecuador

Our first excursion into the jungle is by canoe the first night. Robin (from Illinois), Harvey (from Florida) our Spanich Teacher, Paula, and our Guide, Dennis, slip out onto the dark water. The brilliant starry sky reveals itself behind the dark curtain of palm leaves and the jungle canopy above. Insects, frogs, and bird calls fill the air. We are looking for caiman. Dos puntos rojos is what Dennis tells us to look for on the surface of the water.

We spot a caiman sitting on the left bank of the river. Our headlamps are on him as Dennis quietly pulls the canoe over to the shore - within a few feet of the caiman. We are a little close for comfort. Suddenly the caiman lurches forward towards our canoe and dives into the water beneath us. Robin jumps and lets out a shriek! The canoe nearly tips completely over! We take in a ton of water. Dennis pulls us back over to the bank so we can get out (get out!?, I think) and empty the canoe. Suddenly I´m standing in the pitch black on the exact spot where the caiman was just sitting, wondering how many more are hiding in the blackness, hungrily conetmplating my ankles.