More adventures around Cajamarca

After waking up yesterday, I went to the market for my usual green soup (yes, that is what they call it) and aloe extract. The mamacha makes the green soup by boiling potatoes and whole eggs in a huge pot of water. Then she gets a bowl, puts a big spoonful of blended herbs (parsley, basil, some other green herbs), a big slice of fresh cheese and then the broth with a bunch of potatoes. After I have my bowl of soup, I go out on the street where another mamacha prepares the aloe extract. She scrapes the inside of the aloe into a pitcher and mixes it with an herbal tea, honey and something similar to maple syrup that comes from a tree around here. Before I drink it, she always gives me a shot of this mysterious ´´medecine.´´Supposedly, it is good for your stomach. The best part about the aloe drink is that it is very slimy and if you try to take a sip and then pull the cup away from your mouth, there is a big slimy thing connecting your mouth to the cup. So, really, you just have to drink it all at once.

At 9:30 I met my friends Ever and Juan in the Plaza de Armas. We took a combi (a van) to the village of Otuzco, about half an hour away. The big attraction of Otuzco is the Ventanillas of Otuzco, which is supposedly an Incan cementary carved into a huge stone cliff. In order to not have to pay, we walked down the road for a while until we saw a trail that went up the mountain. We hiked up the trail and around a few houses until we arrived to the top of the ventanillas. There were a few women there selling fossils that they found in the surrounding mountains. We each bought some fossils and then found a place with less cacti to be able to jump the stone wall around the park. The ventanillas are pretty cool, it didn´t take very long to see them all and then we sat down to eat some fruit. Not more than five minutes later, a guard showed up who asked us for our tickets. It was all very comical; he kept getting so upset that he wouldn´t stop talking. Finally, we just picked up our bags and walked out.

Ever remembered going to a tunnel somewhere in the mountains around the ventanillas three years ago so we set off on an adventure to find the tunnel. We started hiking through farms, fields and on little trails asking people around the way. It was a very rural area, with the houses being pretty spread apart. There are a lot of different kinds of cactus including one that grows a fruit called tuna. The fruit has needles too so we used leaves or pieces of cane to grab them and then rolled them in the grass to get the needles off. Then you break them open in the middle and eat the fruit and seeds. We also picked these little purple berries that were growing all over the place. There were a ton of colorful flowers everywhere, including some that they call elf´s slippers. One of the flowers has a bunch of little pokers in the middle and if you throw them at someone, they stick on their clothes or in their hair. We had wars with them the whole time.

It took us a long time to find the tunnel since we didn´t really have much of an idea where it was. The best part was just wandering around, especially when we walked through the wheat fields. With the sun and wind hitting them, it looked like a scene from a movie. The tunnel was on the side of a mountain and was just big enough to enter crouched over. We didn´t have a flashlight or candle, just a lighter, so we tried to guide ourselves mostly using the walls of the tunnel. After about 20 feet it was tall enough to stand up and we continued another 80 feet until we finally reached the end. It was a little creepy the farther back we got. You just don´t know what might be back there, or when you will find the end, or if there is going to be a huge drop-off. In the area around the tunnel there were tons of pieces of broken pottery, probably Incan, that were left after people had dug holes looking for something else. I think that this was the part where the cementary really way, and that the ventanillas are really more decorative, but that is just my theory.

On our way back, we decided to test the theory about rubbing a pig´s belly, which is supposed to make them fall asleep. It was hilarious, they lay down right away and start snoring. We also stopped to get fresh cornstalks that a campesino was cutting down. You can bite and pull off the outside part and chew on the inside stalk just like sugar cane. It is really sweeet and then you just spit out the chewed up stalk. All this time growing up in Ohio with all the corn we have, I should have known!

We hiked back down to the village of Otuzco, where we tried to find a place to drink chicha. Unfortunately, no one in the village makes chicha anymore, so we bought a few beers and went to the riverside to drink them. There is a suspension bridge to cross the river and it was full of a bunch of kids who were making it swing back and forth. We had to burn dry eucalyptus leaves to keep the mosquitos away and sat there until the sun set. Back in Cajamarca we ate dinner at "luka-china." Luka is slang for one sol and china for fifty cents of a sol. One and a half sols is equal to about 50 cents, and thats how much dinner costs- soup, main course and tea.

This morning I woke up early and went back to the village of Banos del Inca, to actually go into the thermal baths. This is the place where the Inca Atahuallpa supposedly bathed. There are a lot of hot springs that come up, and the Incans constructed pools that the water fed into. These baths are actually too hot to even touch and you can see the steam rising from them from far away. Since those days, they have contructed pools and bath houses (little rooms with bathtubs where you can open spickets with different temperatures of spring water). The idea of sitting in a bathtub kind of weirded me out, so I opted for the big pool. It ended up being a lap pool with hot spring water!! I was there early in the morning and there were probably 10 people swimming laps lengthwise in what we would consider 4 lanes, and then 3 or 4 who were swimming laps in the opposite direction when the space opened up. It was hilarious, no one swam in straight lines; they were all over the place! I swam for about an hour until the reflection of the sun on the water started to get really annoying and when I got out, I was super relaxed.

In the evening, I hung out with some friends drinking vino de sauco, wine made of the sauco fruit. We drank on the staircase that goes to Santa Apolonia church. It is one of the most unique staircases that I have ever seen and has lots of trees and plants lining it. Curiously, after hanging out a few hours, we realized we were sitting under a sauco tree. Funny the way things work out sometimes!