Waking up in the Andes

When you live in the suburbs, waking up in the morning is often a mundane, quiet experience. You wake up to an alarm clock, and may hear a  bird chirping right outside your bedroom window. Occasionally, the garbage truck will remind you to run outside and put the trash can on the curb. Even in a city the size of Lima, staying in a hotel located on a busy thoroughfare, the early morning sounds were muffled outside our hotel room due to the newer age of the building. Waking up in Cusco, on the other hand, is quite the noisy, cityscape experience. For someone who has only lived in the 'burbs, it was an empathy to finally understand the experience that millions of others have waking up in the middle of a busy city. Cusco has roughly 300,000 people, and the day starts early for seemingly all of them.

Our hotel, Casa Andina, sat on one of the brick streets that feed off the town square, and there was constant foot and car traffic flowing past our balcony situated almost directly over the main entrance to the hotel. Shop owners were opening up their store fronts, some rolling up metal garage doors that covered their entire shop entrance, some taking the actual large wooden doors off the hinges to make more room for customers to come in and out. Others were making deliveries to different businesses, and often yelling for admittance to the business. Cars and carts alike were rolling across the bricks making their way to their daily work. 

With the proximity to the town square, given the age of the city, Casa Andina had been renovated sometime in the last twenty years, with some interesting techniques used to satisfy the modern day traveler. The bathroom was updated with new toilets, pedestal sinks to accommodate the smaller room, and a big shower with a new shower head. The water presser was perfect, but the temperature of the water fluctuated  a bit. As a grumpy morning person, I found the shower dance to be a great way to wake up! If you were paying attention, you could hear when the hot water shut off for a few seconds, and could slide out of the way of the stream of water. After a few seconds of cold water, the hot water would return and you could continue your shower. Simple!

The keys to the rooms were actual keys on a keyring, with a big plastic card engraved with your room number. For those of us that had made several trips to and from our rooms in Lima getting key cards reactivated, the real door keys were a welcome change. The high altitude made climbing the hotel stairs difficult enough without the need to go back downstairs to reactivate a demagnetized key. The most interesting aspect of the room key was its other job - in order to turn the power on in your room, you had to slide the room key into a slot on the wall which activated the electricity to the room! Fascinating!

Despite the relaxing day we had on Friday to get acclimated to the high altitude - Cusco is roughly 11,000 feet above sea level - most of us were feeling the effects of the thinner air and struggled with the simplest tasks, like taking a shower or walking up and down stairs. We had some time built into the agenda to relax during the morning hours, and then headed to our first Cusco excursion to see some local ruins called Saqsaywaman (other spelling includes Sacsaywaman, and Sacsayhuaman). Saqsaywaman is an area of ruins overlooking Cusco that dates back to 900 A.D., originally built by the Killike culture, and expanded by the Incan empire around the 13^th century. The stones used at Saqsaywaman are some of the largest stones used in construction in the Americas, and the construction design has withstood earthquakes to the region for hundreds of years. One thing, though, is the stones had to be moved from the other side of the mountain, so the big question is--how did the do it? The Incas did not use the wheel, so, how did they move those stones from one place to another?

Sacsaywaman

View of the city of Cusco from Sacsaywaman

Once we returned from the ruins, everyone freshened up to spend some time hearing from Ingrid Guzman, the Cusco representative of Tarea, an organization dedicated to research, advocacy, and educational materials production. The group empowers educational partners to work with classroom teachers in an effort to incorporate intercultural education into the classrooms of indigenous people in Peru through four initiatives: Intercultural Bilingual Education, Rural Education, Student Participation, and Local Management of Education. In Cusco alone, there are eight different languages besides Spanish that students may speak upon entering primary school. Tarea trains and equips indigenous language speaking teachers to work with students in preparation for Spanish-speaking classes in the upper levels of primary school. The organization has seen phenomenal success in helping students achieve higher test scores when taking the national exam in fourth grade. You can learn more about Tarea at http://tarea.org.pe/. 

--Jodi Adams