The Changing of the Guard at the Presidential Palace

On Thursday, Liz and I headed downtown for a bit before lunch just to look around and get out a bit.  As luck would have it, we arrived just as the Changing of the Guard ceremony at the Presidential Palace was getting started.

The guard regiment at the palace are the Dragoons of the "Marshall Domingo Nieto" Cavalry Regiment.   Every midday, Monday through Saturday, some 40 Dragoons, accompanied by the regimental band, take part in the ceremony which was established by President Manuel Prado in 1940.

This was only my second time witnessing the ceremony up close, and the first time I was a little kid, so it was pretty cool.  (I might go back with a video recorder!)

 

 

 

Antioquia

Continuing on our road trip up the Lurín valley from Cieneguilla, we headed into Huarochirí province and to the town of Espíritu Santo de Antioquía, more commonly known as just Antioquía.

Antioquia's main square

Antioquia city hall

Antioquía's claim to fame is recent, and due to the townfolk's practice of decorating their homes with images drawn from nature - birds, plants, flowers.  The paintings, done in a naïf style, were the idea of a priest assigned to the town, who convinced the locals a few years ago to buy into the idea as a means of building town pride and pulling in a bit of the valley's tourist trade.  

Elba, Willy, and Liz in front of Antioquia's church

It must be admitted that the idea has on fact worked.  We, for example, were the third delegation from our family to make the trip to the town in the past several months, and we had all learned about it from it's being featured in newspaper, magazine, and television segments.

The road to Antioquía is still a bit rough, but even so there's enough traffic to allow a couple of restaurants with large seating to operate in town.   I expect that once the road is paved the whole way, it won't be long before a good segment of Cieneguilla's weekend tourist traffic will head that way, even though it is about an hour further, much as the summer beach exodus has moved ever further out of the city in the past decade.

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Lunch at the Sheraton

Today we had lunch at the Sheraton Hotel's reknown sancochado buffet.   Sancochado means "boiled" and refers to food cooked in a boiling liquid, and in Peru, sancochaado, as a noun, refers to a meal of boiled meats (most often beef and mutton) and vegetables (usually cabbage, carrot, celery, leek, and potato), served with the broth on the side.

Sancohado is often served on Mondays as a restorative tonic to the excesses of the weekend and as a way of getting enough substance in order to start the work week.

In Lima several restaurants compete for serving the best sancochado, and among  them the Sheraton Hotel regularly comes at the top.  The weekly sancochado lunch buffet served at its Las Palmas restaurant is famed among sancochado enthusiasts, and it is easy to see why.

The Sheraton's buffet offered 15 cuts of meat -including varied cuts of beef and pork, but also mutton, chicken, turkey, and sausages-, 5 soups or broths, a couple dozen vegetables, and 50 sauces to accompany them.  That is in addition to the several salads, many desserts and 50 varities of flavoured piscos on hand...

 

Personally, I love a well-done sancochado, so this lunch was a real treat, and it was made even better because I got to try tripulina as well.

Tripulina is a dish that was started from the practice among abattoir workers of taking the odd bits of offal that were not widely wanted by customers and distributors, and throwing them into a common cooking pot.  In time it developed into a dish of its own, whose name -"tripulina"- makes reference to its origins in the tripas, or intestines or "guts".  The Sheraton's tripulina, as tasty as it was, however, was limited to beef testicles.


Afterward, Liz and I walked over to the Lima Museum of Art, about two blocks down, at the intersection of Wilson and Paseo Colon.

Lord of the Fall

On the third block of Av. Republica Dominicana, just down from Plaza San Jose and across the street from the main market in Jesus Maria, resides a local landmark that is, literally, an icon.   

Inside a relatively nondescript archway that looks like it might be the entrance to the several-storey building above it, there is a figure of Jesus that is an object of veneration by locals and even people from further afield, including Mama Pali, my late grandmother.

The story goes that a sculptor named Marcos Huapaya created the image with the intention of selling it, but that fate intervened.    Huapaya had fashioned a previous religious image from wood, cardboard, and plaster, and wanted to create a larger one of Jesus.  He selected to depict a moment from The Passion in which Jesus stumbles under the burden of his cross.   The family thus decided to name the figure the Lord of La Caida (The Fall), a choice that was further cemented by their owning a country estate named La Caida.

Before Huapaya could sell the figure, however, a neighborhood woman gave him a white cord to add to the figure's vestments in thanks for divine aid she said she had received after praying before the statue.  Soon others started to do the same and Huapaya ended up building a sanctuary for it.

Later, when the family moved to Jesus Maria, they built the niche where the statue now resides, and where it receives numerous visitors daily, some of whom leave behind tokens of the "miracles" they say they have been granted after praying to the Señor de La Caida.

Huapaya has since died, but the niche is still maintained by his family, who open it up every morning and close it up every night.

Mancora

On  our second day in Piura we took a mototaxi ride  into Mancora.

Mancora is a fishing village that has turned into a tourist destination thanks to the nearby beaches and surfing spots.   Consequently, Mancora has turned into a bit of a tourist trap, with the main drag, along the Panamerican Highway, and the beachfront being lined with stalls hawking souvenirs and cheap bathing suits, and restaurants/drinking joints of dubious quality and salubriousness.

The community, nonetheless, has managed to keep hold of its fishing roots, and on the weekend we were in the area it was celebrating the Feast of Saint Peter, patron of fisherfolk.

As we strolled the beachfront looking for a place to eat -we were seeking some seco de chabelo, a regional dish- the townsfolk were holding a children's egg-in-the-spoon race on the beach while a small band belted out tunes.

The beachfront gazebo was crumbling, having clearly been undermined by waves at some not too distant past.  There was a sign warning people that it was not a suitable place for entertainment as it was too dangerous.  Of course that did not stop the band and emcee from setting up shop there, nor anyone else for that matter.

Eventually we ended our search for seco de chabelo at La Sirena de Juanchi, a restaurant on the main street, with  really ecclectic and fun decor, run by a lady from Lima who came to Mancora for a one-month stay nine years ago.

They did not serve seco de chabelo, but we did have some other really good food, including a tuna tiradito with balsamic vinegar.

An evening of shamanic magic

Thinking back on my trip to Peru last summer, I remembered that I had neglected to mention one of the most interesting events, which was a taking part in a shamanic session. To be precise, it was a cleansing ceremony, or limpia, performed by a curandera,  or traditional healer.   

That omission was in part due simple procrastination and negligence, but also largely because I did not know how to go about talking about it.  Part of that was just because I wanted more time to process it, but also because it was kind of an intimate experience and writing about it seemed a bit like talking about someone else's medical appointment.  Anyhow, Susana did give me permission to photograph her part of the session and to blog about it, so that covers that.

Peru's north coast in general, and the Trujillo region specifically, are known throughout Peru for the survival of shamanic medicine, and it is not uncommon for quacks in Lima and elsewhere to claim to be a "brujo norteño" to attract clients.    How our own involvement came about is that Susana's field program director in Trujillo, Dr. Douglas Sharon, PhD, has known a local curandera for many years, and since the students' field work in the program involves documenting the folk uses of medicinal herbs and plants, it only makes sense for them to see and experience them actually being used in traditional medicine and to experience what the curanderos' clients experience.  So, after visiting the pre-Inca city of Chan Chan and the Huaca de la Luna temple,  Doug had us journey a bit further south of Trujillo, to the seaside town of El Paraíso and to the home of Julia Calderón.   

Her family greeted us warmly and we ate dinner at the restaurant that they run on the first floor of their building.  We, of course, paid for our meals, but because we were also guests and were with Doug, who is godfather to Julia's son, Jimmy -and therefore Julia's compadre- the portions they served us were huge!

Julia is the daughter of  the late Eduardo Calderón, who was a fisherman by trade, as well as being acknowledged as a powerful curandero, indeed one of the foremost curanderos in the Trujillo region.  He was the subject of a documentary film, Eduardo the Healer (1978), and of a book, Eduardo el Curandero: The Words of a Peruvian Healer (1982 and 2000), which he himself co-wrote partly with Doug.

Julia inherited the don, or the gift, and has developed into a respected curandera in her own right, and her own daughter is also said to have the don.

Anyway, after dinner, Julia and her family set up her mesa -which literally means "table"- on the ground in the family's courtyard behind the restaurant.

In the image above, we observe the mesa from the perspective of the curandera.  The patient will stand across from her, on the other side of the mesa.

Every curandero has his own setup, but in modern mesas Jesus , here depicted in a crucifix, is always at the center and is flanked on all sides by objects of power or with ritual significance.   There are studies published on the geometry of mesas, but here (and below) we can even with a casual glance observe one of the prime divisions: on the right side are statuettes of saints and fruits - items associated with heaven and above; whereas on the left, we find shells, stones, ancient artifacts, fossils - items associated with the earth and below.

This is a reflection of the duality that is part of the Andean cosmovision, which divides things -nature, communities, even family clans (aylllus) into nonhierarchical "upper" (hanan) and "lower" (hurin) moieties.  It also reflects the Andean tripartite division of the physical world into heaven and underworld, with the earth as intermediary.

The bottles on the little table to the side contain perfumes, while the bottles on the mesa and on the ground contain macerations based on medicinal plants and, in particular, "herbs from the Huaringas".  The Huaringas are a string of fourteen high mountain lakes in the Northern Andes's Cordillera del Wamani which are said to possess mystical and curative powers.

The pot on the ground by the mesa contains an infusion of the hallucinogenic San Pedro cactus, which all participants were asked to partake of before joining the ceremony, although no one was actually obligated to do so.

The mesa was set up privately before we were invited to enter the courtyard.   As a final preparation, Julia then drew a six-pointed star within a circle on the ground with lime, which was to be the spot where her patients were to stand during their sessions.

Susana was the first to go.

Here she is flanked by Doug, who is observing the ceremony but also there to support Susana, and Julia's son, Jimmy, who is helping with the ceremony.  Julia, meanwhile, is flanked by her other son and by Susana's colleague, Anna, who is attempting to document the ceremony with a digital sound recorder.

Julia began each session, and puctuated each at several points, with a rythmic whistling accompanied by the shaking of a rattle, which she is doing in the photo above.

The patient was then asked to drink  from the concoctions in the bottles, first blowing across the top of the glass three times.

Susana, who was already feeling strongly affected by the San Pedro, said that this drink affected her perception and balance even further.

At various points during each session, Julia would take one or more of the perfumes, asking to be handed specific ones in a given order,  and spray it from her mouth into the air and directly onto the patient.   As she is doing this in the photo above, Jimmy -behind her- is going to each of us observers and offering us the San Pedro infusion.

The San Pedro is held to be a sacred and mystical plant, and has been so for thousands of years, and all of us who partook of it that night were asked to observe certain practices after we left Julia's place, which I get into later.   San Pedro, I can attest, does affect one's perceptions, and it's effect -along with being part of a group taking it- helps make one more suggestible.   Now, I am not implying that there was any fakery or quackery involved in Julia's ritual, but the San Pedro did serve to lower one's inhibitions and help one be more open to the ritual being performed and to the curandera's probing questions and observations.

At some points Julia pulled in Anna, Doug, or myself, to have us observe alongside her and her daughter, and they would ask us to confirm what they were observing.   In my case, when asked to participate in Susana's session, they asked leading questions about what I saw, but I'll be damned if they weren't correct in what I was observing: that Susana appeared to have no eyes, and that she had something shining, as if a bright white gem, at her throat.   (Bear in mind that other than the moon, a lamppost down the street, and camera flashes, all of this was taking place in the dark.)

Having trusted individuals - and in Susana's case, her own father- confirming the curandera's observations undoubtedly serves to bolster the curandera's legitimacy in the eyes of the patient.  

Julia's sons would at some point in each session also partake of the herbal infusions, but in their case it was through the nose.

Nearing the end of Susana's session -and, yes, I know I haven't shared  the specifics as to the content of her session, and I won't, nor of any of the rest of the group- Julia passed each of the bottles of Huaringas herbal infusions over her, and also the rattle and other items (for example, in the background above, one can see Julia's daughter with a sword in hand, and Jimmy holds it in the two below.)

Between Julia's blowing perfume and infusions all over people and into the air, and with each patient being asked at several points to ritually rub some into his or her hair -passing the hands over the scalp three times- we were all pretty well covered in smelly and colored water by the end of the evening.

Those who had undergone sessions and those of us who had partaken of the sacred San Pedro were to undergo a final cleansing to rid us of any residual shamanic energy which might be clinging to us and render us attractive to negative energies and witchcraft, which involved being covered in yet more perfumes and with a milky liquid containing perfume, some sort of white powder in suspension, and flower petals, which we were also asked to drink and to rub over our scalps following the ritual of the three passes.

We were instructed to not wash it off until the next day, and to avoid certain foods until the next evening. I recall beans and hot peppers being two of the proscribed foods, and perhaps meat.  

How accurate were Julia's diagnoses?  Well, it is hard to know.  A lot of shamanic medicine has to do with restoring and maintaining balance in life, and thus in identifying that which is off-kilter and throwing one out of balance or attracting negative energy.    It is telling that, in the course of their sessions, everyone who underwent one confirmed Julia's conclusion that there was some troubling interpersonal issue going on, or a worry or emotional burden they'd been bearing.

The evening of cleansing sessions turned out, actually, to be a fairly intimate experience, even for those of us who did not undergo a cleansing.  In fact, almost every one of the women who did, ended up crying during their sessions, even without knowing precisely why.

Later, after we had exited the courtyard and Julia and her family had put away the mesa and undergone their own cleansing --both, private rituals--, they rejoined us in their restaurant.  Since I hadn't undergone a session, Julia's kids invited me to partake of some pisco and showed me a photo of their dad and some of his artwork --he made statuettes out of clay-- while we chatted as we awaited the taxis Doug had contracted to transport us back to our hostel in Huanchaco.  

I knew that I had been part of a special experience, but one which is not particularly extraordinary in Peru's north coast, where magic still retains a foothold in the modern world.

Huanchaco

I spent last weekend -my second in Peru- away fro Lima again, this time up north, visiting Susana who is living in the seaside town of Huanchaco and working in nearby Trujillo during her summer break from school.

Huanchaco is a quiet little town at this time of year, when many of the businesses are closed for the winter. It was once principally a fishermen's town and a port for the loading of sugar cargoes from the hacienda owned by the Larco family - the former loading pier has been turned into a pedestrian walkway with a gazebo at its end.  Today, it seems mainly to subsist on tourism, as the weather is mild all year round, it has a very pleasant beach, and is part of Peru's surfing and backpacker circuits.

Fisherman using a caballito de totora

Huanchaco is also rekown for the locals' building and use of caballitos de totora (lit. "little totora horses"), reed boats that have been in use for centuries.   In fact, depictions of caballitos have been found in 1,500-year old Moche pottery.

The totora plant grows in wetlands and standing water, which is possible to achieve even in northern Peru's coastal desert plain because in the area of Huancacho the water table is only a few meters below the surface of the ground.  The ancient Moche dug pits where they grew the totora, and many of these are still in use today, maintained -often by the same family- over many centuries.  Though the totora plant is crucial to family substistence for many of the locals, the totorales are increasingly threatened by urbanization.

The caballitos themselves are handmade by local craftsmen and fishermen, who gather the totora stalks, dry them, and tie them into bundles.  Each one has his own style and preference of materials, which -in addition to its placement- allows each fisherman to easily recognize his own boat.

Being a seaside resort Huanchaco, of course has plenty of establishments form which to choose from for dining, thirst-quenching, and just plain sitting and enjoying the view.

On the beach front, near the pier, is a place called Jungle Bar Bily, which has a sort of jungle/tiki bar ambiance.  It is open late and draws the more bohemian -and hard-drinking crowd- in  the late hours of the night.  They do serve a mean caipirinha.

One that has turned into a favourite of Susana and her companions is a small place a few blocks from the town's Plaza de Armas, called My Friend.  At My Friend there is offered a selection of several dozen spaghetti dishes -on the menu it's labeled a "Spaghetti Festival", which has become a catch phrase for Susa and her friends- for a very reasonable s/. 10, and on Thursday nights drinks are only s/. 3 each. We ended up there almost every night of my visit, as we found ourselves feeling "festive".

There is also, of course, no lack of seafood choices of varying price and quality, in terms of both flavour and ambiance. (The three examples below are from a restaurant called El Mochica.)

I arrived in Huanchaco on Thursday evenning and stayed until Sunday night.  In the intervening days, besides enjoying Huanchaco, I was able to meet Susana in Trujillo and tour that city for an afternoon, take a tour of the nearby archaeological sites of Chan Chan and the Huaca de la Luna, and take part in a cleansing ceremony by a local curandera, or traditinonal healer.  I'll write about those experiences in future installments.

Video: Takanakuy

Another one. This time it's about the custom of takanakuy.

In the province of Chumbivilcas, in the Cuzco region, Christmas is celebrated with partying, drinking, fireworks -like in the rest of Peru.  What makes chumbivilcano Christmas different is the takanakuy, which is a festival of ritualized hand-to-hand combat. 

Fights are one-on-one bareknuckled fistfights accompanied by huaylia music, and all strata in the community take part -men, women, young, and old.  Even kids.  Through  the takanakuy grudges are settles, stress is released, community harmony is retained, and the Earth is repaid for her bounty through  the fighters' sacrifice.

In this video, the host, Thomas, travels to Chumbivilcas to witness and participate in the takanakuy.


PART ONE:





PART TWO:

Video: Scissor dance in Andamarca

Just browsing the web today I came across this cool little video on danza de tijeras, or scissor dancing, in Peru.  The danza de tijeras is an age-old custom, as one of the musicians in the video explains, and is intimately tied to Andean veneration of the earth and the apus and wamanis (mountain spirits).

The video shows two travellers -Krishna and Anthony- who drive  from Nazca to the community of Andamarca, in Apurimac, to witness a tijeras competition.      It reminded me of stories my mom told when I was little, of danzaqs she had seen in her travels, who -she said- seemed as if they had no bones in their bodies.

I've got to tell you that what the show's hosts witness the danzaqs do in Andamarca is a far cry from the tijeras dances you'd see on stage at folkloric shows in Lima.

Chinese New Year in Lima

On the eve of Chinese New Year, I thought I'd share these photos taken by Liz in Lima's Chinatown during the Chinese New Year holidays in 2008.