Roho kuri Perúpe

Today´s Post: We went to Perú

I encourage you, dear readers, to anticipate Jake in Paraguay’s return to Paraguay for just one more entry, as we take a brief detour for the second part of my vacation chronicle and make a brief visit to the Arequipa region of Perú.

The germ of this trip was sown in 2009, as I prepared to leave for Peace Corps service in Paraguay. My college roommate Cyrus reported to me that Nils, a close friend of his from grade school, was flying out to serve as a volunteer in Perú at the same time. Two strangers linked by a friend in common, we headed off to separate parts of South America. Almost two years later, Cyrus and I headed off to visit Nils. Though both of our host countries are on the same continent, Perú often felt as different from Paraguay as Paraguay often feels different from the United States. Perú´s population is five times larger than Paraguay´s. Its surface area is three times as big. The former seat of both the Incan and colonial Spanish empires, Perú has more recently benefitted from considerable mineral wealth and a world renowned tourist trade. On the contrary, Paraguay´s early (1811) independence from Spain was largely the result of benign neglect and evidence of pre-Columbian culture is largely limited to the remarkable survival of Guaraní as a lingua franca. Cotton and soy booms have environmentally degraded the country rather than enriching it and the only tourists I have ever met here have been Argentine hippies and a pair of rather dementedly serious English birdwatchers.

There were more prosaic differences, as well. Perú has the potato and Paraguay, mandioca. The percentage of Paraguayans who do not speak Guaraní and of Peruvians who do speak Quechua are similar. The legacy of the Incas in Perú seems more palpable than the legacy of the Spanish in Paraguay. Peruvians (especially women in the countryside) still wear traditional colonial dress – the famous bowler hats, dresses, and braids – while Paraguayans have eagerly adopted spandex and a variety of unintentionally hilarious English-language t-shirts. (My favorite: seen at our annual Teacher´s Day picnic, a shiny, black top with ´´I know you are jealous´´ emblazoned across the ample bosom of a very sassy and self-confident profesora in my community.) Peruvians have ceviche and stone terraces. Paraguayans have chipa and yvy pytâ (red earth). This is not to denigrate Paraguay. On returning to Paraguay from Perú, I have to say that I felt more impressed by the latter and more charmed by the former. Of course, it´s impossible to separate my own prejudices as an adopted Paraguayan from my observations about Perú. If only in my head, I kept remarking on the barbarism of a country in which everybody spoke Spanish and nobody drank maté or terere.

Other differences in Nils´s and my service became obvious. He lives four hours on paved roads from Arequipa, the country´s second biggest city. Prettyview, on the other hand, is a tad more remote: a six hour bus ride on pavement from Asunción followed by an hour-long walk into town. Nils works as a health and sanitation volunteer and (per Peace Corps rules in his country) has lived with a host family for his entire service. My project is agroforestry extension and I happily moved out on my own a little before I was even allowed to. As of our visit, Nils was counting down to the end of his service, but hoped to live in Perú afterward doing infectious disease research. I feel much more ambivalent about the end of my time in (terrestrial) Peace Corps, but am certain that I will not be living in Paraguay come the holidays.

Yet we also have shared a lot of experiences as volunteers. Some of the challenges (disappointing projects, lack of enthusiasm, lack of privacy, corruption or inept government, and cultural dislocation) and joys (successful projects, good relationships with host families, new experiences, personal growth, and friendships with other volunteers) have been the same for us. Our communities are of roughly the same size and are both located in the countryside. We both talk to our families a lot on the phone and enjoy decadent sprees in our nearest city from time to time. We have both taught English and done gardening extension work. We both went home to the States on vacation and have mosquito nets and copies of The New Yorker in our rooms.

Getting to know Nils was a treat - the three of us developed a great sense of camaraderie. So was experiencing the Peace Corps through a different lens: the experiences of volunteers in a different Peace Corps country. Talking to Nils and some of his colleagues and seeing their work only deepened my belief in the Peace Corps and its fairly decentralized organization by country posting.

Foregoing Lima and Machu Picchu, Cyrus and I decided to spend our entire 10-day visit with Nils in his region of Perú. I´m really glad we did. Perú is a large and diverse country and I was happy to get to know one area intensely rather than running around. We spent about half of our time in and around Arequipa and the remainder in the rural Cotahuasi Canyon.

I can´t recommend Arequipa enough to travelers visiting Perú. The weather was lovely, as were the architecture (colonial with many buildings fashioned from striking white, volcanic stone called sillar) and the layout of the city center. Restaurants abounded – the delicious, the cheap, and combinations of the two. Highlights included ceviche (raw seafood ´´cooked´´ in spicy citrus juice) joints and chifa (Peruvian Chinese food) diners. Cafés serving excellent coffee were plentiful, and we also made multiple visits to a creperie and a Turkish restaurant that served amazing breakfast. The alcohol selection was also intermediate between the confusing multitude of the States and the tripoles (Brahma, Pilsen, and caña) of Paraguay. My favorite drink was the dark version of Cusqueña beer, although my compatriots preferred Pisco sours (which tasted to me like moist towlettes). Beyond the culinary delights, Arequipa also offered clean hostels, well-curated museums, great nightlife, and tons of cheap taxis for getting around. There is something disingenuous about decrying ´´touristy´´ places when one is, in fact, a tourist. So I want to counter that by saying that Arequipa is touristy in a classy, accessible way. We had a great time there.

Our Cotahuasi adventures were the perfect foil for the decadence of Arequipa. The only other tourists we met along the way were a single French couple and we visited places that would have been quite inaccessible without Nils´s knowledge and connections. Our first stop going into the canyon was Nils´s town, where we spent a day exploring the beautiful scenery (rock terraces, farm fields, canyon cliffs, rivers), hanging out with his host family, and playing guitar and singing. I enjoyed my taste of Peruvian campo food, which is delicious and far spicier than typical food in Paraguay. Rice and potatoes are a big staple, with meat, corn, pulses, vegetables, and exotic grains (Perú is home to quinoa) introducing a number of tasty flavors, as well as fiber. A common template for meals seemed to be soup followed by stew with rice, in contrast to the Paraguayan model of one stew with Mandioca as accompaniment (tyra in Guaraní).

From Nils´s site, we embarked on a twelve-hour, three-bus odyssey to a town called Puyca in the interior of the canyon. Backpacking in further several hours, we arrived at the home village (a couple dozen houses perched on the edge of a cliff) of his host brother. This was the true Peruvian campaña. Though it was aesthetically lovely country and an authentic experience of life in a very remote village, the visit was hard on the three of us. The abject poverty and social problems typical of rural isolation were obvious. It was only in this satellite village of Puyca that we encountered a majority of people speaking Quechua. I tried to listen in without being rude and have to say that the only word that seemed familiar was ´´michi.´´ This means ´´cat´´ in Quechua and ´´small´´ in Guaraní and is, very strangely, the most common name for pet cats in Paraguay. I´m open to any possible explanations of that one.

Heading back toward Arequipa from Puyca, we took a four-hour bus ride to Alca and crashed there at a hostel. Our objective: a visit to the local hot springs. The walk there from Alca was worth it. We arrived chilled to the bone from high wind and filthy from days without bathing and settled into the delightfully warm mineral pools. The hot springs were a big highlight of the trip, especially because they were otherwise completely populated by (probably local) Peruvians. A party atmosphere pervaded, helped along by the liberal sale of beer by the bath´s operators.

Our restful visit in Alca ended with another bus trip: first into the town of Cotahuasi, and then the rest of the way back to Arequipa. Like Alca, Cotahuasi boasted a charming central square and excellent local food. The highlight of our brief time there was, for me, trying homemade chicha, fermented corn drink, from a vendor´s thick ceramic cups. Chicha was tasty and reminded me a bit of the kombucha mushroom drinks popular in the U.S. now.

What would our trip to Perú have been without some botanizing? We were, of course, in the arid, mountainous region of the country, rather than the tropical East. The tallest trees in all of the places we visited were imported eucalyptus, probably planted for firewood. Native trees were rarely taller than three meters and vegetation was much sparser than in my region of Paraguay, due to limited rainfall. Some of my favorite plant finds were giant horsetail ferns, wild lupines, and mind-blowing intensive agriculture (inter-cropping, steep contour terraces, irrigation, and rotation between pulses and other crops). I almost incurred a serious groin injury scaling a stone terrace to photograph prickly pear intercropped with corn, but was certainly willing to take the risk.

So my time in Perú was great, as much due to the setting as to the company. Having the time with Cyrus and getting to befriend and share in the Peace Corps experience of Nils made for the perfect transition from the U.S. back to Paraguay. And our time in the Arequipa region left me excited to go back to Perú someday to visit Machu Picchu and other such destinations.

This brings me to the early morning hours 21st of June, when we touched down in Paraguay and I heard my first strains of Guaraní again (they were, unfortunately, begrudgingly issued by a Luque taxi driver who preferred to speak Spanish). Cyrus and I enjoyed another 10 days together in Paraguay, visiting Prettyview, Encarnación, and the site of my colleague Leah in rural Itapúa and spending a few days in Asunción as well.

Our time in Paraguay was novel for Cyrus, although I have to say that, after my time in America and Perú, everything felt very comfortingly normal to me. Thus, I won´t say too much about our time in Paraguay. We did get to visit el Museo de la Memoría in downtown Asunción. This tribute to the victims of torture during the Stroessner regime is housed in the actual former imprisonment and torture center of the Paraguayan secret police. Emotionally wrenching and intellectually fascinating, the museum is free and a must-see for those interested in contemporary Paraguayan history. I was overflowing with happiness to get back to Prettyview and got a kick out of parading Cyrus around as I greeted my Paraguayan family and friends, some of whom probably didn´t think I would come back from my vacation. Cyrus was feted appropriately, with plenty of offers of maté and terere, and generous helpings of homemade empanadas and freshly slaughtered rooster stew.

Cyrus liked and understood my love for Prettyview and also had his own verdict on Paraguay. Asunción was a Latin American Bratislava while the countryside around Pindoyu was, down to the red dirt, more like southern Alabama with an emphasis on the ´´southern.´´ He was a good sport as I, like Nils, dragged him onto more long-distance bus rides than most Americans can tolerate in one vacation and subjected him to hours of barely comprehensible conversations about people and animals whom he had never met and what had happened to, with, and among them while I was out of town.

As much as we both enjoyed ourselves, after three weeks, Cyrus and I were ready for our trip to come to an end. He was eager to get back to his girlfriend Emma and I felt my work and relationships in Prettyview calling. As of the first of July, I was back in Prettyview gossiping with my host mother and alternately chastising and praising her/our dog. Cleaning my house after a month away was quite a task, and was making the rounds to assure everyone that I am back (at least for a few months). I made chili for the 4th of July and, happily, did not give my Paraguayan friends diarrhea this year; the trick was omitting most of the hot chili peppers. Since then, I’ve actually been quite busy with a new project, but I think I’ll wait for a future post to go into that. For now, as I am still saying almost every day, ´´Avy´aite ajujeyrupi Paraguaype´´ (I´m very happy to have returned to Paraguay).