Archaeology

This past weekend was my designated weekend to leave Tolte and get out and learn a little about Ecuador. It’s probably very revealing that I don’t look forward to doing this. It means going to an unfamiliar place alone, and I’m not a person who usually chats up strangers or mixes into groups of tourists. But I have been planning to go to Cuenca for months, and this was the weekend. And I absolutely had a good and interesting time. I think I should have gotten to Cuenca sooner. In fact, I think I was going to go to Cuenca the weekend I was persuaded to go to Riobamba instead. Maybe that was a mistake.

The weekend was aided by yet another unexpected day off from school. I’m not sure whether the teachers had training or contract talks on Friday, but either way, I hit the road at 8 o’clock instead of some time after 1 in the afternoon. In a particular stroke of luck, a cab was going back to Chunchi and took two of the high school kids and me right there for the same price as the bus. And a bus to Cuenca was waiting for me when I got there. Cuenca is farther away than Riobamba, but not much. I think the trip took about three hours.

Cuenca is higher than Tolte, at about 8,100 feet compared to Tolte’s 7000 or so. And it seems that this is enough to get you above the load line. People say that Cuenca is colder than Tolte, and maybe it is, but the equatorial sun is a lot more likely to shine there. The air temperature may not be high, but the sun sure is strong. I was definitely warmer and drier in Cuenca than I’ve been for a month, which immediately made a god impression.

I caught a city bus from the bus station to the center of town, where I knew of a hotel I could stay in for $6 a night, about half of what I’ve paid anywhere else. The building was pretty impressive, and may once have been elegant, although the bathrooms have probably always been down the hall. There were hardwood floors and embossed plaster ceilings. Between floor and ceiling, though, conditions were fairly Spartan—a bed, a bit of hard and uncomfortable looking furniture, and a sink. But I’m a budget traveler on my volunteer stipend, so I didn’t mind. The bed was definitely comfortable enough to sleep in, and the building was pretty quiet, and that’s what counts.

My first big splurge was to take some laundry to be washed, dried, and folded in a nearby laundromat. Laundromats in Ecuador do your wash for you. Five T-shirts, four underwear, and a pair of socks cost me $1, and I didn’t have to worry about when it would dry. A pair of socks takes about a week to dry in Tolte these days, if you manage its location carefully so that it gets some sun, and breeze if there is any, and keep it out of the rain. Believe me, hat was a dollar well spent.

I had found a walking tour of Cuenca on the Internet, and my hotel was a block from its start, so off I went. The first stops were some big churches, but I’m a bit burnt out on churches after my visits to Quito. The architecture was impressively Spanish colonial looking, though, massive with bricks and towers. There are many churches in Cuenca, with a variety of styles, and they do a lot for the city’s overall look.

Cuenca also has several famous markets, and the first ones I saw were the flower market and the artesania, or arts and crafts, market. Cuenca is the home of the Panama hat, which was never made in Panama. I think the story is that these hats were popular with Americans building the Panama canal, and because they were purchased there, people assumed they were from there. But the hats are actually made in Ecuador, especially Cuenca, which doesn’t really have the tropical climate the hats are associated with in the States. Some of them look pretty sharp, too, but I can’t quite picture myself in one. Maybe I’ll get one for Allie. It might be a suitable accessory for a jazz guitarist of his caliber.

I didn’t stay long in the markets, though, because I had hear that there were a number of interesting museums along the Calle Larga, a street that follows the edge of El Barranco, the small river canyon that divides old Cuenca from the newer part. And this is where the word Archaeology comes in. The first museum I went to was the Museum of Indigenous Cultures, which has thousands of artifacts from cultures from different times and places all over Ecuador. I think I actually enjoyed the first room, with the most ancient objects, the most. There were axe heads and arrow points going back as far as 13,000 years ago. This sort of thing always gets me, somehow, that sense of the deep past of human existence. Somehow, people used these stone objects to survive, thrive, and pass the land to their children. It couldn’t have been easy.

By the second or third room, I was starting to be overwhelmed. The collection includes thousands of objects, and by the time you’ve seen a certain number of zoomorphic bowls, it’s hard to tell them apart. But there were some interesting human figures in ceramic, which might give some idea of what the people who made them actually looked like. And then there were metal objects, and the arrival of the Incas (only about 80 years before the Spaniards), and a sense of changes in skill and technique. It was all a bit overwhelming, but I definitely felt as though I had seen some of ancient Ecuador.

I definitely felt even more that way when I got to Pumapungo, an archaeological site down the street that is maintained by the Banco Central. Archaeologists believe that Pumapungo was a combination temple, palace, and barracks for Incas living in what is now Cuenca. Although it took me a while to figure out how to get to the trail, once I found it there were signs that explained what I was looking at. It was a bit hard to tell, since all that remains is foundation stones no more than one or two feet high, although the building patterns are easy enough to make out. The explanation is that Pumapungo was destroyed during the Spanish Conquest, and then used as a quarry to build all sorts of things around Cuenca. There were a couple of interesting intact places, though. I enjoyed seeing the terraces, of the sort I used to build in Costa Rica, but here reinforced with stone and about 500 years old, which shows that these earthworks can last, even in an earthquake zone, if they are well-made. It gave me hope that I could persuade someone here to terrace part of a farm. The other interesting spot was a tunnel under the complex, which may have been used to store mummies or for ritual purposes, but it was closed off. Well, sort of closed off—the gate had been torn off its hinges. I kind of wanted to sneak in, but I couldn’t quite gat past the idea that no one wanted me to do that, and that it would be too dark to see anything anyway. But I wish they would consider opening it to the public. It definitely was intriguing. Below the terraces was a garden made with the Incan planting system in mind, including staple crops, tree crops, and medicinal plants. It was nice to recognize some of the medicinal plants that my neighbors sell in the market in Chunchi, but there were others I’ve never seen before.

On the way back up the Calle Larga, I saw one more archaeological site, a place where the three cultures of Cuenca were sort of stacked one on top of the other. Once I signed in, I was given what started out as a private tour of Spanish grain mills built on a slope terraced first by the Canari and later by the Inca. Cuenca, as its name (which means “basin”) suggests is surrounded by mountains and rivers, and the Spaniards routed some of the water down sluices to drive the mills. The differences in stone construction were easy to pick out, at least once they had been pointed out. The Canari used stones that seemed to have been shaped and fit them together with mortar. The Incas used carefully cut and fitted stones without mortar. The Spaniards used raw stone and lots of mortar. All three techniques have stood the test of time. The grain mills were in use well into the last century, and the indigenous structures are even older. Think about it: how many structures in New York are 500 or more years old?

After this I had a few unstructured hours until I could do anything one could consider “night life.” I have wanted to get to a dentist and have my teeth cleaned since before I left the US, but whenever I have been in a city big enough to go looking for dentists, my timing has been off, and all the offices I have passed were closed. But here it was, late on Friday afternoon, and I seized the opportunity. I saw a dental office, walked in, asked to have my teeth cleaned, waited less than ten minutes, and was attended by the dentist himself. I paid $25, and didn’t have to hassle with insurance. Of course, $25 is about a day and a half’s pay in Tolte, but it sure seemed cheap and convenient compared to the same service with insurance in the US. I think a dentist in Cuenca probably lives pretty nicely, and I know that my neighbors don’t see dentists too often, but I also understand why Cuenca might be a retiree’s paradise.

Wandering back to the Calle Larga, I stumbled across the La Compania Microbrewery. As previous posts have shown, it’s tough to get a good glass of beer in Ecuador, so I went right in. Pedro Molina, the brewmaster and proprietor, was there, and we had a really interesting conversation about operating a brew pub in Cuenca. Pedro has a degree in industrial design, and has designed all the microbrew equipment that is available in Ecuador, so the pubs in Quito and Banos are his clients. Needless to say, his beer is better than theirs. The atmosphere was better, too. Usually when I travel around Ecuador, I have trouble finding people to talk to. That wasn’t the case in La Compania, where aside from talking to Pedro, I met Craig from Colorado, who is taking a five month breather from the States to learn Spanish in Cuenca and then travel to Central America, and another Craig, a vacationing Irish bartender who works in Costa Rica. The second Craig tells me that Nicaragua, especially the island in the middle of Lake Nicaragua, is the place to be right now. I’ll have to put it on my list.

Having seen so many museums on Friday, I wasn’t sure what to do with my Saturday. After picking up my washed, dried, and folded laundry (a bigger thrill than you might imagine) and getting breakfast, I decided to try to walk to the Feria Libre, the big open market on the west side of Cuenca. I made it most of the way, but got caught up in all sorts of weird detours due to road construction, and was advised to take the bus the rest of the way. The market is sort of a combination of the open market in Chunchi and the indoor market in Alausi, at about ten times the size. That sheer size did keep me wandering about for a while, but I can’t say that I saw anything that I wouldn’t have seen in Chunchi, so it didn’t hold my interest for too long, and I caught the bus back to the historic district and the Calle Larga.

I had seen most of the museums that I wanted to see, but I did stop in at the smaller of the two hat museums in Cuenca, where people are actually making Panama hats. They weren’t actually weaving the straw by hand, but there was a big machine that seemed to be doing that part of the job. The people seemed to be doing more shaping and sewing of ribbons and so on. I also walked over to the Prohibido Centro Cultural de Arte Extremo at Craig from Colorado’s recommendation, but didn’t really feel drawn in—maybe I’m just too old. The art looked like good rock album cover art, but I wasn’t sure how much of that I really wanted to see. I was more in an ancient Andean frame of mind.

I decided to walk down to the river that runs along the Calle Larga, and see what was going on down there. This seemed to be the zone of the people that Ecuadorians call “hippies,” with young folks selling hand-made jewelry and practicing circus arts on the grass. I got lunch in a vegetarian restaurant run by a couple of post-college looking folks, and it was really pretty good. Continuing along the river, I came across a big open-air concert in the Parque de la Madre. It was put on by one of the ministries, maybe Ministro de Seguridad, because there were ongoing announcements about being safe and not buying stolen property. I stayed for a couple of acts, including the Rey de Technocumbia and Brito, a guitar-playing pop star. The weather was nice and the whole thing was free, so this was a definite bonus to my visit. After that I wandered up Calle Hermano Miguel to the bookstore Libri Mundi, which had been mentioned on an internet site as worth a visit. It was a nice place to sit down and rest for a while, as my Ecuadorian imitation Nikes were starting to pinch my feet, but I didn’t feel the urge to buy any books. Prices were surprisingly high: $18 for paperback Harry Potter books, which I would like to have in the library in Tolte, and $30 for paperback Lord of the Rings books, of which we only have the first book in Tolte. I didn’t splurge for them, but maybe I’ll start saving.

I did go back to La Compania again, perhaps hoping I’d run into some of the people I had met the night before. The same crew of barmaids was there, and they talked to me a bit, but things were very quiet until Mario and Javier, who have the look of perpetual students, came in. Mario and I had a lively (and not unfriendly) discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian situation (“Palestina Libre, Carajo!”), which is not the sort of discussion I’ve had anywhere else. My conclusion is the fairly obvious one that Israel is losing the support of the thinking population who, a generation ago, were among its biggest supporters. I don’t think Mario opposed Israel’s existence, but he did feel that everything they were doing in relation to the Palestinians is wrong. Ecuador has its own oil supply. It is more resistant than most countries to Arab pressure. If Israel can’t maintain the support of a country like Ecuador, I think it faces some serious problems. But then, it always has.

Sunday turned out to be the real adventure day of my weekend. I had looked into visiting Ingapirca, Ecuador’s largest archaeological site, at a travel agency. I had looked into going on Saturday, but I would have had to pay $130 for a private tour. In my hotel, I found a bus schedule that showed that I could take a bus straight from Cuenca to Ingapirca at 9 AM, and that the site itself provides a tour. So I hustled out Sunday morning and bought a ticket for $2.50, got on the wrong bus, got off, got on the right bus, and was in Ingapirca by 11:15, in time for an 11:30 tour in English.

Ingapirca, which means “Walls of the Incas” in Kichua, was originally built as a kind of palace and ritual city by the Canari people, whose descendants still live nearby. I don’t want to try and offer a guide to Ingapirca, because you can look that up on the web for yourself. But I found the differences in the Canari and Inca approaches to the site interesting, because these differences seem to have been driven by differences in religious belief. The Canari were matriarchal and worshipped the moon. Their structures were round and tracked changes in the moon’s phase. The Incas were patriarchal and worshipped the sun. Their structures are rectangular and elliptical, which suggests that they knew that the earth travels an elliptical path around the sun. I wish I knew how they could figure that out with the observational record they had. I think it has something to do with where the sun’s rays hit at certain parts of the day at different time of the year, but I can’t quite work it out.

As my fellow tourists were taking pictures of a half-moon shaped garden area, I asked my guide, Susana, a question in Spanish about the irrigation canals that led to this spot. She asked why my Spanish was so good, and I told her what I do here, and she came back with the idea that she’s trying to start a school where people could study Spanish, Kichua, and English, and was that something I’d be interested in doing? I have to say that I don’t know what the follow-up will be, but she did take my information. I may find myself teaching English in Ecuador for longer than I originally planned.

I will admit to buying touristy souvenirs that may or may not be archaeological artifacts. If they are genuine, it would be wrong of me to take them out of Ecuador. If they’re not, I’m sure I overpaid. Sucker or despoiler of the national patrimony, which is worse? Let’s say that these things were made recently, and I overpaid. They’re still pretty cool looking, though, and 7 or 8 people will wind up with one. I wonder if I could pay for this trip by selling them on eBay?

I hated to leave Ingapirca, and I guess the universe could tell, because I had to wait in El Tambo over 2 hours for a bus to Chunchi. Several buses heading north refused to pick me up unless I were heading to Quito. The weather closed in, and it was a cold, misty wait for a bus that would tolerate my short-distance presence. I did finally get standing room for the hour and a half ride to Chunchi. It’s nice to think that Ingapirca and Cuenca are so close if I want to go back.

Since coming back to Tolte, at least one new and interesting thing seems to be brewing. A group called MCCH, which is an acronym for words in Kichua that I do not understand, is dedicated to promoting community based tourism. One of their projects, first mentioned to me back in October or so, is to develop a network of organic farms in Pistishi to provide food and agrotourism to the train station. Rumor has it that they will be coming every Wednesday for a while to train and support farmers in this project. Needless to say, I hope to get myself involved in this up to my elbows. Like the language school of Ingapirca, nothing is certain, but I am hopeful. I’d like to make some mark on agricultural practices here before I leave—and terraced farmland is a tradition that goes back to the Canari. That might just be a Stiny Brook Technology and Society question: Why do people abandon an effective technology? How can they be persuaded to take it up again?