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March 06, 2005
¡Hey Sacsayhuaman!
QOSQ'O, PERU. I arrived in Peru on Saturday and today am writing from an internet cafe in Qosq'o, the nearest major city to the ruins at Machu Picchu, which I will visit on Wednesday. The keyboard is terrible and i'm running on very little sleep, so this will be brief. We spent yesterday in Lima, where the highlight was a fabulous French-Peruvian dinner at Astrid & Gaston, which is perhaps Peru's best restaurant. Dinner featured baby goat leg, baked guinea pig, shrimp rizotto, scallops in the shell, and local specialty desserts. (Tonight I had alpaca... tastes like beef.) Dinner went from 7.30 to midnight, and the wakeup call to come to the airport for Qosq'o came at 3am, so i need to return and get some sleep! Eventually I will have tons of pics to share.
The highlight of today may have been the visit to Sacsayhuaman (pronounce it out for a fun surprise), an Inca temple-fortress located high above Qosq'o (which is already at elevation 11,200 ft). I despise group tours, so when the guide started going off about Americans' obsessions with Pizza Hut, Cluster Y´s favorite Aussie and I split the scene and climbed to the top of the fortress to enjoy the views below.
We also paid a visit to the cathedral, a massive triple-nave complex built atop an Inca temple destroyed by the Spanish. The Quechua Indian guide was not thrilled with the use of Incan stones to build a Christian cathedral, but he did give a good description of the various devices used by the Spanish to make the forced conversion of the Quechua easier to swallow. One was a crucifix with Jesus wearing a Quechua dress rather than a loincloth. Another was a crucifix painting attributed to the 15th century Flemish master Jan van Eyck (famous for his masterpiece The Adoration of the Lamb in Ghent). However, the Christ figure in the so-dubbed van Eyck painting has a very feminine body, which the Guide argues is done to convert the Quechua, who believed that the chief diety was female (Mother Earth.) Therefore, the painting could not be by van Eyck and is probably of local origin.
Posted by adrianjo at March 6, 2005 09:08 PM
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