South Africa

South Africa
Johannesburg Airport

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Rooster's Do Not Lie





A rooster crows for the third time its 5am. Leaning outside the door in the courtyard of Tres Balcone’s I spot the alarm clock perched atop the low facing Ceramic roof line. He struts across the peak as if to announce what we are in for. His brethren have done the same here for some 600 odd years, speaking volumes, as if to say “you should have been moving 3 hours ago”. He would be right... Our host Francisco Alcoser, an amiable Peruvian man
is up sorting out are breakfast down the stone steps in a semi open kitchen. The mountain air smells sweet.

Welcome to Peru, Welcome to Cachora Peru, an idyllic village squeezed into a canyon bottom quite neatly as if stone, mud and brick boxes were mechanically pressed here by some giant hand. Looming in the distance out the bottom end of the canyon to the north is the Salcantay range, so Grand and enormous in stature with peaks ranging in and out of 22,000ft it makes the Rockies look like the foothills.

My Friend since University of Minnesota Rugby days is Jeff Lien or “Duff” as I know him, a nick name he picked up when as kids his younger brother Dan would flub the pronunciation of Jeff. The two of us have traveled to the far corners of Peru to venture into the heart of the Andes and Choquequairo (pronounced “shokeekerow”), a lesser known mountain top Inca ruin. Abandoned around 1530 it is considered to be one of the last holdouts of the Incan Empire, an Empire internally fractured by civil war with the inevitable arrival of Francisco Pizzaro and his merry band of gold diggers. Fortunately for Pizzaro not a lot of digging was required, just the taking. The Conquistadors spent little time with pleasantries forcing one of the more sophisticated civilizations of its time to head for the hills, literally, inhabiting villages teetering on cliffs of extinction. So remote is Choquequirao it will take two days of vertical foot travel to get there.

This is not your Machu Pichu. No exhaust belching buses, no camera on polo laden tourist, no glossy brochures, and no descendants of an ancient empire hucking t-shirts, in fact no one at all, just a few suspicious mules and the singularly inconspicuous trekker.