“This,” Hernan says proudly, “is the room where I was born.”
Well, not quite. He is one room off, as his aunt quickly informs him. But it is clear how proud he is of his origins.
Hernan has brought us to his aunt’s block-long home in Urubamba to show us where he came from and to give us a glimpse into daily life.
During my time in Peru, I’ve been amazed at how the natural world infused the Incans’ worldview. Machu Picchu looks like a condor when viewed from neighboring heights. The mountain near Picara is a crouching puma. And the Sacred Valley mirrors the heavens.
The Incans saw the familiar in the world around them, and they used their architecture to reflect those images back at nature.
I caught a glimpse of how strongly this impulse lives in the local people while walking near the Urubamba River with Hernan, a local woman and her two children. The woman pointed up at the cliffs in the distance and insisted she saw the shape of a car there. After squinting a bit toward the heights, I finally saw what she was talking about. This descendant of the Incans still looks for the familiar in the local geography, and if the similarities are more likely to take the shape of a diesel-breathing car than a soaring condor, so be it.
While in Peru, Wes and I wanted to sample the local delicacy called cuy, or guinea pig. We’d already seen them being raised in a local home. Now we wanted to get a taste of one.