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Aric S. Queen was on a quest to be the first person at the ancient Inca city of Machu Picchu, Peru, on January first. However, that involves some high-altitude walking uphill first thing in the morning, and he despaired as other hikers passed him by. But at the gate, serendipity gave Queen the opportunity to go first.
Ten-plus years of travel, forty-plus countries, countless marvels, but this is the only place I cried at seeing.
One photo was snapped from my phone — those four seconds were the maximum amount of time I wanted to take my eyes off of it.
For 30 seconds, I sat in silence – not even realizing what I had just done.
It took the sound of footsteps behind me to bring everything back to the present. And it took the sounds of voices to realize that when I had first gotten up – there were none.
An estimated 1.2 million people this year, and I was visitor no. 0,000,000,001.
Read Queen’s story and see a video of the adventure at Intelligent Travel magazine. Link -Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!
(Image credit: Aric S. Queen)
There’s not a force in this universe that could get me to cross a bridge made of dead grass, suspended hundreds of feet over a river, swaying gently in the breeze between a couple of rock faces. That said, it’s still kind of sad that the hundreds of handwoven bridges that existed in Peru for centuries are gone, leaving only a single example of Incan bridge technology.
Known as keshwa chaca, this is the only remaining example of the Incan handwoven bridges once common in the Incan road system. Made of woven grass, the bridge spans 118 feet and hangs 220 feet above the canyon’s rushing river.
The Incan women braided small, thin ropes, which were then braided again by the men into large support cables, much like a modern steel suspension bridge. Handwoven bridges lasted as long as 500 years and were held in very high regard by the Inca. The punishment for tampering with such a bridge was death.
Over time, however, the bridges decayed, or were removed, leaving this single testament to Incan engineering. This previously sagging bridge was repaired in 2003, christened with a traditional Incan ceremonial bridge blessing, and is now in extremely good condition.
Link (Image: Dylan Thuras)
A sheitel is a specific type of wig worn by Orthodox Jewish women. Helen Rosen of Baltimore took up an apprenticeship with a master craftsman of sheitels. She eventually moved to Peru to set up her own shop. Peruvian women, she found, have the best hair for this type of wigmaking:
Helene says that the ample selection of hair colors and textures in South America — the result of more than twenty-five generations of intermarriage between Europeans and indigenous people — make it the ideal source region. The hair of indigenous Peruvian women is thick, straight, and black-perfect for the lace-front wigs sought by black women, who have come to represent the majority of Helene’s business — and is worn in two braids that often stretch all the way down their backs and are plaited with tassels made from Alpaca wool.
You can read her story at the link. The site design is unusual. It scrolls from left to right, and the scrolling buttons appear plus and minus signs on the sides of the page.
Link via Kottke | Photo by Flickr user The Gifted Photographer used under Creative Commons license
Chan Chan in Peru was and still is a maze of adobe walls adorned with Pre-Columbian designs. Archaeologists have been studying the site for years, and even up until now, they are still unsure as to how many inhabitants called Chan Chan their home.
Within the confines of the city there were religious buildings, cemeteries, reservoirs, communal gardens, residences, and some other structures that may have been used to house food and supplies.
Interestingly enough, there was a class system at Chan Chan, much like the districts are separated today. Social classes were sectioned off in nine “citadels” where they lived, worked, and carried on with their daily lives.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
The following is reprinted
from Bathroom
Reader Plunges Into History Again
The guano-rich Chincha Islands of Peru (1863)
The next time a pigeon drops a load onto the windshield of your car,
spare a thought for the guano miners of Peru's Chincha Islands. They spent
their working lives knee-deep in the stuff.
The economies of most countries are founded on things like farming or
factories. But that was not the case for Peru, the mountainous South American
country just north of Chile. Back in the 1800s, this country's national
wealth was based on bird poop!
THE REIGN OF SPAIN
The Spanish explorer Francisco Pizarro arrived in Peru in 1532. After
taking a good look around and figuring out that the local Indians would
be no match for Spanish firepower, he claimed the country for Spain. In
1533, he did away with Atahuallpa, the Incan king, and formally made Peru
a Spanish colony. The Spanish remained in control for the next 300 years.
When independence came in 1821, the Peruvians suddenly realized that they
had to look out for themselves. One of their main problems was how to
make money. Peru wasn't overly blessed with natural resources, but it
did have a lot of birds. And where there are birds there's usually a whole
lot of bird crap.
Guanay cormorant (Phalacrocorax bougainvillii) - photo: Jens
Tobiska [wikipedia]
WHAT
A DUMP!
It's true what they say: birds of a feather really do flock together.
And the area where all discerning South American cormorants love to flock
to is a group of three unimpressive-looking lumps of Pacific rock just
off the coast of Peru called the Chincha Islands. Maybe it's the fishing;
these seabirds just love to hang out en masse there. And what
do cormorants do after they've gorged themselves on the poor, unsuspecting
anchovies that swim in the waters thereabouts? Well, they relieve themselves.
In fact, they've been doing it there for centuries. So, by the early 1800s,
the Chincha Islands were coated in a very deep and very smelly layer of
cormorant crud.
Don't ask who discovered that bird poop, or guano, was an excellent fertilizer,
but it's true that few things will help your roses bloom better than a
good dollop of cormorant droppings. So, starting in the 1840s, citizens
of Peru, under the control of a military strongman called General Castilla,
realized that there was white gold in the hills. And that all that waste
was too good to, well, waste. The general dished out licenses to highest
bidders (or bribers) to "mine" guano. And he set himself and
his cronies up in prime positions to exploit the amazing profits that
were expected from guano sales to the United States and Europe.
CHINESE TAKE-OUT
The only problem was, who in his or her right mind would want to spend
days working on what are possibly the smelliest islands on Earth, knee-deep
in guano, while being dive-bombed by incontinent cormorants? The people
of Peru were poor and desperate, but they weren't that desperate.
The usual solution to this sort of problem is obvious: oppress your local
minority. Castilla tried this, but there just weren't enough natives to
go around. Fortunately, one of the important businessmen controlling the
guano trade, Domingo Elias, knew where he could get his hands on some
really cheap labor: namely, China. The Taiping Rebellion in China was
a civil war that drove hundreds of thousands of Chinese out of the country.
Many were desperate to leave and would go anywhere: the United States
to build the railroads, England to work in sweatshops - or the Chincha
Islands to mine guano. The first coolies (from the Hindi word kuli,
which refers to an unskilled laborer, usually from the Far East, hired
for low or subsistence wages) arrived in 1820. Soon, they were probably
wishing they'd stayed home. They were kept in conditions of near slavery
and were flogged if they didn't meet their quota of two to five tons of
guano - each! - per day. Needless to say, they were paid terrible wages.
The only avenues of escape were suicide or opium, both of which were rife
on the islands.
CLEANING UP THEIR ACTS
Castilla and his bunch of guano gangsters did very well. During the 1850s,
there was so much guano waiting to be shipped out that vessels would commonly
have to wait at the dock for 30 to 80 days to load up. Between 1840 and
1875, the value of Peru's exports rose from 6 million pesos to 32 million
pesos ($43,351 to $231,226). Unfortunately for the rest of Peru, Castillo
and company didn't get around to plowing the profits they made back into
the economy. In fact, on the rare occasions they did, the results were
disastrous. Again using coolie labor, Peru built over 770 miles of railroads
around the country in the 1860s, at a cost much higher than the profits
yielded by the guano trade. In just a few years Peru leaped from last
to first place as the biggest borrower on the London money markets.
OH, POOP!
By the 1860s, new and cheaper forms of fertilizer were being developed.
Guano's big rival was salitre, or nitrate of soda. As most of the salitre
trade was conducted through neighboring Chile, Peru began to lose out.
Then, in 1866, Spain tried to recapture the Chincha Islands from Peru.
Although Peru won that little skirmish, the financial cost of the war
was crippling. In 1879, Peru went to war with Chile in an attempt to wrestle
control of the salitre trade. Peru lost the war in 1881 and was occupied
by Chilean soldiers, who went on an orgy of looting and destruction. The
Golden Age of Guano was well and truly over.
ENOUGH OF THIS POOP
By the time Peru got back on an even keel in the early 1900s, it had
learned not to place all its cormorant eggs in one basket. It diversified
into agriculture, copper mining, oil production - in fact, anything that
didn't involve guano.
And today? Well, those hungry cormorants are still creating one almighty
mess on the Chincha Islands. But fortunately for all involved, there are
no Chinese laborers to clean up after them. |
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The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into History Again.
The book is a compendium of entertaining information chock-full of facts on a plethora of history topics. Uncle John's first plunge into history was a smash hit - over half a million copies sold! And this sequel gives you more colorful characters, cultural milestones, historical hindsight, groundbreaking events, and scintillating sagas.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute
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Photo: Anne Lummerich
German conservationists Kai Tiedemann and Anne Lummerich came up with an ingenious solution to Peruvian village Bellavista’s water problem. The small village south of the capital city of Lima has very little rainfall but a lot of fog, so the duo set up fog catchers to harvest hundreds of gallons of water a day right out of the air!
The nets stand perpendicular to the prevailing wind, which blows fog into the coarse, woven plastic mesh. From there, drops of fog-water fall into gutters that carry the water to collection tanks.
In 1971, Juliane Koepcke was the sole survivor of a plane crash that killed 91 people over Peru. She fell two miles and landed in the rain forest. The 17-year-old Koepcke then walked for ten days through jungle terrain to find help.
As she travelled downstream, Koepcke discovered more wreckage from the plane — and found some of the crash victims.
“I found another row of seats with three dead women still strapped in. They had landed head-first and the impact must have been so hard that they were buried almost two feet into the ground.
“I was horrified — I didn’t want to touch them but I wanted to make sure that my mother wasn’t one of them. So I took a stick and knocked a shoe off one of the bodies. The toe nails had nail polish on them and I knew it could not have been my mother because she never used nail polish.”
Juliane continued through the rainforest, wading through jungle streams infested with crocodiles, piranhas and devil rays.
Koepcke is now a librarian in Munich. Read the whole story and see a video interview at CNN. Link -via reddit
Photo: Steve Bourget
A team of archaeologists co-led by Steve Bourget of the University of Texas discovered a treasure-filled tomb of the Moche Culture in Peru. They found this gem amongst the content: a 1,500-year-old funerary mask of Lord Ucupe, dubbed the "king of bling" because he was covered head to toe in shiny jewels and metals.
Kelly Hearn and Ted Chamberlain of the National Geographic News have the story: Link
Archaeologist Benedicto Perez Goicochea and colleagues discovered something fantastic in a remote mountainside in the Amazonian jungle: the village of the mystical "Cloud Forest People."
The buildings found on the Pachallama peak are in remarkably good condition, estimated to be over 1,000 years old and comprised of the traditional round stone houses built by the Chachapoya, the ‘Cloud Forest People’. [...]
Archaeologist Benedicto Pérez Goicochea said: "The citadel is perched on the edge of an abyss.
"We suspect that the ancient inhabitants used this as a lookout point from where they could spot potential enemies."
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From the website:
For other fantastic cast of bones, see: Link (via Jaf Project) |
