botWerks

26-november, 2009 – misc. cusco

inka museum – bring your own tp.  note, this is one of those places that you would think is included in the boleto turistico, but in reality, it’s not.  i run hot and cold on this one.  there’s some interesting stuff here.

very few of the displays here have english translations. so you have to puzzle through the explanation if you’re spanish challenged as we are.  there are guides available for hire based on tips only.  in retrospect, it might have been useful to get a guide to tell us the stories associated with the displays.  i don’t mean for the word “stories” to come off as pejoratively as it does, but you always have to go back and balance the account that you’re told when you’re on a tour with the research that you can dig up as an obsessively detail oriented individual.  in most cases, it’s close enough or romanticized appropriately.  sometimes you just want to hear a good story.  remember, if it bleeds, it leads.

getting back to the inka museum … they’re pretty aggressive about enforcing the ticket policy here.  there are guards all over the place and they ticket number at entry.  kathy couldn’t find a bathroom and they almost didn’t let her back into the museum.  a little bit of local explanatory help got her back into the mix, but seriously people …

the displays here are no where near as polished as the displays at MAP there’s a lot of card stock and fading ink-jet printing with ye-olde english font action.  there are however, a lot of artifacts that are well worth checking out and a few dioramas that are more than a little entertaining.   that said, the artifact displays are haltingly covered in english.  if you’re not conversant in spanish, you’re screwed.

almost worth the price of admission alone are a handful of large format aerial photographs from the 1930s.  these were clearly taken before exhaustive restoration and excavation had taken place.  ollayantaytambo looks practically native and machu picchu looks like it was just discovered.  there are a number of pictures from the 1912 national geographic expedition led by hiram bingham.  this had to be the first expedition of note since the “discovery” of machu picchu by bingham a year earlier.

as a side note – these pictures had me dig up the original national geographic articles from the natgeo archives.  fascinating stuff from a time when there was still active exploration to be done.

the first floor of this museum has a couple of small textile production exhibits.  one of the exhibits has a number of interesting displays detailing various textile patterns and their symbolic significance.  (star pattern / mountain range / etc.)  apparently, there’s a lot of interest in the part of the peruvian government in insuring that there’s a repository of native skills and they’re supporting a number of initiatives to teach and document the original techniques.

thursday evening – the briefing …

this was the pre-inca trail briefing at the llama path office.  this was more interesting than i thought it would be.  first off, it’s the first exposure to the people you’re going to be slogging 30+ miles on the trail with.  our impressions were very favorable.  there’s an underlying dread at the possibility that you’ll have to slog the next 3-4 days out with a bunch of douche-bags.  fortunately, we got a good crew.  largely non-U.S. in composition, we had a handful of australians, a portuguese couple, a woman fromt he isle of man, a couple from michigan and a venezuelan by way of seattle.

• day 1 – looks to be relatively chepa
• day 2 – looks to be a bitch
• day 3 – looks like stair hell with a break in the afternoon
• day 4 – wake up @ 3:30a – hike in the dark, wait in line, hike and tour within machu picchu – bus to aguas calientes and a train to poroy for us.  llama path bus to cusco.