Sunday, we had our last breathless day and sleepless night in Cusco.
Apart from writing that last dreary post that I shouldn’t have bothered with, we had only set ourselves two goals for the day: Museo de la Coca and to find the ‘twelve angled block’ in the part of the ancient wall in the city. Four days of acclimatisation hadn’t brought any respite from the breathlessness, so that was considered enough for a day.
Vanessa left me to my dreary post and I joined her outside the small art cafe Museo Hilario Mendivil. Vanessa had read my post before I reached her and promptly suggested that I might like to hide it from the Peruvian Tourist Accociation. We set off in search of today’s delights, but as is my wont in these days under the mild effects of altitude, we did so without first consulting google. I knew roughly where the ‘block was as I’d found it the day before, but it was much too busy for me to hang around at, so on the way there I looked up the Museo de la Coca only to discover that it was just two doors down from the place we’d just left.
So it was breathlessly back up the hill and first stop that cafe. I had a mid-morning beer and Vanessa had another exotic brew of andean herbs and coca leaves that she’d had earlier. I’m sure the beer gives just as mild a relief from the effects of altitude as the coca leaves do. Either way the relief is so mild as to be unnoticeable.
The Museo de la Coca was both facinating and quite amazing. They had taken what was not much more that a fairly large room and turned it into a maze of fascinating insights into this group of plants that grow all over the Andes and has been used by indigenous peoples as a mild stimulant and more, probably even long before the Incas.
The teas we had been having gave us no sort of stimulation at all, although we hadn’t chewed the leaves as some locals still do. We were presented with the well preseved mummy of young boy found in the caldera of a volcano with evidence of having been drugged with coca before his sacrafice. Then an elongated scull and a trepanted skull, both ‘surgeries’ performed with the help of the analgesic effects of coca leaf. A whole section on the production of cocaine and it’s differences in the different areas of production, along with an exhaustive list of the industrial strength chemicals used in this process, including Hydrochloric and sulphuric acid. A process that starts out with at least 300 kg of coca leaves to produce 100g of pure cocaine.
A section on the barbaric spraying of whole areas of the Andes with glyphosate herbicides now banned in many countries. Herbicides that polluted their rivers and stayed around in the environment for years. Cancer causing herbicides that are now banned in many countries.
Then you turn a corner and you see illustrated the devastaion caused by cocaine in our societies. Pictures of Amy Whinehouse and Freddy Mercury and a rather grotesque mannequin of a young man in his early twenties, clearly dead, with headphones still on. This last representation is that of a real young man, not a famous celebrity, all the more tragically poignant.
Then the gift shop.
We had been allowed in for free because we were over sixty, so we felt obliged to buy something. What better than a pack each of coca toffees and candies. Before you start thinking we were being wreckless, let me remind you that we’d been drinking coca tea for days now with no effects. The only devastating effect of the toffees was that I mansged to extract yet another of the large fillings in my back teeth. By the time I get home I’ll probably need a ‘full set’.
That last night was even worse than the three before, as I lay awake all night trying as hard as I could to fill my lungs. In the morning my watch confirmed what I already knew, less than two hours sleep from my eight hours in bed. I am not sure if the paranoia about finding it diffuclt to breath was the cause of my sleep deprivation or the sleep deprivation was the cause of the paranoia. When I fanally awoke from my last half hour of sleep I realised as I had tried to tell myself all night. However uncomfortable it felt, it was not life threatening. I had just managed half-an-hour without even a thought of my breathing. Still, it was so uncomfortable in the morning that we eschewed the 15 minute walk to Inca rail in favour of a taxi.
The first part of our trip in to Machu Picchu was by minibus. This involved a steep climb out of the Huatanay valley were we reached a now somewhat dizzying and breathless height not far short of 4,000m, before careering down the other side into the Urumbamba valley, more prosaically known as the ‘Sacred Valley of the Incas’. At the base of the valley we picked up the Urumbaba River as it cascades steeply down and we closely followed the river all the way to the train station at Ollantaytambo to pick up the train for the final part of our journey in to Machu Picchu.
