Following the Inca trails

The Incan empire had outposts from Ecuador to Chile, with the central areas around lake Titicaca. All these areas were linked by trails that the imperial messengers and armies could use to get around, and in many parts of the modern countries (esp Peru and Bolivia) long stretches of mountain-hopping paths still remain. 

We've been lucky enough to trek through three inca trails in the Andes of Bolivia and Peru, starting in the beautiful city of Sucre, southern Bolivia.

Maragua crater
The first trail we trekked was near Sucre in Bolivia, starting altitude around 3600m (not sure how high we ended up). It took us through some high altitude dry forests to a crater where we stayed in a local village. No one is sure if the crater was once a meteorite, an underwater volcano, or the result of conflicting seismic forces, but in many ways it is like a reclusive celebrity: a decent size, shapely, and quite picturesque from many different angles, though access can be a bit challenging.

Lake Titcaca islands
Lake Titicaca is the home turf of the Incas. Their creation legend has the first Inca and his family emerging miraculously from the lake and marching north to find a good place to found an empire around (the future Cusco).  There are still two dominant indigenous groups - the Quechua/Inca (north) and the Aymara (south) that live around the lake, only speak Spanish as a second language and make up the majority of the population of Peru and Bolivia.

Lake Titicaca is deep, clear and cold in the south around Isla Del Sol (3800-4000m) which was once the scene of important annual religious pilgrimages. We hiked across the island on the remaining trail, partly to check out the ruins there, but also partly to find somewhere to watch the Copa America, which was in its early stages and not easy to find on an island without reliable radio signal or electricity.

Around Uros islands in the south the lake is shallow, reedy and full of algae. The Uros people, a bit like the Venetians, fled to man-made islands to escape from the dominant Inca and Aymara people. These were made entirely from the native reeds, which are not hollow but filled with a spongy cellular structure that makes them float. Each island is a sandwich of continually-renewed layers of reeds which last for about forty years with regular maintenance.

Urubamba Valley
Inca central: every hill has a trail, every other hill has an old city. Unlike nearly everyone else, the Incas liked to build on mountain tops, even when more hospitable valleys were available to them. It's wasn't only for defense, as most towns (like Machu Picchu) are not very fortified. Also, was not for protection from natural disasters; while they avoided floods, they were more vulnerable to landslides. Just a preference.
We did not do the traditional Inka trail, which visits five ancient towns, including Machu Picchu; we took a different trail through the Vilcabamba region, the last holdout of the Incan empire and more recently the heart of Peruvian cocaine production.
Along the way we included some cycling, whitewater rafting (new favourite thing) and zip lining, to break up the long steep marches. Machu Picchu itself was better then we expected; easy to look at, with lots of interesting angles on offer. It's a hard climb but when you get there, it's a miraculous place.

Incan-Spanish wars
The Incan empire lost to the Spanish in very mysterious ways. After Pizarro tricked the Inca, took him hostage then killed him, he, his brothers and his lieutenant Amarga successively tricked, bribed and murdered successive members of the surviving Incan royal family (and each other) until they revolted. For a long time there were only 300 Spanish soldiers to maintain control, yet they managed time and time again to fend off Incan armies, much to their own surprise. If anyone was betting on the successful colonisation, the Spanish occupation is a great example of a long shot that unexpectedly paid off.
For a long time the last resistance was based in the area adjacent to Machu Picchu, and the need of the rebellion to conscript soldiers  is very likely the reason it was eventually abandoned.

In fact, Machu Picchu was only found because in 1911 the scientific expedition was looking for the final citadel of the Incas (still not conclusively identified).
A few hundred years later, some latter-day Inca heroes emerged to help throw off the yoke of Spanish colonialism, caught up in the revolutions of San Martin and Bolivar in the early 19th century. One such was Juana Azurduy de Padilla, who recruited a large force of irregulars and even led them in battles herself. Bolivar appointed her as a colonel when he arrived on the scene, but she was subsequently excluded by Sucre from the Declaration of Independence due to her race and gender. She was posthumously appointed a general of both the Argentinian and Bolivian armies.

Four quarters of the Incan empire

In broad terms, the Incan empire (Tawantisuyu) was divided into four quarters that roughly matched either georaphical regions or conquered smaller states: north was Chichansuyu, which correspoinded with teh conquered smaller states making up modern Ecuador, parts of Colombia and north Peru. South was Collasuyu, the altiplano region of Titicaca, Aymara, modern Bolivia, north Argentina and north Chile. After the death of the Inca immediately prior to the Spanish invasion, Chichansuyu defeated Collasuyu in a civil war that (together with a smallpox and influenza epidemic) left the Inca state vulnerable to the Spanish. The coastal region immediately west of Cusco was Cuntinsuyu, and the jungle frontier zone east of Cusco was Antisuyu. 

The central point of the lines dividing the empire was the great template Qorikancha in Cusco. This template was stripped of its gold to ransom the Inca back from Pizarro, and now has a Dominican convent built on top of it, but is still used as the ceremonial starting point of the revived (since 1944) Incan festival of the winter equinox Inti Raymi.

Inti Raymi

Our adventures through the Andes finished at Inti Raymi festival in Cusco. Inti Raymi ("Festival of the Sun") was a religious ceremony of the Inca Empire in honor of the god Inti, one of the most venerated deities in Inca religion. It was the celebration of the Winter Solstice - the shortest day of the year in terms of the time between sunrise and sunset and the Inca New Year. During the Inca Empire, the Inti Raymi was the most important of four ceremonies celebrated in Cusco. The festival attracts tens of thousands locals and extranjeros and goes for days throughout the streets of Cusco before the final Inti Raymi is held in Saqsaywamen. The festival is still performed with many of the traditional rituals including the sacrifice of a llama, where the priests tear out its heart, lungs and trachea. Right in front of us all.

Neo-Incan/colonial city living: Sucre and Cusco

Apart from trekking along the inca trails, sucre and cusco are top cities with lots to do and see. Below are some of our highlights.

Sucre fruit  juice markets

Amazing museums - the Incan nobles would strap and warp their heads so they looked like cones

Cusco markets

Cusco night life

Cicciolini's - where the food is crazy amazing

Incan accountant

Farming

The Incas practised a wide variety of farming practices, which included potatoes and livestock in the highlands, corn and quinoa in the lower areas, and fruit in the cloud forest and jungle areas. They built steps into almost every single hill around lake Titicaca, and many others further out in the empire, where they built irrigated raised garden beds that also prevented landslides.

Volunteering at La Senda Verde

 Four(ish) years ago when planning our honeymoon, we planned to volunteer at an organisation doing animal and habitat care in South America. We never made it that far. When May heard about a similar organisation near La Paz, we decided to take up where we left off and help out at an animal refuge.
La Senda Verde is located at the end of the "death road", 2000m lower than La Paz, with a subtropical climate. Many exotic animals that are given up or seized from traffickers and markets in La Paz end up here. In general, only rescued animals are kept here and there is no breeding program for the endangered species. All the animals are from lower, warmer jungle areas so they find it a little cool here in the Yungas, but it is prohibited to release animals back into the wild, so these rescuees will live out their days here.

We wake up early each morning to the sounds of macaws, Amazonian parrots, and the amazing Howler monkeys, whose howl sounds like an aeroplane flying above. They can project this sound up to 4.8km in the jungle.

Our typical day looks something like this...
7:15am Meeting of 8-14 volunteers to split up tasks
7:30am Clean out enclosures and feed breakfast to birds, monkeys, tyras, capibara
9am Human breakfast
10:00 Feed snack to monkeys, feed and clean turtles and tortoises
11:00 Fix up bird enclosures, take any English or French tours
12:30 Feed lunch to monkeys, capibara and tyras
1:30 Lunch
2:30 Siesta and cuddles with the spider monkeys
3:30 Clean out enclosures and feed dinner to birds, monkeys, tyras, capibara
6:00 Showers (very necessary by now)
6:15 Sunset wine on the porch
7:30 Dinner
8:30 movie, head to ´town´, hang out, read book, play cards, play pool, etc

Other long-term volunteers had special projects, like the spectacled bears, small big cats, nocturnal monkeys, and caring for the high care sick or baby monkeys.

Capuchin monkey area


Henrietta the Capibara
May's taken charge of Henrietta the Capibara, and possibly the happiest animal on the planet.the capibaras are the largest rodents - though if you saw them swim and play you would never think they were anything short of a ballerina. Henrietta loves corn and banana leaves: she jumps gently up on you with her webbed feet, flaps her ears and does a little bum dance to show she is happy. And her happiness is contagious. She loves swimming and does little rollie-pollies in her pool while fluttering her eyelashes.





Tortoise Time
After breakfast May heads to care for the turtles and tortoises. It's a chilled job, the hardest part being physically moving the tortoises to their food mats and keeping kantuta, the coati, and the monkeys away long enough for our chilled-out tortoises to eat. Tortoises can get cranky sometimes and they make a hissing noise and withdraw into their shell to show their disapproval at being woken up! They're as slow as you have heard, maybe slower, but when a monkey gets near their food , they can team-up and ram it with their shells.














The Birds
La Senda Verde has many beautiful amazonian parrots, macaws and Sam the Toucan. Most days either Sam or May with other vollies check up on the birdies, feed them and clean out their enclosures.

We did a lot of work with the birds, trying to make their lives a bit better - they were in relatively small and temporary enclosures while waiting for a larger aviary to be built. Every day Sam (and whoever he could rope in to help) would fix little things, like broken locks, ripped or missing curtains, perches, etc. May spearheaded the entertainment team that made edible games and picked branches for inside their cages. Apparently part of the money for the aviary had already been donated, but they were waiting for the donating currency  to go up, so they can get more bang for their buck before building it. Other afternoons May helped out feeding and cleaning after the Tyras, which are like big weasles, and love climbing all over volunteers, or eating monkeys.



Monkey business

In the meantime, a lot of new parts were being built into the monkey enclosure, where Sam spends his days, : a "human cage" to allow guests to visit the monkey territories in safety, and see them interacting. There are two main communities: capuchin monkeys and  spider monkeys, plus some howler monkeys, titis and squirrel monkeys. It is a little hairy working in the monkey area, as they regularly swing from being very huggy and affectionate to biting people pretty badly (this happened about 5 times during our two week visit). Plus, rescued monkeys often associate women with former abusive owners, get very protective of their favourite male carers, and really hate children - so only men are allowed to work with them and women are only allowed in with an escort.  That said, we definitely got a lot more bites from the bloody birds than the monkeys.

Pimienta and the Spider Monkey Cuddles

And when we both get a little downtime, there is nothing more relaxing than hugs from the spider monkeys. We sit down with shef, rosie, bobbie and alex and before we know it, they've come to our porch and grabbed hold of you with their tail, then proceed to climb up and nest their head in your chest, ready for siesta. Pimienta makes love noises at may and will crawl under May´s shirt to sleep on her chest. She's snoring in no time. Spider monkeys have scent glands that actually make them smell like roses. they love grooming so when you get cuddles it's probably the cleanest you feel on any given day while working at la Senda Verde. the spider monkeys here are still wild and they can snap and bite any time. our friends got bitten on the neck with puncture wounds to show it.

We've met lots of cool travellers and locals here. All our meals are shared and its a nice time to get talking. If we miss a meal, there's always someone happy to share a bottle of wine at sundown on the deck of our cabin. We also had Toto Tuesdays, the pizzeria is located in the little town of Coroico, which has been built into a cliff face up a steep stone road. We squeeze 20 people in a mini van and 20 minutes later we are eating arguably the best pizza in Bolivia. When the mood took us, Saturday nights we hit the Coroico night scene, at reputable night clubs such as Tropicana, where you share the dance floor with Cholitas and dogs, and can taste the secret tropical concoction if you´re feeling brave. In such labour-intensive volunteering, a good experience hinges on having a great team of volunteers who are willing to help, are reliable and fun to hang out with. We were very grateful to have this!