Sur America: Chachapoyas: Gem of the North

CHACHAS

We arrived in Chachapoyas after a rough and curvey journey up and down valleys in the wee hours of Tuesday. We grabbed a room in a hostel and layed down our tired heads for a few hours, it amazing how riding a bus for a night can make you tired...

Our thoughts were to take a few day tours here, there are lots of things to do in the area but you need to get taxis or combis (small UW van sized vehicles that they stuff up to 21 people inside). We ran into a girl from Bellingham, of all places!, that wanted to do some similar trips and we teamed up with Robin to tackle the Sonche Canyon outside of Huancas (sounds like Wankas). The trip was fast and we got to see most of the canyon but the clouds mostly ruled the day. This country is filled with impressive canyons, steep valleys, roads that grip the edges, and crazy beautiful sights. We also met an English man who knew a ton about the local history and loved chatting about history in general. He told us a funny, if inappropriate, joke while at dinner that I will tell you if you wish :)

We had received some ambiguous information from a tourist information place about a multiday hike we could try that would take us through some tiny villages, past ruins, around valleys and definitely through rain. As Kasey and I didn´t have a tent we were a little skeptical of the information and taking the chance that we would be able to get to a village and ask for a room. We started by taking a taxi out to a village called Cruzpata, and after a short hike down some very muddy and slick "stairs" we came around a bend and behold the Sarcofaguses. Six of them remained and they were about 50 feet above the trail up an overhanging cliff. These were remains of the Chachapoya people and apparently important people to be buried in such a way. The cliff and graves were only the start of our journey. We had the taxi drop us off at the next town and began hiking towards the Belén Valle, and when we stopped to ask a local woman how far we had to go she said "pobrecitos" (poor us) she said we had 28 km to walk! Not believing her we sent out again the direction we thought correct and were amazed to find the next person we asked claiming 2-3 hours! What? A third local gave us another answer and we decided to turn back. The map we had was not to scale, hand drawn with no topography, and no distances. Kase and I didn´t have a tent so we really didn´t want to get stuck out there. So we headed back to Chachapoyas via potato truck, taxi and combi. Our combi driver thought he was driving a WRX or something and I had a bad feeling when he started handing out plastic baggies. He succeeded in making three "generations" lose their last meal: a baby lost her milk all over her moms arm, a younger kid lost his too but hit the inside of the bag, then his mom-auntie lost hers too! And then the waste bag went out the window...Dinner anyone?? We had some dinner back at Robin´s hostel which had a kitchen! And schemed with 3 aussie girls (Bonnie, Ella and Katie) as well as Roc and Andy (Slovania and Germany) about hitting up Gocta Falls the next day.

José, the owner of the hostel we ate at, had drawn a map of how to get to Gocta falls, as he was a guide too and spoke excellent English we felt very secure in his directions. We caught a combi up to San Pablo (which saved us 1.5 hours of walking if we had started from the valley floor) and paid our "registration" of S/10 (ten soles, about 4 dollars) Roc somehow schmoozed his way to paying only S/5 (this would be a trend and made us realize that he mooched and used others all the time). For about 2 hours we hiked through jungle and came finally to a fork, one going up to the first fall, the other going down to the Mirador. We had to do the first fall of course! Gocta falls is the 3rd tallest waterfall in the world, the first step is 231m and the second is a staggering 540m for a total of 771m! (Multnomah, in comparison, is about 190m). We snapped a few shots before the mist could cover us and our camera completely (we were already wet from rain), and headed back down. Kasey, Robin and I headed down to peer over the edge of the second waterfall, basically looking off into nothingness (don´t worry Kasey didn´t let me get too close to the edge..) We raced back down in the rain, catching up to the other 5 in a cave they had found to get out of the rain for lunch. Lunch felt good, but it was back into the elements and back on the muddy trail so we could get to the base of the tall fall. It´s amazing that when water falls for that long it really just turns to mist, powerful mist and you are going to get wet. Andy, the German took a dip in the pool but we didn´t have much in terms of dry clothes, on second thought we should have jumped in, we got more wet walking the rest of the loop for it to not matter. We were getting short on time so we decided to kick up the pace; the weather, not wanting to be left out, turned up the rain too (We haven´t been that soaked to the bone in a while). We arrived at Cocachimba and called a combi from a restaurant. We then waited the 30 or so minutes, squeegying ourselves less wet, or simply getting down to the bare minimum and hanging the rest to "dry." For dinner we tried an avacado pasta that the aussie had been talking about: avacado mashed up with garlic, salt and oil mixed in with pasta, DE-licious!! We´d add some fried onions and fresh tomatoes next time, any interested should try it out!!

Kasey and I had been busy before dinner, we ran up to our hostel, stripped wet clothes off and put on a dry set then went back to the square to make sure we got a tour to Kuélap Ruins (with José´s company: Tourismo Explorer). We also got our overnight bus tickets bought so we could check out the next adventure town of Huarez. But let me tell you first about Kuélap! (if you want more info, go on Wikipedia and look it up, hopefully our guide wasn´t just feeding us lies :)

Kuélap was a "fortress" of the Chachapoyas, it was built over 1000 years by villages who worked 2-3 months per year with the other time spent tending their crops. The "Men of the Clouds" or "Warriors of the Clouds" picked this spot as a stategic place they could look out over the surrounding valleys. It´s protected by a massive outer wall and three narrow entrances, two of which line up with the sunrise and sunsets on agriculturally important dates (March 3 and October 6th, planting and harvest). The interior had about 420 buildings, most of them circular, rectangular ones coming after the Inca took Kuélap by siege. There is some speculation as to where these people came from because it was said that they had very fair skin and blonde hair. I think it was Clive Cussler´s Inca Gold that I remembered hearing the name Chachapoyas. That particular theory is that the Vikings got to South America 500 plus years before the Spanish did...Don´t mean to bore you with history but I can chat about it later if you want :)

Kuélap was awesome. Some say it is second only to Machu Picchu. Our guide said maybe 50 people took a tour that day, Machu Picchu has thousands each day... This sort of stuff makes me want to be an Anthropologist, that, or a teacher :)