Feliz Año Nuevo

It’s a new year and the beginning of mango season here. We’ve been spending our free time getting to know the hiking paths around La Jalca, visiting the spectacular ruins in the area and on Sundays we usually head to the weekend market in Yerbabuena. It’s a couple hour trek down the mountain out of the “eyebrow of the jungle”, the name for the cloud forest climate region where we live.  At the bottom, in the village of Ubilon, we hike along the Utcubamba River for another hour or so and arrive to the bustling market where we stock up on spices, meat, mangos and avocados and then hop on the truck for a butt numbing ride back up the mountain to La Jalca. We bought beef at the market for the first time and it was rather amusing. We picked the most crowded of the vendors in the row of meat stalls and pointed at the part of the skinned cow we wanted that we thought most resembled a filet. The petite señora slapped the carcass down on the wood stump, pulled out an axe and in a few bone crushing hacks we had about 3 lbs of meat from which we made a steak dinner and fantastic stew the next day. At the spice stall we found dried truffles for about $1 and they were a perfect accompaniment.

The amount of biodiversity here is incredible. On a hike with one of the community officials I asked about medicinal plants and within minutes she had plucked an armful of different leaves that are used for everything from soap to curing malaria. There is a lot of discussion at meetings we’ve attended to make this region a natural protected area in order to preserve the biodiversity, which is exciting for us to be a part of.

The holidays here were quite a different experience. It feels like we’ve stepped back in time. There were masses and processions through town and celebrations of the Saints with music, dancing and eating.  In the days leading up to Christmas, we attended our first celebration in the community complete with a candlelit procession to the 500 year old cemetery. The band played traditional folk music and men carried a beautifully decorated float of San Roce on their shoulders while women and children followed behind with lanterns. The stone church in the cemetery was filled with candles and calla lilies and we were unexpectedly welcomed by the priest at the mass and introduced to the congregation. Afterwards, a feast was held with more live music and dancing well into the night. 

For Christmas we found a small synthetic pine tree in the store, decorated it with some lights and played our Ella Fitzgerald Christmas songs playlist way too many times. Thanks to our wonderful family and friends in the states we had cards and gifts under our tree to open Christmas morning and a mini ‘Nacimiento’ or Koresh. It was a quiet holiday but we were happy to have each other to share it with.

Our year in review - a family tradition.

On New Years we visited Kuelap, an ancient, sprawling mountaintop ruin that rivals Machu Picchu in size. It was spectacular. 

Our first week

It’s hard to believe we’ve been here in La Jalca for over a week. And what a week it’s been. We spent our first couple days ‘decorating’ our one room home and making it more comfortable to live for the next couple years. We had a carpenter make us a bigger bed frame and bought a straw and cotton mattress that sort of fits the frame. We splurged on nice sheets and heavy wool blankets.  We made a kitchenette with a desk, a two burner gas stove, new pots and pans and added some tacky yet charming Christmas lights shaped like grapes for ambiance. Since installation we’ve been cooking some tasty Peruvian-American fusion meals with ingredients like quinoa, lentils, ají, saffron and queso fresco. 

We’ve both had great meetings with the community leaders and are really excited to start on projects here. Brian has a lot of community support for improvements to the water system and I have plans to start a native tree reforestation project with the fledgling nursery here. Right now they only have Eucalyptus and Pine seedlings, both invasive. We had a chance meeting with the national and regional directors of Agrorural, a government land management program, the Director of the Inter-American Bank, and other NGO’s in the region and it went great. Everyone was really supportive of a native tree nursery and reforestation project. We are feeling like our arrival here is welcome and needed.  

Our plans over the next couple weeks are to build on the momentum we’ve got, start planning projects with the community and hopefully take some time to go exploring and see the fantastic ruins that dot the landscape around our town. We discovered a book in the municipality that was written in 2003 by a German Anthropologist with hand drawn trekking maps of the region dotted with ruins, caves and tons of information on the history of the area.

The road to La Jalca

Last Wednesday we packed our suitcases and ourselves into a Volkswagen and headed from Chachapoyas to La Jalca. A half hour later the pavement disappeared. We rattled down the road alongside the Utcumamba River for an hour before the driver stopped.

He pointed to one of the green cliffs towering above the river. On cliff face vegetation obscured stone fortifications. Pre-Incan the driver said.

How old? A thousand years? The driver smiled. “Much older,” he replied.

The driver stopped the car a few miles further in front of a stone laid near the road. Someone had carved a puma into the rock centuries ago.

An hour-and-a-half into the journey, our driver turned into the dirt path that led to La Jalca. It’s a half hour of switchbacks in a car or grueling hour-and-half 2,200 feet up the mountainside.

A rusted sign points to a dirt path, which leads to the lost city of Ollape - built by the same people who carved the puma and laid the stone along the cliff faces. Our driver headed straight and dropped us of off at our new home for the next two years.