Sexy Woman

I couldn't resist using this as the title for today's blog, though the explanation is disappointingly pedestrian. 'Sexy woman' is the tourist nickname for Saqsaywaman, a huge Inca ruin, once a huge fort for the Inca settlement of Qosqo, which we can walk to from our house, though beautiful green hillsides and forests, and so we duly do.

We are spending the day with Beth, our own sexy woman, whose company is probably the best gift that she, or any AirBnB host, could give us.

She walks, chatting, with us to the site, and guides us around the ruins. We are all, Beth included, (she says she never stops being moved by the Inca ruins on her doorstep), amazed at the sheer size of the stones, and at the precision and mathematical exactitude of their shapes. Fitting exactly into each other these stones survived the deliberate destruction by the Spanish and the countless earthquakes since. Indeed it is believed that shortly after the Spanish conquest, a huge earthquake levelled every single one of the Spanish buildings, leaving only the Inca built structures standing. How did they move the stones? How did they cut such precise angles with what must have been such rudimentary tools? What knowledge they must have had of their environment, and of the laws of physics, to build such lasting structures and such insightful systems. In fact, given all of this, and the fact that the Spanish were on unfamiliar ground, I voice my surprise that the Incas were conquered at all. How did the Spanish manage to defeat such clever inhabitants in such difficult geography?

"Gunpowder." Says M, sadly.

And I suppose that's it. What a waste.

Of course almost everything we know about the usage of these ruins in their time is conjecture. This all may have been part of a tower, or it may have been a temple. This may have been drainage for blood sacrifice, or simply a toilet.

"Your imagination has to run riot," says Beth. I tell her it does that pretty much constantly anyway.

We leave the stones with their untold mysteries, and make our way into town for a drink.

We talk about the corruption of big corporations both in England and Peru, and their daily manipulation of their customers.

We talk about the importance of viewing life in through a lense of positivity, even remembering bad experiences as slightly nicer than they actually were. Beth tells us about a time when she found herself balanced in her car on two wheels just above a large drop.

"Beth!" Her companion had said to her, pale, "what are we going to do?"

"Look at this!" Beth had said, to his amazement, "quick, take a picture, or no one will believe it!"

She had, she tells us, become aware a little later of the gravity of the situation, but was mostly concerned about the waste of the good wine she had bought that day, and which was in the boot.

In the end all was well, they had sat very still in the car, and just as Beth had observed that they would need a big truck with chains to pull the car out of this situation, what had cone round the corner, but a big truck. With chains.

"I believe in angels." says Beth.

We agree that life is wonderful and is always pulling some new marvel out of the hat, if only people could see how beautiful are the small chances and strokes of what we tend to call 'luck' and count them as closely as we do our complaints.

We agree that money is worth nothing compared to experience.

We agree that children don't need as many materialistic goods as the richer ones are given, nor as much relentless attention from parents who later grow to resent them. (M and I are going to bundle our child up into a blanket, strap it to our backs and take it with us to market like the South Americans do. It will be part of our family but not the centre if our world. Hopefully this will be some sort of a magical formula to ensure it turns out as happy and contended as the South American children we have seen, who do not throw tantrums, make a fuss or demand constant attention, but smile more often and more freely than all but the very nicest of European children.)

We laugh at Mary's story about setting her hair alight with a particularly fancy cocktail which she hadn't been used to, and listen with fascination to her description of the most important elements of building her bungalows the traditional way, this being the provision of Chicha (a fermented alcoholic drink) to the workers, and the filling of two hollow 'Toritos' (small ceramic bulls) with Chicha and the mounting of them on the rooves, as gifts for the Gods.

When Beth finally leaves us for another appointment, having first shown us into the most beautiful hotels in Cusco, not for their riches, but for their architecture, something we would not have thought to look at ourselves, I am left considering the great worth of human interaction.

Our travels have been brought alive by the people we have met, much more often than purely by the places we have been. When the Spanish ransacked this land they forgot about the most valuable asset in it, the Incas themselves, and their superior knowledge of a landscape so new and so different to Spain. Beth tells us of her trust in her watchman, Benedicto (pseudonym), who can mix her a tincture of herbs to cure anything, but only speaks a little Spanish, his first language being Quechua. Benedicto, Beth tells us, is 'the happiest man she has ever met', though he has no formal education and lives in a small hut on Beth's land.

Happiness is Other People.

Whatever Satre might have said.