We are like time travellers in this world, changing the future in one, accidental gesture, a flap of a butterfly's wings. You cannot help but change a culture when you visit it.
The original reason for visiting might well have been its distinctive cultural customs and beliefs, from which most tourists hope, genuinely, to learn and become wiser by. But the more that culture becomes a marketable commodity, the less it is seen by its original practicers as a normal way of life, and the self conscious become its customs. Until, like certain areas of Bali, and the Sea Gypsies in Thailand, it begins to transform itself into a performance.
Of course many people are aware of this, and there are various ways to travel responsibly to try to minimise the impact of your visit. You can try to fit in, so as not to dilute the place you visit with your own cultural influences, you can chose eco and culturally 'friendly' options and spend wisely, choosing hand made crafts and paying the craftsman directly, avoiding unfair, rock bottom prices or wholesalers who might be large corporations, failing to pass even the smallest margins onto the individual who created it, or cutting that individual out altogether, using factory driven processes which may not even originate in the same country.
And, as I think I have said before, trying to hold any country in a kind of stasis, discouraging progress or change, is false and rather selfish. In the UK we enjoy a very good quality of life (despite the weather), but this is precisely because we no longer work quaintly by candle light, weaving tapestries into the night, or hand thatching our roofs in the snow. Tourism is good for a country's economy, given time and a reasonably honest government, it can pull up everybody's standard of living and provide the most helpless of people with a possibility to earn a living.
It's just that, as in all things, there is a balance to be struck. And that balance, like all balances, isn't easy.
We arrive on Wednesday and are immediately picked up by a beaming, twinkling petite lady with beautiful jet black hair and a sense of enormous life and vitality surrounding all her gestures, words and general demeanour. This is Beth (pseudonym), who is our AirBnB host and who us, unbelievably, fifty years old. She looks and acts about thirty. We are taken to a small store to buy basic provisions, shown around our beautiful wooden bungalow up on the hillside in a remote (but walkable) area of Cusco, and then invited to Beth's own bungalow (there are four, arranged around a garden, facing inwards like chattering friends) for lunch.
And what a lunch. Roasted yuca dipped in mashed avocado, a beautiful creamy quinoa soup and bread and cheese, plus a shared bottle of red wine. And conversation to melt your heart and fire your brain. Beth's housekeeper, Suki, is responsible for the food, which we eulogise over, Beth is responsible for the conversation. We discuss politics, literature, the shameful role of religion in justifying cruelty, the true meaning of life, the uselessness of material things (I forget about that part a little too quickly later, when we hit the artisinal markets ), and the uses and abuses of technological invention. We feel as though we have known Beth all our lives, and that our lives have been enriched by it. As AirBnB hosts turned friends go, she is a keeper.
After lunch we walk into town, mostly just to purchase some sort of a sim card with data, as our lovely remote bungalow does not, (as most remote places do not), have internet.
The actual experience of purchasing the sim card, in a huge building so devoid of soul and so enormously and pointlessly bureaucratic, it is like stepping into the film 'Brazil', takes a protracted and very surreal hour and a half, but what I really want to talk about is our walk into town, when Cusco, in with it's marvellous and complicated personality, really hits us.
The walk from our bungalow to town takes half an hour, walking down through green hillside, before meeting the cobbled streets of the artisinal district, San Blas.
The countryside is verdant and unspoiled, here and there are Inca ruins, small shacks, stray dogs and fields of strikingly beautiful red quinoa.
The artisinal district is quaint and cobbled, lined with shops selling truly beautiful hand crafted art works. We are stopped every few steps by somebody trying to sell us a small painted gourd, a plaited bracelet, a massage or, unsettlingly, a cuddle with a lamb wearing a knitted hat, for one Sole. (Or is that one soul? I am a little unsure of how I feel about the plight of those lambs, available for hire, cuddled all day by their sellers, but kept apart from their mums...)
Cusco is a world of contradictions between old and new, tourist and local. My initial and fervent response to Cusco is to love it. Everything together. Including the lambs. M feels much the same way. It is a place we simply make an instant connection with. But that tourist balance does tip rather violently every now and then.
In Cochabamba, as M comments later, we were pretty much the only tourists we saw. There were a couple of tourist sections of the market and I suspect a whole wealth of tourist focused things in the posh Northern end of town, but in the main heart of the city and the end we lived in, we were just there. No one blinked an eyelid. No one tried to sell us things any differently to the way they tried to sell to anybody else. Nothing seemed to change for our benefit. We were just there, doing our thing, and the people of Cochabamba were just there, doing theirs. Equally, the sheer lack of changing things for our benefit meant it could be hard to navigate. The tourist information was more or less non existent, not that this mattered too much, but it was possible to walk within a hairs breadth of a fascinating culture, be able to observe, even participate in it, but not to understand or gather any information on it.
In Cusco everything is laid on. Beautiful things are set out in artisinal markets with clear prices, tours abound, information is plentiful, there are English language plaques in museums. It is very easy to be a tourist here.
But at times, when I feel the scales tip, it seems that maybe tourism is tipping them violently, smashing the culture it is here to admire. We see a lot more people begging here, their hands out on the tourist streets, to the tourists, considered so rich in comparison. In Cochabamba beggars were in the minority, most people sold tiny things like packets of tissues or a handful of toffees for a Boliviano or two. But whether selling or begging, the targets were anyone who walked by, indigenous or tourist. Here it feels as though the people are somehow subjugating themselves to beg so specifically to westerners. The lamb thing feels wrong to me too, because the reason there are lambs are because people keep sheep. The lambs are for farming but that business has been subjugated to renting the lambs out for cuddles, because westerners think they are cute. (I may be reading this wrong - perhaps lambs are too young to produce milk or too plentiful to all be used for meat and therefore this is a better business use for them.)
The idea of a living thing being put to 'business use' is a difficult concept too, though in our farming industries we do it constantly and, often, without question. But I balk when a woman stops me in the street, points to her baby and asks for a Sole for a picture of the 'pretty bebe'. For a moment I actually think she is offering to sell me her baby, before I come to my senses, but I wonder what she did before there was a tourist industry and whether it carried with it more dignity. Maybe it didn't. Maybe before she was simply begging and only now is there a market for something she can afford to give.
"Wait, wait, signora!" people shout as I try to leave their shop, "buy now, better price than later!"
It doesn't have the desperation of Cambodia, but there is something about it that makes me want to reinstate the Inca pride.
"Don't stay out here" shouts somebody in Spanish, as we sit on a rock at the 'Temple of the Moon' to watch the full moon rise on our first night, metres from our door, "it is peligroso (dangerous) at this hour."
Why? Where is the danger coning from? Everybody is so keen to warn us about it, who are the people who might perpetrate this danger, and why are we, as tourists, more vulnerable to it? The answers, of course, are obvious, but it seems, once more, a lowering of dignity.
Ultimately of course, the danger to Peruvian culture is that the tourists, by their presence, will erode it, realise this, start to complain, and gradually stop coming. With no intention at all we will destroy something and then walk away. And we won't even know we have done it.
This cultural tipping goes both ways though - Cusco offers beautiful insights into preserved gems of a wise and rich culture. (And of course the tourist demand for it will, conversely, in certain ways, help to preserve it. As Diana observed in Bolivia, tourists help to increase understanding of the true value of a culture which the next generation might have considered throwing out, given time.)
The following day, our first full day in Cusco, we spend all day on town, wandering through squares and markets, cobbled streets and green hills. We eat in a Shamanic restaurant where we revel in the purity, healthiness and vegetable contents of the food, after a long time of rice, potatoes and pasta in Bolivia.
We go, in the evening, to a small cafe selling traditional herbal infusions and a very small, basic selection of food, which was putting on a double bill of two pieces of artsy drama, for free. It was 100% in Spanish and we were the only tourists there. We watched a captivating story teller retell some of the ancient myths and stories from all over South America. She used puppets and gestures in true story teller fashion, and we understand a lot more than our Spanish would really allow.
The second piece, I am not sure whether anyone understands much of, despite it being largely in mime. Those of you who have ever watched the 90's sitcom, 'Spaced' will perhaps know what I mean if I say it was just a few hops away from the 'Rabbit Rabbit' episode. We may simply not have been intelligent enough to understand.
Either way, it is a wonderful day. And it is nice to be part of something in the evening which made zero concessions to us as tourists.
No comments:
Post a Comment