Cumbe Mayo
Trip Start
Feb 06, 2007
1
81
332
Trip End
Jan 14, 2008
Cajamarca,
Peru
Friday, May 18, 2007
We paid 20 sol each for tour to Cumbe Mayo with 'In God We Trust' tours, on Plaza de Armas, and our English-speaking guide was Nino. Cumbe Mayo is a Don't Miss, and our choice of tour company could not have worked out better. Nino was excellent.
The combi climbs the hills for 20km, to a point less than 10km from Cajamarca at about 3500 metres with lovely scenery of strange rock structures and more wildflowers for Barb to photograph (she must have at least 100 photos of flowers by now, mostly different). We watched people working really hard to cultivate their land, with mattocks or with 2 bulls pulling a wooden plough. The local name for the bull pair is Yunga, and a colloquialism is to call one of a pair a Yunga. Pete is Barb's yunga. It is also the word for the black sheep in a family ! Peruvian Spanish is full of local words
Emerging from the deep.
.There is an acute water shortage so the crops produce a poor yield, keeping the very poor indigenous people very poor.
There was a small museum, then we walked down a steep path to a rock formation with petroglyphs, or rock carvings. Between the rocks there was a very narrow channel of about 10 metres, pitch black half way along, and we all scrambled in one end and emerged in the sunlight at the other. It was a tight squeeze in places - the average overweight Aussie would get stuck right at the start,
Lunch of local food was available. We ate choclos, freshly cooked sweet corn. It was in boiling water and looked safe, unlike the much handled cheese, eggs and meat. A hungry-looking little girl came asking for our choclos so we handed over what was left . They get pretty boring after a while.
Then there was a long walk between the rock formations until we came to the 1000 BC aqueduct, which runs for several kilometres. 3000 years ago these smart people diverted some of the water that previously flowed towards the Pacific so that it went the other way, towards the Atlantic passing through Cajamarca. To do this they cut a channel in the rock, created ramps to stop turbulence, and varied the width of the channel to vary the rate of water flow, and had cut an exact right angle in the rock at one point
Handicrafts
. It was very impressive.On our return we visited the small University Museo Arqueologico which has some nice Cajamarca era pottery (years BC) in good condition. An attractive book was available to buy, but we can't carry any more, and after paying 6 sol to send a postcard dread to think what sending a book would set us back.
We also went to the crypt and museum of the church San Francisco. Avoid this ! A dragon lady acted as guide and explained every brushstroke in detail, thumping her hand on already-tatty 17th century oil paintings, and touching other exhibits clearly marked 'Don't Touch'. We escaped her clutches and found some bones in the crypts, then fled.
We have been getting too many mild tummy upsets, and after meeting a family of 4 from the US who have been in Cajamarca for 3 months and who all tested positive to intestinal parasites, we bought tablets to wipe out the commonest local parasite. Of course, we should have been tested first... 2 more tablets each in a week's time.Tomorrow we leave for Cajabamba, on Tranportes Rojas. Hopefully their buses look better than their bus station.
