First stop was Ayacucho where my spherical little grandparents grew up so I went like some sort of Who Do You Think You Are contestant like it was all acutely emosh. I never actually made it to their village Pomabamba as apparently it's been razed to the ground but I imagine it looked like most of the other rubbly villages you get spangled with Coca Cola advertising and incontinent goats. Instead I took a day trip to Vilcashuaman (almost pronounced like vile crass woman), a former Inca hub of bloody sacrifice, skull-moulding and general solar epiphanies. It was most lovely since no one else was there and I could pull the sals (heehee) in the church belltower which turns out isn't allowed unless a child is borne of a virgin. I also got a free potato. Classic.
The trip was most marked however by the hilarious delays en route. Peru is trying to HAPPEN infrastructure-wise so this means asphalt roadworks and big Japanese steamrollers and characteristic lack of civil planning, putting me literally ON their obstructive, inconvenient path to "modernisation" with many shouty peasant women in a rickety 3-and-a-half wheel banger, the kind often spotted mangled and rusting halfway down the side of a cliff.
Pronto I headed norf to see some pre-Inca village with that museum staple the shrivelled mummy, and a field where many Spaniards killed many brown folk. After munching on a deep-fried guinea pig I got to Quinua (the village not the Waitrose grain) and observed troll-like statues of Jesus and sexually joyous couples.
This place is good, I like this place. But it's time for another vomit spattered bus journey to Arequipa to see what's the craic. (The names'll get less ridiculous I swear. Maybe.)
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