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Cuzco, Peru – Week One
We are on the fifth working day of our Peru shoot, tracing the tale of the Spanish Conquest of the New World, the fall of the Incas. Tomorrow we begin our trek up to the sacred mountain Ausangate on a pilgrimage which has been going since Inca times.
We started running after we arrived in Cuzco. Our hotel is at 12,000 feet, just enough if you are not acclimatized to start feeling rough. You don't sleep, you wake with palpitations ... a big meal or alcohol reacts especially badly. Your body doesn't know where it is. Lifting the camera gear, especially the 28 kilo battery box or the tripod, leaves you whacked, gasping for air. Everything is an effort. Nagging worry that we may not be up to it.
In the countryside the poor peasantry is still the Runa people, Quechua speaking descendents of the Inca peasantry. They still till their maize fields in rows with the old foot hoes, just as their ancestors did, the women wearing Spanish hats and Inca dresses. Separate from other civilisations, the Inca world in 1532 had developed in isolation and was at about the same level of development as the Chinese had been in the Bronze Age. And once they had conquered it, the Spanish had no concern for it. After the 1780 Revolt they finally elected to crush it altogether: banning all its manifestations, whether in poetry, dance, song, music, drama, painting, or religious ritual. [more]
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