Landing the Mother Ship

The past few days we have been driving on extremely good, fast PanAm highway through the flat coastal desert, and we decided we needed a change of pace. We also wanted to see the famous Huasacaran National Park, with lots of high peaks, and drive along the Canon del Pato road (so named because it looks like a duck from the air). So we headed inland from Santa. The road immediately got smaller, but was still paved until we had gone some ways inland. We drove through lots of small villages where every single building was made of adobe. Then, suddenly, the road turned to a dirt track, and that’s when the landscape got really beautiful. We felt like we were driving through a Martian landscape – everything was dry, rocky, and red. The road often dropped off precipitously, and sometimes the road had fallen away completely and been re-routed, probably by a bus driver. There were lots of fresh piles of rubble where there had been a tiny landslide, and lots of the trucks had heavy duty grates on top to protect passengers from landslides. We didn’t dally!
The road was really slow, though, and it took us about 9 hours to get from Huanchaco to Yuramarca – check what a small distance that is on the map and imagine our speed. In one of the villages nearing Yuramarca, we were hailed by two women and asked if we could give one of them a ride onwards. We generally don’t mind picking up women hitchhikers, and they looked like they’ve been waiting for a ride for a while. Veronica turned out to be a health worker, an obstetrician, who works in the district, traveling from village to village. Some of the villages only have foot paths leading to them, so she spends a lot of time walking around getting from place to place. Her job demands that she be multitalented – fit enough to hike all over, multilingual, since many people in the area speak Quechua or Aymara rather than Spanish (though that is changing, sadly kids aren’t learning their native language, only Spanish), and good at diagnosing non-obstetric problems, since the area has no doctor, and she has to decide when a case is serious enough to send the person out of the district for more care. What a job!! She was very interesting to talk to. She said that family size in the area used to be 8 or 9 kids, but that 3 or 4 is more the norm now. Apparently many men are still too macho to permit their wives to use birth control, but many take it on the sly anyway. Veronica had also traveled a lot around Peru, more than most people we’ve talked to on our trip. She studied in Lima, and after finishing at college took some time to tour around and get to know her country.

We dropped her off at the health facility in Yuramarca, and she advised us to camp in the Plaza de Armas, saying it was very friendly and safe. It was already an hour after dark, and we hate traveling after dark, so we decided to take her advice. She even offered to guide us through town to find it, which was much appreciated. Yet another super-friendly Peruvian.

As we drove towards the center of town, we heard shouts of ‘gringo’, the first sign that this would be an interesting night. Once we stopped, the crowd started to gather – boys under 10 crowding close and pushing each other closer, girls and their parents a little further away up on a platform for looking out over the hills (or down into the vans of passing tourists), and teenage boys walking by, pretending not to be interested. When we popped the top, some people stepped back and gasped in surprise, never having seen anything like us before. After about 10 minutes, the bravest of the boys had come close enough to start asking questions, and they continued until our dinner was ready, at which point they magically dispersed without having to be asked. Every Latin American we’ve met recognizes that eating is sacred, and no one will ever bother you if you’re trying to eat. After we’d finished eating, they came back, of course, and they never stopped drawing graffiti in the mud on the sides of the car, or peeking in the windows. We finally had to say ‘We want to sleep, please go away’ and shut the door!! We felt like we’d landed the mother ship on an alien planet, and were being besieged by curious natives!

We had a great night’s sleep, and when we opened up in the morning we heard a young girl running down the street shouting ‘They’ve opened it, they’ve opened it!!” and waving her arms. The questions started again. 8) We met the mayor’s assistant, talked a little about the political and economic situation in the village, and then were handed a piece of leaf from a lime tree that was covered with fungus. Apparently about 5 years ago “the plague”, as they call it, started showing up on all of their lime, orange, and mango trees. The fungus covers the leaves, slows photosynthesis, and prevents production of all but the littlest, stunted fruits. One of the village’s main sources of income is its fruit production, so this is a serious problem. The ag extension folks from the local university have come up to see about the problem, but have done nothing but spray chemicals on the plants. This works for a while, but the fungus comes right back. They also really want a solution that doesn’t involve chemical sprays, if at all possible, since they’re concerned about side effects.

I think the fungus is probably a sooty mold, which doesn’t actually penetrate the plant, but lives on the surface feeding on aphid honeydew. So if you can control the insects, you can get rid of the fungus, too. Does anyone out there know of a good way to get rid of aphids? I have the mayor’s assistant’s e-mail, and have promised to send her any information I can gather on how to get rid of “the plague.”