At one point Alejandro tosses a fish and it hits me across the face, like a slap on the cheek. “Disculpa, señora, disculpa!” he says, apologizing quickly before he’s back to snapping fins. But the fish doesn’t really hurt (no stinging whiskers or slicing dorsal fins) as much as the feeling that even when […]
We didn’t take a bus to Cullebrayoc. And Cullebrayoc isn’t so much a place as a crook in the road–one of those hairpin turns with a single structure at the edge of the road. From Marcapata we hailed a truck that hauls gas cisterns and climbed aboard the platform on the back–with about a dozen […]
On Friday, June 29th, Ben and I sat in the main plaza of the town of Tinke–3 hours east of Cusco. “The bus will come through some time in late afternoon,” Jason had told us. “Make sure you’re waiting. You can always stand on the side of the road and flag it down if you […]
The next few posts are dedicated, much belatedly, to my travels in Peru. I was lucky enough to receive a Nationality Room Scholarship from the University of Pittsburgh this summer–The George F. and Mary Ann McGunagle Memorial Award–in order to research and write about the Interoceanic Highway. The highway runs from Peru’s Pacific coast eastward […]
Here’s a photo of Mono Grande, photographed by Swiss oil geologist Francois de Loys in 1920. He claims the primate was 1.57 meters tall (spider monkeys are about 1 meter tall). It’s widely considered a hoax, scientists criticizing Loys’s claim with the argument that what’s pictured here is a spider monkey. (It’s dead, and the […]
I came back to Pittsburgh for the start of the school year on Friday, August 26th, and Hurricane Irene hit Massachusetts two days later. Whereas wind damage wasn’t as heinous as expected, rain caused water levels to rise to record heights. I came back to Mass to visit the following weekend. Nearly all the shrubs […]
