Leymebamba to Tingo to Maria

Wednesday, March 4th 2008

Still reeling from the 6 hour trip up and down the mountain in the dark, in the rain, on a junky road, in a junky car, with a 16 year old behind the wheel; we awoke to the small peaceful town of Leymebamaba. This town, like others we had come through in the last two days, rarely sees visitors over 6 feet with sunburned faces, white socks, and blond hair, and so I was the subject of many, many stares and glances. Apparently it is rude to point here so as not to single anyone out, but it is not rude to stare at gringos. Several times Stewart and I have walked into a restaurant to sit down and have every single person at every single table staring straight at us. No hiding glances, or discrete one at a time looks, NO, every person stops whatever they were doing, stops talking at their table of 8, stops eating and drinking, and just stares at you. You think you are ready for it, but wait until the day you are singled out like that, however I have good news: eventually this too can be grown accustomed to. I returned the favor and walked around town that morning getting some images of the people who live here, what they do, and who they are.

Leymebamba is a town of about 2-3,000 people with a usual gorgeous town square, lively friendly townsfolk, small one lane streets spreading out for 4 blocks from the Plaza, and crumbling yet loved 2 to 3 storied buildings of semi-colonial facade. Outside of town for 2-3 miles are small farms dotted with the occasional shack that passes for a house. Making up for the meager living arrangements of the majority of the inhabitants are gorgeous views of rolling fertile green hills as far as you can see. Flora was lush, wet, and green again after we crossed the 10,000 foot pass between Las Balsas and here. It was increasingly feeling like a jungle as we moved east away from the Andes and towards the massive rainforests hundreds of miles away surrounding the Amazon. Leymebamaba became semi-famous in 1997 when they discovered 3 perfectly preserved mummified pre-Incan bodies on the cliff above a lake about a 12 hour hike outside of town. Even with all this notoriety, we were the only tourists there on this particular day.




As much as we were encouraged to hike up to the ruins, mummies, and museum, we had tunnel vision towards the ruins of Kuelap, the town of Chachapoyas, the Ecuadorian border, and Quito. The last two days had taught us that the longer you wait to get where you are going, the higher the likely hood was that you would never get there. This is not true if you travel between the larger cities with planned bus fare and decent road, but we were in the sticks, the boonies, nowhere Peru, where the roads were a step below fire roads, and our transportation consisted of farm trucks and people with empty seats in their car.




So after haggling with a local driver, we procured a ride from Leymebamba down the valley to the town of Tingo, about 1 and 1/2 hours away (he said), for 7 dollars a piece. 2 and 1/2 hours, 3,000 potholes, 1 inch of mud and dirt, and 2 worn bottoms later, we arrived in Tingo. Fortunately this road followed a river down a valley and was surrounded by blanketing jungle; there were no 2,000 foot drops on either side of us, and so I really didn’t care about the other problems. Rounding the bend into Tingo, I noticed a village up on top of a hill about 100 meters above the river and another village. This, the driver kindly explained to me, was Nuevo Tingo, and Viejo Tingo, or New and Old Tingo. Here again we have an example of what the cataclysmical rain of El Nino in 1990´s did to Peru. The entire old town was completely flooded for weeks at a time, forcing the people who lived there and subsisted off the land to build a "new town"

When we asked were Kuelap was when we arrived into Tingo, everyone pointed to a trail that said 10 Km and a mountain that was 1,300 meters (4, 300 feet) higher from where we stood. Originally we were going to stay in Tingo and hike (with packs) up to Kuelap, but now staring at what would have been a long, long hike up for me with 45 pounds on my back, we decided on alternate means of ascension. Sure enough not less than 5 minutes after we arrived, we were able to flag down a water truck going up to Maria. Maria was about a 2 hour hike away from Kuelap, but only 900 feet or so below the summit. So this is how we got halfway up the mountain until... A landslide. As I have said earlier it was the rainy season here in Peru, and despite it being like this for a third of the year, EVERY year, the Peruvians haven’t figured anything better than just waiting for one to happen and then trying to fix it. The driver let us off, where we were able to scramble over rocks and dirt taking care not to slip and slide the rest of the 1,000 feet down to the bottom. On the other side, we snagged a car up to Maria, again just by nightfall.

Maria, a town of 500, is perched at the top of the valley and with only one road in and out, we were the only visitors in town that night (the others not willing/able to scramble over the landslide). Again more stares from the townsfolk, but I was getting used to it by this point. As sun set everyone in town loitered along the main road to catch up with a farmers as they came in from the fields to close the day’s work. The closeness of a small town is the same in Peru as it is the States and elsewhere, something that bridges cultures. When the town was built, they must have seen what happens when you try to build a flat road in landslide territory, so the entire town is sloped about 10-20 degrees, even the town plaza.

Our Hospedaje

After dinner, Stewart and I went and played with the kids in the town square, who were gathering giant beetles off of all the bushes and putting them together in a giant pile where they would fight each other. It took a while to absorb the cultural differences and similarities between kids here playing with beetles and kids in the US playing... video games? maybe. The interbeetle skirmish was all fun and games until one of the kids got the great idea to start throwing the beetles at us. Yes, you can hurl a 4 inch wide beetle through the air and it will stick and grab to your shirt. My initial reaction of surprise and fear of a giant beetle only inches from my face encouraged more kids to throw beetles at us. IT WAS WAR. A beetle hurling fight ensued for about 5 minutes until the beetles were gone.