The first email I’m responding to in the grand return of “Other People’s Email”, now boringly  called “mailbag” is by my dear friend allison brown…her questions were pulled from 3 separate comments she posted on this site…so technically it’s not even an email, but it would just be too complicated to differentiate, and anyway then I’d have to call the category:  “Other People’s Email And Sometimes Comments Or At Least Parts Of Comments And Whatnot”  So, anyway, here goes:

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Allison!

ok, ok…I’ll try to answer those million and 1 questions you fired at me in your comments…
 
by the way how are you? 
 
why is the earthquake jesus black? ok, so I had to do my research to answer this…because frankly, I hadn’t a clue.  legend had it that Carlos V had him sent over to cusco as a gift…but he was in fact made in cusco itself, maybe Charlie sent the cash to finance it…he’s made out of the maguey plant (same one used to make tequila…looks like a giant aloe vera).  He took on his black coloring from having been on display for so long with only candle and torchlight to illuminate him, the resulting smoke from said lighting source tinted the carving black over the centuries.
what do you keep in the blue plastic can on your cart?
the blue can is kind of like that miscellaneous-stuff-drawer in most people’s desks, or like the just-throw-it-in-there closet in most houses. I keep my stove, pots, tire repair stuff, medical kit, toiletries, trinkets/gifts/mementos (until I can send them home), electronic accessories (recharger, card reader, headphones, etc.), and stuff that I just don’t seem to use very often (and later either send home, donate, or conveniently ”forget”) and any extra food that doesn’t fit in my 2 “pantry” containers.
do you miss the altiplano?
yes and no.  When I’m in crazy up-and-down mountains like I am now I miss all the flat miles of walking in the altiplano, but when i was bored to tears walking the empty wastes of the altiplano I missed the crazy up-and-down mountains…I don’t miss the extremely cold nights and mornings, but I do miss the huge, huge night skies…I don’t miss the lack of shade at all but I do miss the absolutely mosquito and other biting-bug free environs 
did you taste guinea pig? 
yes.  picture a charred, naked, gutted rodent with his jaws full of little teeth lying on his back, his little old-man claws poking up in the air…now picture all the tiny little ribs, vertebrae and other bones with miniscule amounts of meat attached to them…now picture nibbling away at all that and say to yourself “hmm, tastes like chicken.” and you’ve pretty much just eaten a guinea pig (or cuy, as they call them here)  
have you tried san pedro? is it a cactus, like peyote?
no I haven’t tried it.  back in the day I most likely would have, but I’ve sworn off of hallucinogens these days…life is already almost too wacky for me.  It is indeed a cactus (Echinopsis pachanoi), one filled with all kinds of psychedelic alkaloids, including mescaline.  There are a bunch of ways to prepare the plant so you can trip, the most common being a process of concentration through boiling the skin and meaty parts. Word has it that the trip is really powerful, makes you nauseated, and lasts for quite awhile.
did you feel any energy from sacsaywaman?
of all the ruins I visited, including machupicchu, sacsaywaman maybe blew me away the most in terms of “how in the f%$k did they do that?”  The site is huge, and that’s only 10% of what once existed!  And many of the stones are absolutely MASSIVE…the scale is incredible.  I was totally humbled there.   But in terms of “mystic” or “spiritual” energy…nah…just a rush to be touching history, to get a glimpse of what we’re capable of creating sometimes.
how the hell did they carve those things?
slooooooooowwwwwwwly.  Most of the stones at sacsaywaman are made of limestone, which is pretty soft by rock standards (like Journey, or Toto…haha), so the workers, and there must have been a friggin’ army of them, used another, much harder stone with a high concentration of iron in it to chip away at the softer stuff.  The site itself was the quarry, so they didn’t have to haul the rocks far (and it’s thought that they rolled them on logs from one place to another, not having invented the wheel).  They would set down the base rock, put another stone on top of it, and then carve away the top of the base rock until it snugly accepted the contours of the stone on top of it.  Sometimes, they would put sand on the bottom rock, lower the levered upper stone down, then raise it again and carve at the places where the upper stone had made an impression in the sand. It recently took some university people over a month to carve 5 small stones using traditional methods.  But the dudes back in the day were definitely faster (a whole lifetime of practice)
could you sense the people of the inca as you strolled the ruins? did you give your imagination free reign?
totally.  in fact, that was the most moving part of the visit for me, that out-of-the-corner-of-the-eye feeling of all these generations of people doing there thing, overlapped, melded, blurred and mixed together over the centuries…an old lady weaving, a young man leaning cockily on a wall, a serious man kneeling at an observatory, a group of priests with arms raised, a young girl carrying a bundle of wood, a stonemason sitting cross-legged, chipping carefully at a seemingly useless stone, processions, chin-held-high rulers, laughter, solemn faces as a mummy is placed in its niche, sickness, tears, pain, doubt, hope, laughter…yeah, I sensed all that, tried to picture it as stubby-legged French tourists with varicose veins hobbled by complaining about the llama shit on the path…haha.  
did a train come while you were in the tunnel?
One came just as I reached the mouth of one of the tunnels…I followed right behind it.  thankfully, the tunnels weren’t very long, but even knowing that I was ok, I couldn’t help but look over my shoulder…it’s the same feeling you get just as you’re coming back up after getting something in the basement, you know that no one is down there, but you haul ass up the stairs and fly out the door anyway, the hairs on the back of your neck all standing straight out…train tunnels do the same thing.
have you spoken with any indigenous people?
tons.  90someodd percent of the Peruvian population is indigenous.  And almost all of them speak Spanish to one degree or another (except maybe in the deepest parts of the Peruvian Amazon).  They’ve all been very nice, curious, and often with great senses of humor…good peeps.
Allison, thanks so much for the questions, you’re a star!