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I arrived in Huaraz at seven in the evening after an 11 hour bus ride. It had been a long day but the spectacular drive up Cañon del Pato left me still tingling with excitement when I retired to Hostal Raimondi shown here.
I love the mountains but unfortunately my knees won't let me climb anymore (one was badly broken and has a big screw holding the pieces together and the other has a torn meniscus). Coming here was nevertheless a treat. Meeting climbers and looking at the great Cordillera Blanca made me feel 20 again!
Huaraz, at 3090 metres, is surrounded by dozens of peaks of 5700 meters or more (North America has only 3 of those, Denali, Logan and Orizaba and Europe has none). Huascarán, almost hidden in the clouds in this photo is Peru's highest mountain at 6768 meters.
Looking west, the Cordillera Negra appears less impressive but that is only because we're already at 3090 meters and because of the presence of the ice-capped Cordillera Blanca on the other side of the valley.
Here I am saying goodbye to a friend and leaving with my backpack to catch a bus that will take me to Chavín de Huántar on the other side of the Cordillera Blanca.
From its great height of 6395 metres, Huanstán looks down on the small village of Chavín, where I am going, whose present appearance hides the fact that it once was the capital of great Empire.
Even if I had not been going to Chavín, the beautiful scenery along this mountain pass would have justified the trip.
I hope you enjoy mountain scenery as much as I do.
Three thousand years ago, Chavín controlled the eastern end of this mountain pass which is the only one crossing the Cordillera Blanca for a considerable distance.
If you look carefully at this photo you will see the grass huts in which mountain Amerindians still live from herding alpacas like their ancestors did two millenniums ago.
You can see the grass hut and the stone animal stockade a little better in this photo.
The Huachecsa flows down this valley and meets the Mosna river at the strategic crossroads where Chavín was built.
Today's Chavín de Huántar does not look like much. It's a sleepy mountain village with a big church in front of a Plaza just like so many others.
I was amazed that the touristic value of this historically very important place had not been developed by Peru.
When I was there, there were just a couple of basic hotels like the Hostal Montecarlo where I slept for less than two dollars a night.
The village seemed deserted and it was obvious that the Peruvian authorities had no idea of what could be done with a place like this. They had not even thought of cleaning up to streets and building a museum in what had been the capital of the first Empire in the country almost 3000 years ago.
There was only an old man and his dog to watch over the Temple of the Smiling God whose influence had spread from here to cover almost all of today's Peru. I could not believe my eyes to see the state of abandoned and disrepair in which the birthplace of civilisation in the Central Andes had been left by the nation whose inheritance it is.
Anywhere else in the world this would have been turned into a showplace of the national pride. The Egyptians are proud of their Pyramids as the Greeks are of the Acropolis, the Italians of the Coliseum etc.
The Peruvian people could be proud of this place so on two counts, a) the Chavín Civilisation unified Peru and gave its various peoples a common culture and vision that lasted almost 1000 years, and b) it managed to do with his by peaceful means, without a standing army without torture and oppression. This is the stuff of which legends are made!
I was puzzled by this indifference until it dawned upon me that the leading classes in Peru could not identify with the ancestors of the Quechua people because they were not, and still are not, Quechua. Ever since the Spanish invasion, power has been carefully kept in white hands, those of Spaniards born in Spain until independence and since then, those of Peruvian born whites of predominantly Spanish ancestry. Discrimination against the original inhabitants has been so severe that the term "Indio" has become such an insult that Amerindians prefer to be called "campesinos" (farmers).
There might the other explanations of why the brilliant Chavín Civilisation has been "swept under the carpet" but it's the only one I could find. I guess that the Moche, Chimú and Inca ruins were just too big to be ignored. And so were the Nazca lines!
The outside walls of the Temple were decorated with sculptured heads tenoned into the masonry which represented the shamanic transformation from priest to feline under the influence of the hallucinogenic drugs that were used in their religious ceremonies (principally tryptamine in epena and vilca seed snuff and mescaline in San Pedro cactus).
In the center of the temple was the most sacred holy of holies, the impressive sculpted white granite "Lanzón" or "Smiling God", which was the supreme deity of the Chavín religion. On the left is a front view of the prism shaped 15 foot column and on the left, one of the side views showing the smiling mouth with big feline fangs.
