Quillabamba!

I love the place names in this part of Peru: Urubamba, Ollantaytambo, Vilcabamba, Quillabamba...

Escaped the tourist madness of Cuzco yesterday on an 8 hr bus ride up over the Abra de Malaga pass surrounded by snowcapped peaks and the incredible shrinking glaciers of Peru: Seriously, you could see the global warming happening right there before your very eyes. Very scary. At the top of the pass the driver jacked up the bus and fiddled with the wheels to make it harder for them to spin and, by extension, easier on the brakes on the way down. We descended over 3000 meters into lush subtropical Quillabamba on the banks of the Upper Urubamba River, arriving late in the afternoon at the magical hour when everything is golden in the light. Enchanted, I wandered around the plazas and watched kids playing soccer for a long while after finding a nice little hotel (with coldwater showers - found out this morning - ouch) just near the leafy, shady plaza.

Lots of curious staring from kids. Lots of friendly people wondering why I'm here and where I'm from. Definitely not in Cuzco anymore... and I haven't seen a single other gringo since I arrived.

Today I met with COMARU - el Consejo de Machiguenga del Rio Urubamba - the indigenous federation representing the communities most directly affected by the massive Camisea gas project on their territory. I'm going to help them create a powerpoint presentation that they can use to explain their position clearly to government agencies, oil companies, and NGOs. Right now they're making do with verbal, off-the-cuff presentations by various representatives, some of which don't jive with the official organizational position. So this will hopefully be a big help. And I may yet be able to tag along on a community visit further downstream... we'll see.

Being here in Quillabamba, so close to this massive industrial development project in the rainforest -- and one that I worked hard to stop from being built in the first place during my early days at RAN -- is amazing/awful. It's one thing to rail against a dirty megadevelopment project in the Amazon when you're shouting into a megaphone in NYC or San Francisco. It's really just rhetoric - hard to make real. But being here, hearing people talk, reading the newspaper, learning more about the enormous challenges the Machiguenga are up against... it's something else entirely.

Most Peruvians seem to welcome Camisea - it's cash in the national coffers, construction jobs, gas for cooking and heating. For a handful of indigenous communities and voluntarily isolated hunter/gatherer tribes, it's extinction. Not to mention the strictly environmental impacts, from climate chaos (melting glaciers 50 km southbound, anyone?) to species extinction. Try to work out the ethics on this one. I'm trying, and it's giving me a headache.

No photos for now, as Quillabamba's internet connection is too slow for uploading... BTW, isn't it crazy that these days it's not a question of "will they have internet in location X" but rather "will they have broadband wireless that I can use to watch online cumbia music videos or download episodes of Latin American Idol to my cellphone?" My how times change!

...Then again, COMARU's office is equipped with an old-school radio transmitter to stay in touch with the far flung Machiguenga communities who have no phone at all, let alone internet access. And that's the communities who actually live in one place and have a radio antenna. There are still plenty more nomadic folks out there who have no connection to the outside world, and prefer to keep it that way, thank you very much. Exposing the fatal flaw in Tom Friedman's book "The World is Flat," some things and places in this world change much faster than others. These days Bangalore and Boston may be a few nanoseconds away from each other, but in Peru, at least, the 21st Century and the Stone Age both exist, and the nomadic tribesmen don't particularly want to be "flattened," as Friedman would have it.

He should have called it "Some Parts of the World are Flat, and They Want to Flatten Everyone Else Too, Whether They Like It Or Not." Maybe I'll give Tom the benefit of the doubt. His publisher probably told him they'd sell more copies with a shorter title.