Elad’s blog

The Inca world was strongly connected to astronomy and celestial objects, as I found out in the last few days. The most interesting fact, is that regarding to the dark stelar constelations. In addition to the normal star constelations, the Inca regarded the milky way as the celestial river, and dark areas in it - where there are no stars (or rather, cosmological clouds)- were also regarded as constelations. This is the first culture I encounter that actually did this - like inverse paintings, only celestial. The black areas were regarded as the dark shadows of animals coming to drink from the river, e.g. the celestial llama, the serpant of the sky, and so forth. They were all really important for the Inca everyday life.

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Cusco, which was the capital of the Inca empire, is located high in the mountains of southern Peru. The scenery on the way is very dramatic: deep valleys with fast rivers separate the green mountains, irrigated terraces spot the slopes, and on the side of the road you can see locals walking with strong colored textiles: as I have learned later, Cusco is the centre of the Peruvian textile industry.

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Half of Israel is covered with deserts. The most dominant ancient culture that flourished in Israel’s deserts is called the Nabateans. Originally from Saudi-Arabia, in the era of the first temple they were known as the pirates of the red sea. Later, however, they developed immensly and formed a state, based in present days Jordan, who was a sister state to the Hashmonaic state of Israel during the second temple times - pretty much like present day Jordan is a sister to present day Israel, shaped by the same regional and international forces, and by the same natural environment (actually, it always amazed me just how much equivalences one can find between present-day Israel and Jordan, and the 2200 years old Hashmonaic state and Nabatean state. Too bad people don’t know history). The Nabateans, which had an extremely interesting and developed culture, based their state on commerce - bringing spices from Yemen to the roman empire in Italy. On the way, they left numerous archaeological sites throughout the middle east, the most famous being their ancient capital - Petra, located in Jordan. In Israel they left huge water holes, old desert inns, and even some glorious city ruins that are spread throughout the deserts. I once spent some time studying their culture and their adaptivity to desert life, and during my day in Nasca I kept comparing the way these far away culture developed in order to survive in the harsh environment.

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Maybe it is only me, but the deserts of southern Peru have striking resemblance to those of southern Israel. Once you leave Lima on the panamerican highway, you immediately enter an area of small brown-grey hills that look just like the area between Beer Sheva and the Negev Junction. Later on, when you get closer to Nasca, the view changes considerably, and after passing an area of large sand dunes it becomes very close to Israel’s great desert rivers - the Paran and Zin desert areas. Stuck between the Andean mountains in the east and the pacific coast in the west, the Peruvian desert feels like an excellent place to visit, and indeed it didn’t fail.

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When I was a child, and first read about the fall of the precolombian american empires (the Aztec in Mexico and the Inca in Peru), I took a very natural position in favour of the indians. It took me many years to understand that apart from being ruthless murderous criminals, the spanish conquerors must have also been very brave and adventurous men - even if only for the money. They did have, at least before they established their courts, pretty difficult life; and they did live and die away from the country they grew in. Makes you wander.

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Ilha Grande is one of the most touristic places that I’ve seen in Brazil. The island is, like implied from its name, quite big. However it has one rather small village, that seems to live exclusively out of tourism. And for a good reason.

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Manaus is a huge city. I didn’t realize how big it is, until the guys from the company with whom I went to the jungle (they are really good, and showed me around the following day, including a ride to the airport) told me it has 2 milion residents, and that it is a major industrial town. Indeed its port, on which huge ships reside, is suitable for a big industrial town, eventhough it is some 1700 k”m in the land - just in the heart of South America.

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The Leaf Frog, a small and beautiful creature, is one of the deadliest killers on the planet. Though it is born defenceless, soon after it begins eating it produces a poisonous layer above its skin. It has a rather spongy skin, so the trick is that any animal that bites it would die because of the poison before causing any harm to the frog. It works so well, that humans - for example - die in seconds if they just touch the frog. This marvelous creature is just one of the small things we saw in our last two days in the Amazonas, when we turned our attention to the jungle.

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The local residents of the Amazon river are usually reffered to as caboclos. This group is usually of mixed ethnicity, descendants of both indians and europeans: the few remaining pure indian communities now live far in the jungles, and are very hardly accessible in Brazil (it is probably easier in Venezuela or Bolivia); those who lived close to Manaus have long ago been enslaved to provide workers for the rubber plantations that made Manaus a big city, or perished otherwise due to the implications of the european invasion of the americas: the caboclos, whose way of life remains very close to nature, keep an echo to these pre-colombian cultures, and were the focus of our second day on the Amazon.

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Never in my life did I expect to find myself sailing in a lousy canoe, full of holes that drip water in (and every few minuts having to put them out), less then 5 centimeters above the water level, in total darkness, moving silently in the middle of the Amazon river with the pronounce intention of hunting Caimans. Literally looking for trouble.
However, I do many unexpected things in this travel: I didn’t expect to find myself, for example, swimming in the middle of a river that swirls with notorious animals and really enjoying it. Yet, both happened this week. This post describes the first day of my Amazonian excursion. Read it in conjunction with the next.

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