Horseback Ride

Today we went horseback riding in the mountains. We were picked up at our hotel and driven out to a small ranch on the edge of town. At first there was no one in sight, but soon a jolly little figure bounded out of a stable with two horses in tow. He introduced himself as Gabriel, a man who had inherited this ranch from his father and had worked with horses all his life. His eyes lit up as he told us the names of our horses and what their names meant - mine was Waiki, which means “best friend” in Quechua. He helped us all get up on our horses and we were off.

Gabriel’s first order of business was to take us up past Saqsaywaman to the Moon Temple. While profusely and frequently calling us “my friends,” he explained the importance of the moon temple. During the reign of the Inca empire, Inca nobility would be buried here in a grand ceremony that included burying the body in the fetal position so that it could be born again into the next life. They also held a monthly ritual where they would sacrifice a llama to the moon god during the full moon. To this day, there are people - “descendants of the Inca” - who still perform this ritual, albeit without the ritual sacrifice of llama. Instead, they offer coca leaves and other such things.

To me, this horseback ride exposed just how much the Inca culture persists compared to the cultures of native Americans. As we all well know, in America, the native populations were seen as inferior, and as such were largely eradicated, with the surviving populations being forced to live on small reservations with terrible living conditions and little to no government support or help. As such, many Americans, myself included, don’t even know the names of the tribes that once lived on the same land that we once did, much less their traditions, languages, or customs.

In Perú, on the other hand, some Incas were intermarried with Spaniards, and many others survived, and now Inca culture is an enormous part of the heritage here. Our guide’s first language was Quechua - not Spanish or English, but the native language of the Inca. The women we encountered on the trip wore the traditional clothes, and we were often serenaded by pan flutes on our way. The people call themselves “descendants of the Inca”. This heritage adds another dimension to their culture, one ancient and marvelous, grounded in the mythical origins of their ancestors - they say that they are descendants of the children of the Sun. Americans have no such mythology. We are the children of immigrants who came from other countries.