One week

“Although my travels covered only a part of southern Peru, they took me into every variety of climate and forced me to camp at almost every altitude at which men have constructed houses or erected tents in the Western Hemisphere—from sea level up to 21,703 feet. It has been my lot to cross bleak Andean passes, where there are heavy snowfalls and low temperatures, as well as to wend my way through gigantic canyons into the dense jungles of the Amazon Basin, as hot and humid a region as exists anywhere in the world. The Incas lived in a land of violent contrasts. No deserts in the world have less vegetation than those of Sihuas and Majes; no luxuriant tropical valleys have more plant life than the jungles of Conservidayoc.”

- Harold Bingham’s Preface to his Inca Land: Explorations of the Highlands of Peru, 1922 (written after his rediscovery of Machu Picchu)

Less than a week from now I will board a plane to Peru. I’ve been thinking over my “itinerary.” I argue to myself that when I get thoughts of being in over my head they are irrational, while the thoughts of confidence are rational. For example, I don’t have a plane ticket to Cusco yet, and I’m planning on walking off my plane to the various domestic flight ticket counters and buying the cheapest one. But since I get in at 11 at night on the 10^th…what if the cheapest flight isn’t at 6am on the 11^th, but sometime on the 13^th? Then I’ll have to take a taxi into a city of 9 million I’ve never been to before with a reputation for street crime and rely on my guidebook to find a cheap hostel address that is open after midnight. You might have guessed I won’t be sending my mother the blog’s url until I depart. I guess we’ll see how this plan gets executed and if the potential monetary savings are worth it.

Then again, I am hoping to find, and find myself in, interesting circumstances. On that I watched a funny and worthwhile (if just for the food) Peruvian episode of No Reservations by the delightfully sarcastic chef Anthony Bourdain and was reminded of a question Tim asked me that I may as well repeat the answer for those wondering. I am not traveling to Peru to seek enlightenment or spiritual peace – I’ve already benefitted from the consolations of philosophy, which thankfully, have not proven permanently transcendent as of yet. While I will continuously renew my subscription to this benefit package, my philosophical and existential views are not in crisis – I’m seeking a different kind of consolation – that of delicious food, adventure, natural beauty, new people, and those little umbrellas they stick in the fruity rum drinks I’ll be drinking at ten in the morning on a hot sunny beach when I reach the coast.

The 7^th is my 23^rd birthday and on it I’ll be getting a shot for yellow fever, which apparently, upon contraction by a westerner like me, has a 30% kill rate. Impressive. I asked the travel clinic advisor if the rate was correlated to imunocomprimised demographics (since the shot is 100$ or so) and she said she didn’t know of any data that pointed that way. Though I think it is likely I won’t volunteer myself for any sample outside of the control group.

Other trip planning finalities include thinking about what to pack, testing out my new digital camera, and getting a haircut. Not much to finish up in Kingston except getting done with a couple library books I need to return. I have spent about ten hours familiarizing myself with my guidebook’s chapters on the regions I’ll be visiting, and feel pretty confident about knowing the material, so to speak. I have spent about 3 hours listening to Coffee Break Spanish podcasts in the background of doing something more entertaining. I’m optimistic about the osmosis that likely occurred.

I know I’m packing the following:

- a single person tent

- a sleeping bag

- some emergency blankets

- swiss army knife

- a bike lock for my backpack

- a pair of jeans, a few shorts and shirts, one dress shirt, running shoes, sandals, a healthy amount of socks, underwear, undershirts, a pair of pajama pants (double as longjohns) my thick hoody, a tuque, sunglasses, and a rain poncho

- a camera

- passport, money, documents, etc.

- a notebook and pencil wrapped a few times in duct tape (a handy grip and a useful amount of duct tape!)

- a roll of toilet paper (apparently essential as it is not provided throughout much of the country)

- travel toiletry kit and sunscreen

- my 2 Peru guidebooks (lonely planet and insight guide)

- Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, Heidegger’s Being and Time, and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain

- fabric softener sheets

Now, I didn’t come up with the idea for fabric softener sheets, but apparently it’s a very useful thing to just keep them in your pack on these types of adventures, since they don’t weigh anything and when clothes get wet or sweaty in between times you can access laundry they keep your bag fresh. Thomas Mann was a late addition to the reading list, recommended by mon ami Benoit for such an adventure. J'évalue son jugement hautement, donc je suis excité pour lire le travail. I read Hobbes’ Leviathan on the long train rides around Europe, and having bought Being and Nothingness the other day, I can see my plan of going through the entire work when I am removed from the internet is a good one. I should be reading Heidegger first, since Nothingness was largely a response to Time, but I did sneak a peek at the frenchman’s work and am pretty excited. I actually think my pre-existing bias was that I wouldn’t like his work, mostly from unreliable and incomplete data. This is no longer my anticipation. How is this for a first paragraph?

“Introduction. The Pursuit of Being. I. The Phenomenon. Modern thought has realized considerable progress by reducing the existent to the series of appearances which manifest it. Its aim was to overcome a certain number of dualisms which have embarrassed philosophy and to replace them by the monism of the phenomenon. Has the attempt been successful?”

Wow. What kind of dressing down of Descartes and Kant are we in for here? Soon after: “In the first place we certainly thus get rid of that dualism which in the existent opposes interior to exterior. There is no longer an exterior for the existent if one means by that a superficial covering which hides from sight the true nature of the object….[on physical-chemical actions that make up electric phenomenon, as an example] No one of these actions is sufficient to reveal it. But no action indicates anything which is behind itself; it indicates only itself….Thus we arrive at the idea of the phenomenon such as we can find…..Relative the phenomenon remains, for “to appear” supposes in essence somebody to whom to appear…..”

And then: “The appearance does not hide the essence, it reveals it; it is the essence.”

For some reason I thought I might run the risk of being bogged down by a morose work of pessimism. That might still be the case. But regardless, it already seems to me that it has that classics feeling of a leviathan, a meditations, a discourse on inequality – one is presented with immediate, powerful, and compelling assertions of philosophical revisionism. Whether it’s a romantic but ultimately fallacious revisionism a la ‘man is born free but everywhere he is in chains’ I will have to form an opinion of later.

Enough philosophy. I promise photos and videos will dominate these entries when I have something to photograph or videotape -- until now be satisfied with this photo taken by Bingham of an unexcavated Machu Picchu, nearly one hundred years ago.