QueenPuya

Hola! Greetings from Cusco, Peru...South America exactly as you expect it be. Mountains, greenery, campesinos in colorful clothing leading llamas, potatos, giant cathedrals. I am quite impressed, though i don´t know if we can entirely trust Cusco, as almost everything I see it geared towards tourism. This is the first place I´ve been in South America where gringos are common and a ¨tall blond¨walking around in zip off pants, fleece vest and a wide brimmed hat does not get stares. Actually, it gets the hustle. Everyone is ready to sell you something here, whether pot (Bryan got offered pot basically the first second we stepped into the Plaza de Armas), artwork, an insane variety of knit goods, a seat at a restaurant, a massage, a tour of some ruins or just about anything else. I am still quite charmed by the roving pan pipe groups that descend on our restaurants at night, but I can see it getting a little old. It is so funny to see all the people that end up here. Little old couples from the States or Germany on the trip of their lifetime, Australian women on a girls only tour, way too fashionable, and therefore fold, Chilean and Argentinians, boorish British dudes walking around in flipflops, American familys on Spring break. All roads in Peru eventually lead here for tourists. I don´t have much interest in them or being them, though.
Peru is quite a lovely place, though. The landscape is huge and the mountains seem bigger than anything I´ve ever seen. Bryan and I debated this and came to the conclusion that, though they might not actually be higher, there are more of them closer together than in the States. We had our first day in the field yesterday and got a remarkable amount accomplished, considering we had only just arrived. We got in Wednesday and hit the ground running, making our way to the herbarium with Mercedes to find some more plant localities. There is a ridiculous beaurocracy around this little herbarium and poor Mercedes has had to fight many battles just to see the wil potatoe collection. I feel so sorry for her being cooped up in a small room with dead plants and mothballs, carefully retyping all the plants locality information onto her laptop for weeks. I remarked that such a task reminds me of Rumplestiltskin and she needs a small man to pop up and spin that straw into gold (Rumplestiltskin=undergraduate). Actually, there is a very nice undergraduate, Miguel, who by order of the herbarium diretor must be with Mercedes at all times while she works. It must be quite a boring job, but he seems to like the rhealm of dead plants and was very helpful to us while we tried to find the names of places on our whimpy tourist maps. Before we knew it, we had a plan for our entire stay and a friend of his, Nelson, to accompany us.
I have come a long way in my travels down here and now have finally ascended to the rank of Translator. My Spanish is better than Bryans and I soon was being introduced as the one who hable castellano bien¨ and I translate back and forth and have the important conversations about dates, times and places. It is a thrilling feeling when I am able to do so successfully and I know that on this trip my Spanish is going to improve astronomically. Very, very few people off the tourist circuit seem to speak English, but at least they speak Spanish rather slowly and with little slang or accents.
Bryan, Nelson and I met on Thursday morningg and headed out of town with our driver. Our first stop, above an Incan wall ruin, yielded perhaps a new species of Puya! Quite exciting, but today I´ll do the task of meticulously measuring it against the descriptions of other species to see if that is indeed true. The sky was blazingly blue and we had to put on sunscreen right away. After a terrible Wisconsin winter, I really felt like Dorothy waking up in Oz. It is the end of the rainy season and everything is as green as it can be and most things are in full flower. Apricot colored wild iris, wild potato vines, Salvias in a riot of color and cliffsides covered in Puya. That day I did some of the nastiest cliff climbing I´ve done to date, even though I said I´d take it easy that first day. I got to see thousands of bat pollinated Puya ferruginea, with their night blooming flowers curling in the sun and climbed a ridiculous mountainside of small rocks and ant nests to the giant Puya herrerae. It might not be the best time of the year for the Puya bloom, but I am still thrilled by skunky, year old inflorescenses at this point. I do hope my enthusiasm continues as the weeks go by. Bryans plants are a whole different story and it was like looking for a needle in a haystack to find the small blue flowered mints in mounds of vegetation on the side of the road. Luckily, Nelson has good eyes and won the prize for first Lepechinia collection. When Bryan saw that plant, I saw a side of him I had never seen before...quite cute. We do so love our plants. Today we are taking a much needed break and going to see the Good Friday madness downtown. Lots of parading of relics from the churches and festooning of cathedrals with red Salvia flowers. Should be fun! The weekend will bring a trip up, up, up to the moister highlands and then Monday we will finally go to Machu Picchu, because how could we ever explain that we didn´t go! Hopefully Mercedes will be done with her work soon and can start to accompany us into the field. So far, so good. The people here are extremely kind and helpful and I slid so easily back into the South American groove. It really feels like second nature to me anymore, I am so happy to report. Off to press some Puya!