Our first week

It’s hard to believe we’ve been here in La Jalca for over a week. And what a week it’s been. We spent our first couple days ‘decorating’ our one room home and making it more comfortable to live for the next couple years. We had a carpenter make us a bigger bed frame and bought a straw and cotton mattress that sort of fits the frame. We splurged on nice sheets and heavy wool blankets.  We made a kitchenette with a desk, a two burner gas stove, new pots and pans and added some tacky yet charming Christmas lights shaped like grapes for ambiance. Since installation we’ve been cooking some tasty Peruvian-American fusion meals with ingredients like quinoa, lentils, ají, saffron and queso fresco. 

We’ve both had great meetings with the community leaders and are really excited to start on projects here. Brian has a lot of community support for improvements to the water system and I have plans to start a native tree reforestation project with the fledgling nursery here. Right now they only have Eucalyptus and Pine seedlings, both invasive. We had a chance meeting with the national and regional directors of Agrorural, a government land management program, the Director of the Inter-American Bank, and other NGO’s in the region and it went great. Everyone was really supportive of a native tree nursery and reforestation project. We are feeling like our arrival here is welcome and needed.  

Our plans over the next couple weeks are to build on the momentum we’ve got, start planning projects with the community and hopefully take some time to go exploring and see the fantastic ruins that dot the landscape around our town. We discovered a book in the municipality that was written in 2003 by a German Anthropologist with hand drawn trekking maps of the region dotted with ruins, caves and tons of information on the history of the area.

The road to La Jalca

Last Wednesday we packed our suitcases and ourselves into a Volkswagen and headed from Chachapoyas to La Jalca. A half hour later the pavement disappeared. We rattled down the road alongside the Utcumamba River for an hour before the driver stopped.

He pointed to one of the green cliffs towering above the river. On cliff face vegetation obscured stone fortifications. Pre-Incan the driver said.

How old? A thousand years? The driver smiled. “Much older,” he replied.

The driver stopped the car a few miles further in front of a stone laid near the road. Someone had carved a puma into the rock centuries ago.

An hour-and-a-half into the journey, our driver turned into the dirt path that led to La Jalca. It’s a half hour of switchbacks in a car or grueling hour-and-half 2,200 feet up the mountainside.

A rusted sign points to a dirt path, which leads to the lost city of Ollape - built by the same people who carved the puma and laid the stone along the cliff faces. Our driver headed straight and dropped us of off at our new home for the next two years.