Leymebamba

A break. I´ve been working 6 days a week teaching English since the day I arrived in Chachapoyas. Yesterday the semester at The International Language School ended, thank god. I love my classes, and most of my students, but I´ve needed some time to see Amazonas, the department of the northeast Andes, and the Westernmost edges of the Selva.

It´s starting into the winter rainy season here, though it´s almost summer everywhere else in Peru. In January the sun steams the moisture from Selva, collects water from the Ocean in it´s warm hands, and throws the wet air headlong into the Andies to be wrung out against the mountains in giant billowing gray storms. The clouds block the summer glare, and this plus the altitude provides a chill, thus producing the North Andean winter. But for now, the roads are still passable. Sometimes the downpours are so unrelenting that creeks become rivers, and the roads become rubble.



Today, I left Chachapoyas for the first time since I arrived three and a half weeks ago. I climbed into a combi, a small rundown minivan, filled with people and weighted down with cargo on the roof and set off for Leymebamba. The road wound along a river, cupped by mountains of orange gray rock the flaky texture of halva. On the slopes stood agave-type plants that, summoning all their earlthy strength, had shot up erect stalks 20 feet in trees of striking fertility. Cacti burst out of rocks, and trees and green foliage filled in slopes and the remaining crevices. On the valley floor, next to the road and river, we passed fields of Sugar cane, stone houses, small pueblos with blue and red houses, banana trees, cows tied to plows (including a cow and an elegant white stork nuzzling eachother), lush fields of grass, and trees that had been colonized by hanging plants of magenta and green blades that exploded out of their limbs.



After three hours of travel we arrived in Leymebamba where I was greeted by Menita, friend of Enita (my saint who I live with in Chacha). We prompty set off on a tour of the city... a small pueblo with rock streets, surrounded on by rivers and backed up against a mountain. We wound up the hill behind her house on a narrow rocky road, encountering wandering pigs (big and baby), horses, chickens, and trees,plants, herbs: baby papayas, manzanilla, figs, and many more. From the hill we could see all of Leymebamba, the two converging rivers that circumscribe it´s territory, green hills in all directions and other pueblos in the distance.





As we descended down a set of rock stairs we stopped at a friends house of Menitas. Inside lived two older women, one wearing an intricately woven straw hat and a blue embroidered shirt, who was maybe ninety, but who´s eyes lit with the playfulness of child. We stopped and ate sweet limes on her porch, next to coffee and tobacco plants, and she rattled on laughing and poking fun at me.

After the hill we visiting a cockfight, ate locally produced sweet yogurt dyed pink and yellow and green. Retired to Cena of milk soup (leymebamba is famous for it´s dairy products) and succulent pork.

Love you all, pictures soon.