Peru – July 10
We awaken to dreary Puno and have a lovely breakfast at the
hotel. Coffee is good and strong and the
bread is European style with a crunchy crust and soft interior. Since we have not made plans to go to the
floating islands that are the main attraction of Lake Titicaca, we decide to
take it easy and see if we can find any redeeming parts of this place. Turns out we have no luck. We check out the sad cathedral in the middle
of town and do our best to muster some enthusiasm for checking out the local
shops, when we have a family meltdown…..this kids, it seems, are not having fun…..hmmm. We all return to the hotel to try to do some
research on what might be of interest and get a game plan for the next few
days. We will stay another night in Puno
and check out the floating islands tomorrow.
Afterward, we will depart for Arequipa by bus. After our little hiatus from each other, we
regroup and Annie, Paulie and I decide to take a taxi to a nearby ruin of the “Temple
of Fertility”. We hire a taxi and are
off. As it turns out, the taxi driver is
actually from the nearby town where the temple is and he is full of interesting
information about the area. We arrive to
a ramshackle baseball field that has a chain link around it, pay our s/5.00
(that is 5 soles or around $1.75) entrance fee and we walk through the field to
the remains of the temple. Inside the
wonderfully exacting masonry walls, we are met with what appears to be a
mushroom patch….but no….these are statues of phalluses! .JPG)
Some are heads up and some are heads
down. Built by the Incas as a place that
women could come and bring offerings to the Sun God, there is an altar of sorts
in the middle in the shape of a penis with a slit in the middle. They would place a poultice in the slit and
if it ran down the outside of the penis sculpture toward the base, then luck
would be bestowed in their quest to bear
children. Outside of the temple walls,
there are a series of rather curious chairs carved out of stone. It is believed that once pregnant, women
would come back here to measure their progress during pregnancy as a means of
determining when they might go into labor.
Fascinating! We also check out the local cathedral which,
coincidentally, also pays homage to fertility by including a phallus on top of
the bell tower….you don’t see that every day!
.JPG)
Some are heads up and some are heads
down. Built by the Incas as a place that
women could come and bring offerings to the Sun God, there is an altar of sorts
in the middle in the shape of a penis with a slit in the middle. They would place a poultice in the slit and
if it ran down the outside of the penis sculpture toward the base, then luck
would be bestowed in their quest to bear
children. Outside of the temple walls,
there are a series of rather curious chairs carved out of stone. It is believed that once pregnant, women
would come back here to measure their progress during pregnancy as a means of
determining when they might go into labor.
Fascinating! We also check out the local cathedral which,
coincidentally, also pays homage to fertility by including a phallus on top of
the bell tower….you don’t see that every day!
We leave the ruins and convince our taxi driver/tour guide
to take us by the bus station on our way back to the hotel. He obliges and we get our tickets to depart
the day after next. Once back at the
hotel, we rest up and Paulie and I go out to dinner on a date to the Jiron
Lima, the main walking street here in Puno.
It turns out to be a lovely dinner and looks like we have found that one
redeeming factor to the city.
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