Chinchero, Peru

Chinchero is about 20 miles outside Cuzco and widely known for its fine weaving.

We went there today to see first hand how the people of the Andes use this centuries old craft to separate people from their wallets.

Seriously, it was extremely interesting (and they did some serious separation of wallet and Janet) and they really are expert weavers.

They use a kind of potato grown in the area to wash the shorn sheep or alpaca wool. They grate it into hot water like they're asking if you'd like some parmesan on spaghetti, then swish it around and it sudses up as good as any Tide or Cheer you've ever seen.

Then they boil the wool with plants - a camomile-like one gives it a yellow colour, a green plant somehow gives it a light blue colour - but the best is the bug they take off a prickly bear cactus. When they squash it an extremely rich purple red comes out - but by adding lemon or salt they can turn the dye (and wool) different shades of dramatically different orange.

Very cool.

Then over to the weaving department who weave images of things like alpacas and condors and pumas into things like table runners and purses.

After the weaving show we went to visit the town's temple that the Spaniards turned into a church in a continuing theme.

So, after the Spaniards took all the gold, silver and jewels from the Inca's Quechans, they had two things to accomplish.

1: make sure the 20 million or so understandably upset conquistadyees didn't get together and gang up on the 2,000 or so conquerors and

2, get to work teaching these heathens who had built temples to their gods the stars and sun that aligned perfectly with sun and moon phases and ALSO built entire towns and mountainsides (see Cuzco, Ollantaytambo) into tributes to the animals they respected..well, they needed to get some olde time Christian religion.

So in a few fell swoops they accomplished it. First, they took as many Quechans as they could into slavery and second they got those slaves to knock down the temples they had grown up with, build new cathedrals and churches on top of the foundations and then do all the decorating inside the churches - painting depictions of Jesus and Mary and all kinds of other iconography.

They even took it one step farther. Because the quechans didn't have a written language the Spanish couldn't very well pop a Gideon's Bible into everyone's mail box or even sell The Watchtower door to door, so they got the slaves to draw art that incorporated what they already knew into the Christian stories.

Quechans like to eat guinea pig on special occasions? Well, let's get them to paint Jesus and the boys chowing down on some of that for The Last Supper.

Here in Chinchero, the entire inside of the church's ceiling is painted (by the Quechan slaves) with bible stories between the rafters, and the frescoe on the outside (again painted by the slaves under the guiding hands of their old world master) depicts the joyous life of the being a Christian versus the stray dog existence the folks had previous to Pisarro bringing them the good word in exchange for endless galleons of gold and their freedom.