Inca-Kola : a traveller's tale of Peru by Parris Matthew

Author:Parris, Matthew
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, Peru
Publisher: London : Phoenix
Published: 1993-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

Inca-Kola

sentence for dangerous driving in Bolivia may be to suffer a form of prolonged public humiliation, by being ordered to park your car with a notice displaying your own name, the nature of your offence, and details of whatever harm you may have done to your victims. This was a harsh country.

We stopped by the cathedral. It was a huge building, of warm yellow stone. Its great carved facade - in a style they call Indian Baroque -caught the evening sun. On the stone-slabbed forecourt as big as a football pitch, townspeople, peasants from the country and a few tourists warmed themselves in the sunlight. The noise of the city's homeward rush hour, the shouts, the hooting and the revving of engines, was insistent.

Inside it was so quiet and so dark that it took a minute for eyes and ears to adjust: and to see or hear anything at all. When they did, it was to the echo of dozens of little confessionals, all around the walls and alcoves, and the murmur of hundreds of peasants, praying at minor shrines. Jewelled light flooded down from stained-glass windows.

In one shrine was an image of the Virgin Mary, as gaudy in royal blue and gilt and fluorescent lighting as you can imagine. At her feet, held back by a wooden rail on which she had thrown herself, wept an old Indian peasant woman. She had cast herself completely at the feet of this gilt-and-plaster image, and wailed and sobbed as if there would be no end. Nobody took any notice.

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