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Blog #20, Turn Right at Machu Picchu- Mark Adams (180-230)

Summary: The last 10 pages that I've read were John getting to Machu Picchu. He got there and it wasn't like anything he expected. It was beautiful. The amount of mountains and forests with tall perfectly grown trees was making him feel sort of Melancholy. He thought to himself "I should've done this a long time ago instead of sitting on my ass doing nothing for half of my life". After spending close to thousands of dollars on transportation and paying people to show him around, he said that he's made many mistakes and regretted many things, but this, wasn't one of them. There was literally a lost city in front of them. He wanted the world to know about Machu Picchu but the islanders refused. Claiming, it would make all of their progress on building their homes and raising their kids, go bad because of the money the government would have to spend to make it all happen. There are around 750 people that live there and there have been over 200 skeletons found at Machu Picchu. John's goal is to get as much information about Machu Picchu as he can so that he could write a book about it. He did.

Critical Analysis: On page 212, there was a quote that stuck to me. "The objects found do not belong to us, but to the Peruvian government which allowed us to take them from the country under the condition that they be returned". This stuck with me because hes basically trying to tell us that anything found in Machu Picchu was taken by the Peruvian government to do studies but its wrong because they're ruining the worth of it and they aren't seeing the background story of it and how it belongs in Machu Picchu and not the museum.

Personal Response: I think these last few chapters I read were kind of predictable mainly because in the beginning of the story he was talking about how he wanted to get tons of information about Machu Picchu then he wanted to write a book about it which is exactly what he just did. He's about to get lots of information about everything hes looking for any everything hes founded so far in his adventure trying to get to Machu Picchu, then he;s going to write a book about all of those things which is going to lead to lots of person getting curious bout it and them wanting to go there themselves.

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The objects found do not belong to us, but to the Peruvian government which allowed us to take them from the country under the condition that they be returned.

Turn Right at Machu Picchu (212)

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"The Sun Gate at sunrise is a complete waste of time"

Turn Right at Machu Picchu (193)

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Turn Right at Machu Picchu

Week 19 blog

Pages read: 95-190

Summary: I left off where an "explorer" met a man named John who didn't speak a word of English so they had to communicate with nods and hand signals. John told Andrew that he would take him to the Incas and he went through with it. They ended up at Huanacacalle, a city near the Incas. After days and days of traveling, they made it to Vilcabamba (a peruvian rain forest), the Kolpacasa pass crossing, vista Alegre, Concevidayoc, Espiritu Pampa (The plain of Ghosts), then finally, Machu Picchu. after getting caught up in lots of trouble with gangs, other visitors, and just overall curious people wondering where John is taking Andrew, they made it to Machu Picchu. Although they made it to their final destination, they still hadn't made it to where they wanted to be for Andrews research. Andrew wanted to go all the way up to the top of the mountain of Machu Picchu, which means, more traveling. Andrew spent close to $400 just taking the bus, train, the fees, etc. Now, Andrew didn't know exactly what he was looking for when he got to Machu Picchu, he just knew that he had to get there.

Critical Analysis: In the book, the author included "When I mentioned the stranger with the bad eyes to Justo later, after we'd suffered some serious bad luck, he was amazed that I hadn't recognized bad Omen when it stared at me in the face. "The eyes, senior Mark," he said, shaking his head. "The eyes never lie". When he said this, it made me think that even when you think you know someone, you truly don't. They knew this man, who wasn't named in the book, for almost throughout the whole book, up until Andrew took him to meet John and John didn't think this man had good intentions. This showed loyalty and curiousness.

Personal Response: Just reading the name of the next chapter in this book, which is "The Big Picture: High Above Machu Picchu", I know i'm going to learn more because this is what Andrew went there for, to get research on Machu Picchu. But now, I'm liking the book so far because since this book is based on a true event, there's even real pictures in the book from when Andrew went, I'm learning both about Machu Picchu and I'm learning about what he went through to get there.

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“The Sun Gate at sunrise is a complete waste of time” -John

Turn Right at Machu Picchu (192)

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“Owing to the absence of mortar. There are no ugly spaces between the rocks. They might have grown together” -Bingham

Turn Right at Machu Picchu (179)

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“Did your life flash before your eyes?” “No, no. You have to keep your cool. Without discipline, you’re dead.” -Mark

Turn right at machu picchu. Recovering the lost city one step at a time. -Mark Adams (161)

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“God, i’d love to go in there. They could tell a few tales, take you to a few places.” -John

Turn right at machu picchu (149)

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“The eyes, Señior. The eyes never lie.”

“Turn Right at Machu Picchu” -Mark Adams (129)

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"When Manco's men retrieved Cura Ocllo's body from the river adn reported the news to their ruler, the Inca wept uncontrollably"

"Turn right at Machu Picchu" Mark Adams (125)

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"Hacienda' is still a dirty world in these parts" -John

"Turn right at Machu Picchu" - Mark Adams (114)

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Week #15 blog

Turn right at Machu Picchu - Mark Adams (82-94)

Summary

I have read that Andrew Garman, narrator, had met a man named John. John didnt speak any english so any time Andrew would try to have a conversation with John, he wouldn't understand what he was trying to tell him. He would just nod yes or no. They went out to dinner together to talk about their plan to go to Machu Picchu, John lived North of Machu Picchu. Now, John's life had been a struggle when he was younger. He suffered from hay fever and asthma so severe that "in order to breathe, he had to get up every night around one o'clock to take his ephedrine." He had eczema so bad he would rip through his skin, blood would stick to his skin, etc. Both Andrew and John had to wake up early to start making their way to Machu Picchu. Now when they woke up, they made their way to the Incas which would take up the rest of their afternoon going up the staircase. John knew where he was going but Andrew, being a tourist, had no idea where he was. "How many times have you been through here?", Andrew asks. "8, 10, yo no sabe". They had finally made it to Huanacacalle.

Critical analysis

John says in broken English. "Is true Michael Jackson dead?" and Andrew, trying but failing to come up with the Spanish words to say "The King of Pop will live forever in our hearts". So he just nodded yes and tried to look sad. I chose this quote because it goes to show that Michael Jackson is a huge artist, even in the smallest city in the biggest country, people know who he is. He had such a big cultural impact that people knew who he was but nobody in that city knew if he was really dead or not.

Personal Response

This chapter wasn't really a huge difference from the last 10 pages that I read because it was just introducing a new character, John, in the story. But looking past that, I found it interesting that he just met a guy, then the same day he told him about his story and his life, then trusted him enough to let him take him out to the Incas, Huanacacalle, and then later in the book, to Machu Picchu, if he decided to stay.

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"Men do not rest content with parrying attacks of a superior, but often strike the first blow to prevent the attack being made. And we cannot fix the exact point at which our empire shall stop; we have reached a position in which we must not be content with re-taining but must scheme to extend it, for, if we cease to rule others, we are in danger of being ruled ourselves."  

- Thucydides pg 38

(the last days of the incas)

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10 Interesting Peruvian Novels

"The novel opens from Camino’s perspective describing her home and the island. She and Tia help an old woman dying from cancer. Camino goes to the airport to meet her father, who is supposed to be arriving from New York. He has been gone for nine months. She is told that there was an accident."

"Anita de la Torre is a twelve-year-old girl living in the Dominican Republic in 1960. Most of her relatives have emigrated to the United States, her Tío Toni has disappeared, Papi has been getting mysterious phone calls about butterflies and someone named Mr. Smith, and the secret police have started terrorizing her family for their suspected opposition to the country’s dictator. While Anita deals with a frightening series of events, she also struggles with her adolescence and her own personal fight to be free."

"The Night Diary is an epistolary novel which recounts the partition of India into two separate countries, India and Pakistan, through the eyes of a twelve-year-old half-Hindu and half-Muslim girl named Nisha. Nisha and her twin brother live with their Hindu father, Papa; their grandmother, Dadi; and their cook, Kazi. Their Muslim mother passed away at their birth, and Nisha writes to her mother in the diary which lends this book its title. Nisha’s first entry in her diary begins with a letter on her twelfth birthday and, as the weeks pass, her entries begin to write not only of her personal struggles with shyness but also of her deeper fears of partition in India."

"Nora, an aspiring composer in her twenties who lives in Oakland, learns that her father, Driss, has been run over by a car and killed in an apparent accident, back in Nora’s hometown in the Mojave Desert of California. Nora returns home to be with her family during the grieving process, which is complicated by the fact that Maryam, her mother, disapproves of her chosen profession, and is unafraid of voicing her opinions"

"A boy journeys to self-discovery through the power of stories and traditions. Eleven-year-old Maximiliano Córdoba is ready for an idyllic summer. He plans to work hard as a builder for his father and train for fútbol tryouts."

"Yo! is a novel told through alternating points-of-view by a cast of characters who know or are related to a central protagonist, Yo Garcia. In the first two chapters, Yo's sisters discuss their alienation from Yo after she has published a book that is a fictionalized account of their lives"

"Xochitl Gonzalez's novel Olga Dies Dreaming is written from the third person point of view and in the past tense. The novel employs an unconventional narrative structure, braiding scenes from the present with epistolary accounts from the past. The following summary adheres to a linear mode of explanation and uses the past and present tenses."

"But the Incas did not submit willingly. A young Inca emperor, the brother of Atahualpa, soon led a massive rebellion against the Spaniards, inflicting heavy casualties and nearly wiping out the conquerors. Eventually, however, Pizarro and his men forced the emperor to abandon the Andes and flee to the Amazon. There, he established a hidden capital, called Vilcabamba—only recently rediscovered by a trio of colorful American explorers. Although the Incas fought a deadly, thirty-six-year-long guerrilla war, the Spanish ultimately captured the last Inca emperor and vanquished the native resistance."

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10 Interesting Peruvian Novels

"When his father, a journalist, is murdered, Keita escapes to the wealthy nation of Freedom State―an imagined country much like our own. A stateless refugee without documentation, Keita must hide from the authorities even as he races marathons to support himself and ransom his sister who has been kidnapped."

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10 Interesting Peruvian Novels

"Buried Beneath the Baobab Tree is the writer’s attempt to humanize the stolen girls and put a face to the countless victims of the worst terrorist violence in Nigeria. In this story, Boko Haram is the antagonist, the evil and death- dealing force, the destroyer of dreams and communities."

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5 Interesting Non-Fiction Peruvian Books

"In Search of an Inca examines how people in the Andean region have invoked the Incas to question and rethink colonialism and injustice, from the time of the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century until the late twentieth century. It stresses the recurrence of the "Andean utopia," that is, the idealization of the precolonial past as an era of harmony, justice, and prosperity and the foundation for political and social agendas for the future. In this award-winning work, Alberto Flores Galindo highlights how different groups imagined the pre-Hispanic world as a model for a new society. These included those conquered by the Spanish in the sixteenth century but also rebels in the colonial and modern era and a heterogeneous group of intellectuals and dissenters. This sweeping and accessible history of the Andes over the last five hundred years offers important reflections on and grounds for comparison of memory, utopianism, and resistance."