Eye in the sky

Horus would love to be blind.

Poles’ Sabbath

 

Under the stars a secret meeting starts. Silently and without turning any light on they pronounce words meant to be unheard to human minds.

This is the secret, the lines we draw in the space are also a threshold and a gate, seven is six and one more.

The eternal night is almost upon us.

Nuit: temps de chasser étoiles

Hidden, I could just have one chance to get one star alive.

Once upon a time a lake

This is a view from Puno’s bay. Those ships were built in England, taken in pieces using donkeys and assembled in the highest (navigable) lake in the world: the Titicaca. Funny (or sadly?), because we have thousand of years building ships, we navigated to Oceania and Antarctica.

They were two ships, Ollanta and Manco Capac, (Capac is a misspelled form of Qhapaq).

I had curiosity to see the port at night, but there was empty; in a certain way is like go to a museum to see objects from the past: there is no life.

BTW in the sky is, if I’m not wrong dear reader, the Jach’a Qhana (what you probably name Southern Cross), four brilliant stars in the middle top.

View from the starship “Earth One”

 

Certainly I’m bonded with the sea. There is an old inner memory that connects me with it. Perhaps it’s the Titicaca lake, the last survivor from an ancient sea millions and millions ago, perhaps it’s the balance with the sky and the earth. What I know is that I feel it at the distance.

But I cannot be so much in the coast, I win the sea but I lost the stars; and the stars to me are more needed. The sea is my the nexus with childhood (previous eternity) and the stars with the adulthood (future eternity) .

Juliaca is a city at high altitude (3824 metres or 12,549 feet above sea level), so the sky is clearer than in other cities from Perú. The city is big but not so big that the pollution hide the sky. Juliaca is not a beautiful city, I say it because I born and grow up in Juliaca and I believe in truth, not in false patriotisms, but the sky and the countryside are absolutely formidable.

Imata II: Toward the Stars

inolvidable

 

The previous week I published the first part of my visit to a non touristic place called Imata. It is half way my home city in Puno Region (highlands) and Arequipa Region (near the coast) If you have curiosity is here: Imata I: The Blue I know that there isn’t a clear difference between both posts, but remember that the change in the day is gradual, there are half tones between the words day and night.

Recapitulating I was searching for some waterfalls, but they were so far and my goal was just to walk and see whatever the road would give me to me. This second and last part is about Imata’s surroundings beginning when the light was gold until the blue light of stars and the moon as only companion.

Axis

Colours falling upon the two brothers

Wait for me

Last man on Earth’s Journey

Fields of Gold

Daedalus alone in the sky

Rorschach test

blue river in yellow submarine

Crossing this point, this river, I had a little opportunity to see if I could go to the waterfalls, but that was an insane dream: I had walked near three hours to that river, if I would tried to go I probably had got hypothermia; so I just take more vistas for a prudent and reasonable time and came back to the town of Imata. My limit was this rock formation with the river, the sunset and the moon. I think it worth the adventure.

Yellow river

(Earth-Fire-Water-Air) Collision

gentle farewell

the wall

Intersection of Forces

desvanecer en rosa

That point into the blue

blues and whites

Suave Levitar

Luna de Imata

And that was the end of the blue hour. Actually I didn’t take so much photos. I think that with a better camera is less necessary to take more pictures. A time ago with the old compacts I had to take at least three times more photos to can get one with a better exposure, and of course I hadn’t enough practice. But know I am taking much less photos but at the same time everyone has more right to exist, in reference to what I want as photography. It is the fantastic that it’s just a hobby, I am not worried if it fulfill professional requirements… Simply I take what I want.

Neo Qosqo

solitaire can

Pimum mobile (glimpse)

Road to Fairyland

Milky Way and moonlight

Field of stars upong travellers

Night crossing Imata for the last time

And that was all. I walked again two hours and half and I bought some things in Imata. After that I waited for a car that would do service between Juliaca and Arequipa. After one hour or a bit more fortunately one passed the highway and I just paid ten soles (a bit more of three dollars) to come back to the city.

I would like to go another day to see the waterfalls, but to go to normal places has its risks. I mean, the first is that you can be truly alone there, so if you aren’t careful anything could happen and nobody would notice it; there is no much data and the people in those places although kind and polite haven’t much interest in know those places. That’s understandable, they have to work. But it also has great advantages. You are truly alone so you can think clearer, have a pause and in a certain way start again with a better point of view. Nothing like go to another place to see how some situations are really meaningless and other ones are worthier of our attention and valuable time.

Apus

 

To understand the cities in the country were was the Inca Empire one has to know first a bit of the mythic origins: in few words every people is bonded to a determined place. This place can be a mountain, a lake, a rock, an island. In the mythic origins the humans were produced from these places, whose names are pacarinas.

In this believing there not exist a god or gods creators. Instead there are a lot of human groups that take care of a pacarina. There are some more important than others, in the case of the incas it was first a hill called Tampu Tocco. Inca Garcilazo de la Vega (son of an Inca princess and a spanish invader) wrote about the Titicaca Lake as the mythical pacarina but that could be a distant mirror of the old times before the incas came to once would be the imperial city Qosqo (misnamed Cusco or Cuzco).

My apu is called Huaynarroque, for example. The volcano in the photograph is called Misti that means white, perhaps in an analogy similar to the Mount Kilimanjaro. But I think that If it is an apu is one very recent.

An apu more than a god is a living ancestor, I hope that tradition survive our incipient modernization, but sadly the news about invaders in sacred places are not uncommon, and the worse is that they are not poor people but people that wants the easy way to do the things.

Usually the apus have crosses on their tops. That was a way to mix religions I suppose, so they are old crosses, I want to believe that they were put in there without violence, but the invasion wasn’t one peaceful but was our end of the civilized world. Fortunately something new was born and is something real that every civilization has its moments and declines but always its apparent destruction is important to build something sometimes better.

About the eternal and the ethereal

 

In photography I like to try new things, I like to try the clichés to after avoid them. Although I guess I am committing a lot of photographic clichés. I don’t know, I have no much photographic books and I am not totally familiarized with the big names of this art. But I am learning something new everyday so I hope to be more and more in the water.

This photo could be a natural landscape but the highway was near so I wanted to mix a urban type of photo with landscape. Fortunately the night covered me against the car driver’s incredulous stares. I mean, Is it so hard to believe that someone is walking alone in middle of the nature? Is that or I’m so skinny that probably more than a walker I seem a ghost, lol.

I liked the composition so I took just two or three pictures more and after that I walked two and half hours to the near town of Imata and… well, that is a story for another day.