I just don't know anything anymore

I hate, hate, that I can't tell you anything! That I have to be so vague about what's going on, where I am... but we don't know if they're still intercepting this mail, if they can get their hands on these letters. We can't risk them knowing.

I hate that I don't even know who they are...

You probably hate you don't know who "we" is though.

I think I mentioned this before, though I'm not sure, I'm a bit confused as to what's really happened and what hasn't  (I've been deep undeground, hiding, alone, until the heat died  a bit) but there's a bunch of people who live under the city. Unwanted people, or wanted for a very unpleasant reason, like me... And we have a leader. The so called leader of our so called resistance. We call her Lil.

I can't tell you much about that though, in case they're listening. She warned me not to, until we know what they know.

I need to go now. I hope you get this letter and not them.

At least the sewer drakes keep me company

I've not seen another human being in a week. I feel like I could go crazy. I don't know if you're getting these letters but they're the only thing keeping me at least a little sane

I was charged with treason. I don't know if they told you that. It's not true in any case. I hope you know that. I hope you believe that.

I don't know why they accused me. I guess... I guess I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Talking to the wrong people. I didn't do anything though. I was just a stablehand...

There's others too, living in the shadows, people who've had a fate similar to mine. Something it going on, something big. But I don't know what. And I don't know why. I hope I can find out before they find me.

I don't even know if you'll get this

They've been intercepting my mail. They've been intercepting my fucking mail!!

I don't know how long it's been going on, we only just found out! It might've been weeks, it might've been months! For all I know, you haven't had any updates since I moved to this godforsaken city! I have no way of knowing, since Co we haven't got our hands on the missing letters yet!

Gods, they might intercept this one too.

I need to be careful.




I just don't understand... why is this happening to me? I'm just a stablehand!

...I was just a stablehand....

Hello, Finland

Somehow, after a half a year, I have made my way back to Finland. It shouldn't really be that surprising. I've had the return tickets booked since December, after all. But somehow I'm still a bit surprised to find myself in Helsinki.
Everyone's speaking Finnish. They understand what I'm saying. For better or for worse.
People are so tall.
I don't have to wonder if there's hot water in the shower.
I got complained to by the person behind me in the line in a grocery store because apparently I wasn't moving fast enough standing right behind the person in front of me.
There are no people trying to sell me stuff on the streets. Except the ones collecting money for Unicef or some other charity. And they're not actually trying to sell me anything.
The Sun is warm, instead of burning.
I suddenly feel very tan.
I missed the strawberry season.

Honestly? I don't know what to tell you. It's too soon.
Did I change, because I went to South America for a half a year?
I don't know. Though that's how most change is.
Did I learn something? Of course I did, you don't spend a half a year in a place so completely different than what you're used to and not learn something. But what?
I don't know.
No, I do know one thing.
I learned that everything will work out. Maybe not (nearly) as early as I'd like, but somehow, things will work out, even if at some point I felt like something should already be done, like I'm running out of time. It will work out, even if right on the last possible day.

I don't know.

I'd be lying if I said I'm not glad to be back.
But I'd be lying even more if I said I didn't leave a piece of my heart in South America.

~matu

(So where does the blog go from here? I don't know. We'll have to figure it out some time, probably soon.)

I'm alive

Oh gods, I am, I am alive, I'm just-- fuck. Some stuff has happened, I...

Someone's here, shit, I gotta go, I'll explain when I can.

That time I went to a Moot

Like I said last time, I just spent ten days on a scout camp. The Interamerican Moot, to be exact. For those of you who don't know, Moots are camps where also the participants are adults, 18-25-year-olds. Which means this was my last ever opportunity to be a participant on a scout camp.
The campsite was somewhere in the sacred valley of the incas. Which means that the views were way better than ever on any scout camp in Finland.

Here.

The campsite was almost 3000 meters above sea level, meaning almost half a kilometer lower than Cusco. As you can see in the photo, the area was simply a field. The next field over had something growing on it, and some cows. As you may imagine, a surface like that in an area where it only rains very rarely (like during the last night of the camp but never otherwise) gives off a ridiculous amount of dust into the air when you put 2000 people walking back and forth on it for ten days. Or one day. Or at all. The fact that it's a valley and a pretty strong wind is blowing through it during the daylight hours, especially late afternoon, did not help. By the last few days of the camp people were coughing and having sore throats from having breathed dust for over a week, and others were walking around with respiration masks so they wouldn't breath in any more dust. I'm not kidding, there was so much dust. In the air. In the nose, the eyes, the lungs. In the tents. Covering clothes. Forming tiny tiny cyclones. I'm not kidding.

Another key feature of the campsite were the temperature differences. In Finland, it's not like we're not used to large temperature differences. The difference (is a word I just used way too many times in a row) between the temperatures in the winter and in the summer can be 50 degrees (yes, Celsius), no problem. The thing is that that difference is just that: between winter and summer. This high up but close to the equator and with very little clouds the temperature varied by probably 30 degrees at most during a 24-hour period. Which meant that while it was easily t-shirt weather during the day, it was three layers of clothes -weather after the sun went down. I have to say, that was a bit annoying.

Ok, enough complaining. It was actually a great camp. I got used to the varying temperature in a few days, and the dust really became annoying after we'd been breathing it for a week.

What was different about this camp compared to the ones I've previously been on is that we left the campsite on multiple days. Of the eight full days on the camp, we were not actually in the camp for four.
One thing we did outside the camp is going to see some ruins. A lot of them, actually. Because it turns out that in the sacred valley there are a lot of inca ruins. Like if you take a car and drive for an hour, you'll see something.

Here are some ruins from Ollantaytambo, which, if I understood correctly, was some kind of military base / watch tower / temple. You can only see a part of it here, though.

We got lost one day on our way to this local community we were supposed to help, and ended up stopping on this bit of road high in the mountains between two peaks for maybe an hour while the bus drivers tried to figure out where we were and where we were supposed to be going. Meanwhile all the latinos (because that's who were on the camp. This was an interamerican camp, but people from US and Canada were maybe 20 people in total) decided to have a snowballfight, because the great majority of them were in the same place with snow for the first time in their lives. Because yeah, we were high enough to have snow.

We also saw some lamas. Or possibly alpacas. I can't really tell the difference. Apparently lamas have longer necks and faces than alpacas, but I'd need to see them side by side to be able to tell the difference. We saw them that day and other days when we went high enough that I think we were above the tree line. Because apparently that's where they actually live. Not in the places low enough to have rain forest, like that one pasture Emperor's New Groove. Although it's obviously possible to take them that low. They used to grow lamas at Machu Picchu, for example.

Another day we went rock climbing. It was one of the best activities in the camp, even though it, like everything else, consisted of a lot of waiting. Seriously. There was so much waiting. One day just going to have dinner took me two and a half hours.
Anyway, rock climbing. I've been climbing inside every now and then for the last couple of years, but never outside on real rock. I learned very fast after I started climbing that real rock (unsurprisingly) hurts your hands way more than the handholds they use inside. I found half a dozen scrapes on my hands and arms and legs after I got down and my everything stopped shaking. I also learned, higher up, that even though while climbing inside I can only get my head up to maybe five meters before starting to feel like I'm too high and my head refuses to let go so I could reach higher, I didn't have the same problem while climbing outdoors. I would have gotten all the way to the top of my line no problem, but I couldn't find any handholds in the last meter or so that my by then shaking, hurting and tired hands would have been able to hold on to. Actually rappel, which is descending with a rope and that we also did, was way more scary than the climbing. Partly because it required going over the edge of the rock from above, and partly because I knew that if I let go of the rope I was hanging from, I would fall, and it was a long way to the ground. Ok, that's not actually true. There was all the time a guy at the top of the rock with a second rope attached to me, so even if I had failed miserably and let go of my rope, the second one would have stopped me from falling.

The days we stayed in camp we had mostly workshop-kind of things. Countries telling about themselves on stands on international day, some development-village thing for a couple of days (one or both of which we could have also spent outside the camp helping out some more in some local communities, but I didn't go) of some development-village thing, where there were stands and workshops of projects that try to make life better in the Andies. One stand had some potatoes.

And we had one day of actual workshops. I did Andean weaving, which didn't actually include any weaving and was more like step-by-step-instructions for how the locals make thread, starting from cutting the wool off of a sheep, and then they showed us for a few minutes how they weave the thread into fabric. I also did photography, which would have been a lot of fun except literally everything was in Spanish, so I only understood a few words here and there of the instructions.

Ok, what else.

Well, here's another general photo of the campsite. This is from in front of the main stage, which is on the right. There's some areas for hanging out on the left, as well as the workshop/stand area. The area with the tents is at the back there.

The toilets were the same as in Finnish scout camps, and all other scout camps, but if you look closely, you will see that the ones on the left are for men and the ones on the right are for women. And I actually once heard someone being complained to by security for using the wrong ones. Don't ask, I don't know.

I learned that there are still people living in Peru who speak Quechua, which is the native language from this area, spoken by the incas. Or, actually, spoken by the Quechua people. Because I also learned that the incas aren't actually a people, but instead the nobility and leaders of the quechua people. Either way, there are still people living in the mountains who speak Quechua, and a lot of then actually don't speak any Spanish. I was not expecting that at all.

And there were parties.

Of course there were parties. Every night. This is, after all, a scout camp for young adults. In Latin America. These people dance. (And their music is loud , which, once again, goes to show that while the people here are amazing and kind and helpful and welcoming, they have no respect for other people's right to sleep in the middle of the night. I was located in the far corner of the campsite from the main arena, and I could easily hear the music there once I went to bed and the party continued. But it wasn't too loud. It the far corner.)
I'm generally not a party person. Not even a little bit. The music is too loud and there are too many people and they're all either already or soon drunk. And parties always mean I have to stay up later than I'd like. The only exception is scouts. Those parties are good. I've figured out it's probably because no one is drunk. The music is still loud, but it's easier to leave when it's only a few hundred meters to your tent instead of kilometers home. And on Moot the parties often started really early, like around eight, which meant there was plenty of time to dance a bit and still be in bed early.

So that's the main things about the camp.
The reason this post is coming out on Wednesday and not Tuesday is because it ended on Sunday, and we spent Monday and Tuesday going to Machu Picchu. I simply didn't have the time to write. But that means I can share a couple of photos from there too.
So on Monday we just traveled to Aguas Calientes, which is the small town built at the foot of the Machu Picchu mountain, so that tourists can stay there for the night and eat. And buy souvenirs, of course.

On Tuesday morning we woke up at 3:30 (that's not morning) and left to stand in a bus line. There's a shuttle bus from Aguas Calientes to Machu Picchu, every few monutes, starting at about 5:40. If you really want to be at Machu Picchu early (aka. ~6 AM), which you do, you need to be in line at little past four. By five the line is already looong. There are thousands of people going there every day, after all, and even if there is a but going up every few minutes, each of them can only fit so many.

So we got to Machu Picchu around six, had a couple-hour guided tour, and then just walked around on our own. This is a super-touristy photo, only taken from a different angle than the one they're usually taken from.

I tried to think what to tell you about the place. I've been wanting to go ever since I was a kid and saw that one episode of The Busy World of Richard Scarry where they go there.
It was worth waking up at 3:30.
But honestly, either you've been there or you haven't.

One thing I will say though.
By now I've been all over the Amazon and the Andes, from lowlands to 4500 meters. But this

was the first time when I thought "yep, this is where the people making Emperor's New Groove came and decided to use the landscape." (Do I talk about that movie way too much? I don't know. But it's unsurprisingly been on my mind lately.) Not only the mountains have the same feeling, but also Machu Picchu is low enough to be surrounded by highland rainforest.

Also, the real purpose of Machu Picchu is apparently not entirely clear, because the incas didn't have writing, but there is a hypothesis that it was built as a summer palace by an emperor based in the capital Cusco.

I don't know if it's true, but I choose to believe it. Despite the fact that there was no singing.

~matu