Evan Graves Walks A Path Of Cultural Discovery

Along The Inca Trail

By Dottie Evans

Not every junior in college travels halfway around the world to improve his Spanish.

Evan Graves, 21, was born and raised in Newtown and graduated from the high school in the Class of 2001. During the summer of 2003, he spent eight weeks in Peru, living with a family in the town of Cieneguilla, outside of Lima. At the end of his stay, he hiked to Machu Picchu via the Inca Trail.

After that final four-day trek along the ancient path through the high Andes Mountains, the exhilaration of his experience at seeing the sunrise over the ruins at Machu Picchu was only slightly dampened by the arrival of several big tour buses along the modern day road.

Nevertheless, Evan tried to see beyond what he called those “touristy” aspects.

 “Plenty of people hike the trail,” he noted during a phone interview Tuesday from the University of Vermont, where he is a junior majoring in mechanical engineering.

“But it is a different group of tourists [from the ones that ride the buses]. I was younger than most, and I felt a bit like an outsider in that sub-culture of hiking eco-tourists. They would sit around the campfire and say things like, ‘When I was in Belize I saw this and that.’”

“Luckily, I had a few stories I could chime in on,” he joked.

After he arrived back home in Newtown on August 18, Evan said it “felt kind of strange.”

“But you sort of fall back into it pretty easily,” he added.

Evan is the son of Allan and Patty Graves of Boggs Hill Road, and it was through the Graves’ good friends, Newtown residents Wendy and Ernesto Leon-Gambetta, that the opportunity for Evan to travel to Peru became available.

Learning Spanish And Living Peruvian

Ever since seventh grade when Evan first began Spanish lessons in the Newtown schools, he had enjoyed the language and continued taking courses, even gaining college credits from the University of Connecticut.

But when he went to the University of Vermont in Burlington, he became frustrated when the credits didn’t transfer, and progress in arranging a semester abroad to a Spanish speaking country got bogged down.

“On campus, I sort of got disgusted with the bureaucracy of trying to go with an organized group. When I started out, I didn’t really have any expectations for any particular location. I just wanted to go.”

The Leon-Gambettas told their relatives living in Cieneguilla, Peru, about Evan’s desire to travel to a Spanish-speaking country, and Hugo and Mona Otero volunteered to offer him a home and a bed. Evan paid for his ticket and brought along spending money. He planned to live with the Oteros for seven weeks and would travel as a tourist for one week.

Looking back on his summer, Evan said Tuesday that aside from the fun of meeting new friends and feeling a part of the Otero family, his experience in Peru humbled him. He found himself respecting what we have in this country more than he had before.

 “There are families in Peru that eat off of $10 per week. Some of my [Peruvian] friends were not that well off, and I was seeing that first-hand.”

He plans to work someday in a Spanish speaking country, and has delved back into this engineering and math studies at UVM. Meanwhile, he’s got a lot of great memories to bring back his summer in South America, not the least of which is the sunrise at Machu Picchu.

Also included in those memories are the 1,400 pictures taken with his digital camera, some beautifully carved avocado pits he fashioned during his leisure moments after eating the fresh fruits for lunch, and a dried “but not stretched out” goat skin from his Peruvian friend David, which he brought home to hang on his wall.

Writing Home: Evan’s Email Log 

Evan Graves kept a regular email account of his experiences, which he was able to send back to his family. Several excerpts are reprinted below in italics.

Week One: Arrival in Cieneguilla, and time spent getting accustomed to language and establishing a routine; Sightseeing; Helping at local church youth group and meeting friends;

Week One: My Spanish is OK. I’m listening a lot now. I am just beginning to realize that I miss Newtown, but nothing serious. Just that this will be a different summer than what all my friends are up to, and I am looking forward to coming back to them.

Evan’s host mother, Mona Otero, had written to her niece and nephew, Wendy and Ernesto Leon-Gambetta in Newtown, “We understand one another quite well, and don’t ask me how but we are able to joke around and we tell funny stories…Evan is fixing everything that doesn’t work in our house and I think he feels very comfortable.”

Weeks Two and Three:

Hola, amigos! Thanks for the letter, that’s a nice picture of Newtown. It got here on the 5th of July. This past Sunday was the Grand Kermess –– music, food, prizes and cock fighting –– all at the church. My stomach gave way to Peruvian food, but I am recuperating.

Week Four: Evan has established a jogging routine, is exploring the surrounding area around Cieneguilla, and has even found a few favorite cartoons on Peruvian TV. He is beginning to set up an itinerary for travel to Cuzco, Machu Picchu, and Lake Titicaca.

Now I am beginning to play the part of the gringo living in Peru. I wake up around 8 am, eat breakfast with Mona and Hugo, then watch TV. There are only about seven channels, but they have Tom and Jerry, Xenia the Worrier Princess, Pokemon, and Dexter’s Laboratory.

The town where I am living in is a perfect example of a river valley. Now the river is real low, but the main road follows the river with houses two to three blocks on one side where it is flat, before the bare mountains shoot up.

Weeks Three and Four: More sightseeing. Evan finds Peruvian friends his own age to play acoustic guitars and jam with.

Hopefully my musical practice will fare better than my running practice, which has dwindled, meaning it has stopped…

I went to work with an engineering friend of Hugo’s. They do a little of everything. I took a quick walk through the machine shop, with lathes, computerized oxygen cutting machine that can cut steel up to six inches depending on the nozzle they use, cold cutting and other workers welding and grinding. All this noise can be heard from the design offices, where I hung out most of the day. They use AutoCad 2002, a 2D technical drawing program, the updated version of the program I was taught to use in good old Engineering 002.

I finally got my feet wet in the Pacific Ocean. Hugo has a house south of Lima for the summer that looks out at Punta Hermosa (Beautiful Point).

Week Five:

My Spanish is definitely better after a month, but as much as I miss Connecticut and Vermont, I am glad to have another month here. One thing I am learning is slang, not just bad words but other names for money, clothes, and these types of things you need to know to work in the language. I stutter a bit too much to have a Peruvian accent, but give me a month and we’ll see.

Today, Monday, July 28, is the Fiesta De La Patria, like the Fourth of July for the US. Basically a long procession of kids marching, then the police, then the taxies, and that is it.

 Went to a concert in nearby Baranco, to hear Los Kjarkas, otherwise known as the Beatles of Bolivia. Then home to Cienguilla to a meal of chicken on the grill, which he described as “always good.”

We had fresh avocado, normal and fried yucca, and Lucho made Cerviche a classic Peruvian way to serve fish. Now I don’t like fish, but this was really good. Basically, it is fish with lemon, plus he makes two different sauces.. It is served with chocio, a type of corn, and a seaweed lettuce. That with a rum and coke was a fine lunch for a Peruvian portrait holiday.

For dinner, Evan repaid the favor by cooking a meal for his host family. He had found a box of Bisquick at a nearby World Market and had brought the Oteros some Vermont maple syrup.

Week Seven: Travel to Cuzco as a “real tourist,” a ride in a raft down the river Urubamba, and the four-day hike along the Inca Trail to Macchu Piccu along with nine others, all American except for one Englishman. Tour bus to Puno, and then a boat ride on Lake Titicaca; then back home to Cieneguilla for his last week in Peru.

In Cuzco we went to a church, which was built on the site of a sacred Inca spot...When the Spanish saw an important site, they either pillaged it or built their place of worship on top.

On the rafting trip down the Urubamba River...we had wet suits and rafting jackets along with life jackets and helmets, but my feet were cold. It went well. No one fell out or anything, although in the front of the boat I took the most water.

On the Inca Trail…I reached the high pass just as the clouds did. This was the day we would see other ruins and also when the rain would follow us. At some points along the trail there would be a drop-off to one side of the Inca stonework and then the immaculate sight of the fog. Even if it had lifted, you would hardly believe what you saw. The whole place was surreal. Just the size of the Andes is ridiculous.

There were ten of us, one guide, one cook, and several porters. They pack all the tents and such on their backs wrapped in plastic tarps. Their calf muscles are tremendous. Needless to say it is brutal to carry metal propane containers over the Andes.

At 4 the next morning, breakfast and on the trail at 5, staring in the dark and watching as the color of the valley grew. The last pass had a good set of steps that made us line up along the Inca Trail like waiting to get on an amusement park ride, over 100 people, mind you. There was the “sun gate” from which Machu Picchu lay below for every traveler to take his first picture. By now the sun was making its mark on the higher peaks in the distance. Then the descent into the ruins. Along the way there were a few other structures to see.

The boat ride on Lake Titicaca elicited some amusing observations.

 I took a tour bus to Titicaca, which I found out has nothing to do with breasts or poop. Titi means puma in Spanish, and caca means rabbit, and the map of the lake looks like a puma and a rabbit.

Finally, Evan reflects on the more serious aspects of his experiences.

There is not enough money to go around and preserve all the beauties of Peru…I am glad I lived in a small town for seven weeks, or I would have thought that all of Peru was like what I saw during my crazy week as a tourist.

 Now I am back home in Cieneguilla for a week, then home to Newtown for a week, then back home to Burlington for, well, more than a week.

Evan