So Happy Birthday Andes! How does it feel to be somewhere between 145 and 200 million years old? Give or take a million years? What? You only feel Cretaceous? Ok, enough of the jokes but yes, age is relative and mysterious - and such great age is as always, a source of great beauty and great mystery and wisdom and above all, presence. GREAT presence. Take a look.....
I call these colours, the colour wheel of Ancientness - rock, grass, cloud. Chris and Jesse allowed themselves to be swept up in these sample pots of otherworldliness last Tuesday, the 13th April, or the first day of the rest of Cuenca's life. They drove up, up, up into the Cajas National Park and got out of their vehicle and climbed up, up, up even further and perhaps even as high as 4500 meters above the crashing waves of the nearest sea. It's a funny name for a National Park, if you speak Spanish because it means 'boxes'. Some people think the mountains were named for these box shaped tarn lakes but those who speak Quichua claim the name means 'cold' - Caxa or even Cassa - 'Gateway to the snowy mountains'. Whichever, you get more of a feel for the place from the older inhabitants than from the blow-ins.
The Cajas are a significant area of Biodiversity. They're a designated Important Bird Area of the world and are also recognised as a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance. Tramping all over them, gently, lightly, you can sort of get an idea of that - they are indeed wet and highly populated with unique plant life, with birds and bats and pumas and possibly even bears. There used to be more bears but... you know how the story goes. There was definitely an Andean Fox around earlier in the week.
From a distance, amongst all those 'ancient' hues, it's not easy to see how many bright, 1970's colours abound until you're right down on the ground and close up and until you are more self-reflective, perhaps, like Chris was.
Where have all the flowers gone? They've all gone to the Cajas!
This one below, is called a Globolito, a tiny balloon, the diminutive of the name of the large and colourful paper lanterns set adrift in the night skies over Cuenca on Feast Days and Birthdays and Sundays and other days.
Yes, this Paramo, a word roughly translating to 'bleak landscape' is anything but. Like the tiny gentian flowers and bromeliads and deer-antlers hugging the slopes and blossoming among the sponge-like cushion plants, people also spring up, joyfully or puffed out or both, all over the National Park, on weekends, and holidays and days off. 'Time out' is needed from the bustling city, for, young and vibrant as it may be, it doesn't allow the eye to rest on fuzzy horizons, logical in their own Jurassic way, nor the foot to rest on carpets of wonderful creatures, things that our soles must surely yearn for.
Debate about where Humans, both Beings and Conquistadors, belong and don't belong, rages and admittedly, we're not so well equipped to wend our ways upon narrow paths and rocky passes, but still we do. T'is indeed a mad, mad world no matter how far one roams from the madding crowds.
