Cotacachi: Inti Raymi Party of the Sun

Cotacachi: Inti Raymi Party of the Sun.
June 30. Part 1:
I met a random person in the Otavalo post office today who told me through my broken Spanish that there was a huge fiesta taking place in Cotacachi, a village 15 minutes away.  Never interested in missing a party, I headed for the town on a $0.25 bus.

Cotacachi is an almost entirely indigenous Ecuadorian community and it took me hours to find out what the peculiar festival taking place was for I was the only gringo in town and no one else spoke enough English to be able to really explain to me I was watching.  Eventually I found an Italian girl, of all countries, who spoke English and told me that I was at the fiesta of Inti Raymi to celebrate the solstice.  The party went on for the entire day and into the night…  Nearly everyone participating was drunk and many people were passed out on the street by 2:30pm.  It is quite a festival:  A simple stomp as you walk and whistle in step march-dance while wearing fuzzy chaps and a pointy wooden hat dance whilst carrying a whip…  Random dancing men were playing harmonicas and some guys had deer skulls mounted on sticks they carried high in the air.  Some dancers were carrying small trees.  Riot police with clear shields stood at every corner of the town square to keep the fiesta and dancers from creating havoc anywhere else.  I love the craziness of life…

It is nice to feel tall somewhere in the world amongst a crowd, which is how I feel when I move around here.  After a walk, I found the familiar bowls of corn made moonshine that had gotten me plastered when I was in Macha, Bolivia at the Tinku Fighting Festival.  Suddenly the 2:30pm pass-outs on the sidewalks made sense.  Pig roasts were in abundance and I am pretty sure that the soup I had with dinner was made out of stomach.  I tried to not chew the pieces of meat in my soup and just got it down into my own.  I had it once before in Japan so it looked familiar to me.  I am 50/50 on culinary culture…maybe less.  I usually do not like what I am eating, but I try everything just in case something blows my mind.  That happens on very rare occasions.  Today, ‘stomach’ did not blow my mind…

Inti Raymi (‘Party of the Sun’ in Quechuan – the primary South American indigenous language) is also known as the celebration of San Juan and San Pedro and it takes place one week after summer/winter solstice.  It was a religious ceremony of the Inca Empire to honour of the god Inti and to show a love for Pachamama (Mother Nature).  Only the men dance today and tomorrow is the dance of the women and children.  Similar to the Tinku Fighting Festival, the highlands and the lowlands people are rivals.  Fights break out between the two groups of people if they are in the same place at the same time.  Today the lowlands began first to dance in the town square and when they went to eat and drink more alcohol, the highlands came to dance in the center.  Then the lowlands dance and then the highlands finish the night.  There is a strict schedule to ensure that the groups are in different places at different times.  Both groups can be friends at any other time, but they are complete rivals during this celebration.  Fights break out away from the center, as the square is policed very well.  I found out that there is a retired gringo community in the surrounding areas, but they gringos are not to be found because they are afraid of the violence that can happen at the celebration.  Friends I later made told me in broken Spanish that this is the only place in Ecuador where such a festival is so grand and traditional.  I got lucky meeting that man in the post office today…

To finish off the night I was drinking $1.50 large beer with three indigenous friends I had made.  Two of the friends were brother and they were telling me that they were afraid to go home because their wives were going to beat them for being out so late.  One of the brothers was a lot bigger than the other and he told me that it is because his father screwed harder to make him.  Wow!…

July 1. Part 2:
I slept in large because I was up late stealing the five Pink Floyd albums I do not have from the internet.  Things seemed to start slow in town today for the women’s Inti Raymi dance celebrations anyhow.  At 3pm, things were set to go and I met a gringo girl from Alberta and lives in the area.  She told me that two years ago at the Inti Raymi Festival here in Cotachchi two people were murdered.  So, last year they brought in 400 police officers and this year 500 were brought in for the men’s celebrations.  Yikes…

The women’s celebrations today were very different from the men’s celebrations of yesterday.  The riot police were about 10% of the shenanigans yesterday.  Apparently this is day 11 of celebrations in the town, and on this, the final day, the women are finally front and center of the celebrations.  These people must be tired.  The festival in the square was just as busy, but it was so much quieter.  The male aggression has been lost and it has become sort of a sweet, innocent and cute festival.  Is this why women are not usually among great guitar players, because they do not naturally have extreme obnoxious aggression in them?  The women are all dressed in traditional clothes but the massive black particle-board wooden hats are missing.  There are more gringos around, apparently coming out of their houses no longer in fear.  The guitar and flute players in the circle dance are still primarily men, but most of the dancers are women and children.  The guitar is a 15 stringed traditional instrument called a vandolin with five sets of three stings.  There is also another kind of guitar called a charango that is has a back made out of armadillo hide.

There are 12 communities here for the festival, which would explain why the town is so busy.  I have been told that this is as traditional as it gets. In the stores, the ice-cream treats that are sold are homemade.  A very drunk old man got really angry at me when I would not give him my glass of beer to drink.  He put up his fist as if he was going to take a swing at me.  But he was much smaller than me and extremely drunk, so I just shoved him away a couple of times as my reach was much longer than his.  He stood there and breathed very loudly in his anger, and then he just started whistling and dancing again.  It was the only kind of altercation that I seen take place the entire time.  Though I definitely stand out here people are respectful and no one really stares at me which is nice, although at times I feel like I am invisible to everyone else here knowing I am not.  People just sort of ignore the gringo.  I am sort of caught between two worlds.  Celebrations were still taking place at 11pm and I had even danced a little but the crowd was thinning.  People were not as drunk as the night before and there were only two small dance circles left.  I guess aggression sort of makes a party.  At least it makes it edgy.  Sweet and innocent always gets boring after some time.

$10 – Hostal Cotacachi for one night.
$2 – Meal of pig roast.
$1.50 – Big Bottle of beer.
$61,000 – Price of a three bedroom three bathroom house in a gated community in Cotacachi.