Fun in Cajamarca!

February 2nd, 2008 Cajamarca, Peru

Carnaval Fun!

The real Carnaval is held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and is an elaborate festival known worldwide. Cajamarca is the capital of Carnaval in Peru and hosts a milder version of the Brazilian celebration. Its kind of like Mardi Gras minus the nudity plus paint. By the end of the day, several people claimed that this ranked as one of the top ten days of their lives.

Basically, for the month of February people throw water balloons at those who pass by from either balconies or behind the shelter of doors. A certain Saturday (determined by the lunar calendar) is designated as the all out war. This day people throw water balloons like crazy and even paint.

Volunteers knew from previous years to reserve a particular balcony in the Santa Rosa Hotel. Starting at around 10am, we began filling bucketfuls of water balloons. From the balcony we tossed balloons at those in street or others standing on their balconies. Perhaps our greatest weapon was The Launcher. Evan had brought back one of those super balloon launchers from the States. We could launch balloons as far as 3 blocks. Those people had no idea where the balloons were coming from.

Around noon, Ryan and I decided to venture out to the streets. Armed with a bag of water balloons each, we would soon learn we were underprepared. We were fine until a large group of 10 attacked us with buckets of paint. Ryan took some straight to the eye and fortunately a nearby bakery offered him water to flush it out. I took a passion fruit (kind of like a small apple) to the chest. That wasn´t cool. We returned to the hotel to round up the troops.

Everyone armed themselves with balloons and buckets of paint. Groups of about 10 to 15 people are formed and then march around the streets. Several groups have drums and chant as they parade the streets in search of victims. When two groups come upon each other it is all out war for about 3 minutes. Then the groups move on to find other groups.

What is really cool is that just about everyone participates. Although the groups are primarily high school and college kids, several groups included adults. Even older women participate. They might be the trickiest of all. One lady in her late 60´s asked if we would like some more water to mix with our paint. We accepted and while we were preparing our watered down paint mixture she came up from behind us and dowsed us with buckets of ice cold water and then scurried back into her house.

Around 3pm all the groups meet in the plaza (the city´s central meeting place) and unload any remaining ammo. There is lots of music and drinking and dancing. This goes on for a couple of hours before most return to their respective dwelling places to wash up. All the hot water was out, so we took freezing cold showers to remove the paint.





Baños del Inca

Since we were all shivering from cold we decided to head out to the Baños del Inca. These are natural thermal hot baths that were used by the Incas. For about a $1.50 you can rent a private hot tub like bath for 30 minutes. It was quite relaxing after the day´s festivities.