A Stay in Vicos - Why?

During your stay in Vicos you will be staying in the lodge very close to a Quechua-family's home. They will cook for you and ensure that you will have the deepest intercultural experience ever by making you a part of their everyday life. The man will be your personal guide throughout the days and explain you everything about his life. He will show you his lands and the crops he grows on them. He will introduce you to his family and tell you about his kids. You will see them coming back from school and you might even find yourself helping them with their homework or with the household tasks they receive from their mother. She will explain you all about the way she cooks, the ingredients she uses, where they come from and how they will be prepared. It is really great to realise that practically everything in the lives of the Quechua Indians comes from their backyard. It is so interesting to see the way they co-operate with nature, so many things that all people from Western countries have already forgotten for a very long time.

Families

Families in Vicos are big. Eleven kids are no exception at all, and it is also no exception that parents are still having kids while their first children are already starting a family of their own. Sometimes grandmothers and -fathers live in the house of (one of their) children to help and to be taken care of.

Family life is very important for the Vicosinos and having fun with each other is very common. When you eat with them in their kitchen they are talking a lot about what the kids did during their day, and they make lots of jokes. All members of the family have their own responsibilities and tasks within the household and on the lands. Everyone accepts those tasks, so life is very tranquil and happy.

Household animals

Apart from many kids walking around their house, the Quechua family holds an incredibally large number of pets as well. All animals have their own function in the household. Dogs are to protect the house, and also serve to keep the place clean from food leftovers, together with the cats. Furthermore there are many chickens, rabbits, pigs, guinea pigs, pigeons, ducks, and turkeys walking around the house and on the land one will find sheep, donkeys, cows, goats and sometimes horses that are grazing peacefully.

Food

During your stay you will be eating typical Andean food. And though there are some exceptions, and of course tastes differ for every person, the main reaction from former visitors was that the food was one of the greatest aspects of their visit. It is always very healthy and definitely enough, also for big eaters. The campesinos themselves eat a lot, especially the men. Breakfasts are very heavy but so are the lunches that are already served at 11 o'clock. However visitors (especially foreign visitors) are known to eat a little and therefore they are given less food at first. When you want more though, you are free to ask for more and the people will feel very pleased to give you more.

The base of most meals is formed by potatoes, now a widespread vegetable all over the world, originally from those Andean regions! The variety of potatoes is impressive. They have potatoes in all different colours, shapes and tastes, an example of a native potatoe is the Papa Ocllu on higher altitudes (above 3.800 m.) and an example of a genetically improved potatoe is the Papa Yungay that is cultivated around the village.

Drinks

The most famous cold drink of the campesinos is chicha. It is a drink made from corn, and sometimes contains alcohol, when they leave it fermenting for a while. Normally it is just a sweet drink, and sometimes they add pure alcohol to it that they buy in a local shop. Chicha is normally served in a bucket with one cup. The bucket and the cup pass from one person in the circle to another and this goes on until the bucket is empty and the people in the circle are dashing with liquid in their stomachs.

Hot drinks are more common in Vicos. Fortunately, because the water quality is bad and you have to be sure that everything you drink has been boiled long enough before consumption. In Vicos the most common hot drink is definitely tea. In and around the village you can find all sorts of tea herbs, well known ones like anise or camomile, local herbs like pashpa or other famous herbs like coca leaves. Except for tea they also make their own coffee out of wheat. Furthermore they have several thicker hot drinks, the best of which is still the jugo de quinua, a sweet porridge kind of a drink, which they often bring with them on trekkings to make you feel warm on cold days and give you the energy to go on.

Medicines

When the campesinos get sick or hurt they always have one or several medicines around which will cure the patient. Plants from which they extract liquids or which have to be eaten, herbs where they make tea from, plant extracts which they make a kind of cream from, which is to be rubbed on somebody's body, as you see they have all kinds of ways to cure people. They even have remedies for small children to prevent them from peeing in bed, or to make the guinea pigs more fertile. On the other hand, several drinks or creams used to cure people contain ingredients like children's urine or other seemingly dirty things. It is very interesting to learn what they make and how they make it. You get the feeling that the campesinos literally use each and every plant in their surrounding for something. There's not one thing in their environment which does not exist for some reason. Everything is part of the big ecosystem and humans are just one bit of it. This realisation changes the visitor to the Cullaquihuayi project forever and makes you appreciate your existence so much more.

Additional information about the tourism project Cuyaquihuayi

The organization Cullaquihuayi is a very small and young tourism organization in the village of Vicos in the Andes of Peru, run by local Indians, from now on called the "campesinos". The organization has been started in co-operation with a Peruvian NGO called The Mountain Institute, who started a tourism development project in the village of Vicos, and wanted the locals to have the ownership of the project. After having trained them in all organizational, cultural, environmental and social aspects of a tourism project, the Mountain Institute plans to let the campesinos run the project individually by making their own, well-thought decisions.

The organization's main goal is to develop the region, especially the village of Vicos. People who live in Vicos have always been very poor but they had their own lands where they could crop their own food. Medicines could be found all around the village in the form of plants, flowers or other natural things known to cure several diseases or other problems. For centuries the campesinos of Vicos have been living and surviving like this, but lately problems have arisen. Overpopulation is probably the biggest problem, as good agricultural lands are getting scarce and inadequate to provide food for all inhabitants.

Tourism development in the rest of the region has brought financial growth in many places, especially because of the beautiful natural environment. Unfortunately Vicos has always been left out of this development.

This is the main reason why The Mountain Institute chose the mountain community of Vicos to develop a tourism project on a very sustainable way in which locals participate in the decisions that are made. This has been called Participative Tourism (Turismo Participativo). From the first decisions on, the campesinos have decided what would happen, in co-operation with employees of the Mountain Institute.

The Mountain Institute executes this program on a non-profit basis, and profit has to go to communal projects and not to personal financial satisfaction of the eight project members. The project members, all campesinos from Vicos, have all agreed on this. One of the most important objectives is to preserve the natural and cultural resources of Vicos.

Feeding the pigs

Quinoa is the main ingredient for jugo de quinoa, a delicious local hot drink

Drinking jugo de quinoa at 4.800 meters

It’s quite heavy work! But many of our visitors like to help us