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Full Circle
Day 195: On the Camisea and Urubamba River
Shivankoreni. Simple wooden huts, expensive new corrugated iron roofs.
In the Matsiguenga village of Shivankoreni the Fiesta de San Juan begins with a series of mournful blasts on a conch shell summoning the villagers to ancient ceremonies. At least, this is what it sounds like as we scramble up the slippery clay path that leads from the river to a collection of wood-framed, tin-roofed houses raised a few feet above hardened mud and receding grass. In fact, any conch shell exists only in my imagination. The sound is produced by blowing through a length of yellow plastic tubing and the ancient ceremonies turn out to be a football match. Even my illusion about the timelessness of this riverside village is quickly disabused when I ask the headman how far back in the mists of time lie the origins of the village. 'Thirty-seven years.'Shivankoreni is a settlement in transition. The wood frame huts are traditional but the tin roofs are a sign of prosperity. The football match, organized by the younger men with all the earnestness of a club game in England - a team list, distribution of shirts of roughly the same colour - is totally ignored by the village elders who lie about in their plain, sandy-coloured robes, on the stoops of their houses, propped up on one elbow like long-redundant emperors.
The football game, too, is a mixture of ancient and modern. The bow and arrow fisherman we met yesterday has neat skills, a sense of tactics and a pair of football boots, while others play in patched shorts and bare feet. A specially appointed time-keeper keeps the first half to a strict forty-five minutes, but then mysteriously disappears, resulting in an epic second half of almost sixty-three minutes.
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PALIN'S GUIDES
- Series: Full Circle
- Day: 195
- Country/sea: Peru
- Place: Shivankoreni
- Book page no: 265
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RELATED LINKS
- Sport and Leisure
- Day 6
- Around the World in 80 Days
- Day 4
- Pole to Pole
- Day 10: Chitral
- Himalaya
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