Colonial Tours: is it good as the Trip Advisor says?

by the Colca Specialist

Colonial Tours is a travel agency that it is recommended in several travel guidebooks and be sure that if the Colca Specialist pays 500 US to the representatives of these travel guidebooks I would appear in them.

If the Colca Specialist appears one day in one guidebook it would be thanks to the work well done with each one of our clients and not because I payed 500 US to appear in the guidebook.

Well, there are many travel agencies in Arequipa and just a few ones are responsible enough with their clients.

Colonial Tours is a travel agency which has enough experience in these kind of tours in Colca Canyon but it is not the best. There are many complaints against this travel agency which became famous because of car accidents, because of being late all time and because of having poorly paid tour guides who have no insurance, nothing.

What kind of responsible tourism is this that the tour guides are poorly paid and have no insurance?

Now we understand why the tour guides are eager to take their clients to the touristic restaurants in order to get commissions.
There are many tour guides whose English is chaotic and whose knowledge is very poor. It is because the travel agency he or she works with is not responsible enough with their workers. If they are not responsible with their workers you can easily realize that they don´t care about their clients.

If these guys would be properly paid they would have money to improve their languages and update their knowledge. If they would be paid properly they wouldn´t have to travel everyday in order to cover basic needs ,neither to show their bored faces to the clients.

In order to make it in tourism you should have a vocation of service. If you don´t have it is simple: you won´t be successful in this business.

Travel agencies should be responsible with their workers and with the people and the environment of the places you visit. That is called sustainable tourism.

As tourists we should have to be responsible too and we should avoid buying tours to companies that don´t practice sustainable tourism. In that way we would collaborate with the development of the areas we visit.

Another funny thing is to see web page of the different travel agencies in Arequipa. 90 percent of them say that the do social work and that they are involved in volunteering programs. Volunteering programs have to be checked carefully. Lots of lies.

Don´t believe those travel agencies that tell you that tips are included in the tour price because they will never arrive to your guides hands. If you want to tip your tour guide because of the good service provided, do it, but you don´t have to tip in advance.

As part of the propaganda many travel agencies from Arequipa put pictures of children of Colca Canyon who supposedly are being helped with the money from donations ,but when you find out you discover that nothing was done with your donations. The same situation happens in Puno.

Many travel agencies from Puno use donations for their own purposes and the donations never arrive to their destiny. Careful with those mystic associations or travel agencies who are sending fake Incas to United States in order to perform condor sacred dances that are fake,dances that nobody knows, not even the most famous peruvian historians or anthropologists. None of these groups are guaranteed by INC (National Cultural Institute of Peru).

The sacred music they play is the music we hear in restaurants everyday, music that most of Peruvians hate, because the same songs are played in all the touristic restaurants you visit. The fake Incas collect money in order to keep the last inca survivors alive and when you ask their names and surnames both are Spanish! Funny right?

Only an innocent could believe those stories. The donations for the children never arrive to their destiny and with the money obtained they buy cars or motorcycles. The fake Incas are musicians who have a deal with esoteric travel agencies from Puno. Next time I will write more about that with more details. The Colca Specialist became a Mythbuster!

Well, travel guidebooks have to be serious with their job and have to inform their clients properly.

If the clients are complaining against the bad service of a specific company, write to that company you are recommending in your travel guidebook and suggest them to improve their service. By the contrary, the clients will realize that the info provided in the guidebook was wrong and they won´t advice their friends to buy your travel guidebooks.

There are many travel agencies in Arequipa that need to improve their services. In the internet you can find all the information about them and there are a lot of complaints against Colonial Tours in web pages and blogs done in english and Spanish languages. Colonial Tours needs to improve its service quality and to solve its problems with its workers in order to be a good responsible travel agency from Arequipa.

If a worker has a problem,the company has a problem too. If the workers don´t work properly the clients satisfaction will be affected and your business can go bankrupt the less expected moment.

Is Trip Advisor reliable enough? I don´t think so.

The Colca Specialist.

Quipus:The Talking Knots of the Inka

by Viviano Domenici and Davide Domenici

An Inka accounting system that used knotted strings called quipus to record numerical data has long been known to scholars. The complexity and number of knots indicated the contents of warehouses, the number of taxpayers in a given province, and census figures. Were quipus also used to record calendars, astronomical observations, accounts of battles and dynastic successions, and literature? If so, all knowledge of such use has been lost--or has it?

At conference of Andean scholars this past June, Laura Laurencich Minelli, a professor of Precolumbian studies at the University of Bologna, described what she believes to be a seventeenth-century Jesuit manuscript that contains detailed information on literary quipus. Surfacing at a time when the decipherment of these string documents is at a standstill, the manuscript, if authentic, could be a Rosetta Stone for Andean scholarship.

Found in the family papers of Neapolitan historian Clara Miccinelli, the manuscript consists of nine folios measuring eight by 11 inches with Spanish, Latin, and ciphered Italian texts. Included in the document are three half-pages of drawings signed "Blas Valera" and an envelope containing a wool quipu fragment. The manuscript, folded in eighths, had been bound in a chestnut-colored cover bearing the title Historia et Rudimenta Linguae Piruanorum, or History and Rudiments of the Language of the Peruvians.

Miccinelli believes the text was written by two Italian Jesuit missionaries, Joan Antonio Cumis and Joan Anello Oliva, between 1610 and 1638, and that the three half-folios were written by Valera, a mestizo Jesuit, sometime before 1618. An inscription and the manuscript's cover were apparently added in the mid-eighteenth century by another Jesuit, Pedro de Illanes. A short dedication on the last page bears the name of an Italian duke, Amedeo di Savoia-Aosta, who is said to have given the manuscript as a wedding gift to a fellow army officer in 1927.

In addition to details about reading literary quipus, the document discusses events and people associated with the Spanish conquest of Peru. It includes the incredible claims that Francisco Pizarro conquered the region after poisoning Inka generals with arsenic-tainted wine and that the chronicler Guamán Poma de Ayala, author of one of the most important works on Inka Peru, the Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno (New Chronicle and Good Government), merely lent his name to a work actually written by Valera.

Of particular interest is the text's abundant biographical information on Valera, about whom little is known and whose writings are known only from the works of others.
According to Cumis there were quipus that differed from the ones used for accounting. These so-called royal quipus had elaborate woven symbols, which hung down from a main string.

Cumis tells us that few existed by his time since so many thad been burned by the Spaniards out of ignorance. In discussing how Quechua, the language of the Inka, was recorded on the knotted strings, Cumis writes that "The scarceness of the words and the possibility of changing the same term using particles and suffixes to obtain different meanings allow them to realize a spelling book with neither paper, nor ink, nor pens....

[The] curaca emphasized that this quipu is based by its nature on the scarceness of words, and its composition key and its reading key lie in its syllabic division....[The] curaca explained, "If you divide the word Pachacamac [the Inka deity of earth and time] into syllables Pa-cha-ca-mac, you have four syllables. If you...want to indicate the word 'time,' pacha in Quechua, it will be necessary to make two symbols [in the quipu] representing Pachacamac--one of them with a little knot to indicate the first syllable, the other with two knots to indicate the second syllable....

[The curaca] listed the main key words with an explanation of how to realize them in quipus. " Following this section of the text, the author provides a vocabulary list along with illustrations of the symbols used to indicate the words on quipus.

Most of the historical information contained in the manuscript is in conflict with our current understanding of the Spanish conquest of Peru, which is based on the writings of Garcilaso de la Vega, the Spanish Jesuit Bernabé Cobo, Guamán Poma de Ayala, and numerous official communications between Spain and its New World colony.

Few scholars have had access to the Naples document, and what was presented by Laurencich Minelli has met with mixed reactions as academics cautiously evaluate the manuscript's authenticity and the reliability of its contents.
According to Laurencich Minelli's preliminary examination, signatures on the Naples manuscript appear to match those on authentic documents by the same authors.

Moreover, the watermarks on some of the sheets are similar to late sixteenth-century European watermarks, and the substance of the pigments used in the drawings attributed to Valera appears to be South American. "The ink binder in the main text of the manuscript itself has crystallized over the years and in some places has perforated the paper, which is in need of conservation," says Laurencich Minelli.

"Our biochemical laboratory at the University of Bologna would like to run a battery of nondestructive, noninvasive tests on the document. We are hoping that Clara Miccinelli will release the manuscript for analysis."

According to Bruce Mannheim, director of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Michigan, "From its sound, scribal practice, and grammatical forms, however, the Quechua itself is likely of northern, probably Ecuadorian, origin and resembles that used by Jesuits in the mid- to late seventeenth century--no earlier.

" Colgate University's Gary Urton, a specialist in quipus, is skeptical about the manuscript's authenticity. He cites its extravagant claims about Pizarro and Valera and wonders why this method of quipu decipherment has not surfaced in other chronicles. John H. Rowe, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, has little doubt about the manuscript's authenticity, but questions the reliability of its contents.

If much of the historical content is suspect, what about the document's information about quipus? "If, in fact, it does offer a method for reading the quipus, this would represent a tremendous advance in the study of Andean societies," says Urton. "We need to have the results of the tests that Laura Laurencich Minelli wants to run on the document, tests analyzing the inks, paints, and paper that were used.

We also need a group of scholars well versed in the study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish and Italian documents from the New World to look very closely at the language to give us some assurance that it is of the period that it purports to be. Until then I think we simply have to withhold judgement. If we admit into the literature a document that was written in recent decades, we risk diverting ourselves from the serious study of Inka writing."

Trip Advisor: Is it reliable?

by the Colca Specialist

Trip Advisor is a web site whose main goal is to offer information to travelers from all around the world.On the net, there are many travellers blogs who share their traveling experiences on them,but most of the travellers before making a decision they check the information of a web site like Trip Advisor.

Many visitors don´t trust much the travellers blogs because many comments and suggestions are relative. In the case of those web sites specialized in traveling, the comments and the suggestions are going to be done according to a specific criteria,mainly based on an analysis of the services provided by those travel agencies, tour guides, or hotels.

Of course, travellers blogs are gaining terrain specially in the last years because many of them are written by people who have experience in this field of tourism.

The other problem with travel agencies web sites is that “all of them are very good” on the net. Most of them exaggerate about the quality of their services and when the traveller comes to Arequipa and books for a tour to Colca Canyon realises of the real situation: many travel agencies are not good even though that they are recommended in Trip Advisor.

As a specialist in organized trips in Arequipa and Colca Canyon, I checked many different forums about trips in Colca Canyon and Arequipa. I checked Trip Advisor forum too and I discovered that many travel agencies are becoming members of Trip Advisor with a specific interest: to write wonderful comments about their services provided.

Comments of backpackers are not reliable too. Most of them are looking for discounts and discounts are offered if they write “good comments” about the services provided by the travel agency they are traveling with.

If you check the comments about trekking tours in Colca Canyon it is incredible to see the quantity of exaggerated comments about tour guides, travel agencies whose services don´t really deserve those comments!

Because of Informality in Arequipa, a law was published recently. It says that all tour guides have to be professional or specialists in their areas. Travel agencies have to be formal.

All guides that do the conventional tour to Colca Canyon are registered and professional, but in the case of trekking in Colca Canyon 90% of the guides are ilegal and informal. They don´t speak english fluently ,just a few do it and their knowledge about the area is very poor.

The authorities are taking measures now to solve this problem.

Going back to the point, we cannot trust on comments that say that the services provided were really great. If I pay for a tour guide it is because I want to be given information about the area I am visiting.But if the guide doesn´t speak english fluently what kind of tour I am going to have?

Most of the trekking tour guides in Colca Canyon are charismatic. If you ask questions about the origin of the Colca Canyon for example, they are going to smile because they are not going to be able to answer your question.

Many tourists are not happy with the tour they took, but because it was so cheap and the guide was so friendly they feel compromised and don´t complain, because they payed 100 soles or 30 US for a 2 day trekking tour in the Colca Canyon that includes hotel, transportation, tour guide, all meals included. What kind of service I am going to have for that price? The worst.

If you check travel agencies in Arequipa, they have very nice offices, but when you take the tour you can easily realize that the “tour guide” who is not professional is not making it good. Unemployment rate in Arequipa is 46% so you can imagine.Easy to realize.

That is why the tour guides and the bus drivers are so eager to take you to eat to specific restaurants in order to get “comissions” . Restaurants give them from 5 to 7 soles per person and that is not really honest. Travel agencies make it good. The most affected are the tourists who are cheated all time. This topic is very delicate in Colca Canyon and if you ask the locals about what they think about tour guides you will realize that they are very unpopular in Colca Canyon and Colca Valley because of their abusive commisions.

If you want to check if a travel agency is good, just check different travel guidebooks.
For example, just a few ones were awarded by the Ministery of tourism o Arequipa. If one is awarded by the major of Arequipa or by the major of Colca Canyon you have an ace in your hands! Those are the ones that don´t really need exaggerated comments in trip advisor forums because they are very well known in Arequipa.

In my case I love travellers blogs because they are more personal .I like Trip Advisor too but we have to be very careful with those exaggerated comments...Thank you for your kind attention and good luck...