Bittersweet Infamy - #143 - Blood on Rainbow Mountain

Episode Date: May 14, 2026

Taylor unpacks his recent trip to Peru, and tells Josie the story of Vinicunca, a.k.a. Rainbow Mountain, the breathtaking tourism destination that brought prosperity and tragedy to the remote community of Chillihuani.

Welcome to Bittersweet and Me. I'm Taylor Basso. And I'm Josie Mitchell. On this podcast, we share the stories that live on and in me. The strange and the familiar. The tragic and the comic. The bitter. And the sweet.

Josie, it's been a, it's been a while since we've seen each other. It's true. You have been away. My Scott staff has suffered in the meantime. Well, we'll get to me later. I can wait. I can sit under the heat lamp for a little bit. What have you been up to while I've been gone?

You know, Teakshin, Teakshin the young minds? What prompts you should put into the AI in order to get the essay that you want? Yeah, yeah. And like, hey, you know, when you have multiple headings like that, it really reads, like, you're using AI, so stop doing that. Yeah. Dude, I hate that. I've had to start cautioning my students not to use M-dashes.

I love an M-Dash. It's stupid that I have to do this now. If you go through our episode summaries back to like 2020, I am liberal in my use of an M-Dash. They're training off of me, these goddamn robots. They're training off of me and you. I hate that. That's what's happening. I feel so violated.

Yeah. Fucking pricks. But otherwise, how was the time apart? What did you enjoy? I went to a concert. I saw Lily Allen in concert. Ooh. Blast from the past.

You're just some racist. You can't tell more lices. Yeah. That the one? Yeah. She has a new album out. I will rep it because I think it's good West End girl. Okay.

She was married to David Harbor, the sheriff and Stranger Things. Okay, sure. They had like a pretty bad breakup, like infidelity, not good stuff, a lot of like running around. And she wrote a fucking album about it. And it's a fucking killer album. She wrote this album in like a two week time span. The concert is fantastic. It's a concept album, so the concert is like a play, and it's really good.

And she's a huge megastar in England. She's big here. She's known in North America, but in England, like, she can't do anything without people knowing about it. She's a masked singer judge rather than a masked singer participant, is what you're suggesting. Yes, this is what I'm suggesting, yeah. Understood. But the whole idea of, like, sharing the very personal, almost like, confessional album is interesting.

to me and then when you pair it with like the paparazzi's going to know all of this anyway. So for her to take control of the narrative and make a killer album out of it. So good. Okay. Josie recommends Lily Allen's latest effort. Yeah. There's a shirt that my friend Izzy bought me. I should have worn it, but it does say Pussy Palace all over it because that's one of the song titles. And then on the back, Lily Allen is wearing a nun's habit and smoke it a siggy. Just good stuff. Real like long-term booking with your journey with the word pussy hay. I was thinking about that.

We can trace like a half a decade of your evolution of feelings on specifically the word pussy on this podcast. Yeah, and now I'll just wear a shirt. You would adorn yourself with the pussy shirt, right? Well, Izzy did buy me the shirt, and so I will wear it. And I should say, I saw that concert with Chelsea and Izzy, my two high school buddies. It was really fun. It was a good girls' trip girls outing, especially because, like, it's a breakup album that, like, takes down men because men are scum. You know?

Yeah, we are. Just like this fucking rocks. I'm a West End girl. Yeah. Your memories are growing up on the West End. I'll came flooding back to you in that moment. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But you, my dear friend, have had some wild and really adventures.

I have heard small inklings mainly in, hey, answer your fucking phone so the Canadian embassy can contact you. Yeah. Yeah. That's all I know of your trip. So I can't wait to hear more. Yeah, Josie and Mitchell don't answer their phones. Okay, I have a heavy spam blocker that a lot of spam still gets through.

Oh, it's working. No, it's working. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Block that shit right out. Yeah, I went on a trip with friend of the podcast and I guess like friend of

mine, like romantic friend of mine. Rui Gonzalez Flores. Ruizma, Maribel. To Peru, which was a gift from Ruri, which is so fucking lovely, and I'm so grateful. It was originally supposed to be the three of us plus Miss Angela, Rui's like, I think like a middle school

or elementary school teacher who collects spoons. Oh, yeah. Who has featured on the podcast before. But she wasn't able to make it, unfortunately. And so it was the three of us for a couple of weeks, just going to Peru. The trip, in very brief, involved seeing many, many natural things of note on the journey from sort of Lima, the capital, which is at sea level,

to Kusko, which is sort of like the pre-Columbian capital and like a UNESCO world cultural site of importance. And is also like at very high altitude. So that plays into it. You go and you see the environments around there. And then we ended at a place called the two major cities are Puno and Juliaka, but we were mainly there to go to Lake Titicaca and stay a nice. on an island there with like a local family, which is really cool. I love islands. And then I also love local families. Don't we love islands? He doesn't love islands and local families. Wow, cool. Depends on the family. We got lucky.

Okay. That's true. Some local families from like my childhood that I think of not so fondly. I don't know. I don't want to stay with them. You're right. Yeah. Not naming any particular names, but you know, if you hung around 130th and 64th in Newton in the 90s at me. So this was my first time in South America entirely. Like, I'd never been to South America before. Have you been to South America before? No, I have not.

You have a new Never Have I Ever strategy against me now is what it happened. Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah. I'm always stockpiling. It's true. I have a ever's. Yeah. You never know when a game show is going to pop up, dude.

They just fucking, they catch it from the right side these days. I have learned my lesson, yes. Twice. Lessons. Yeah. What is your knowledge of or impression of or perception of Peru as a country? That's a big question. Like the Incan Empire is based in what is modern day Peru.

In the same way that Mexico kind of has these ancient and like deep, deep roots. I imagine Peru kind of functions in a similar way. Yeah, absolutely. Incredible mountains. Like up there. Holy shit. Crain your neck. Yeah.

Holy. Oh, not even crane your neck. because they're like right there in your face. I don't know how to describe it, but you're looking at the most majestic mountain you've ever seen in your life and it's close enough for you to touch it. It's crazy.

That's wild. That's so cool. I love that. They're all kind of enshrouding you and giving you like a big squeeze. Yeah. A big scary mountain squeeze. It's wonderful.

What else? What else? before. Four times, as a matter of fact, we have four Peru stories on offer in the back catalog. We start with number 57, follow the river. Josie, this is the story that you told of young Julianna Kopki. She was the lone survivor of effectively, just like a complete fucking plain disintegration over top of the Peruvian Amazon. What do you remember about that story? Christmas Day, and she's wearing like a spring dress and some flip-flops because she was at like a garden formal or something.

before this. Yeah, and she lost her glasses. And to top it all off, she lost her glasses, folks. Terrible time of Riliana. That's where I'm just like, I'm done. I'd be done, I'd be dead. The Velma Clause, they call it. I can't see a thing without my glasses. Yes, exactly. Next time we attacked Peru, not these diplomatic times, I should be clear. Next time, next time we drew ourselves nearer. Yes. To Mother Peru. We were we alighted upon. Alighted upon with respect to Pacham and Pacha Tata and the whole gang, was episode number 70, Finding the Groove.

Sort of approaching, approaching Peru in an abstract way here. Josie, tell me about finding the groove. This is the tried and harried story of getting the Emperor's New Groove into production, out of production. It's a Disney movie. It takes place in Incan era.

David's Blade plays the pecculent emperor who gets turned into a llama. Yeah, it's a great movie, and then the story behind all the twists and turns and very interesting view of how some of these animated films in particular get made because they take so long to make that there's a lot of little ups and downs and sex.

And twist and turns. We needn't pass on the twists and turns, folks. We have them here in abundance. Yeah. And again, the Emperor's New Groove sort of taps into this cultural association of Peru with the llama, the alpaca, the vicunia, right? Like, this is tourism to Peru,

many people is a matter of there will be llamas. Yes. And I'm amenable to this situation, right? Yeah. Yeah. They're very cute. I didn't, we didn't get any rogue llamae or alpacae. No, no biters, no spitters, no chompers.

That's what you got to. So if you're hoping to get that from this story, you're not going to, my friend. Tune into another podcast, dogs. Absolutely. Absolutely. Tune into the Alpaca Attacka podcast. I think Joe Rogan hosts that one. It's fucking nine hours and it's so much of.

it is about chemtrails, it's rotten. But not here, folks. No, Calcuttax here. No, no. No, none of that here. No, that here. In episode number 75, we took on the bizarre story of the YouTube sensations from Peru and Ecuador, who were sort of, I guess, laundering Israel's image in the public eye through viral hits. Right. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. to Israel with love. But there's also a good chunk in that episode about things like Wino music. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Which is very much of the variety of music that I was hearing all the time there, because Wino music is music from the sort of like the Ketchua people of the Andes to simplify. And it really is like, you're always walking through waiting for like

Lepa and you Wendy to hit because it's that same sort of like musical flow. Yeah. And then we get to episode number 94, duly amor parentheses, sweet love. We've gotten less esoteric with the title. This is the story of a viral TikTok anthem, Mi Be Bito Fiu Fiu, which was sort of about the affair that Peruvian President Martin Viscata had with a fellow politician. And it turns into a TikTok sound that everybody loves and nobody kind of really even understands the original origin of, but we're just going viral. 6-7-6-7.

6-7-6. 6-7-6. Exactly. Exactly. So we've been to Peru a few times. with just sort of a variety of different interests in like, okay, what is the culture doing down in Peru? What is the environment doing down in Peru? And this time I thought, no, I need to get in there with a magnifying glass and see in person. Yeah. For the uninitiated, Peru is a country on the Pacific coast of South America.

Population 30-something million. Strattles of the coastal desert, Andean highlands, and Amazon jungle biomes. Also lots of really interesting culture there, lots of really interesting history, sites connected to pre-contact kind of civilizations, the Inca, the Lima, the Wadi, other groups, and lots of culture connected with the local Ketra, Imara, other indigenous groups. We still comprise about 25% of Peru's population. This trip to Peru, I think, was the most touristy. I've ever had a trip be planned for me. Okay.

And I gather that that's not uncommonly the way to do things in Peru because it's a large country where things are very spread apart. Communities that you're attending and visiting can be quite remote. Yeah. I'll say too, like my experience in China was kind of similar. It was hard to get to places without booking the tour. You know, you kind of had to. And then there was also just this like ecosystem of this is how locals also saw, you know,

the terracotta soldiers. This is how it's kind of done. There's no real off-road way to go and see, you know, the palace, right? Like it's like, you got to kind of do the thing and get the luncheon walk through the gift shop. There are multiple instances in this story. including a place in Lima called Waka Pukyana, which is sort of like a pre-Incan site of, I think originally the LIMC people,

but then like taken over by successive groups, including the Wadi people, until it gets buried and then rediscovered in the 1980s. Love that. Can't do that without the tour. Yeah. I'm going to tell you today in my main story, the story of one of the tourist attractions

that I attended and I used the term tourist attraction very deliberately. Yeah. It's the story of how this came to be a tourist attraction and what are the repercussions of that? Yeah. I think because in this trip in a lot of ways, I was more conscious than ever of being a tourist with tourist groups in an identical line of white

servicios turisicos vans that only differ by like the sticker of the particular agency in the back window but are otherwise identical and very difficult to tell apart. I very much felt myself like part of this line of ants. Marching upon these places, these beautiful places that I don't regret having seen and that I adored having been around, but always swarmed and swarmed and swarmed with tourists. And what does that mean? Yeah. And that, I mean, sometimes then the tours are ways to regulate and make sure that people are

where they need to be and not where they don't need to be. A neat swarm of ants as opposed to a mad swarm of bees. Yes. Mean bees, not the good bees. The killer ones. Yeah. The killer bees. I'm always like, I don't want to like follow the little flag or like wear a hat. I don't want to follow the crowd. Sort of as a point of pride, I like coming in, doing my own shit, educating myself, and leaving with my shit packed up, not having had the same experience as, you know. Not the cookie cutter experience. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I feel like it leaves you open. I like the thing where you go to Carcross and you end up chatting with the librarian and she sends you somewhere. You know what I mean in the Yupon that I talked about on the show before, too. Yeah, exactly. But in this instance, there is like really sort of no way around it. So I'm conscious that what I'm about to give you is going to be like a very touristy retelling of a tourist's trip to a country where a lot of times, I guess, the attention that any given community is given by the state has to do with, do they have a viable tourist attraction nearby? Yeah.

Which also comes into my story today. Yeah. And then otherwise, there's a lot of people who like make their living, selling tourism things to tourists. Here's a hat, here's sunglasses. Here's a stuffed llama. Here's, you know, this, that, and the other. Yeah, yeah. Tell me the story of your trip.

One thing I warn you about attempting the itinerary that we've done here is that everything you have to get up at fucking two, three, four, five in the morning to do because you're two, three... Calamete. Because you have to get to the mountain top before, like, the clouds roll in kind of vibe. It's because you're so often so far away from the thing that you're doing that you're literally looking at like six hours overall travel time to like two hour activity. Like, it's that kind of vibe.

Yeah. It's a commitment for a once-in-a-one. a lifetime trip, right? Yeah, yeah. It's not to say there's not a version of this trip where you're getting up slightly later. I don't know. It's not to say there's not a version of this trip where you're not booking your own shit. My initial instinct is that I think that if I had any mobility issues, I might find this particular thing hard because it's a lot of, like, spoiler, the Inca were big fans of stairs and thin air. The thinner the air, the taller the stair. I'm there. It rhymed in their language as well is the crazy thing.

Because there were visionaries, these people truly. The thinner the air, the taller the stair, you know I'm there. That's the ancient ink and saying. I've heard that. Absolutely, yes. David Spade. I hear it in David Sabeid's voice. I just say, Patrick Warburton, I think maybe Rufa Kitt says that one, maybe.

Yeah. So there's that component to it. Pregnant, it might be tough, heavily pregnant, it might be tough. Not impossible, but tough. You know what I mean? So just please, please take that all under advisement. Gicked your birth control, roaring to go before this trip.

So I'll just kind of, I'll try to blow through these things pretty quick, but it was like two weeks of just doing a lot of everything. Really recognizing for the first time, the rhythm of the tour, which I've never been on before, but like, you know, too early, you arrive, everyone's a little standoffish. The first piece of information

that you find about, out about everybody, is the country that they come from. That's how you get to know. Columbia's over there, America's over there, Mexico. Me and were two Mexico and a Canada who were traveling together. That's distinctive, right? Cute. And midday, people are starting to get a little bit loose. If people are going to want to flirt, which there was some guys who were so down to flirt on a couple of my tours. Same dudes, two tours back to back. And they were trying to hit. And I think they probably

got lucky because they got into a shot competition with these Colombian chicks at a Pisco place. And it was, I think it was on from there. Oh, I thought they were flirting with you. Like, you would really. No one's flirt with me, dude. No one's, no one wants this to you. Come on. I would flirt with you all day. I do. Thank you. I do as fun. This is evidence.

But yeah, and then by the end of the night, everyone's just tired going to sleep because we got like three hours back to Lima on a bus, buddy. It's a half decent bus, but it's three hours to Lima on a bus. Close your eyes. So you start to get to like even just recognize the rhythms of how people interact with one another, et cetera. Otherwise, things that we did, I'll start with Lima because we were in Lima first. Went to the catacombs.

Always fun to go to a catacomb, isn't it? Makes you really depressed about Catholic. always. Oh, there's so many ways to be depressed about Catholicism, but a catacomb is a nice, like, cool underground way to do so. I mean, it's one of those things where, like, I feel genuinely bad about how much I shit on the Catholic Church as an entity in this podcast, because the individual Catholics that I know tend toward being pretty lovely people. Yeah, I think Catholicism is going to be okay. Don't worry. You're not. I'm not bringing the whole thing down. Ah, damn. Well, maybe next time. episode 142. We'll say that.

No, no. Well, this is episode, this is also 142. Let's get a clue. Let's get a, not get a twisted with Shannon Doherty. That's true. That's true. A big part of the story of Peru as nation, as place is the story of the Catholic church, specifically like, our most like, let's say, like, militantly anti-Catholic tour guide, which I was really grateful that we had one. Oh, yeah. Because a lot of them were just like Catholics who were just like recounting the history of like this is my faith as well, right? And that's complicated. Sure.

Oh, God, isn't it ever? But this particular tour guide was very like, no, I want to be clear. Like, my beef isn't with the Spaniards. It's with the Catholics. They come from everywhere. It's not, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was like, one, let's not let the Spaniards off the hook.

But number two, I feel that. I feel that. But there's also like an aspect of, you can see that manifesting physically in any kind of tour of Peru. because you go to like in Kusko, there's this place called Kori Kancha, and it's this like very beautiful and filigreed in the way that like Catholic, really fucking nice Catholic churches look like if Donald Trump had better taste, right? They're just dripping with fucking everything and they're stunningly craft and they're crafted with such amazing intention and there's like 72 wooden carvings along the wall and they're all of different saints. They're not identical carvings. You know what I mean? Gori God. And yet it is Kori Kancho in particular is.

built on top of like, again, a sacred pre-Columbian site. Yeah. That was used to like mark really important occasions, like the solstice and stuff like this for like the local indigenous groups, right? Yeah. You see that all over Peru and it's like at once beautiful and like super duper. You're like, man, I wish we could like keep the architecture, but nothing else. Yeah.

You know what I mean? Nothing else about this story pleases because it's a story of like, let us take all of your gold, make it a monetary thing, and then give it to the church, you know? It's that shit. Yeah, that's pretty, pretty, uh-go. A place that I really liked in Lima that wasn't part of the tour, but was something that kind of I sought out. Upon the recommendations of many, it was a place called Barranco, which is sort of like the cool, like, hip, like, you know, we've got wall murals and, like, artists in shops where you can buy clothes.

Iceed coffees and, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Loafers. Yeah. Here is a jacket that I got on sale because it's an XL, but that's fine because it's like street wear, so it's like, it can be baggy. It's supposed to be baggy. It's got like a fucking sick dragon on it. Oh my gosh. And it's got the cutest tag here.

It's by a brand called Inoportuno and it says, made in Peru. Sorry, China. That's the tag. Also, get that sound in there. That's some nice, like, nylon. Wind breaker. And Josie, can I wrote, can I really sell this to Josie Mitchell and particular. Josie, it turns into a backpack.

Fuck. Yes! That's amazing. There's nothing I love more than a bag, but a jacket that turns into a bag? The bag is right on the inside, and then you just, it's got a drawstring. Stop fucking around. You just pull it in, suck it into itself. Oh my God. Boom. It travels. You can put a little book in there, put some sunglasses on. Go to the beach. You're not going to want to use those. And then the design is on the outside of the bag. Boom. Oh. It's a fucking backpack. I can't. I can't. My stomach is like flipping. I'm like, I'm going to bar. It's so cool. That is so cool. Good find. Sorry, China.

Sorry, China. That's not even the half of it. I'll kind of stop there for the sake of time. But like lots of cool. Go to Barranco. There's cool museums there. Other than that, very humid right by the water. Siara's got ocean noises. Lima. There's a malicon. If you're in like the Mita Flores Baranco, which is like the touristy areas, this is a city of 11 million people with, again, a lot of stratification. of wealth. So like, again, I'm talking like very touristy and there's shopping places, right? Yeah. But very humid, I would say. Be prepared for humidity and lots of high UV. Ooh, sunscreen. S.B.F. Oh, yeah. You're going to want to lube up. I think the one day trip that we did from Lima, it was to two places. Number one was a place called Paracas. The reason that you go there is because you get in a little boat and you go to the Islas Bayestas, which have like humble penguins and dolphins and these sorts of things. Yeah.

Can you do your little, a very cute little boat tour? See some fucking dolphins, which we did. It was very cute. Oh, also that's where I finally got a fake Labubu, which I called Perubu. It was $5. And when you press it, it sings the Labubu song. La Boo Boo! La Boo!

Oh, my God. I was going to say, were you just like always constantly like putting it on a No, no, because I wore it. No, because it was so cheap and fake that like it felt. I wore it one time and it fell off. So like, the libubu itself, the labo, I've got it still, don't worry. Libu itself is of, like, decent fake labubu quality for like a five-soucichain. But like also, you're going to want to make sure that you replace the string, I think.

Okay, yeah, do some reinforcements. And then we went to this place called Wachachachina. It's an oasis in the middle of the fucking harsh, harsh desert in like Wachachachina area. You dune buggy around until you get to the top of a dune where you like look down on truly like just a fucking, like, it looks like an obfxious. Oasis in the middle of the desert. Nice. Then we went sandboarding, or I went sandboarding.

Rui and Marty opted out. Oh, it was so fun. It was really dangerous, but it was so fun. You know the Mitchell as a... Oh, recta nerve in his arm sandboarding. I thought about that the whole time, of course. Okay, good, good, good, I'm glad. But how fun!

Lost my sunglasses somehow on that part of it. I just, I keep losing things, Josie. That's okay. Whatever, things are things. No, no. We were about to find out. No. Okay.

Yeah, okay. So after Lima, we head up to Kusko. This is, you know, you are advised that you should take it real easy in Kusko when you get there because the altitude is, you know, so good. Okay. Okay. It's pretty thin that altitude, pretty high up there. Pretty thin, pretty high. They recommend Koka leaves a lot so you can buy Koka leaves pretty much anywhere by the bag full and just jam them in your thing.

Like, Chunea. Did you do it? Oh, fuck yeah, of course. Oh, fun. Like, constantly. It was, are you kidding me? Always Coca-Cola, baby. Are you fucking kidding me?

So true. Fuck Pepsi. I'm like a fucking polar bear with an AI baby, man. Jam it in my gum, you know? And so I did. They also have this great tea that they recommend call Munya. It's like a type of mint. It's wonderful.

They have it like after every fucking meal. And I love, that was like one of my favorite things was like, after every meal I'd have like three fucking scalding hot cups of munia tea because I don't let that shits I want the burn right yeah so that's what I would do do real good with teas infusions we had like some teas in Kusko we had really good massages in Kusko that was one of my things like I want to give you guys massages as part of being here oh and that's good like take it easy you're in high altitude like oh it came at just the right time because we were gonna have to get on a bus for like fucking nine nine hours Kusko spa massage ask for Madilus. The way that the

air affects you is that you get tired quicker, especially when you're doing a lot of uphill climbing, which again, inclines of any kind, stairs of any kind, you're going to be doing them, right? Yeah. The way that it really manifested most brutally, I think, for me, Rui and Madiosi, in a few ways, but fuck, that first night in Cusco, which is like a very, it's like a Pueblo, right? Like, it's a city of a million, but the part you'll be staying and it's like very, it reminds you of like a little Pueblo. Okay. We had the worst, all three of us, the worst sleeps of our lives. Oh no. Yeah. Could, like, just lay in there for five hours being like, I'm exhausted. I can barely breathe. Why can't I sleep? Oh. It didn't overall, the altitude didn't rock my shit as badly as I was

expecting it to, but maybe that's because I came and, like, prepared. Yeah, yeah. You were, you were a labyrinthensive about that. Other than that, Juan in Kusko, you get, like, a tourist ticket that gives you access to all of these various, like, pre-columbian ruins and things. One is called Saxi woman, which is sort of, I think, best known for its name. Yeah, exactly. The many guides that we had were very knowledgeable about, like, here is what it was like in pre-Columbian Cusco. Look at how they arranged these 12 stones to intersect without any mortar. Yeah.

Just precisely. Isn't that mad? What the fuck? That's cool. That's very cool. You get a lot of, like, alpaca sweater education. You get a lot of, like, here's how we make the dyes. Yes.

Here's the difference between regular alpaca and baby alpaca. And Josie, you want the... The baby alpaca. is very expensive, but you do want it. Okay. I got one baby alpaca. I did get one baby alpaca item. It is a sweater.

That is gorgeous. Look at this bad boy. Oh my gosh. That's like if Cosby were cool. Thanks. And it's baby alpaca, so I can't feel it, but I know. So the best tip that I think that I picked up on this trip, baby alpaca-wise, or or alpaca sweater-wise is if you want to know whether it's real or fake, real or synthetic.

Rub it against your teeth. And then... Close, close. Okay. Real wool, real alpaca wool is cool to the touch. Ah. So if you touch two and one of them feels warmer, that's not the alpaca sweater. The alpaca sweater will feel like it was sort of just like left next to an open window to chill in a breeze.

Yes, yes. Okay. Okay. Ooh, that's cool. That's, yeah, I love that. Also, the flag of Cusco in the surrounding region. is the same as the gay pride flag. So when you roll up, it's very tempting to think that everyone in this city must be gay.

Like, wow, these people are just celebrated pride and are really enthusiastic. Like, the whole city was celebrating pride, you're thinking. Like, wow. It's really a rainbow flag? Perhaps the colors or the shades are very slightly different from, like, the iconic LGBTQ flag. But it's like, was that flag in the sun or is that cuscus flag or is that gay pride flag? Who knows? I was so happy that I picked it up before.

I was the first one to be like, yo, is that your city flag to the Uber driver? And he was like, yeah. I was like, thank you. I thought maybe. Because I thought I was, you know, I didn't say this, but I was like, this city's so fucking gay. Holy shit.

I don't know if I'm going to fit in here. I might not be gay enough for this fucking city. Oh, I should say that where we are, by the way, many, many people speaking Spanish, many, many people speaking Quechua, as well as Aymada, but in lesser numbers. But a lot of Quechua, a lot of Quechua. Did you learn any Quechua?

Alintuta. Allintuta. I think is good night. Cool. From Cusco, we did a tour of like the Valle Sagrada, which is like a whole bunch of like really cool sites. There's like Maras Salinara, which is like a salt mine, so you get to, you know, see all these salt flats.

Yeah. Oriante Tamba is where you can take train up to a little town called Aguas Calientes, but it is perhaps better known as Machu Picchu Pueblo. Oh, okay. Yes, yes, yes. A few things happen here. Number one, this is where I encounter an object of some interest a Piano. And we had talked about back in episode 94, there's a sort of a baked good called

a Piano. It's like a little roll cake that gets made into an object of viral interest as part of this song. And I was tempted. I thought, I wonder, because I'm a dessert guy, I want to know what the Piano is like. Treat Princess. Thank you. As Rui and I and Madi are walking toward the train station to get to Machu Picchu, I see. It was a little case facing the open air because this place is fucking hot all. Everything's open. Yeah. I turned to her and I say, in just like, like the way you might ask someone like, is that Tom Cruise? I said, is that a pionno? And she says yes.

And then I say, can I buy it? And she's like, yeah. It's not up here for my fucking health. Like, yeah, you can buy it. And I bought it. And I bought it. And you ate it. And I ate it.

And I sent you a pitcher. I sent you a pitcher. It's like the only picture, the next time I got in touch with you, was, hey man, pick up your phone. It's true. The Canadian Embassy's calling you. So I had the Piano. We can hype too big.

We can hype too big. You know what? Don't meet your heroes. Yeah. Yeah. It looked good, good looking, like a nice little roll cake. I think that I wanted more, because the thing that's on the inside of the roller was with this particular Piano is Cageta, which is like, what would you call it, like a caramel

type of? Yeah, like a maybe a little runnier. for any. Yeah, like a custard, like a custard and a caramel kind of baby. Yeah, yeah. In any we don't need to get into the finer points of cacetta versus caramel versus custard, okay? We'll save that. Joe Rogan can take it up with the opaca, a DACA podcast. Okay, fair, fair, I wanted more caheta in the mix. It was too much roll cake, not enough caheta, and in that balance, I feel like you want a decent amount of caceta because if the rest is cake, then it could be a little dry, and it was a bit dry. Fair, okay. Pio, no, no, no quarter, turn,

Dern, jern. Yeah. So that's the end of our... The gavel is a piano. The first and last time we're doing our piano, our piano, court segment. Yeah. So we get on the train to Machu Picchu. And it really is.

It's like a little train that you take to Machu Picchu. Okay. They come around and they give you a little bracelets. Look at that. Tide that one on one-handed. My gosh. Wow. They give you like local drink offerings.

I had an ointai mule. Ooh. Okay. Yeah. When we were coming back, they had like a little like, here's the story of Kibu's, which is like how we record our history on ropes and they had like the attendants kind of acting it out. And they, it's really, they give you a little experience. One funny thing that happened is I was supposed to sit like kind of squashed with another person

in like a shitty seat. But then there was a knock that the porter comes in. Because again, I'm separated from Rui and their mom, Rui and Marri on another train. Okay. And the porter comes in and goes, Taylor, Taylor Basso. And I'm like, yeah? See? I'm the guy, yeah.

Yeah. He's like, Su esposa is ta foira. Okay, my wife is outside. Yeah. I'm like, my esposa? Yeah, no, literally. My esposa? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it's you, man, it's you.

Okay. I come out and there's this, there's like a, I would say like a kind of quite done up blonde lady there, clearly. And they're like, esu esposa, and I was like, yeah, yeah, laestima, but no. I'm sitting in 43. It was 44's wife who was like, hey, I got a seats together on another blah-bidi-blah. So 44 gets, and he'd been trying to get her attention beforehand, so it kind of made sense. Yeah. He vacates, I've got the seats to myself, so I'm just sitting there having a little loyante mule,

you know, admiring my little bracelet. That's nice. This is the point at which I realized that I haven't seen my passport in a while. I think, did I bring that on this? Oh, no. And I noticed that my passport is missing. And I think, well, after we get back from Aguas Calientes and Machu Picchu, I'm going to, like, dump everything.

It'll be in Kusko. I must have just left it in Kusko because we're going back to our hotel there. Like with your luggage, you mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Left it there with my luggage. Yeah. It was gone. I don't know.

I think somewhere in the Valle Sagrada, I don't know. Do you think it was sua sposa? Oh, my God, it was a grift. It was a Mr. Basso. Someone brushed your shirt as he walked by and he looked down. Oh. And $2,583 are gone from your pocket. That's Vegas Stakes, baby.

The S&S game Vegas Stakes is what I'm referring to. Obviously, Josie. I'm so sorry. The game that everybody knows and talks about all the time. Vegas Stakes. Did you lose money too? just your passport? Just my passport. Just my passport. It was a brand new 10-year passport, so like eight years left on it. So like eight years left on it. I think this might have been my first time

traveling internationally with it. I wouldn't swear to it, but I think maybe. My gosh. Yeah. So were you carrying it on you like in a pocket? Or did you have like a special spot? You're like, this is where it lives. I believe I put it with my ID in my backpack because it was said that that was what was needed to get into Machu Picchu, which is we were going to be doing a day full of Valle Sagrada things, salt flats, blah-bidi-blah, million billion different fucking places for it to somehow go missing and then take the train up to Aguas Calientes, uh, Machu Picchu Pueblo. Uh, so could you do all of that? Or did that just kind of sour the whole day? But did you get to have a nice day still? I still had a nice day because at that point I was still willing to be like,

okay, it's back at the hotel in Cusco. That's the most obvious spot for it. Yeah, yeah. Because I didn't even remember interacting with it, honestly. Right, yeah, it was where it lives. To this exact moment, no, the passport doesn't come back and no, I have no idea where it is. So, spoiler alert. That is like heart dropping. I'm so sorry. Oh, it's the word.

It is, this was such an expensive mistake, Josie. Oh, no. Just in terms of money, a very expensive, hundreds of dollars. Lots of hundreds of dollars. Whoa. I had to move flights around. You did. So you did change a flight.

I had to move a flight. I had to move a flight. I didn't, okay. I almost didn't get on to a domestic flight. Oh my God. Oh my God. I mean, I, I handily got on that flight, but we didn't know that that was going to happen. Yeah, yeah. There was the potential of that to not happen. It was a lot of prep. It was a lot of prep. Yes. The worry of that not happening. Oh, man. If I hadn't made it on to that flight, it would have been a 24-hour bus back to Lima. It was an one-hour flight versus 24-hour bus, and it hinged on whether they accepted my ID card without a passport. And they did.

Okay, good, good. Every time someone went through, like, beep, security, beep, Mr. Basso, there was something left in your luggage. We need to take you outside. Beep, beat, beat, we have to walk you back around. You have to wear. Me and Madi had to put on, like, the orange air. report gear and go out onto the thing to like go through our bags and get power. Every time it was like we were, I felt like I was getting like secret police, dude, it was fuck. Whoa.

Legitimately, it was all just innocent shit, but I kept feeling like, oh man, I'm not going to make it onto this flight. I'm going to have to take a 24 hour bus. Yeah, they're going to say, like, okay, now I need your passport to like get you to the next step. You're going to be like, I don't have it. And they'd be like, okay, well, then you can't go. It's, oh, that's terrible fine. I had to file a police report. Here's the original copy. with the tourism police in Kusco. Oh no. Yeah.

Had to get new passport photos taken. Had to get in touch with the embassy to do a bunch of paperwork, pay a bunch of money. Carolina was great. Carolina should run the embassy. She is a fucking star. Carolina for fucking President of Peru

or at least the Canadian part of it. I enjoyed my interaction brief, but it was good. Yeah. Let's fucking talk about that. because I had to put down character references. It's part of my 8 million forms I had to submit.

And Courier to Lima, where I wasn't, where the embassy was and I wasn't, and I had to figure out, am I going to be able to do the rest of my trip, or do I need to bail and go back to Lima right now? Yeah. Oh, yeah. The thing that kept me going was that whether I took the bus back from Kuska

or took the bus back from Puno, which was the next stop, it was going to be a 24-hour deal. Fuck it, we ball, right? But I had to put down some references who could attest to who I was. I was like, who are some friends who will definitely pick up the phone? Oh, no.

And I thought, Josie and Mitchell, Josie and Mitchell will be my references. I will get in touch with Josie and Mitchell. I will tell them that my passport is lost and that the Canadian embassy is going to be getting in touch with them to verify my identity. And of course, this is such a stressful process. They will answer the phone immediately. I wasn't thinking any of this. I know, I'm just fucking putting a thumb in the wound.

Okay, okay, okay. I was actually thinking any of that. I don't know. That's April fools. But honestly, in being more serious, I say to Josie, hey, the embassy is going to be calling you guys. Tell them whatever they need to know about me. Be honest. It's great. What happened next? They called me, I think, on a Thursday. Bad day to call Josie. Come on. They should have known that. I teach back-to-back classes. She teaches back-to-back classes that day. What were they thinking calling Josie on a Thursday? Well, when I saw that I had missed the call or that a call had been missed, I did try calling it back, and there was no way to call it back.

That makes sense. I mean, not like, how annoying, but I get that. Yeah. Thank you for the effort. And then when I got home, I said, Mitchell, did you get a call from this number? And he's like, oh, yeah, I thought it was spam, because we both got a lot of spam. And so it's like, okay, well, fuck, we got to answer this. And so then the next day, Friday, we were sleeping in and my phone was on silent.

And so I didn't hear the phone calls. Carolina called me a few times. But they did call Mitchell right after. Thank God. Yeah. Well, they called Mitchell right after. And he, like, answers their questions. It's very quick.

It's like, do you know Taylor Bassel? How long have you known him in what capacity? Yeah. Like, what is your address? What is your name the end? Like, it's a minute, right? And so Mitchell is answering these questions, and I can tell he's wrapping up. And I'm like, wait, wait, wait, tell them to call me right now.

I will answer right now. Like, I had the phone in my hand. And apparently Carolina told Mitchell, like, well, just pass your phone over to her. If she's right there. This isn't a fucking embassy, guys, take your shoes off. Right. But Mitchell was like, no, no, I think you should call her. Mitchel and I were talking about it after.

Mitchell said, I didn't want there to be any type of bureaucratic snafu later. where they're like double-checking. Dude, I almost didn't get my passport. Spoiler, I make it back to Canada. I'm here now. I almost didn't get my fucking passport because someone accidentally misentered my birth year in the back end as 1987. Oh.

It very much meant that I was like waiting until the very last minute to get this fucking passport at the embassy. And so that's why Mitchell was like, no, no, no. She has her phone. He's like, I'm hanging up now. Goodbye. Thank you, Caroline. Mitchell, that's really smart.

Thank you. And so Carolina called and my spam thing is. made it so that it didn't, the call didn't even show with my phone. I had to like, hot. Josie! I answer. Josie wanted me to stay in fucking Peru. It sounds so lovely.

I thought. It was beautiful. Oh, lovely. And then, uh, that was it. And I was like, Carolina, are you going to call me back? Because obviously, this is kind of an issue. And Caroline is like, you'll never hear from me again. Exactly.

Oh, that is so stressful having to make your friends pick up phone calls. That's not. It's like the hardest thing to do. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. We're both sorry. We're sorry. We're so sorry. We're so sorry. They expedited your passport. So you got it down there. I've got a temporary. It's golden white. It's golden white like Seth Rollins at WrestleMania. Yeah. That's really, that's a, keep that. That's a good. I'm not allowed to keep it legally. Oh, you have to return it. Okay. Oh, do I fucking ever? Check out. Taylor Mitchell Basso. You. You.

I look like fucking stunts. in this photo. You hunk upon hunk. Holy shit, dog. This was meant to happen so that I could update my passport photo because I look fab here, considering I just got out of the rain in fucking Kusko altitude. That's a movie star. Thank you. I'm glad that it all got fixed. I imagine too being in a party of people, being, you know, one of three. Real sick of being the main character at a certain point in the fucking trip. Because I had hoped to blend into the background. Yes, yes, yeah. That's what I'm trying, yeah, yeah. That is really, really rough. Again, for those you may not know about it, Machu Picchu is a very picturesque 15th century Inca Citadel. A wonder of the world. Very beautiful.

I feel like I have nothing to contribute to the Machu Picchu conversation other than, wow, it's fucking cool. And so is the trip up, taking the little trip up through the jungle, you take the trip up from Aguas Caliente slash Machu Picchu Pueblo, which really is like, it feels like almost whistler in its vibe. That's what I was, yeah, I was almost thinking of, a touristy. slur, yeah. Yeah, we know a lot of backpackers are coming through. The restaurants have Jenga, come in here and have a free drink. Yeah. There's like a hot springs there, which is, which we did, and which was quite nice. The saga continues. And then you go up to, uh, to Machu Picchu, which you're supposed to need your passport to get in. I got in with just my ID. Yeah, girl.

You, you stand in wonder of the, the civilizations that came before you, right? And how they managed to, I'll make it happen in such remote and precarious and, like, incredibly beautiful places. I don't know. I don't think that Taylor Basta has much to say to enlighten the world about Machu Picchu other than like... Check it out. What a gem. Yeah. What a gem. Yeah. I'll zoom us ahead to Lake Tidicaca. The nearest major city is Puno and then from Puno, you take off into Lake Tidicaca, which is a very large, very high lake that is shared between Peru and Bolivia. I had to be real careful about which side I wandered onto because I was not legally allowed to leave the country. Right. Yeah. Good call. Keep that fresh.

we get on the boat to kind of go on this tour of Lake Tidicaca the boat actually hasn't taken off because a French tourist has like in getting on the boat fallen into the water of like pissing rain Lake Tidicaca at like 645 in the morning I wanted to give him the biggest hug Denise I remember his name Denise I'm so sorry but you go out onto the islands and first you get to the Uros and the Uros are like the lore of the Udos is that like these are straw islands that were built specifically by people who wanted to live in community with family away from,

not just like the Spanish conquest, of course, but like other kind of communities and really do their own thing. Straw islands, so like floating islands almost? Floating islands made like woven. Fucking love that. Yes. Very interesting stuff, right? Dolphin House.

Yes. These folks live there with their families on these islands and sort of more as a tourist attraction now than anything else. Yeah. I'll jump ahead a bit because we end up at a larger island of a non-final. floating mat variety, just a big, beautiful island of about 4,000 people in the middle of Lake Tidicacca. It's called Amantani. And this is where Rui and Marty and I stayed with Gerardo and Alejandrina, who were wonderful hosts. Sort of a local couple spoke Quechua, spoke Spanish.

Couldn't have been lovely or amazing hosts. Alejandrina made us like meals that were delicious and vegetarian, which I really appreciated. And we're sitting at dinner when I, and Gerardo goes, Pienza that the Vida in Los Uros is a reality or a fantasy. And we're like, no, that's the reaction we were like, hmm. Philosophical question. That's a really philosophical choice. He's like, no, no, no. What I'm saying is they don't sleep there.

They go back to their big houses at night. Oh, oh, okay. So having looked into it, apparently, once the sort of Uros is off for the night, a lot of the folks just head back to their homes in Puno and sleep there. Okay. Because it's a tourist thing now. Yeah, yeah. My favorite, I think part of this trip was staying with Herardo and Alejandrina and Amantani.

It's this really beautiful island that like, it showcases a lot of some of the, you know, you've got your pre-ink. You've got your temples at the top of the island. There's temples to Pachamama and Pachatata, the local spiritual couple of note. Mother and Father Earth, and you can go and like make wishes and I made three wishes to Pachamama and, you know, come back down and you have a little drink in the bar, which is like set up for like the tourists who come through like once a month. and otherwise it's like just farm our own shit and we make our own food and it's a largely Ketshua population and like you will be like going up the hill and you'll need to take a breath and like three or four like elderly Ketchua women in beautiful dresses with gigantic like

bags on their back will like just blow the fuck past you. Yeah. Oh lap you so hard. Something that I love about this place, when you pass by someone on the street always, Buenos Dias, Buenos Noches. Ola, Irmana, you know, whatever. Ola Tio, whoever it is. I love that. I think that that's like one of the last, like, it's so civilized, I think, to like politely greet people that you pass on the street or like, this is why like hiking. I feel like there's a lot of that in hiking. Hello. That's the nectar of humanity here, not this other shit. It's true. Not building a giant Catholic monstrosity, no disrespect.

Beautiful Catholic monstrosity on top of a sacred site. Give me a hello on the path every morning. Oh yeah. How's your sister doing? You know what I mean? That's the good stuff. That's the good stuff. That's pretty much it. Are you going to get a money belt now? Are you going to wear a money belt? I'll put your little path for it. Oh, God. I'm never traveling again. Oh, no.

It's over, dude. It's over. I can't. I can't. I simply cannot ever again. The end. All right. That's okay.

I'll see you in Vancouver then. Yeah. I'm taking company. I'm taking visitors. I look forward to seeing you. Quick acknowledgement that good things. are happening over at the coffee account. What's the URL for the coffee account?

WW dot, nope. Oh, man. Josie, I'm so much talking to do this episode again. I need you to check in here. This is not the first time I've made that mistake. No. It's evergreen. W.W.W.com

coffee.com slash bit bittersweet. infamy, that's K-O-F-I-com slash bittersweet infamy. Okay, you picked it up in the second half. Very impressive. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. I needed to warm up.

Warm up, that's all. Well, I was off hiking and biking and... Chewing the coca. Chewing some coca in my gum. I left things in the capable hands of Josie and Mitchell back here on the homestead. What sorts of things were just posted this past month and what's coming up? On to our coffee account. We have not one, but it's...

two film club episodes that are available. Yes. Whoa. Yes. You made a meal of that word. Thank you. Thank you. We've got Bonnie and Clyde from 1967 is up and rare to go.

We also have 1981's Roar posted. Crazy movie, wonderful discussion. Crazy movie. Just a crazy-ass movie. If you don't subscribe to the film club, at least read the Wikipedia page for Roar, 1981. starring Tippy Hedron and Melanie Griffith. It's true. And go check out the film club.

Oh, yeah. Shoot us a few bucks. Taylor needs some help recovering from his travel. Oh, my God, do I ever do? This was rotten. This was, I was, I was, I am newly diagnosed with ADHD, like, within the past year, and the meds are kicking in, but they haven't kicked in, you understand. They are kicking in.

You haven't found the levels that you need. Yeah, it takes a while. It takes a while. Oh, yeah. Coming up on the film club, we're watching the movie, the image. invitation game starring Benedict Cumber Pax. Batch. Batch. Batch with a B. B. B. Yeah. And Cure Knightley with a K, K, a couple K's in there. Yeah, yeah. One of them is, sh, silent.

Yeah. Real G's move in silence like lasagna, Drake. Fuck, Drake. But the movie is 2014's The Imitation Game. the real true life story of Alan Turing, who you could really think of as a daddy of AI. AI daddy. The Pachatata of AI. Exactly. Yes. Yes.

Yes. Yeah. So World War II creates a decoding machine that becomes the basis of all computing that we know and love. And hey, now. Yeah. W. Oh, Deb trips. K-O-F-I dot Bittersp.

No, slash. No, what? Got it. Yeah. I make the mistakes so you don't have to. You get as many as you want. It's beautiful. The system works.

Josie, I tease to you that we were going to be climbing the highest altitudes of our trip yet. Yes. For the last tourist attraction. And again, I use that term kind of very deliberately because this is the story of a place that becomes a tourist attraction in a way. that massively impacts a community, massively impacts individual lives. I will say from the jump, not necessarily the happiest story. Okay, prepare ourselves. A pretty solemn story, at times a very violent story.

So I offer to you going in that this isn't necessarily going to be like the most ha-ha-funny story in the catalog. Thank you for the heads-up. But I think that it's an important story. I think it's an interesting story as it relates to people and places. and I think that it really relates to this question of like, what are the impacts of tourism? What does it mean to be a tourist? Yeah.

Who do we become when we become tourists in either a visitor to a country sense or more literal, I am going on a tour to see people who are going to be selling me where's, then I'm going to pay $2.50 to get into the door at this place and then someone's going to take me on a motorcycle over to here. Like these sorts of things and those motorcycles, which I ended up taking a motorcycle to the top of this thing. Well, those are running several times a day back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, I imagine that's not great for the local ecology. It might be good for the economy, not as good for the ecology, right? Yeah.

So what changes about a place when it becomes a tourist attraction? What does that designation of tourist attraction mean in like an economic viability context? And what happens when all of the things that I'm just talking about come to a place that had up until now been, I guess, fairly ignored by the state? Because it was not perceived as a place where there was a thing of value, let's say. natural beauty and abundance to be sure, but otherwise a fairly rural subsistence-level population. Okay. It's a story about what happens when you take a community like that and all of a sudden

a new tourist attraction comes to pass, becomes very popular, very quickly, and there's a ton of money coming into a place with very little infrastructure. Yeah. And money can be the fucking devil. Yep. And this is a story that I think that like it's maybe too simplistic a take to come in and just say that it's a case of like money is the devil. Because like if the alternative is poverty, where do we get off making a judgment like that? Yeah.

But also it's a story that many perceive to be about greed, perceived to be about power and ownership and perceived to be about what can we do with a suddenly desired natural resource. Yeah. With all of that in mind, I'm going to tell you the story of Rainbow Mountain. Okay. A.k.a. Vinikunka is another name for it. Kuichi is a local, like, Ketchua name for it. Okay. Montana de Sieti Colores, popular name for it.

But either way, Rainbow Mountain. Have you ever heard of Rainbow Mountain? No, I have not. I have not. I hadn't either prior to this. Prior to your trip or prior to, like, looking into stuff pre your trip? Prior to looking into stuff pre my trip, but understanding that, like, I bought it When I came in, there was a package that had already been proposed of events that I was just kind of co-assigning on to.

Yeah, yeah. I came in like, okay, well, this is one of the places that I'm going in. And then I kind of looked at this story that was primarily reported upon in English by Bloomberg. And I'll kind of go more into that because that was like a huge source for me and this. But I read this story of, I mean, I'll foreground it. So you know what to expect. This is effectively a story of a lynching connected to a popular tourist attraction to do. with the money and intercommunity disputes.

Oh shit. Yeah. Whoa. Okay. Okay. I see the need to foreground some violence in the story. Yeah. That's intense.

Like I said, not necessarily the happiest, but like it was really resonant in my own kind of understanding of what it meant to like inhabit this space as a tourist, having kind of understood all of this. Yeah. I think it's good to interrogate that when you're trying to think about like how to be a good visitor in someone else's like land, right? Yeah. in Pachamama's land.

When you think of Montaigne de Cite Colores, why do you think it might be called that? Because there's many colors there? There's many colors. Yeah. There are many colors. Let me show you a picture, and I will say, a lot of the pictures of it are kind of Photoshop

to see more the colors more bright than they actually are. Yeah. Which I think is a shame and doesn't really do the real mountain justice because it makes the real mountains seem dull when really it is like a marvel of nature. Describe what you see here. Oh. What? Okay, so it looks like very peaked hills, but the colors, the striation is not from the

horizontal from the ground up. It's like over the top of the peaks, which is different. The stripe folds over the top of the peak. Yeah. And it's really bright. It's like burgundy, red to green to yellow, back to burgundy to green. Maybe about siouxolores, if you had to guess. If I had to guess, yeah. And then the blue, blue sky is adding another range of color here. It's really beautiful. And red, red peaks in the background, too. Very pretty, very gorgeous.

And you can see how it would be very popular in an Instagram era of like, see a tecalores, baby. You know, works great. Uh-huh. I'll describe the process by which you get there. This is one where you leave Kusko and you go up even higher. Like I say, by the time you get to the top where you can kind of take like a big iconic selfie with Rainbow Mountain.

that's, this is a selfie spot kind of for a lot of people. Okay. You know, I'm sad that so much of what we do with beautiful things is stand next to them and take selfies and then leave now. Yeah. I don't know. You know what I mean? Yeah.

This is another one of these very early get up and goes, but the path that you take up into this area near Rainbow Mountain, which, to be more clear, I believe we go region province district. So it's Kusko region, Kisipanchi province, Kusipata district. This will all become important in slightly. entangled in this story I'm about to tell you. Okay. It's very sort of like remote alpine. Really alpine. It feels like the sound of music, but with alpacas instead of goats, genuinely. Cool. Parts of the topography that look like Iceland, it's crazy. This is the highest the altitude will be,

so watch out, and this is where you saw people, like people were. Puffin, puffin, yeah. I did okay. Um, Rui did okay. Mardi did good. Good. But you'll notice it. And I found the actual car ride up through these kind of a beautiful, amazing, enchanting green hills, almost more captivating, because when you get to the top, it's like a huge swarm of people. Yeah. And a million stands, and the ground's been stomped to mud, and they're in the process of, like, building a new bathroom up there. And you really see the tourists, you see what tourism has done to the place, right? It's not that it's not beautiful. Yeah. Spoiler. I don't think this ends up being my lasting impression of Sietico-Laurus. Okay, that's nice. So I don't think, like, he's coming here and dissing, like, a natural wonder, because don't worry. I'm about to, like,

really lather the place out, but it comes at the end here. It didn't help that the day that we went up there, it was entirely foggy. Oh, no. Anytime we, it was not convenient for us, it would clear up slightly, and then the second we were at the peak, it would come back together.

Close in again. I'll play a little recording, it's the only little bit of podcast recording I did on the chip. Did you know the regissa? Really. Describe the the scene here at the peak of Vinikunga Rainbow Mountain.

Lots of colors, mostly greens and reds and yellow. Some purples. Very crowded. My mom fell and ate it. I was going to let her preserve her dignity, but if you must recap the event.

It's beautiful. Very misty, very, very air thin. Hard to breathe. If you walk too fast, you start getting like winded. And the amount of people, how many people would you say, just turn around and look at like a couple hundred people. Yeah. Yeah.

Also, they sell alpaca chicharon. If anyone knows what chicharon is, yeah, it's great. And they sell it right next to alpacas with sunglasses, living ones that you can take pictures with. It's a little bit dark. A little bit, yeah. And we got a bit unlucky with the neblina with the mist today, so it's kind of funny a little bit to watch hundreds of people

line up to take pictures with like a beautiful mountain's 75% obscured. Yeah, great. Thanks, Angel. No problem. sounds crowded. There's just like the din. It's real busy. Yeah. And I think that's where I was a little bit down on it, and especially going in knowing that, as I'll tell you in the story that I'm about to unfold, somebody has died for this. And to see it in that context of like a hundred people lining up for what will genuinely be a very mid-selfie of still a very beautiful spot, but like,

yeah. If it's selfie wars, you ain't going to be doing much with this. I will say I have been traveling with other Canadians, and I do find that Canadians and crowds don't go well together. Like, we've pulled up to like a campsite and I'll, I'm just kind of like, yeah, this is fine. Someone's like, they're just like, they're really close over there. Like, there's a lot of people here. And I'm like, oh, I wasn't, there's like, especially like Canadians who like go out to wilderness or like natural sites. I went to the Yukon because there was no people there.

Exactly. people. Yeah, exactly. My favorite part of this trip was Amantani because there was no other fucking people around. It was beautiful and quiet and you could see the stars and hear the crickets. That's lovely. And it was lovely. But there is, there is kind of a drain. There's a lot of energy that gets drained when there's so many people. That energy is there too. It's also like seeing it in development and like they're building the bathroom. This is a place with this many people up there buying food and eating that they should have a bathroom up here. Taking selfies with sunglass apacas. Yeah. But like,

Like, imagine getting to come across this without that component of it, too. Yeah. And I will say, by the way, I will save it for the end. But again, I'm about to really, really big up this location is when you should go to, okay? Okay. In the meantime, I'll tell you a little bit more about this actual place, Rainbow Mountain, how it comes to pass, how its tourism status comes to pass so quickly. And how it ended up really impacting the lives of the local community, Chihuani. It's called.

Oh, and yes. Sorry, before we move on to that. um yeah ruy's mom slipped and fell Mari was she okay she was okay I think her hands caught the worst fit because you know when you fall and you try to stop yourself with your hands

but she didn't break anything or no no no okay and the person who caught her said that like oh you know the mountain only accepts sacrifices in January so you shouldn't it's cute so let me tell you about Vinikunka aka Monta de Siette Colores aka Rainbow Mountain aka Coichi nestled among the more rural of the beautiful and imposing Andes

mountains, Vinukuka is a selfie lover's dream. If you can handle the three-hour drive from Kusko or the formidable hike to the summit, which stands at 16,500 feet. Whoa. That's 5,040 meters above sea level. This is the same altitude as the base camp of Mount Everest. It's extremely dangerous if you're unprepared. Really high up there. Yeah. Your reward is a beautiful peak which shows off, as you might imagine from the name, a rainbow of colors, pink, red, green, brown, yellow, white, all the result of the diverse mineral deposits which compose the mountainside. Okay. I couldn't get a straight answer as to why this emerged so suddenly in the 2010s.

Popular sentiment seems to be that like a glacier that was covering these colors retreated or melted or something, and now this was exposed. I couldn't quite figure out which hypothesis for the sudden appearance of these perfect stripes of color was correct. And I wasn't there when it happened. Glaciation in me, you know, we don't go together very well. Your timelines don't intersect. Understood.

Visitors are subject to all the perils of intense hiking amidst the air, including acute mountain sickness. The unluckiest hikers tell horror stories, especially those who traveled to Vinny Kunko before the infrastructure was more developed. Oh. The mountain status is a featured tourist attraction, as I said, relatively new and with those growing pains, have come injuries and fatalities. Oh, no. I knew this information going in, and I just kept quiet about it until we were gone, because I was like, I don't need to start talking to these people about, like, the known fatalities here. Yeah, that's fair. But I'm going to keep my eye out.

Lightning strikes have claimed at least four hikers, including tourists and guides. Woo. No lightning when we were up there. No lightning while, and in fact, no lightning at all during the trip, kind of somewhat to my chagrin. We love a good lightning show. People have died from falling, cardio-respatory issues often, of course, exacerbated by the high altitude, thin air, and vehicular accidents on the winding and treacherous road up the mountain.

So you remember how I told you you're always in these white Mercedes vans? Yeah. You can roll off a fucking cliffside in one of those. and people have, right? Those things are fucking top, heavy. Yes, indeed. Bobble-de-bobble. You're spending a lot of time on those. And again, I just waited till after we were done the last of those before I turned to Reno. It was like, yeah. So you know how else they died up there? As mentioned, the mountain only became popular with tourists in the late 2010s around 2016, the campaigning kind of starts. 2017, it's coming to wider attention. In 2019,

it's mentioned for the first time in the Lonely Planet Peru guidebook. And then two years later, it's on the cover. Okay, I see the speed of that. Yeah. A quick, rapid rise to notability for Rainbow Mountain. We're like, yeah. Ten years ago, it wasn't something that people even knew about. And within those 10 years, it's like the reason that some people come to Peru. Yeah. That scratches that itch of like, I'm going to see something that nobody else has seen. It's very remote. You got to get your ass out there. Yeah. How did Vinnie Kunka become so popular out of the blue and pink and yellow? Allegedly it was due to the considerable efforts of a man named Flavio Iatinko Yubanki, a member of a local community called Yachto with access to the site. So my understanding, because I'm going to do a lot of talking about Yachto and Chihuani, etc., my understanding is that Chiuwani is the nearest formal community to the Rainbow Mountain site, and that Yachto is a smaller part of that community, which again, a lot of this has to do with, like, family, right?

These are areas about 500 people. The people that you're with are your family, and that's your community, and that's your sub-community within this group. Yeah. So, Yachto is sort of like a subdivision of Chiawani. That's kind of all you need to remember. Okay. Born in 1979, Flavio was an enterprising and enthusiastic personality.

His cousin, Filameno describes him as smart, dedicated, and eager. Among his hobbies, Flavio liked to herd alpacas and enter them in competitions, where one imagines they were judged on categories like neck length, eye makeup, and attitude. Lashes. Lashes for days. Flavio was also not insignificantly a cook who used to work

feeding tourists on the Inca Trail. So he had some experience in the tourism industry and knowing what would play well with Peru's many tourists. And again, it really is the kind of place where like you come out and all the other tourists

are doing the same kind of touristy things and there's tour guides and it's tourism and a tour. Yeah. There's a great deal of opportunity to be made in tourism if you are clever about what you do. And through his familiarity

with the local environs, Flavio divines that Rainbow Mountain will play well with the tourists. He marvels at it himself when he visits. It has interesting lore, beautiful surroundings. It's a slam dunk. Yeah. Flavio begins to devote his time to evangelizing for the mountain and specifically for improving the infrastructure to make visiting the site more

possible, via roads and so on. The initially skeptical communities are won around by Flavio's proposal and dive in alongside him, breaking rocks by hand with sledgehammers and chisels in order to make Flavio. Vio's vision, their shared vision now a reality. Yeah. The locals stick together when the Peruvian mining industry becomes interested in the site and acquires mining rights. Oh.

Strong advocacy from the affected Cusipata district leads to Peruvian president and internationally acclaimed Bibito Fiu-Fu-Martin Viscata to revoke the mining rights in 2018 returning power to the locals. That's a good little thread in the story. That's nice. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So Vinikunka, Rainbow Mountain, as predicted, becomes a massive revenue generator for the local communities with anything and everything for sale, horse rides,

food kiosks, handicrafts, photo opportunities with sunglasses wearing alpacas. Got to love them. The community previously reliant on barter and economically disadvantage as much of rural Peru is are now building houses and buying vehicles. Okay. Yeah. The wealth is coming in. It is said that early on the attraction brought in nine million solace or 2.5 million US dollars per year to the previously subsistence-based community. That's a lot. That's a chunk.

It's a fuck ton of money. There's 500 of us and we're all family and we all have deep long relationships with one another. Yeah. Let's drop $2.5 million on it. Into the mix. Yeah. Yeah. Woo.

Now it's estimated and again as of a lot of the reporting that I'm drawing from is from like mid-2020. And as of then, we still don't really have a clear idea of the administration of the money and money out of this location. Oh. But it's estimated that it brings in between three and 10 US million dollars a year. That's a big gap. But even if it's just the three, that's still, that's insane. saying that's a lot of money. Why the gap you might be thinking, the money was not deposited into an account, nor handled with any particular care or intention by the president of the

community, Flavio Ietinko, having earned the position by virtue of Vinikunga's success. Yeah, and he's the guy who had the original idea. He's the guy. Yeah. Or so the lore goes, I wasn't there. Big, big fat, I wasn't there, disclaimer on all of this. But there's an English language article in Bloomberg by Marcelo Rochabroon with a great accompanying photo essay by Alessandro Sank. And then alongside that, the same team, I think, did a documentary, a 40-minute-long documentary in English and Spanish. And that was my... These were very much my sources on this.

And, like, even the structure is quite similar. So, like, huge shout out and thanks to them. So, according to Adet Yepaz Chilo, the local deputy prefect, and she sort of... I gather a liaison between the community and the police. Okay. She says, Flavio's weakness was that he had so much money through ticketing, but didn't know how to administer it. Everybody used to ask, what do they do with the money up there?

It's unclear and as a result, people are becoming suspicious. And as you might expect, with this much money hanging in the balance, every entity in Peru wants to reach to assert their claim, and they do. Yeah. Eventually, the decision that's worked out is that the district and the municipality will split the revenue. So as far as I understand it, the municipality is Chihuahani, and the district is Kusipat. And these are, these are like the rushing nesting dolls of like a city within a province,

within a blank, within a blank, within a blank. Yeah, okay. Because of this revenue split, there's like increased oversight because now someone's taking 50% of this money, right? Yeah. Or maybe not 50%, but you understand what I'm getting at. A chunk, a chunk. A chunk, a big chunk.

The increased oversight shines a light on the fact that money from the community pool seems to be going missing. My research didn't find any specific evidence that Flavio was stealing from the community. Yeah. I think that the implication that's commonly made is just that he was not a capable administrator of so much money. That's all. I wouldn't know. I wouldn't know how to do that at all. Oh, especially because like previous to this, you were a guy who like, you were running alpacas as competitively as your side par, sure. Yeah.

But this is a subsistence community where you're probably growing your own things, taking care of your own, like, kind of immediate family, bit of barter. This wasn't a spreadsheet economy, you know what I mean? And so now that all of a sudden there need to be spreadsheets, I can understand why. that would be tricky. Yes, yes. With the amount of money that we're talking about, certainly between two and a half and ten million dollars, US, oh my God.

Seemingly, Flavio was an ideas guy, not a numbers guy. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Flavio and the Yachto community, so the smaller community of which Flavio is a part in which I gather is sort of seen as being like slightly disadvantaged within the context of Chihuani.

Okay. Falls into conflict with the guy who took over the leadership of Chiawani after Flavio. I don't know if it was immediately after, but at some point after Flavio is the leader power shifts to another guy named Cecilio Kishbe Noah. According to Flavio's cousin, Filomeno Iyatinko, Yatinko was a transparent person, whereas Cecilio had a different character. If disobeyed, he imposed excessive fines that he used to frighten villagers. That's not okay, yeah.

Cecilio takes over the administration of ticket revenues for Vinikunka, and he is accused of neglecting the Yachto community. Resentment follows. Yachto calls for transparency. and violence descends upon Yahto, including vandalism and property damage. Flavio Yeetinko supposedly very shaken up personally because they are threatening him specifically as well. Yeah. Flavio has become sort of the figurehead for the other, I guess, here.

Yeah, yeah. Flavio ends up filing police complaints against Cecilia Kishbe Noah and his government, and Flavio and Cecilia become, as local deputy prefect, Edith Yepes Chilo says, mortal enemies. Tensions continue to escalate between the two sides, whom we will call Yachto, Flavio side, and Chihuacliuani, Cecilio side. Okay. With all levels of Peruvian government getting involved and declaring that the root of ingress should be suspended until the issue can get solved.

So now it's in the way of the money. Yeah. Yeah. Because they just want to be like, oh, federal government comes in now. Yeah. On August 8th, 2024, the two sides meet amid very high tensions. Cecilia is very clear that he does not intend to reach a compromise. he asserts that the management of Rainbow Mountain belongs to the community and that the state from whom Flavio is seeking protection should not get involved with regulating indigenous communities and their resources.

He then walks out of the meeting before giving anyone the chance to respond. Says Cusipata Mayor Raul Duran, we were surprised by the arrogance of the president of the community. Yeah, at least you have the discussion. At least, that's the bare minimum. He kind of comes in, lays down his ultimatum and then literally people are being like, Cecilia, don't, Cecilia, wait, wait, wait. Wait, we have things to say. He's on his way out the door. Ada Yipaz Chilo, our deputy prefect, she submitted many police memos, noting that with increasing conflicts, mounting threats, and multiple instances of tourists getting caught in the crossfire, vans getting pelted with rocks and things, that the situation was growing worse, and public security and well-being are at risk.

Yeah. And, most specifically, with no local police station and help far off, Flavio Iatinko's life is in danger. Ooh. Yeah. And I should say that like many of like when even Amantani, which I was talking about in Lake Titicaca, they stress that like, okay, please be careful not to get injured here. There's no local doctor. There's no local. You know what I mean? Yeah. You are in a remote location. A remote, largely self-governing. Yeah. So in this particular case, even though there's been this big influx of like poorly administered money, it's not like they've suddenly got a cop shop there or tourism security or anything like this. They have access to these people like via phone. and technology and things, but they are remote. Yeah, yeah. It will take a few hours to get somebody here.

Yeah, yeah, to address this. Eight years of mounting conflict reached their climax, one horrible evening, August 10th, 2024. So just days after that public meeting? Mm-hmm. Okay. When Flavio, his cousin, Filomeno, and Filomeno's wife, Rufina Ioncinko, whose name I've also seen as Rufina Vigente Noah or Rufina Noah Vichente.

Mm-hmm. are on their way to a local wedding. They're on motorcycles. I should say this is going to be, this is, you know, very dramatic and violent stuff. So I issue you that warning now. They're on motorcycles, all of them. They've got $600 in cash to gift the happy couple.

Rufina's in a lovely dress of her own design and creation. From amid the darkness, the trio are set upon by disgruntled members of the Chiawani community, men, women. The Bloomberg documentary shows phone videos of this encounter in which you can hear the mob, Snarl, grab that dog, stand the fuck still, confess everything. If you don't tell me, we'll burn you. Whoa. On one video, we can hear Philomena reasoning that he had nothing to do with the administration

of the money. Yeah. We hear the villagers taunting the group that the police will never come to help them. According to Rufina, the group is covered in ashes and drenched with water. People are calling for gasoline to burn them and stones with which to... pelt them. And she says Cecilio Kishbe Noah was front and center demanding to know where Flavio Iyatinko was so he could kill him. He kicks Flavio, beats him with a stone, and then supposedly he leaves. Okay, supposedly. What happens next is effectively kidnappings where Filameno and

Rufina are, I think, tied to a post. And we don't quite know what happens to Flavio other than he gets separated somewhere into the night. The group's motorcycles are thrown into the river and Flavios is torched. Exclaims one member of the mob caught on video. Damn right. We'll all go to jail. Big deal. Do you think they've got room for all of us?

Yes. They did. Spoilers. Yeah. Yeah. Filomeno and Rufina are somehow able to get free of this post and escape into the night. Philomeno is able to place a brief disturbed phone call to Prefect Edithepes, begging for police to help.

Rufina and Filomeno are able to hide in the night, ducking amongst trees as the motorcycles hunting them crawl past. Traumatized and in tears, they managed to escape to where the police have gathered, but Flavio Ietinko is still missing, and rumors are starting to spread that Flavio may have already succumbed to the mob. When police attempt to intervene, their car is barraged with stones, and the decision is made to wait until dawn to quell the situation.

Mobs. Mops. Mops are scary. Mops are scary as hell. Mops are scary as hell, right? Like, that's right out of a fucking Shirley Jackson's story. It's horrifying. It's that mom mentality that takes over and you can't reason with it. It's fucking horrifying. And it can infect anybody, too.

That's kind of the spooky thing. And more so if you have, like, let's say a charismatic leader who has convinced you that you are very deeply aggrieved by that someone is taking money away from you. Yeah, yeah. Allegedly, right? Again, I wasn't there. I wasn't fucking there. Thank God.

It's Flavio's son, Yveshare, who, finds his body in the morning. He spots something red at the top of a hill and realizes it's a body. Says Yveshair, he was unrecognizable. His face was disfigured, covered in blood, with a gaping wound in his head. I wanted him to be alive. I wanted to see if he could be revived and tell me what had happened, who did this. I was waiting for a word, but no, my father was dead. Upon investigation, Flavio's body shows bleeding and blunt trauma in line with having been stoned to death, with up to 80 people reportedly composing the mob that killed him. These are friends, relatives, and neighbors of the victims. So naturally, Rufina and Filoemeno begin to name

names. Like, it was dark, but you're my first cousin. Yeah. Rufina is illiterate, which the defense will eventually try to use against her, but despite her distress, she speaks in great length and detail giving her side of what has happened. Yeah. And she firmly accuses Cecilia Kishbe Noah, the president of the community of Chiawani, of both organizing and participating in the attack. In citing this, yeah. arrests begin immediately after the attack on August 11th, 2024. 21 people are arrested, including Cecilio Gishbe Noah. Through his attorneys and during his pretrial hearing,

Cecilia denies any involvement in or presence during the killing of Flavio I thinko Yuponki. Quote, the day my compatriot, Flavio I thinko died. I didn't see anything. I wasn't there that day. Not in the beginning, not in the afternoon. Now I'm detained out of nowhere, Your Honor. Is there video evidence? I was really keen not to look too deeply into the video evidence.

Yeah, that's probably smart. It's really graphic and upsetting, honestly. Yeah. Yeah. This is a small community, too, and people talk, right? There are whispers, there are rumors, things that are said in these beautiful pills that are every color imaginable, right? On August 14th, 2024, Flavio's funeral takes place with many in the community attending. Publicly, son Yvescher names his father's death as a murder, and privately, Yvescher vows that he will not.

let this incident stop his family or end his father's dream of sharing Rainbow Mountain with the world. So again, like, is the answer, don't go there and don't give these people any money and deny this man who is, like, seemingly, like, murdered unjustly his dream. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. Fuck, this is so recent, too. That's the other, you know.

This was very recent. This was very recent. Fuck, yeah. This is ongoing. Like, people haven't even been, this is still, like, being processed in the court system. Yeah, yeah. But Flavio's dream belies a sobering reality. Flavio's death leaves behind a grieving wife, children, two aging parents.

Within a month of Flavio's death, his wife, Vilma, dies as well because of, nothing is said but grief. Broken heart, yeah. She died because of this. In whatever way, within a month, she died because of this. Wow. That leaves Yveshir to take care of the remaining family members, including younger brothers, Oiyanta and Hugo, says Yvescher, when we buried my mother, that's when I was saddest. It was like waking up from a dream, a terrible dream.

August 14th, 20204, the day of Flavio's funeral, also the day of the pretrial hearing for the 21 detainees. With so many people detained, there are three days of hearings, including more than 10 lawyers. Everyone claims that they were at the wedding or working on their farms, not driving modos for the vigilante mob that August night. With so many seemingly innocent parties, the implication is that Flavio simply died on his own.

Of multiple... No one threw the stones that killed this guy. Yeah. Wounds that could never be actually self-inflicted. Yeah. Yeah. Lorenza, Yupanki Choke is Flavio's mother still living as of this 2025 documentary. She tells her grandchildren that their father was a great leader who brought jobs to the local community and was killed out of jealousy. She says, I miss my son terribly. When I see the place where my son died and passed by, I think, will these people hurt me too? I cry so much when I pass the place where they caught him. I don't even want to go anymore. When I come home, I don't eat or sleep. There's no one left. I can.

cry looking at the house, in the mountains, I'm alone with my grief. And then Yveshshaer Iatinko, who seems like a fucking saint, comes in and he says, enough dear grandmother, and he hugs her and starts, like, wiping away her. It's very, he's, he seems like a good guy. He seems like a good guy. Yeah, stand up. As of 2025, Yveshira Iatinko continues the work of bringing up the family, his father unwillingly left behind.

In a uniquely Andean tragedy, Yvescher even needs to sell off some of them. his father's prized alpacas in order to support the family. Says photographer Alessandro Sank, who captured the story and images for Bloomberg, and kind of he did his own, like, substack of like, here's how I took these photos with the participation of the Iatinkos and the local community. And like Ada Ipez gets a photograph and he does them in red to kind of symbolize the blood. And it's interesting. Yeah. He says, while working on this story, I met Ivcher Ietinko, Flavio Son. He's barely in his 20s, but carries an enormous weight. In his eyes, I didn't see resignation, but the strength of

someone determined to continue something bigger than himself and a hunger for justice. Yeah, it sounds like it. Sounds like he's that kind of guy. Rufina Yatinko still lives in Yachto, and understandably, the horror of August 10th, 204 has not dissipated. Quote, the young people tell me, let's promote tourism even more, let's improve our roads more, try to forget the pain. But when I'm alone, I'm scared. As of 2026, the members of Chiawani accused of being involved in the murder of Flavio I Dinko seemingly remain in detention awaiting trial. Quoting Marcelo, Rosabroon, who wrote the kind of article that I've consulted immensely and participated in the documentary.

Yeah. Overall, 29 people are almost 6% of Chihuani's population are under criminal investigation for the violence. All deny wrongdoing, says Rina Arana, the prosecutor in charge of the case. One of the great causes of discord, of confrontation, and of human selfishness is money and the love of money. Even more so for somebody who has never before had money in their hands. It bothered me and angered me to see how they would fight and all for the money. The Bloomberg documentary ends with footage of the Yachto community depicting the night of the tragedy in the form of a traditional dance. The bits that we see are very affecting.

You see a male dancer lying dead on the ground, presumably depicting Flavio and being mourned by the female dancers. Wow. And the documentary, which I've consulted extensively, concludes with the note that as of its release, entry to Rainbow Mountain remains unregulated. So that's the story of the sudden emergence into... prominence of Rainbow Mountain as a tourism destination, how it ended up for Flavio I Tinko as most enthusiastic proponent, and I guess just some unresolved meditations on like the moral culpability of the tourist in this situation, but that's just me navel gazing, I guess, and then also just a meditation on, I don't know, what money and power due to community,

but is that mine to say? Like, I leave this with a lot of conflicting emotions this story, if you can't tell. Yeah. No, that makes sense because it's like, you know, that anybody who would come in here to quote unquote help regulate would only be quote unquote helping themselves helping themselves yeah these poor people poor rufina poor philomen these poor fucking people who now have to live amongst these communities still too yeah and and it's still trying to be resolved and i'm sure it's terrifying flavio's mother still sells crafts at rainbow mountain there's every possibility we were there at the same time yeah yeah dang that that's a lot to carry into like a crowded tourist spot, you know.

And I lost my fucking passport. And I didn't even, I lost my fucking passport too. So one last thing that I want to say before we wrap this up is all three of us, me, Rui and Madi went up by Moto, a little kind of, um, motel single person motorbike. Yeah. That you like kind of get on the back and you like, you hug the Peruvian guy in front of you or not, you know? And you hope he's cute. Yeah.

We all went up that way, but only. Madi came back down via Motto, too, and me and Rui decided we were going to walk down. It's about a four-kilometer hike down. And when I tell you that everything that I thought and hoped that I might get from the Montania de Sieti Colores, which was really cool, but was shrouded in fog and surrounded by tourists, and they were building bathrooms and Apaca Chicharon and, you know, all of these things. Sunglasses on the Apacas, yeah. You get it so many thousand times over from the walk back down. It's a four-kilometer walk where you can see out in front of you a very long, it's a winding path through this again, sort of very almost Icelandic is the reference I would draw,

but like the mountains have crumpled up around you and this one is, they might not all have Sietta Colouris, but some of them have fucking three or four, bright green, bright brown, bright blue, the shocking white of a glacier cap. There are rivers that are running through the ground, literally just through the ground, almost seemingly horizontally, just snaking like the blood in the veins of this location, the ice water blood in the veins of this location. And who is drinking from it? One or five or ten or twenty alpacas just casually chill in there. And because it is so high up, you have to go slow. Yeah, it forces you to slow.

It forces you to just slow the fuck down and be immersed in one of the most beautiful places on my hand to God I've ever seen or been in my life. I was so stunned. And it even started to hail, but like, whimsically. Whimsical hail out of nowhere. Not so big that it hurts. Small merry hail. Yeah, to be like, ah, look.

There's also a zipline, which we didn't do. But that's kind of it. And it really was, like, one of the greatest treats of the whole trip I thought were the nature. The people were lovely. I enjoyed the company. Lots of fun shopping and touristy type things to do. But really what it came down to for me was I really dug. the nature was like nothing else I've ever seen.

Crazy mountains. Mountains, dude, I have not been deliberately seeking out mountains, but Yukon, Peru, back to back has me thinking that I've just been. Even as like a BC guy, mountains, man. How about, let's get, I get to make my fucking favorite joke, my favorite one sentence impression, the musician at a BC-based music festival. Let's give it up for these mountains.

Wow. Wow. And that really is. That really is how I felt when I was down there. They were so immediate. Yeah. They were so green and brown. Like it wasn't like, you know, you see the mountain. It's like, oh, the gray part with the rock and then the, these are like all green, green mountain. It was crazy. And if you want desert, there's desert over in Wakachina. You can sandboard. There's jungle and you can look and watch the orchids grow in Aguas Calientes. It's Peru. Wow. I liked Peru. But to bring the whole thing around, I did really have a legitimate, a legitimate conscious moment of being in that walk back and thinking about Flavio and being like,

wow, I am able to see this most beautiful thing that I have ever seen in my entire life. Yeah. Because of the efforts of this man to bring it to international prominence, right? Yeah. To the success of his community, the financial prosperity of his community. the great personal expense of his own life. So that was, that's the type of things that I, like, not like to, but I guess, yeah, kind of like to wrestle with when I'm traveling. Nothing comes for free, man. Nothing comes for free. Everything has a cost, whether it's the cost

on the nature, the cost on the people, the cost on yourself, right? So, yeah, walk in the world kindly, I guess, and mindfully as much as you can. Slowly, yeah. Slowly, because you're going to need to take some, put some coke in your gum. I brought some, I haven't even tried them yet, but maybe I can try one right here. I've got a ginger candy. It's good. for the altitude, you can see. Oh. But I never ended up needing them. I think I was.

Yeah, that's what I would say is do be healthily scared of the altitude, but don't let it ruin your life. Yeah. Well, I bet the ginger is probably supposed to, like, address any nausea maybe. Ginger's good for the tummy. Oh, this is nice. This is nice. This is more mild than you would expect from a ginger candy. This is nice.

Oh. That's the notes of my chip from Peru. Some highs, some lows. Don't lose your passport, buddy The highs are high in Peru and the lows are low Man alive Keep an eye on that thing Scary

That's ginger candy's good I just had like three Founder baby Thanks for listening If you want more infamy We've got plenty more episodes At bittersweetinfemy.com Or wherever you listen to podcasts

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Stay sweet. For this episode, I read the article. Busloads of tourists chased viral shots against the colorful peak of Peru's Rainbow Mountain. A battle for control of the newfound riches ended in a brutal killing by Marcelo Rochebrun, with photographs by Alessandra Sank, published by Bloomberg, July 16, 2025. I also watched the accompanying documentary, How a Killing in Peru Exposes the Dark Side of Tourism, Bloomberg Investigates, hosted on YouTube by Bloomberg Originals. I read Alessandro Sank's substack, shots of resistance, and in particular his essay,

Murder at Rainbow Mountain of my visual reporting for Bloomberg detailing the photographs that he took for the aforementioned article. That was published July 25th, 2025. And then additionally, I read The Causes of Death Among Trekkers at Rainbow Mountain by AB Expeditions, as well as the Wikipedia page for Vini Gunca. This episode of Bitter Sweet Infamy was brought to you by our subscribers, Terry, Jonathan, Lizzie D, Erica Joe, Sof, Dylan, and Satchel. If you want to become a subscriber like them, you can join us over at the Bittersweet Film Club of Coffee.com, K-O-Fi., FI., dot com slash Bittersweet Infamy.

And if you donate monthly, you can become a member of the Bitter's Sweet Film Club and suggest infamous, infamy, themed infamy, adjacent films for us to watch, like the imitation game, which we are watching coming up at the suggestion of our subscriber Jonathan Mountain. Fitter's student for me is a proud member of the 6-04 Podcast Network. This episode was edited by Josie Mitchell and me, Taylor Basso. Huge thanks to Mitchell Collins for interstitial music. Huge thanks to Rui for taking me to Peru and for appearing at the top of Rainbow Mountain and a little voice clip here.

Huge thanks to Josie and Mitchell for bailing my ass out of Peru when I needed them the most. And lastly, huge thanks to Brian Steele, who wrote T Street, the song you're listening to right now.