there the wild things are

i am putting machu picchu together.

but it's taking a while.

so many of the pieces look the same.

and there are 1500 of them.

all part of the process of unintentionally revisiting a childhood obsession, after an unexpected visit to a toy store, on a rare visit to menlyn park shopping mall.

in hindsight, putting the frame together was the easiest part, even though i had to sift through all the pieces several times, looking for the few remaining flat-ends.

but i found them all, and now i've finished the sky.

but it's the green, mountain parts that are the challenge to build, just like they are to climb.

i didn't think much about doing the inca trail this time a year ago. then it just felt like something else on my mental travel checklist, something that i left la paz to be in cusco in time for.

like putting together over a thousand cardboard pieces, the initial phase was easy. going online, booking the trip, deciding that although the upfront costs were high, that it was worth it.

and it was, in many ways.

as i look at the picture on the puzzle box though, it all seems so faraway, so out of context. the crumbling rocks of the buildings, roofless, overlooked by the green, rocky sentinel of wayna picchu, it doesn't look like somewhere i could have been.

or somewhere where i submitted to being bitten by invisible gnats while lying in the shade, too exhausted from the climb up to the sun gate to fully appreciate the remains of a once-lost and overgrown mountain town.

it feels like an isolated experience, like it only happened inside my head.

similar to what i think the dressed-in-wolf-costume max must have felt like about his travel experiences in where the wild things are.

i didn't get to be a king, or pretend to be, but i did get to be an outsider too, in peru.

and i think it did grant me some kind of twisted authority, manifested in the royal treatment i received from the porters on the trail.

like when they gave me a bowl of warm water to wash my hands in before meals, and when they woke me up with early morning cocoa leaf tea.

or when they carried significantly heavier loads than me, in sandals, and i carried a daypack/camelbak, and wore salomon walking shoes.

for a while it felt like luxury, but after that it felt unnatural, almost exploitative.

unlike max, the characters in my travel experience didn't really expect much from me.

except maybe a tip, which they deserved.

especially after baking a cake for us in the middle of the jungle, in a pan.

that was all a year ago now, almost to the day, and i must say, i feel different looking at the 1000+ scattered pieces of picchu now.

when i looked at a picture of this place before, it seemed like a mystical, bizarre arrangement of stones, surrounded by imposing overgrown, pointy mountain towers.

now, when i look at the picture of wayna picchu on the puzzle box i wish i'd made the effort to climb it. at least then i would have an alternate view of the experience.

now, all i remember is the photo op angles, exhaustion and being bitten mercilessly by too-small-too-see insects, whose only traces were red swollen circles, with central black blood dots.

and when i see the mess of inexplicably related pieces on the table now, and simultaneously try to remember what it was like to be there while i try to fit it all together, i just can't imagine being able to fill my bedroom carpet wall-to-wall with puzzles like i did when i was a kid.

even though those ones were probably made of at least 80% less cardboard.

that dedication, and the amount of isolation seems weird to me, especially since i don't remember those solitary building experiences.

maybe max doesn't remember all his encounters with the furry wild things either later on in life. if i were him, i'm not sure that i'd want to.

even though we debated after the movie about whether the creatures were just monster-like representations of people in his own life (including him), it was still quite disturbing, all that anger, violence and loneliness.

i thought the undercurrent of the film was dark, violent and sad, not like my own adventures into other places.

but i think there were elements that were the same.

not that i didn't enjoy, or appreciate all those new experiences, but i think deep down i was actually trying to re-create things that i was missing.

i didn't build a fort out of branches, but i looked for people who wanted to stay in the same places.

i didn't have to be swallowed by anyone to escape someone else, but i definitely escaped from unfavourable situations.

and, unlike the creatures in the film, i did eat. a lot.

and didn't just mention it in passing.

interestingly enough though, i don't think i ever had a bad meal in peru. occasionally overpriced for sure, but nothing memorably unfamiliar, weird or bad tasting.

to be fair, dirty bird (KFC) does taste mostly the same all over the world, even though the menu and the names differ.

although many people warned me about the perils of foreign food and “peru poo”, i didn't even get to experience it. i didn't even find any strange objects in my food there, like staples.

i'd have to wait a year for that, until saturday night to be precise, to find one of those in my streetwise chicken burger.

2km away from my house.

at least over here, i know the language well enough to complain, or understand when someone complains for me.

here i also know which menu item to choose for replacement- the one that offers the most compensation for a distorted, crunchy staple.

the 3x more expensive boxmaster.

which i took down with enthusiasm, in the same way i devoured cerviche and lomo saltado.

but not guinea pig.

guinea pigs are too much of a domestic, squeaky pet to eat, for me.

but i guess it’s just a matter of mindset, one person’s domestic animal may be another’s wild thing worth eating.

just like the wild things felt about max when he first arrived in the forest.

so maybe our perception of anything untamed or edible is all just a matter of perspective.

and our concept of wild, strange and familiar is all in our heads.