El Cóndor Pasa
Peru 1996
‘Does travel bring wisdom? I think there is probably no better place to find out than Peru.’
Anthony Bourdain
We landed in the dead of night in a dark hell of fog and chaos. I tried to haggle with the only cab driver outside the airport, leaning on the unmetered private car with a taxi sticker on its windshield. It was a game I couldn’t win. All he had to do was look at his watch. The only way to handle a Peruvian is to agree with his pessimism. Our packs flew into his trunk, our faith into his back seat, and our plans into purgatory. He drove like a maniac with his lights off through the blackness, broken only by shadows of bonfires in the shanty town slums we passed, on our way into the second largest city in South America. Limeños called them ‘pueblos jóvenes.’ Young towns. But the fountain of youth was as dry as the bones in the desert air.
If Peru’s capital city wasn’t hell, it was certainly an antechamber. Broken glass was cemented on the top of the walls at the San Antonio Abad Hostal in Miraflores. Our nocturnal repose was only two kilometres from where one of the most notorious terrorists in history had been hiding. His dogs were still hanging from lampposts, spinning in Lima’s early morning mist. Broken sleep was cemented by the ones still howling.
I had landed 16 years after and 7 years before my other trips to Peru, halfway between exotic and exploited. The first time taught me to get the hell out of Lima before hell had a chance to recover its balance.
The custard dawn of yellow flan that suffused into Lima’s damp grey matter found us back at the airport a few hours later. The Faucett flight to Cusco took an hour, climbing over beautiful snow-covered Andean peaks through clouds on the eastern side and down onto the same brown barren landscape as Tibet, and a comparable trail of carnage and conquest. But there were also llama herds silhouetted against an immense train of white saw-toothed Andean peaks. Distant orange tiled roofs and whitewashed walls emerged in the shape of a puma through the heavy clouds of the patchwork panorama below.
Our final descent was a carnival ride of aerobatic turns and throttle roll-ons, roaring into a high-speed hard landing and heavy braking to stop, just before the tarmac ran out. We had gained 11,000 feet of altitude outside the cabin door. It opened onto the thin air and solar giddiness of the Altiplano plateau.
A two-dollar taxi ride took us into the heart of the city and the Plaza de Armas, surrounded by snow-capped mountains.
“City of the Sun.” I said. “This was once the Plaza of Awkaypata, Square of the Warrior, carpeted by white sand carried the same distance we just flew from the Pacific. The Incas raked it daily. Polished gold clad temples of precisely fitted volcanic stone had lined the plaza. The white sand and golden aspects formed an amphitheatre designed for the exaltation of light.”
“What happened to it?” Robyn asked.
“Some gangster with 168 men and 62 horses blew it all away.” I said. “Pizarro proclaimed his conquest and beheaded and quartered Túpac Amaru II here.” Spanish stone arcades looped along the plaza periphery. The Jesuits had built their main cathedral and the kitty-corner Iglesia de la Compañía de Jesús with ornate Baroque façades on minimalist Incan foundations, spilling stairs onto the square.
“I remember llama herders coming through.” Robyn and I hoisted our packs and followed one of the plaza radiations off and up an inclined cobblestoned passageway, a narrow street sandwiched between two Incan walls. We came to the portal that led into a 17th century double-storey monastery. An ancient stone fountain stood in the centre of the colonial courtyard surrounded by 400-year-old woodworked balconies and doors, decorated with colorful Andean weavings, the classic paintings of the Cusco school, and an old sign painted in medieval script. Residencial Los Marqueses. I paid five dollars a night for four of them. The crooked wooden floors sloped so badly our bed slid into the closet during a tremor. The ground shook even worse ten years after we left, when our old room would rent out for sixty dollars a night. We didn’t much care. The combination of jet lag and lack of sleep and soroche altitude sickness sacrificed our first afternoon in Peru on the altar of the Land of the Incas. Finish with me now because the celebrations they held for me in Cusco were enough.
Robyn and I awoke hungry. We followed the cobblestones up our narrow street towards music. It might have been heaven if the thin altiplano air hadn’t smelled of so much smoke and cilantro stew and freeze-dry shit. We passed a Quechua girl with a white llama on a leash. An old blind man with shoes but no socks sat in front of a massive ancient stone wall playing an Andean harp. Chills flew out of its large conical resonator and, in return, our coins flew into the red plastic bucket nailed to the column of his instrument, loud enough for him to acknowledge their arrival.
Further up the lane we entered a small taverna and were seated near an alcove stage. Five young men with Incan faces and long black hair and bright red ponchos in multicoloured geometric designs came together with long and short pan pipes, a charango, a guitarra, and a bombo drum.
It looked like that was all they had. A moment of silence exploded into a haunting huayno of simultaneous and synchronized soaring strummed and blown and beaten tragic minor and joyous major chords of condors and cold mad despair and sad resignation. If the Andes could whistle blood, it would have sounded like this.
Robyn was enraptured. We ate cuy al horno guinea pig and drank Cerveza Cusqueña and stayed until closing, then crashed like two errant satellites into the waning crescent moon of an early September highland night.
We spent three days in the City of the Sun. The ‘attractions ticket’ we bought gave access to the compulsory crowd-pleasers. The interior colonial goldwork and carved wooden altars of the grand Catedral were still the same, as was the Cusco School painting of the Last Supper depicting Jesus and the twelve apostles feasting on guinea pig. The foundation of the pink stone Convent of Santo Domingo was all that remained of the Qorikancha, the most important temple in the Inca Empire.
The mortarless masonry was unrivaled. It was impossible to slip a piece of paper between any of its enormous tightly interlocked blocks of stone. The centerpiece of a vast astronomical observatory and calendrical device, forty seques lines ran radial, arrow-straight for hundreds of miles, to significant celestial points on the horizon. Four thousand priests conducted ceremonies around the clock.
Mummified bodies of dead Incas were brought out for daily veneration in the sunlight. The temple’s sacred garden featured golden plants with leaves of beaten gold and stems of silver, solid gold corn cobs, and twenty life-size llamas and their herders, all in solid gold. Robyn and I visited the carved granite chambers and ceremonial baths inside, vast rooms of reverberating acoustics once covered in seven hundred sheets of solid gold. When the Spaniards demanded Atahualpa’s ransom, most of it came from these walls.
The full length of the metaphor ended in the poetry of subsequent earthquakes, which severely damaged the cathedral, but never shook so much as a millimeter of displacement out of its Inca masonry foundation, and Atahualpa’s integrity. Your own God, as you tell me, was put to death by the very men He created. But my God still looks down on His children.
The third ticketed site of interest was the head of the puma. Sacsayhuamán is a massive citadel on a steep hill overlooking the city from the northern outskirts. In the 15th century, twenty thousand Incas moved 200-ton Andesite blocks from the other side of the valley without wheel or axle and fitted them with unimaginable intricacy into parallel walls twenty feet tall and a quarter of a mile long. I climbed to the top of a steep rock staircase to form a mental image of Manco Inca’s army of 200,000 warriors laying siege to the Spanish here in 1536. It was beyond my capacity.
Another eight kilometers from, and another two hundred feet above the bustle and throngs of Cusco, punched the final formal feature on our dance cards. It was peaceful and built to worship water. More seamless stone masonry platforms led up to a wall of waterfalls, connected by canals to aquaducts, connected to quiet rural hillsides. Tambomachay was a spa.
Robyn and I descended a kilometer down a deserted road, to the walls and terraces and staircases of Puka Pukara, red from the iron in its limestone, and worn from the ravages of time and battle. The countryside expanded into rolling fields, and simple hovels of rust-coloured adobe walls and powder blue doors leading into central courtyards of gardens and livestock.
Another kilometer brought us to Q’enqo, a great limestone outcrop hollowed out into caves and an amphitheater with an altar. Zig-zag channels had been carved out of llama and jaguar and condor rock images, into which rivulets of blood drained streams of sacrifice.
The best attractions didn’t require official passes. On our way down the dusty path that snaked down through the hilltop barrios back into the valley of red terracotta roofs spread out below us was a red flag hanging off a bamboo pole projecting from an adobe hut, perched precariously on a precipice.
“What’s that?” Robyn asked.
“Chicha.” I said, and we entered the hole in the adobe wall to find a congregation of sunburned Cusqueños seated on rough-hewn benches, slurping pitchers of what looked like cloudy urine. Its taste, as I already knew, was not dissimilar, a sour thin and dusty rustic farmhouse funk of saltwater, raw corn, cut grass, and lemons. Robyn was already familiar with Nepali chhaang, the fermented barley concoction we had tried on our trek around the Annapurna circuit thirteen years earlier. Her appreciation of this Peruvian corn version was writ large on the face she made after her first sip. It was an acquired taste of which she apparently wouldn’t acquire.
We visited the house of Sabino Huamán, a gifted luthier who made me a professional churrango, while his two daughters played with their pet guinea pigs. And we ate very well at Tratoria Adriano and Paititi Café and Restaurantes El Truco and El Sol and La Retama. We are waiting for you... nince and cosy...
In our last day in Cusco, we found and followed an intense religious procession, marvelled at the Stone of Twelve Angles on Hatun Rumiyuq street, rambled through the Museo de Archeologia, rested on park benches in the Plaza Kusipata highland sunshine, watching uniformed schoolgirls play avión, a Peruvian version of hopscotch, and bought two more tickets for a mythical train trip to what I had found thirteen years earlier at the end of the Inca Trail.
Robyn and I walked to the San Pedro station next morning and boarded a tired old red and yellow Enafer train to Aguas Calientes. It was at the time between being able to mix with the Peruvians and their chickens, geese, piglets, entire markets, and thieves plundering your pack as you left the station and entirely segregated tourist trains. We were the only occupants of Coche 1646, but we were never lonely. Vendors climbed on and off the train, at every stop along the way. One Indian woman dished out hot soup, while another cut chunks of meat off a pig’s head with a large knife. The railway out of Cusco climbed a shuddering series of switchbacks, precariously perched on precipitous ledges, on which the train inched forward and then back up again every kilometer or so, after which another mechanical turnout was thrown to repeat the process.
The ride was rough but not unpleasant. We crept along at twenty kilometers an hour, weaving through small pueblos of indigenous survivors in dilapidated shacks, living with their animals, and garbage and mud, where water and earth should have been. The Andean sunrise had burned off the morning mist. Our tracks were shadowed by an enormous mountain range of barren rugged peaks in a terrain dry and haphazard semi-desert, spread in all directions with massive blue maguey thirty feet in the air, prickly pear cactus adorned with bright yellow flowers, succulents, cassava, and wispy air plants dancing on the sheer rock faces.
At 12,000 feet, we descended into the wide Sacred Valley, and followed the course of the Urubamba River to our initial destination. Robyn and I dropped our packs off at Chez Maggy in Aguas Calientes and rode the llama dirt trail switchbacks etched along the rim of an unguarded vertical dropoff up through the lost jungle’s tortured thicket and clouds to the granite citadel that crowned the precipices above us.
The first time I saw Machu Picchu, it broke my heart, my head, and my vocabulary. The second time it broke the rest of me. It was a wonder so exquisite and limitless and sublime, it cried out for silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. High reef empire of humanity, built to worship water, every other place on the planet was cardboard by comparison.
Cut into this mountain peak was a mythical masonry peninsula of 200 buildings, long and narrow kancha compounds conformed to the terrain, dwellings and temples and warehouses, stone stairways and arches, canals and reservoirs, and hundreds of man-made terraces, built from the fractured rock of earthquake faults layered with stone chips, sand, dirt, and topsoil carried a vertical half kilometer straight up from the valley floor. Bounded by natural cliffs, it fell away thousands of feet into a sea of jungle on each side. The Urubamba slithered in a canyon a thousand feet beneath us, surrounding the stone saddle on three sides. Jagged mountains, at each corner of the compass, stood as sentries.
Just like my first time in this cathedral in the clouds, I touched my forehead to the Intihuatana stone. Hitching Post of the Sun. Because the Spaniards systematically searched for and destroyed such supremely sacred Incan objects, and never found this one, all its deities were still in residence.
But the Incas had gone. Machu Picchu was inhabited for less than 80 years before being abandoned. Most of its 750 inhabitants died from the indirect conquistador contagion of smallpox. All that was left of them were their bones—fed with corn, worn from parasites, and broken in labour.
I laughed at the memory of what my friend Canadian Dave said in our first glimpse over the caretaker’s hut and the stellar emptiness of our final steps on the Inca Trail. The guy who found this must have had a hard-on for a week. Robyn and I had arrived at the Lost City of the Incas, between Hiram Bingham’s erection, and the Nikon hordes to come. There had been 100,000 visitors in 1980, 300,000 this time in 1996, 500,000 on my third trip in 2003, and almost 2 million in 2017. Which is about where the rules kicked the magic out from under it.
Back at the bottom of the mountain, Robyn and I walked through the tunnel to the backwater inflection point we would sleep in that night. Thirteen years earlier, Aguas Calientes had been a small railway siding slum of a dozen tin-roofed shacks, and litter. Floods and landslides had destroyed the original natural thermal baths a year before we arrived. The reconstruction efforts made them inaccessible to us would wash them away again two years later in some weird form of Incan karma. Our night was filled with savage catfights outside our window, and crowing roosters, untied from the Hitching Post of the Sun.
It was difficult to make out the shape of the train that was supposed to take us through the Sacred Valley when it stopped next morning. Underneath the steam coming off the top, a thousand Montecristi fedoras and pigtails hung off every metal protrusion. Crowded railcars that could have arrived at Auschwitz would instead take us to one of the most magical places in the world.
Four hours later, very few of us got off at on a siding along the Patakancha River. The ones with layered skirts and sweaters and straw fedoras danced and spun away among the flowering Spanish broom and tall gum trees. I guided Robyn down to a small gate on the other side of the platform at the other end of the Ollantaytambo station, and through a portal into my past, under a sign. El Aubergue.
We entered a quiet oasis of cobblestone paths and gurgling aqueducts and green gardens furnished with ceramic pots of geraniums and hibiscus and rare chairs of rattan. There were avocados and figs, and other trees full of epiphytes, bromeliads, and rare orchids. Hanging shells bell rang carillon chords in the trees around which blue and yellow tanagers chased themselves. The sunshine tingled in the crisp highland air, scented with eucalyptus. Colonial wooden balconies and splashes of blood red bougainvillea hugged the sun-bleached bone whitewashed walls. A Canary Island palm rose above the curved lichen encrusted terra cotta roof tiles.
I hadn’t seen the owners of the auberge for thirteen years, and I would only see one of them again. Wendy emerged from the inn interior to welcome us. I remembered her husband with great fondness as well. Robert was a kindred soul, and had taught me to spill a little of what you were drinking on the ground before your first sip, in a toast to the health of Pacha Mama. Mother Earth. He was an irreverent writer, volatile and pure in his worldview. He was also a cynical optimist and a renegade renaissance man, with an intellect of boundless inquisitiveness. He fished rivers and trekked trails and terraformed his paradise into a simple beautiful home on the edge of civilisation. We had been sculpted from similar clay. I asked after him, but then I realised that I had asked, after him.
Three years before Robyn and I arrived, Robert was nipped by a puppy from a new litter. When he danced and toasted on the Day of the Dead a few weeks later, Death danced with him, in his bloodstream. Towards the end, before the rabies killed him, the hydrophobia wouldn’t let him eat or drink, so Wendy chewed up a little apple, and fed him like a bird. There is still pathos in paradise.
We left our packs and deepest sympathies with Wendy to see Ollantaytambo. Out past some of the oldest continuously occupied dwellings in South America, dirty whitewashed buildings with missing stucco and single stone lintels of their Incan doorways, timeless Quechua women carried their body weight of brush with tumplines on their foreheads. The Plaza de Armas had signs of modernity I hadn’t seen on my last visit that many years ago. Refrescos Bimbo... Tome Inca Kola De Sabor Nacional... Bar Picanteria... But it was still a patchwork maze of potatoes and beans and onions, mandarins and mangos and papaya and pineapples, organ meats and real ones, chickens and trout, and queso de campo and fresh bread from a big oven. From a nucleus of seated Pacha Mamas, the history of Peru extended outwards, on cobblestones up the hill to the Temple of the Sun.
The Incan emperor, Pachacuti, had built Ollantaytambo into his personal royal estate in the fifteenth century. It became the temporary capital of Manco Inca during the Spanish Conquest, who won a crucial battle against Pizarro’s army by flooding the plain below.
The landscape was harsh and earthen, fortified and defeated. Where Machu Picchu had been an ephemeral maiden, Ollantaytambo was all Spartan brawn. The fifty-ton rose rhyolite panels of the six mysterious monoliths hadn’t gone anywhere. Sunken agricultural terraces almost a kilometer in length, protected from the wind by massive lateral cut stone walls which absorb solar radiation, retained enough heat to allow plants from warmer climates to flourish. The gravity-fed ventilated Incan storehouses, high on the mountain, still looked like some Far Horizon lamasery.
Each of dozen words to describe the sound of flowing water in Quechua carried Robyn and I along channeled spillways, to the Bath of the Princess. We gulped mouthfuls of whatever word the Incas had for this liquid from its stone spout and poured hatfuls over our heads. Further down, the local Hitching Post of the Sun had been astronomically repurposed to dry and grind corn.
Back in our sanctuary, from the veranda, Robyn and I had a view of Apu Veronica’s glacier and Manca Inca’s victory over his invaders. A surreal glow flooded the surrounding escarpments. We fell into in two hammocks, the sublime warmth of the late afternoon sun, and the sound of the roaring Vilcanota.
It was Robyn’s birthday and Wendy made sure there was cake and candles. After dinner, we retreated behind a heavy door fitted with an old colonial padlock, into a large comfortable room of oversized gingerbread beds on beautiful hardwood floors under exposed terracotta roof tiles. The only intrusion came in the form of an enormous boulder that Robert and Wendy had merged into their dream. We sank into our warm duvets beneath the crisp highland atmosphere of one of the most magical places in the world. I fell asleep counting in the Quechua numbers I had learned from two little girls so long ago, and to the echoes of water flowing over rocks. Och... ishkay... kinsa... tawa... pitsqua…
A dozen market-bound Indians, and their bundles, bounced us out of the main square next morning. The truck we commandeered would take us further down the Sacred Valley. Men were step-cutting clay bricks out of the orange soil with their bare feet and wooden shovels, alongside the narrow dirt road out of town.
It was market day in Pisac. The patchwork of blue and white tarps covering the stalls of pear-shaped Pacha Mamas in the Plaza Constitución spiraled out from a large pisonay tree in a galaxy of food and flowers and natural dyes. From the vantage point of one of Ulrike’s Café upstairs tables, Robyn and I looked out over the terra cotta rooftops. Huiloc women, resplendent in tasseled fruit bowl hats and carmine pollera dresses and manta capes, nursed their babies on the cobblestones below. Multicolored corn and bright red peppers danced in their baskets.
We caught another truck ride up a track above the town. a steep kilometre along precipitous ledges, dropping into oblivion. A natural rock tunnel through a cliff led us up a stone staircase to the sky. Here on a triangular plateau, plunging into space and vertigo on either side, was the hilltop citadel of Incan emperor Pachacuti, guarded by massive stone doorways and crested caracara falcons.
We explored temples of painfully perfect masonry, ceremonial baths, and another smooth intihuatana hitching post. Ancient channels carried the water that flowed into the twelve Quechua words that had named it.
Across the gorge, hundreds of holes honeycombed the cliff face, Inca tombs long since plundered by huaquero grave robbers. Elaborate terraces swept around the mountain flanks in gigantic green graceful curves, connected by diagonal flagstone stairways set into their walls, each terrace backfilled by history and hand-hauled buckets of fertile alluvial soil from the bottom of the world. Stone portals framed villages far below.
Our descent to the valley floor took over an hour. Big red crocuses, and other yellow blooms, sprouted out of dry stubbled earth. Iridescent ground wasps buzzed around like outboard motors, to keep us away from their nests. The trail wound us down to an old woman who ensnared us with hand-squeezed orange juice. After the market ended, the town went quiet. We spent a peaceful night as the only guests in a nameless hospedaje. The tranquility broke beyond repair next morning when we boarded an overcrowded mobbed minivan which jostled us over scary switchbacks stitched onto thousand-foot drop-offs, through a frontier desert landscape of parched gulches and open plains dotted with cactus and completed our sacred circle back to Cusco.
We left the thin air of the Altiplano for the thick steam of Amazonas next morning. It took less than an hour for our Aeroperú Boeing 727 to find Puerto Maldonado, just 18 days before another Aeroperú flight stalled and crashed into the Pacific at night, killing all 70 people aboard. A maintenance worker had neglected to remove the adhesive tape covering the exterior pitot static ports which meant that the pilots couldn’t know their altitude. The accident dragged the airline under three years later.
Robyn and I were also stalled in a tropical town whose name meant ‘ill-favored,’ in the region of Madre Del Dios. Mother of God. Not particularly auspicious nomenclature. We spent the day playing with the baby sloth at the Emturin Hotel and eating heart of palm salads.
The longtail motor of a dugout canoe blended the chocolate milk of the Madre de Dios River into the black tea ribbon of the Tambopata next morning. Around a few bends, the river sun-shimmered like mercury midstream, and its wet mudbanks came alive with butterflies—gigantic blue Morphos and wondrous white and iridescent green and black striped and 1200 other varieties. We entered one of the pristine primary rainforests left in the world.
“How deep can we go into the jungle?” Robyn asked.
“Only halfway.” I said. Three hours upriver, we arrived at Explorer’s Inn and its thatched bungalows and profound biodiversity of vascular plants and birds and fish and mammals and insects. I hadn’t realized that the Tambopata Reserve had 73 species of biting horseflies before I arrived, but it didn’t take long to find out. The 119 species of mosquitos took over the welcome drinks and hummed Guns N’ Roses for our entire stay. Welcome to the jungle, we take it day by day... If you want it you’re going to bleed, but it’s the price you pay... The heat and humidity added to the local colour. Parrots screamed through the canopies of buttressed trees decorated with battalions of caterpillars in geometric formation.
We spent three days paddling canoes in the oxbow lakes, playing with the turtles, marveling at a clay lick where hundreds of colourful macaws and other birds came to feed on its minerals, and walking some of the 32-kilometre trail network. On the morning of the second day, we prepared to go on a long hike. Manuel told us to be sure to shake out our gumboots before putting them on. Robyn shook out one of hers before slipping into both. The one she neglected to shake out was the one with the spider and it wasted no time in letting her know. She danced around our encampment on her one good leg, balancing the other in the air and pleading for someone to pull her boot off. She looked at me.
“I know where it is.” I said. “If I take off your boot, I may not know where it goes.” It was the wrong message to send to the person you promised to love and obey until death do you part. I did still love her despite the not obeying part, and I wasn’t sure how close the parting part might be. Manuel pulled off the boot which now boasted a squashed spider at the bottom. Robyn’s foot was already swollen. She had clearly been bitten. I gave her some antihistamines and analgesics and suggested she spend the rest of the day with her leg elevated.
“Where are you going?” She asked.
“On the hike.” I tried to explain that when I got back she would either be here or she wouldn’t and it would make no difference if I stayed or went and I may as well go so someone gets to see what we came to see. I don’t think she accepted my logic in the spirit in which I had intended it but she had recovered so well by the time I returned, the reserve could have added another species of jaguar.
Before we flew back to Cusco the following day, Robyn and I got to see some of the river dredges that 30,000 gold miners were illegally operating around Puerto Maldonado. Their use of mercury and cyanide had killed off 450 hectares of forest in the Tambopata reserve. Every man now worships gold, all other reverence being done away. How do we like the Amazon now?
We left the Hotel San Augustin Internacional next morning for the Wanchaq station, and another train leaving for the largest lake in South America and the highest navigable lake in the world. The eleven-hour Ruta del Sol crossed an Altiplano plateau the colour of dirty straw. Alpaca herds and Andean peaks danced us all the way to Lake Titicaca. Robyn and I sat across from an obese Peruvian couple, trainsfixed in their enthusiasm for handfeeding each other with whatever victuals could pass through our window at every station stop. Tweedledum and Tweedledee literally ate the day away, continuously and without pause. We watched in horror, as their dismemberment and consumption of half a roasted suckling hog turned piggishness into an artform. If the source of gluttony is supposed to come from something eating at us, they were well ahead on points. Between the shores of Lake Titicaca and the surrounding mountains, the city of Puno climbed right up the steep hillsides. We checked into the Residencial El Buho and went to bed without dinner.
We spent next morning with the chullpa cylindrical family squared and cambered stone tombs at the pre-Incan Ayamara cemetery of Sillustani on the salt-crusted shore of Lake Umayo, and the afternoon in the colourful Puno market. That night we ate two descendants of the trout introduced to Titicaca from Canada in 1940.
There are eighty manmade floating islands in Lake Titicaca. The Uros who made them claimed to possess ‘black blood,’ because they didn’t feel the cold. The totara reed was a principal source of food, and the only source of iodine. They made boats from it. They made houses from it. And they made the ground under those houses from it as well. Even their watchtowers were made of totara, built to evade the Incas and the Spanish conquerors of the Incas. What kind of existence required people to build the very ground they live on?
Our boat, Lancha San Carlos, would only make a brief stop at two of them on our way to our ultimate destination next morning. Stepping off onto the first one, we sank about four inches into a slow spring-loaded gait. It was very sexy, like walking on the moon, or moving on a giant straw waterbed. Three bowler-hatted women sat out front of their reed huts with hand-stitched handicrafts and hope. The doors were simple reed mats, sagging at an angle. The islands used to last for thirty years, but the Uros’ success is becoming their reedy unraveling. The ever-increasing amount of tourist damage to the rotting layers of totara requires them to spend more and more time maintaining their precarious floating existence. They live in the area under the curve.
Almost fifty kilometres offshore from Puno, Robyn and I disembarked from the San Carlos onto the island of Taquile, the most exotic two square miles in Peru. We climbed the rarified air through a stone arch to find three shy, bronze-faced men wearing finely woven nightcaps, knitting. One of them brought out a ledger for us to sign in and took our money in exchange for a voucher. He gave us a few coca leaves to chew and drew a map of how to find the thatched mud house where we would spend the night.
“Señor Santos Hernando Alta Quirpe.” He said. “Alojamiento 37.” We thanked him and tried to follow his chicken scratch along cobblestone paths through the potato terraces. The views of Titicaca were spectacular. The ear-flap-capped children who were stalking us grew tired of our ponderous progress, took our map, and guided us to our lodging. We sat on a stone ledge outside the mud hut until Santos returned from his terrace. He studied the voucher and showed us to our room. It was small and dark and smelled of all the things that made up the life of Santos. He heated some potato soup for our lunch and left us to return to work.
Robyn and I wandered the island until the sun began to dive for cover behind the snowcaps. Santos returned to fry us some potatoes for dinner. The night was cold. We added our sleeping bags to the poncho he provided on our bed. In the morning before we left, he made us potato pancakes and mate de coca tea for breakfast. We were beginning to feel like subjects in a Van Gogh painting. I realized that you could experience a potato famine with or without potatoes. I knew that Taquileños ran their society based on the Inca moral code of Ama sua, ama llulla, ama qhilla. Do not steal, do not lie, do not be lazy... But somehow, I was convinced that Santos had missed a vital fourth commandment. Don’t look at all of life through the eyes of your potatoes.
The following morning found us on another Enafer train climbing from the lake and backtracking in the direction we had come from Cusco. There were two important differences. The first was that we branched off south into a wonderful ascent at the dismal junction-town of Juliaca; the second was how I finally took the Empresa Nacional de Ferrocarriles del Perú company motto seriously, ‘El tren esta en su ruta! Disfrutelo.’ The train is on its route! Enjoy it. While Robyn enjoyed the view of rolling pampas of organ-cactus and savannah and roaming large herds of llamas and alpacas from the comfort of our Pullman, I snuck out and clambered on top, to experience the most exhilarating trip on the planet.
The occasional need to duck my head for tunnels was more than adequately rewarded by the wind and sun and metal coiling around deep tortuous lakes and bare peaks, striated with patches of snow. Up and up more we climbed to over 13,000 feet, to hear the slow grind of steel wheels descend into braking squeals. Lower down, the landscape unwound through a desert of interlocking hills and lakes riven by deep gullies that widened into canyons and snaked into the distance. We raced across a plateau beneath the conical volcano of Misti and a bridge that carried us across a rushing boulder-strewn river into the White City.
Located at the trade route crossroads of colonial silver and camelid wool, Arequipa was constructed of pinkish-white ashlar stone blocks cut from the volcano. Earthquakes flattened the city relentlessly. Four years after our visit, an 8.4-magnitude earthquake killed 75 people, destroyed 17,000 homes, and damaged many historical buildings. It still felt like a Spanish town, with thick arches and vaults and columns and porticoes and balconies and an immense tiered and arcaded plaza with a fountain and a cathedral in the centre, recklessly vermiculated with carved detail crawling with petrified maggots. The desert climate was magnificent, with 300 days of sunshine every year. The Nobel Laureate native son of Arequipa, Mario Vargas Llosa, once wrote that Peruvians ‘dream and take refuge in illusion.’
Robyn and I took refuge in grandma’s house, La Casa de Mi Abuela. Within environments surrounded by gardens, enjoying the twitter of the birds and the peaceful quietness... We left out packs to find a good restaurant. It no longer exists but, at the time, the Central Garden was fantastic. For two of our three nights in Peru’s second city, we were welcomed by our tuxedo’d waiter, Luis, who diligently guided us through the 194 typical dishes on the menu. We ate Palta Rellena and drank Cerveza Arequipeña.
Birdsong woke us next morning. After breakfast in the garden, a Continental Tours Transportes Terrestre bus picked us up for a long day trip to the attractions of Chivay. Is it the most beautiful place in the world? Depends on the point of view. He who knows how to appreciate responds; Yes... It took us three hours to travel a hundred miles of rough road, built in the 1940s to serve the region’s silver and copper mines.
The 70 kilometre-long Colca Canyon is one of the deepest gorges in the world, twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. The faint red stains marking where dead Los Collaguas tribe members were interred centuries before were still visible along the top of the ravine. As we stood on the canyon rim 4,000 feet above the Majes River, a hissing steam of pinion feathers pulled my head off into space. He was at eye level, the largest bird of prey in the world, the great carrion starship of the Andes. My mouth opened, but no words came out. El Cóndor Pasa.
Other black ‘Eternity Birds’ with hooked beaks and white ruffs and red wattles on their otherwise naked necks, red combs on their bald flushed heads, and white patches on their ten-foot wingspans hung in the thermals. Darwin watched them for half an hour without once observing a wing flap.
Before Simon and Garfunkel, El Cóndor Pasa was a zarzuela about miners in the Andean village of Yápac, who envied the freedom of a shepherd playing his quena flute. At the end of the second act, after they killed the mine owners, a cóndor appeared, the first in many years. The miners took it as an omen of a new life of freedom and shouted their hopefulness. We are all cóndors...
But if you could, you might not want to. Cóndors are turning into faint red stains because of habitat loss, shot for alleged attacks on livestock, lead poisoning from other carcasses killed by hunters, and persecution in bullfighting rings, tied to and pecking at the back of a bull. Rather hammers than nails, no bridge over troubled water, across the dark divide, lives the insight of Robert Pyle. What is the extinction of a condor to a child who has never seen a wren?
Robyn and I floated like the carrion starships, but in the natural hot springs of La Calera, before returning to grandma’s house and the Restaurant Sol de Mayo, where we ate anticuchos de corazón beef heart kebabs and drank Inca Kola.
We spent our final full day in Arequipa wandering the Convent of Santa Catalina, a monastery of wealthy Dominican nuns. Enclosed by miles of high, forbidding, snow-white walls, it was a city within a city. Formidable grilled gates lead into a descending progression of cobbled courtyards with fountains and fruit trees. The adobe walls were painted in white and colours and frescoed with primitive flowers and fruit and animals. The sound of water flowing everywhere, through terra cotta and tile conduits, gave the place an insidious charm.
The monastery accepted only the second daughters from upper class Spanish families, who paid a dowry equivalent of $US150,000 in today’s money and had to supply 25 listed items, including a statue, a painting, a lamp, and clothes. At its height, the convent housed 450 people in a cloistered community. Dignified chambers were furnished with kitchens, private wells and large beds in alcoves, their names calligraphically inscribed across the lintels. La Reverendissima Sefiora Madre Maria del Pilar Soledad.
Framed martyrdoms in the main refectory, primitive portraits of stern mothers superior, and the mangled crucifix over the Abbess’s high table must have been disturbing at mealtimes. A long gallery was filled with canvases of the Cuzco and Arequipa schools, both mingling a Castilian splendour of lace and brocade with primitive Indian stiffness, everything spangled in gold stars. There was a terrible life-size mock-up of the Last Supper, deep in dust. The wealthy widow foundress, Maria de Guzman, was no relation to the other Ariquepeño Guzman, Manuel Rubén Abimael, the communist professor and ‘Shining Path’ terrorist, although some historians might point to obvious similarities in their disposition, determination, designs, and deeds. We spent the last Arequipa evening in the ‘Room Dairy’ Restaurant.
Our Expreso Internacional Ormeño bus next morning took almost six hundred kilometres and ten hours to reach Nazca. We crashed in a small hostel, like so many of the touristic flights that placed the lives of their customers on the lines. Before the large number of air tragedies forced the government to close 10 of the 14 air companies and grounding all but seven of their 48 planes sixteen years later, our survival over the Nazca lines was a crap shoot. Ninety percent of the planes at Maria Reiche aerodrome were over 35 years old. There were no co-pilots. The sustained, steep turns required to show off the lines were murder on old fuel tanks. Centrifugal forces caused stalls by pulling fuel away from intake lines. Costs were cut by flying on tanks half-filled with inferior fuel further saved by illegally shutting off engines and attempting to glide home. The company we chose didn’t make the cut in 2010 but we were lucky.
Robyn and I coughed and sputtered for an hour over two-thousand-year-old geoglyphs swept into existence by removing whole landscapes of reddish-brown iron oxide-coated pebbles to expose the yellow-grey clay lime subsoil of the desert floor. Our pilot did aerobatic rolls along a 300-foot-long hummingbird, 440-foot-long condor, 154-foot-long spider and a 305-foot-long monkey and other designs of fish, heron, lizard, dog, cat, human, and trees and flowers. In the absence of wind or rain and hardened by moisture from morning mist, these cosmic calendrical earthworks should have lasted forever. But now there are quarry workings and squatters and their pigs.
One of the features that stood out during our flight was a blue rectangle that belonged to the Enturperu Hotel Nasca. We made for it after our feet found the ground again. For less than twenty dollars, we had its swimming pool, the Restaurant Sud America, and a poolside room as the establishment’s only guests. The question of why this, and other more upmarket accommodation had no patronage, was finally answered by one of the hotel employees. Shining Path.
We decided to spend an additional day in Nazca, wandering through vast tracts of longbones and skulls and textiles half-buried in desert sand, discovering the pisco brandy from local vineyards originally planted by the Jesuits with the labour of slaves from sub-Saharan Africa, and lounging poolside. After meeting the deadlines of Nazca, life finds a way.
An Ormeño bus whisked us seven hours north to Lima the next day. Robyn and I passed through a wasteland of smoke and embers, and flickering dog shadows. We arrived at the Hotel Maury with a weary nausea that tasted of cold metal and diesel.
The following morning, we awoke in Lima’s peculiar climate—never cold enough to have a fire but cold enough to make you wish for one, never raining but never dry, less than 1300 hours of sunshine a year, and all made worse by bad air pollution. The city had built billboards which serve as air purifiers. Its sky was as grey as a donkey’s belly.
The Hotel Maury was good enough for an overnight recharge but not as good as what waited for us four blocks away on Plaza San Martín. The Gran Hotel Bolívar was named for the liberator of the continent.
“They changed it to ‘Bolívar,’ because its original name was ‘Hotel Ayacucho.’” I said. “After the major battle for independence.”
“What’s wrong with that?” Robyn asked.
“In Quechua, Ayacucho means ‘Corner of Death.’”
“Oh.”
“In fact, the place is thought to be haunted.” I continued. “Probably the most famous ghost is La Gringa, an American guest who committed suicide by throwing herself out of the Room 666 window, a little like our honeymoon story about the female guest who hung herself in the closet of Room 202 at the Fort Garry Hotel in Winnipeg. The housekeepers see her early in the morning, walking the halls, in the lounges, or suspended in the air, dancing with the wind. Another story was of a security chief who, while conducting a round of the closed upper floors, encountered a uniformed employee. The officer scolded him for being there and took his name. Back at the front desk, he was supplied with a photo of the errant employee, who had died a quarter century earlier.
The fifth and sixth floors have been closed to the public for twenty years, because of disturbing phenomena.”
“Like what?” Robyn asked.
“Electrical appliances and red pilot lights come alive in rooms that had been closed for thirty years, movement of tripods and equipment bags, sounds of running water from open faucets long since shut off, open storage doors known to be locked, the loss of magnetic north on compasses, the feeling of breathing on one’s neck, sudden temperature changes resulting in visible breath, children’s bodies at the end of long corridors, and photographs of floating orbs triggered by screams. Stuff like that.”
“Let’s stay on the third floor.” She said. Since its construction in 1924, the Bolívar had been Grand Dame of Limeño and foreign high society. It received Peru’s first two elevators and the first radio tubes in the country.
“It was the belle of the Belle Epoque.” I said. History played there, in black and white and color—Orson Welles, Clark Gable, Ginger Rogers, Yul Brynner, Ursula Andres, Rita Hayworth, Maurice Chevalier, Tyrone Power, Vivien Leigh, Marcel Marceau, Walt Disney, JFK and Robert Kennedy, Charles De Gaulle, Richard Nixon, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Nat King Cole, Igor Stravinsky, Louis Armstrong, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway.” But it wasn’t doing so well at the time of our shining path visit.
We hoisted our packs and opened the big doors that led inside. Despite its shabby faded grandeur, it was still a masterpiece of style and class. We arrived with less money than we had any right with which to approach the front desk.
Across the vast grand rotunda of imported Italian marble columns and floors with shimmering grand piano and a 1920 Ford Model T, all illuminated by rare sunlight streaming down through a magnificent planetarium-sized stained-glass dome and stained-glass lamps acquired in France, the front desk manager, in his faded tuxedo, knew that fact immediately.
“¿Si Señor?” He asked. I considered my opening gambit and asked if there was a double room available.
“Si Señor.” He said. I asked the price and winced when we heard it. My counteroffer was ridiculous.
“Veinte dólares.” Twenty bucks. The tuxedo reared up indignant, on his black shoe polish.
“Señor.” He said. “Somos un hotel de cinco estrellas.” We are a five-star hotel. I looked around at the empty space. I called across the rotunda.
“Cinco estrellas!... estrellas!... estrellas!... estrellas!...” The tuxedo pushed the register forward for us to sign in.
Robyn and I stowed our packs in our third-floor room and set out to see the city. The colonial balconies hooked us, not the wrought iron ones, but the magnificent mysterious multistoried mahogany Moorish ones, carved into private geometries for noble lace and diamonds and pearls. We strolled the five blocks back to the sunflower yellow mustard buildings around the Plaza Mayor, to find a horse-drawn open white carriage beside the fountain, and the changing of the guard in progress at the Government Palace. The band, all red and blue and gold and goosesteps, played El Condor Pasa. Every time a new Viceroy was appointed, the streets from the doors of the city to his palace had been paved with silver bars. Pizarro was buried in a crypt in the adjacent cathedral but the statue of the conquistador and his horse, armored like proud bronze insects with fused spines, had been moved away from its original place at the entrance of the church to a less holy place in the square.
The high Spanish baroque Convento de San Francisco around the corner had an elaborate granite façade. a one-and-a-half-ton silver stand, a disturbing painting of a priest licking leg wounds, a wonderful library with a geometric Nicaraguan cedar spiral staircase and Moorish cupola and 25,000 ancient texts and catacombs with the same number of skeletons, carefully arranged in artistic rows and radial spirals of femurs and tibias and skulls, not a few likely arriving here through the secret passageways of the Inquisition. Full of bones that do not make a soul... as though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul.
That evening I played Rachmaninoff on the Gran Bolívar grand piano in the rotunda under the dome. Robyn and I went through a large archway that led down a mirrored golden hall of elegant Waring & Gillow English couches and sofas and chairs and exquisitely carved board games, to the lounge where the Pisco Sour was born. We entered into the empty El Bolívarcito bar and rung the bell. A bow-tied waiter appeared, turned on half the lights, and lit candles.
“This is a holy tabernacle.” I said. “Pisco Sour, por favor.” We watched him blend Ocucaje brandy with lime juice and simple syrup and egg whites in a cocktail shaker. He added ice and shook again, until frost covered the mixer. After straining the potion into glasses, he sprinkled a dash of Angostura bitters on the foam. A large pitcher of elixir arrived. We sat back in overstuffed leather chairs to savour our swallows.
“In 1889, Rudyard Kipling said it was ‘compounded of the shavings of cherub’s wings, the glory of a tropical dawn, the red clouds of sunset and the fragments of lost epics by dead masters.’” I said. “Sixty years later, after one too many, Ava Gardner danced barefoot, and John Wayne had to carry her back upstairs.” We sipped, and our eyes opened a cosmic crack.
On our last day in Peru, Robyn and I stirred like a Pisco Sour. We headed back to where we first arrived, to Miraflores, above the thunderous gray waters of the Bay of Lima. Constructed on the edges of cliffs where, unlike the rest of the city, it hadn’t turned its back to the sea, we walked along the deserted flagstones, breaking upwards in places from the enormous roots of the shaggy fig trees lining the sidewalk. We bought chocolate and coca tea and ended our trip marinated in the lime juice and red onions and cilantro and hot peppers of the ceviche at La Rosa Nautica, on a foggy coastal pier.
Seven years later, a colleague intercepted my trajectory in the hospital corridor. He asked me where I would go in South America if I ever went again. My heart’s lighthouse. When he asked me if I would take him there, I said I’d think about it. And then I began to dream again, in gold and silver, of Incan ruins and Spanish monasteries, of snow-capped peaks and impenetrable jungle, of eating cilantro chicken soup in native markets, and drinking Pisco Sours in the bar of the Gran Hotel Bolívar.
I met him for coffee. It was from Peru.
Lawrence Winkler is a retired physician, traveler, and natural philosopher. His métier has morphed from medicine to manuscript. He lives with Robyn on Vancouver Island and in New Zealand, tending their gardens and vineyards, and dreams.
His writings have previously been published in The Montreal Review. Some of his other work can be found online at lawrencewinkler.com.
