Touring Peru

I haven’t written in a while, I’m sorry. Somehow, with my boyfriend here, the things that used to take up my day – like reading Dostoevsky and writing my blog – have slipped through the cracks of my suddenly much busier days. So I’ll try to give a relatively brief account of what those days have been busy with.
I met Tim in the airport in Lima (complete with the classic slow motion running scene and sharing an ice cream in the airport) and we spent a few days in Lima, exploring the city. I’ve decided that if I ever live in a city, I want to live in Lima. The houses are so cute! Each one in its own special way – some look like little stone castles, some like mountain chalets, some like brightly colored boxes covered in flowers, some like Greek temples – and all tiny and nestled in right next to each other.
We spent our first weekend and anniversary in a lodge in the Corodillera Blanca (the White Range), one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. Our cabin looked out on a glacier and craggy peaks in one direction and on a sloping valley and more, distant mountains in the other, dotted with potato fields and tiny red-roofed houses. The couple that runs the lodge was really cool; the husband works as an environmental consultant all over Peru and the wife – when she’s not running the lodge or taking guests on horse rides – is working on all sorts of community development projects, from a mothers group focusing on early nutrition and childhood development, to a community center to facilitate tourism in the area, to an afterschool program to develop children’s critical thinking and creativity. The day we arrived, Diana saw our violins and asked if we could come play for the children that afternoon, to introduce them to a new instrument and culture. We agreed happily, and went to play duets for the wide-eyed children who asked, when we told them that our bows were made of horse hair, if they could make a bow out of the tails of Diana’s horses.
On Monday we were off again, this time to Cuzco, the navel of the world…or at least of South American tourism.
Everyone wants to do the Inca Trail – the sacred road that leads to Machu Picchu – but it’s crowded and expensive, even during low season. So we found a local guide who took us around the back way to Machu Picchu, on a lesser used but still authentic Incan trail. We passed by (and spent a few hours at) hot springs on day 1, then followed the train tracks to Machu Picchu Town on day 2, and on day 3 climbed to Machu Picchu itself.
The hike to Machu Picchu was grueling. We woke up at 3:30 AM to start hiking at 4 in the pre-dawn rain, and by the time we got to the base of the 2,000 steps our ponchos were soaked through. Every stone step became a waterfall as we heaved our altitude-sore legs up and up and up. We finally arrived at the gate at 5:30 only to find it locked and with a 200-person line leading to it. Why the line? For tickets to Wayna Picchu, the sacred mountain overlooking MP, to which 400 tickets are given out each day to reduce traffic. The result: only the most hardcore tourists – willing to wake up long before dawn and climb to MP before the first bus – get the privilege of hiking for another hour of impossibly steep steps on already exhausted legs. That’s us! (Since that day, Tim has had a phobia of stone steps, even if they just lead to the entrance of a cathedral.  )
When we finally entered MP, the rain had stopped, and the ruins were playing hide and seek with the flitting clouds. Seeing ancient ruins emerge from the mist as if for the first time was worth all the rain of the hike up (at least in hindsight). It was magical. Even better, by the time we climbed Wayna Picchu the sun had come out and we saw MP spread out in all its glory behind us.
MP, said our guide, was a place of knowledge, where priests and nobles came from all 4 corners of the Incan empire to learn astronomy, religion, history and the arts. It was also the home of the Chosen Women, sacred virgins who wove the cloth for the Inca’s robes and rooms and led the rituals worshiping the moon, the second most important deity of the Incas after the sun. I’ve got to say, if the archeologists are right, this must have been the most awesome university ever. And I thought Midd had a beautiful location. Our hills and corn fields can’t compare to those huge jungle-covered mountains rising from the mist like so many grasping fingers.
We took the bus down from MP, too tired to take another step, and slept the rest of the afternoon until our train left. Next Stop: Urubamba, a little town in the Sacred Valley near Cuzco.
We only spent one day in Urubamba, but it was enough – it was Tim’s 21st birthday, and to celebrate it, I took him paragliding over the Andes. Every spectacular view I see eclipses all the previous wonders: the cloud forest in Ecuador was amazing until I saw the mountains and farmland of Intag, which paled in comparison to a sunset over the mighty Amazon, which was buried in my memory by the majestic mountains and glaciers of the Corodillera Blanca, which were obscured by the vision of MP in the mist, which in turn disappeared before the mountains and lakes and golden-green fields of the Sacred Valley, seen from thousands of feet in the air. I can’t even describe why this place was so much more beautiful. Perhaps it was the colors –red earth, green fields, yellow flowers, blue mountains – perhaps it was the light – bright and sunny where we were but with dark rain clouds over the mountains which gave the day an eerie brightness that accentuated every shadow – perhaps it was nothing more than one of the most beautiful places on earth. Anyway, the important thing is, Tim enjoyed his birthday.
Then we went to Cuzco and spent a few days being accosted by cute children in traditional clothes asking us to take photos of them and their little alpacas (for a price, of course) and street vendors selling hats and paintings and silver necklaces. We also saw some impressive Incan ruins and Spanish cathedrals (often at the same time – the Spaniards had a habit of building churches on top of important Incan temples. Did they have the convenience of future tourists in mind?)
I have to say, this part of my trip is very different from anything I’ve done so far. First of all, I’m traveling with someone else, which is a welcome relief. But we’re also walking the “Gringo Trail” and stopping at all the tourist destinations of the country, which changes me from a traveler (as I was in Ecuador and my first month of Peru) to a tourist, plain and simple. It changes my associates, too. As a traveler, my friends (and they were all my friends, even if I didn’t ever get their names) were the adventurous backpackers traveling all South America in a year or the people with round-the-world airplane tickets coming from Malaysia or Namibia with exotic stories to share. Now, half the people I see are middle-aged Argentineans here on tours for their summer vacation. It changes my impression of myself. I’m not sure I like this new identity, but I can’t spend 2 months in Peru and not see MP, right? So I grit my teeth and try to remember that I probably know more about coffee farming in the highlands and banana transportation in the Amazon than these people will ever learn. And then I ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ with the rest of them at the ingenuity of Inca ruins and the colorful clothing of the indigenous women.