I am not sure why such landscapes - barren, windswept plains, sometimes guarded by sweeps of mountains, all various shades of browns, golds, and muted greens; endless sky above - make my heart swell so. It's not like I grew up in such an environment. But I felt the tug in the steppes of Mongolia and I felt it this time in the Peruvian altiplano. Of course, these types of places are tough, difficult on human inhabitants. Actually, very like Mongolia, while the high plain is hauntingly beautiful, the few towns eeking an existence out of the hardscrabble environment are astoundingly [View Full Entry]

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Peel away all the tchotchky souvenir shops, all the tour agencies, all the backpacker restaurants (many, oddly, attempting to entice an Israeli clientele), the massage parlors, and all the other trappings of a tourist trap, and Cuzco reveals itself as an utterly fascinating case study in colonial domination. The current city is literally built on the ruins of the original Qosqo, the imperial capital of the Inkas. (History nerd alert: it is a misnomer, actually, to call the people of the empire as a whole "inkas" - the term Inka really only applies to the kings. The Inka Empire, as we [View Full Entry]

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He seemed unfazed by our canoe rounding one of the early bends of the Manu River. I am sure he had seen us before we spotted him. After taking a long, bored look at our gawking faces, he simply stretched, yawned, and then languidly rose to his feet to disappear into the jungle. A jaguar! And we had just begun our adventure in Peru's Amazonian headwaters... With almost no turn around time, a subset of six from our Inka Trail group set forth on a very different adventure, an excursion into the Manu National Park in the Peruvian Amazon. Our legs [View Full Entry]

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The porters whispered a gracious "buenos dias" into our tent flap and offered us our choice of hot poison: coffee or coca tea. A bowl of hot water to wash our faces soon materialized, as well. Our final day on the Camino Inka (or Inka Trail). The other trekking groups had left hours earlier, sometime around 3am, to catch a sunrise that would never be considering the morning clouds. We were waking at the more sensible hour of 6 am, and would get to experience the mysteries of Intipata, a cascade of Inkan terraces wreathed in fog, all to ourselves before [View Full Entry]

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Day 1: Cuy and Me There was no hiding what it was. The little, splayed feet; the white incisors; even remnants of the whiskers. It was staring me down over the accompanying papas fritas. Yes, I was going to be eating a cuy. A guinea pig to norteamericanos. I tried not to think of my living toupée of a childhood pet, Pepper. But I am in Peru, so I had to try it...and, you know, it wasn't too bad. (And no, it didn't taste like chicken...) *** Of all the points on my itinerary, Arequipa was perhaps the greatest unknown to [View Full Entry]

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I am not sure when I first became aware of them, but I was drawn to mysteries as a kid. I wanted to know why the moai on Easter Island had been carved and placed high on their platforms. I wanted to understand the pyramids. Why build such hulking structures in the desert? I also wanted to figure out the Nazca Lines, those mysterious geometric and zoomorphic figures strewn in the parched landscape of southern Peru. Why create these images that can only be seen from high above the earth? How did they make them in the first place? Well, I [View Full Entry]

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Day 1: Shortly after we pulled away from the airport, into chaotic, screeching traffic, the city went black. The streets snarled with no guiding lights, cars began zooming down the wrong side of the road to bypass the mess. Daredevils on bikes or foot wove shadowly between the honking vehicles. I felt like I had landed in Cairo or Delhi. But no: Welcome to Lima! I am beginning to think Ecuador was a gentle introduction to South America... Despite the heart-thumping introduction to Peru, Lima has beguiled me. I am not sure why it is sniffed at on most itineraries, seen [View Full Entry]

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I passed my dirty underwear and socks through the little trapdoor in the iron gate, depositing them in the waiting hands of the tiny, wizened laundress. She smiled and said: mañana... Thus is business done in Guayaquil. It is hard to believe that Quito and Guayaquil are in the same country. Although only a 35 minute flight apart (or a torturous 8 or 9 hour bus ride down the slope of the Andes), the cities are different worlds. Guayaquil pulses with frenetic energy, the streets alive with screeching, careening traffic. Quito is a bit more stately. Guayaquil is tropical, the air [View Full Entry]

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It was 5am. I had already been hiking for an hour through the heavy darkness of the forest, my glasses fogged with the thick humidity, my boots almost lost to sucking mud on several occasions - and then my headlamp decided to die. We still had an hour ahead, up and down steep, muddy ravines, over fallen trees. I would only have the weak light of my guide Edison's flashlight to navigate. I would have to try and not think of ten inch millipedes or earthworms wide as a child's wrist. Was that a leech that dropped onto my collar? I [View Full Entry]

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Despite a rainy start to the day, the sun soon emerged, its remarkably intense light warming the cool morning. So I had yet another clear day to explore, continuing my tour of churches and museums, piecing together the layered history of the city and attempting to understand the intense religosity that infuses all aspects of life here. Stumbled on a rally for the worship of the sun god (Inti) and received a more than thorough tour of Mañuela Sáenz's home (the lover of Simón Bolívar, the Liberator's Liberator). Just a few photos to show - am off to the cloud forests... [View Full Entry]

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