A PERU FOR YOU

by Steve Osborne

When a friend asked me how I liked Peru, I answered, “Which Peru?”

He looked at me funny. “The one in South America, of course.”

“Right,” I said. “But which Peru in South America?”

“The Peru,” he said, “Last I checked there was only one.”

That’s where my friend was wrong. I explained to him that Peru is one of the world’s most diverse nations – more like several very different countries with one umbrella name.

I had visited three different Perus. The first was the gateway: the big-city Peru of Lima – a noisy, poverty-riddled megopolis where people are packed in like sardines and have to breathe polluted air under a sky that is dreary and overcast from April to December and smoggy and sticky the rest of the year. Lima is located in the country’s coastal zone – a desert region of sand and rock.

The second Peru I visited was the lush and wonderful high Amazon jungle. Peruvians are proud of their portion of the Amazon jungle. They call it “the lung of the world” – a vast sauna filled with exotic birds, pumas, monkeys and snakes (some deadly); where people eat finger-sized worms they find in palm leaves and oversized ants they call sikisapa (Quechua for “fat butt”).

The third was the cool, crisp highland Peru where the ancient Incas built civilizations in settings so breathtaking I didn’t know whether I was lightheaded from the altitude or the beauty.

Lima: The Gateway

Founded by Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro in 1535, Lima was the most important and wealthy city on the continent until an earthquake destroyed it in 1746. It was rebuilt, but until the early 1920s remained a relatively small city.

I have one suggestion to make regarding Lima: see it, but don’t linger. For the visitor, Lima is merely the gateway to a treasure chest of outlying wonders. That is not to say that the rapidly growing capital of Peru does not have its charm or attractions. It does. But unless you are an aficionado of museums and old churches, you can experience them in a day.

Many of the “must-sees” in Lima are found in the old colonial center of town. Adjacent to or within a short walk from the central square, called the Plaza de Armas, you can visit La Catedral, where the remains of Francisco Pizarro are found, and the beautiful San Francisco church and monastery that sits atop catacombs filled with the bones of 70,000 corpses. There is also the National Museum, the Gold Museum of Peru (home of thousands of ancient gold artifacts), the Museum of the Inquisition, the Santa Rosa Sanctuary of Lima, the small baroque San Pedro church and numerous art museums and galleries.

Taxi rides in Lima are inexpensive and exhilarating. You can go almost anywhere in town for $3 to $20 soles (the equivalent of $1 to just over $6 American dollars) – the $6 ride giving you 30 to 45 minutes of cab time. Tips are not expected but gratefully accepted.

Be prepared for an exciting ride. Forget traffic lanes and signals. Forget traffic laws – which one taxi driver said were considered to be more like suggestions than rules. It’s survival of the fittest and most aggressive on Lima’s streets.

Lima can be a dangerous place for tourists carrying cash, expensive cameras and wearing rings that could keep a poor family in food for several years. There are some areas of town tourists should not go. Truth be told, there are some areas of town where even the taxi drivers won’t go.

Enough of Lima. The reasons for going to Peru lie beyond it.

The High Amazon Jungle

The vast majority of the Amazon River Basin is as flat as a soggy pancake. Where the flat basin approaches the Andes Mountains, you will find the most beautiful and geographically interesting part of the jungle: the “high Amazon jungle.” Here, dense foliage climbs up mountainsides and fills river-cut valleys. Here, exotic waterfalls spill into pristine pools.

The city of Tarapoto – “the City of Palms” – is the best base camp from which to experience this tropical paradise. Located in the foothills between the Andes and the lower Amazon Basin, this city of over 50,000 people can be reached in an hour flight or a 24-hour bus trip from Lima.

After Lima’s gray, polluted climate, Tarapoto’s bright blue skies and clean air are a blessing. The predominant smells here are the perfumes that come from the abundant foliage and the rich, woody cologne that wafts day and night from cooking fires. People live in close proximity here, too, but there is a laid-back feeling of friendly community in Tarapoto that is lacking in Lima.

Cars are rare in Tarapoto. Instead, you will find hordes of three-wheel mototaxis. A mototaxi is a motorcycle whose back wheel has been replaced with a two-wheel, roofed but otherwise open carriage in which two people can sit comfortably and three uncomfortably. The cost of a ride through town in one of these open-air buggies ranges from $1 sole (32 cents) to $3 soles (less than $1 USD) on the upper end. Here, as in Lima, traffic rules are treated as mere suggestions. This fact, when combined with the mostly unpaved and always bumpy streets, results in a cheap ride that blends the thrills of a roller coaster ride with the therapeutic effects of a deep tissue massage.

There are four seasons in the region: two dry seasons (June to October and December to February) and two wet seasons (February to June and October to December). In the wettest months you can find yourself wading up to your calves in flooded streets and the sound of the rain on the red tile roofs is deafening. In the dry months the weather ranges from hot and humid to a little less hot and humid.

About a 45-minute drive northwest of Tarapoto is the pristine village of Quechua-Lamista Indians: Lamas. The villagers are descendants of the Chanca Indians, who at one point rivaled the Incas in controlling the Andes highlands. Few outsiders go there, but a small local museum, a few native artisan goods shops and the local scenery make it well worth the drive.

We drove there with an older acquaintance named Maximo who was born in Lamas and still knew many of the locals. The village was in the preparatory stages of its annual late August festival, the Fiesta de Santa Rosa. Maximo arranged an invitation for us to an evening neighborhood party – part of the celebration. Everyone spoke the native dialect; only a few spoke Spanish. The women did not want their photographs taken. In a village where gringos were a rarity, and where gringos at a neighborhood party were unheard of, we felt like party-crashers and soon left.

Other side trips from Tarapoto should include a drive to the secluded village of San Antonio de Cumbaza, about an hour away on a dirt road. From here a hiking trail leads through the jungle about three miles up a river to the Cataratas (Waterfall) de Huacamayllo, where a high waterfall plunges down into a deep pool. At this idyllic destination you can swim in the pool, jump off a ledge into it, even stand on a rock above it and get a pounding massage from the cascading water. Huge, fluorescent blue butterflies do regular fly-bys.

It is Never-Never Land without Captain Hook.

In the five days we spent in the Tarapoto area, we didn’t see more than a handful of foreign tourists. The next stop, Cuszo, was a very different story.

The Highlands: Cuzco, Machu Picchu and the Sacred Valley

“Where did all these tourists come from?” was my first question when we arrived in Cuzco ( Cusco in Spanish, Qosq’o in Quechua), about an hour southeast of Lima by air. But I quickly realized these were not your run-of-the-mill tourists. They were a hearty, adventurous lot – carrying backpacks instead of suitcases; wearing North Face instead of Polo. That is because Cuzco is the gateway to the famous archaeological sites of the Inca highlands, including Machu Picchu. Some of the area’s best destinations are accessible only by hiking steep, long trails. And then there’s the famous Inca Trail trek – a three- to four-day backpacking trip (porters required) on the ancient trail the Incas used to take to Machu Picchu.

Founded in the 12^th century by pre-Incans, Cuzco is the oldest continuously inhabited city on the continent, and arguably the archaeological capital of the Americas. Massive stone walls, built by the Incas, line many of the streets and form the foundations of later Spanish and even modern buildings. Today, the city’s quaint, narrow colonial streets are lined with shops and restaurants that cater to tourists from all over the world. The city sits at an elevation of 11,000 feet, so tourists should be aware of the threat of altitude sickness.

Inca ruins are prolific in the area. Some, like Qorikancha, are inside Cuzco. Some, including Puca Pucara, Q’enqo and Saqsaywaman (say “sexy woman”) are just minutes away. The ruins and market of Pisac in the Sacred Valley is just over an hour away by road. From there, the river valley runs northwest through a string of communities, including Urubamba and Ollantaytambo to the town of Aguas Calientes. This delightful place is filled with even more tourists per capita than Cuzco because it sits at the base of the switchback road that leads to Machu Picchu.

Machu Picchu – the Lost City of the Incas – is the best-known and most spectacular archaeological site in South America. The first bus from Aguas Calientes leaves at 5:30 a.m.daily and arrives at the site’s entrance a half-hour later. If you’re on it, you’ll have Machu Picchu almost to yourself … at least for a while. Soon the site will fill with hordes of sightseers, especially during the June to September dry season.

Little is known about Machu Picchu, except that it was built by Incas probably around the 15^th century and was an important ceremonial center. An American historian named Hiram Bingham discovered the long-abandoned site almost by accident in 1911. It is also known that the city’s designers knew a lot about astronomy and electromagnetic fields. On June 21^st, the shortest day of the year, electronic signals at a particular location there are squelched and camera batteries are drained in a fraction of the normal time.

If you feel fit, hike up Waynapicchu, the peak that juts up on the north side of the site. It’s an invigoratingly steep climb that takes about two hours round trip and offers panoramic views. Get there early. A limited number of people are permitted to hike it each day.

A Scratch on the Surface

Unless you plan to spend several months in Peru, traveling hard and fast through its diverse regions, you will only scratch the surface of what this intriguing nation has to offer. We spent two weeks there, taking no time off to relax, and left with the feeling that we had only glimpsed through a crack in the door of the full Peruvian experience.

Puno and Lake Titicaca, the coastal city of Arequipa, the jungle cities of Iquitos and Pucallpa, the mysterious Nazca Lines … these and so many other Peruvian destinations would have to wait for our next visit.

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Facts About Peru

There were 12 million Incas in 1535 (including the tribes they had conquered) when Francisco Pizarro and the Spanish conquistadors arrived. The Inca empire stretched from present-day Columbia to Chile, and extended into Columbia, Ecuador, Bolivia and Argentina. Pizarro could never have subjected the Incas had it not been for civil strife within the empire.
The word “Inca” means king. The Spaniards mistakenly applied the word to the entire native population.
Current population: approximately 28 million.
Peru is the third largest country in South America – the size of France, Spain and England combined.
59.3 percent of Peru is jungle; 28.6 percent is highland, and 12.1 percent is costal desert.
90 percent of Peruvians are Catholic.
9 percent of Peruvians are unemployed.
Current life expectancy: 65 years.

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