Only Fools and Llamas

By Simon Jenkins, Conde Nast Traveller (UK edition)

Peru’s astonishing spectacles are not for the faint–hearted, but in just seven days, Simon Jenkins trekked up to the Inca city of Machu Picchu, watched the majestic condor fly at 12,00ft, and saw a god’s-eye view of the 2,000-year-old Nasca lines.

Each Easter, the citizens of the old Inca city of Cuzco drag a huge crucifix out their cathedral and parade it around the town. They are celebrating the day in 1650 when the same parade miraculously ended the worst earthquake in their history.

An identical miracle ended another earthquake in 1950. Not surprisingly, the crucifix of the "Señor de los Temblores" is now made from 26 kilos of pure gold and encrusted with precious stones. The parade is accompanied by bands, bishops, soldiers, nuns, camera crews and cacophony of police and fire sirens. On my visit in Easter 1,999, however, the miracle was reserved. The crucifix did not stop an earthquake. It started one, which nearly threw me out of bed.

Nothing in Peru ever turns out quite as planned. Any visit to the country can be crippled by altitude sickness, or the mismatch between Lima’s keenness for tourism and the lamentable infrastructure of a Latin American state. Peru plays host to three astonishing spectacles: the ruins of Machu Picchu, the prehistoric Nasca Lines and the giant condors of the Colca Canyon.

None of these is for the faint-hearted: Machu Picchu is notorious for rain; when the earthquake severed the coastal Pan –American Highway, I had to make a three-hour detour along a hair raising track to get to the Nasca Lines; and to see the condors involves hours spent on dirt roads a head-busting 3,500 metres up in the mountains. Yet each of these sights deserves ranking in the premier league of world tourism.

Machu Picchu stands comparison with Pompeii, Luxor and the Taj Majal. High on a bluff where the gorge of the River Urubamba spills into the Amazon rainforest the Inca city and temple abandoned even before the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the 16th century. They were not uncovered until an American explorer, Hiran Bingham, stumbled upon them in 1911 while searching for the long-lost city of Vilcabamba (itself not found, deep in the jungle, until teh 1960s).

The four-day Inca Trail is a giant among treks. To reach the final pass at Intipunku, the Gate of the Sun, and see Machu Picchu spread out a kilometre and half below is to be humbled by man’s ability to inspire awe in his taming of nature .

I witnessed the city spot lit in the sun against a backdrop of Andean Peaks, and later enveloped in rain and broken cloud. Both sights were equally amazing. The ruins can be reached only on foot, by train or by helicopter, all from Cuzco, some 70km to the south. Only fools try to get there in a day from the coast. A sensible preliminary is to spend at least two nights at lower altitude in the Sacred Valley of the Incas, two hours from Cuzco. This enchanted area was once the Inca nobility’s granary and playground, but today it runs between mountains terraced with vertiginous strip fields and contains the Inca ruins of Ollantaytambo and Pisac. Monuments in their own right, their masonry is as fine as that of Machu Picchu, their stones carved into polygonal shapes that fit together so perfectly as to need no mortar. They defy both earthquake and attempts of tourists to insert penknives into their joins.

The Incas had no iron, and so had to fashion their extraordinary stones by chipping at them with chisels of harder stone, using a technique demonstrated in the excellent Inca museum in Cuzco. The labour must have been prodigious. Ollantaytambo’s ruins overlook what is a complete pre-Conquest town. Single storeys of Inca masonry, crowned by makeshift adobe walls and roofs, are formed into a perfect grid of narrow streets. Dating from the 15th century, these must be the most intact and extensive "medieval" remains anywhere in the world. And we have the cheek to call this the New World.

With an early start (6am), a train visit to Machu Picchu can be achieved from Cuzco in a day. For bolder souls, I recommend alighting from the train at Km 104 halt and trekking the last 15km of the Inca Trail, taking in the terraced ruins of Wiñay–Wayna with their cascade of ritual baths. The night can be spent comfortably at the Machu Picchu Pueblo hotel, buried in the orchid-clad jungle at the foot of the gorge. (Avoid the overpriced and scandalously located Ruins Hotel, set in a sea of concrete adjacent to the main site) Macchu Picchu can then be explored in the evening and again the next day, followed by a three-hour train journey or an exhilarating US$85 helicopter ride back to Cuzco.

Cuzco itself is like the inland cities of Mexico, built by the 17th –century Spanish colonists as facsimiles of Segovia or Seville and kindly ignored by subsequent history. Nothing left by the British Empire is as evocative of old Europe as these Spanish outposts in the Americas. Cuzco still displays the churches, arcades, cloisters and monasteries built by the conquistadors to remind them of home. Today, they are a more vivid relic of old Spain than anything on the Iberian Peninsula.

Yet Cuzco has inherited the spirits of not one empire but two. In 1532, the Spaniard Pizarro and his 170 men crushed the Inca empire of the Atahualpa, which stretched from Colombia to Chile, their horses and steel swords proving invulnerable to Incas armed with little more than blunt spears and clubs. Pizarro built his first capital of Peru on the foundations of Atahualpa’s old one. Both survive. Perfectly fashioned Inca masonry supports brick and adobe upper floors all over the city, like enslaved elephants carrying the castles of Spain on their backs. With every earthquake, the castles crumble and must be restores, while hr Inca masonry holds firm.

Most visitors fly from Lima to Cuzco. That is to be recommended, even now that the Shining Path guerrillas have been cleared from the Andean passes. Instead, I was offered a two-day overland trip from Cuzco to Nasca on the coast, through the wildest Andean landscape. Such a trip is strictly for enthusiasts of rural poverty and of that lovely and undomesticated cameloid, the vicuña. On the coast, however, lies the second star of Peru: the Nasca Lines.

German scholar Maria Reiche, who died in 1998, made the Nasca Lines her own from the time they were spotted, etched in the burning desert, by aviators in the 1930s. Besieged by every crank and science-fiction theorist, Reiche surveyed the giant "runways" and the pictographs of a monkey, a whale, a condor and an "astronaut", some as much as 200 metres across. They were scratched just a few inches deep into the parched crust of the desert and preserved, possibly for 2,000 years, by its dryness.

By the time of her death, Reiches’s explanation of the lines was generally accepted. She showed how ancient priests, blessed with a phenomenal grasp of geometry and surveying technique, could have directed the carvings from neighbouring hill. Why they were made is more debatable, since they cannot be appreciated from the ground. Reiche believed that they were to be seen by gods flying overhead. Today we honour her theory by taking a 30-minute flight from a neighbouring airstrip, there being no other way of seeing them properly. To play at being a god in the desert haze is an eerie experience. Erich von Daniken’s theory that Nasca was an extra –terrestrial landing strip led to US bikers doing irreparable damage to the Lines, by racing across them seeking signals from outer space. Their tracks are crude graffiti scrawled over the majesty of the past.

The one-day drive from Nasca to the southern city of Arequipa, departure point for the Colca Canyon, runs between the Pacific and the purest desert I have ever seen, and contains what is reputedly the world’s largest sand dune. The terrain is sometimes flat, sometimes a corniche of mountains, and is horribly vulnerable to landslides. This is utterly empty land, vividly contrasting with the dripping jungles of Machu Picchu and the heights of the Andes. The shoreline is dotted with huts offering grilled sea fish to those with courage to stop. Arequipa itself is designed like a small town in Castilla, its gracious town houses mostly built single-stored to defy earthquakes. The central square has a cathedral and superb Jesuit church, La Compañía, whose Spanish Renaissance facade is rich with Inca adornment.

Behind the square lies Arequipa’s treasure, the "Monasterio Misterioso" of Santa Catalina, dating from 1580. This was an inaccessible town-within-a-town, for nuns committed to living and dying within its walls, although until it was reformed in 1871 it was more of a high-class sorority house. He enclave was opened to the public in 1970 when forced by the mayor to raise funds for proper sanitation, but 20 nuns still live in part of it. Inside, there are ancient houses, streets, gardens, and a central square: surely the most remarkable monastic survival in South America.

The road to the Colca Canyon from Arequipa is a trying five hour drive on an unyielding dirt road. The high Altiplano landscape rises to 3,500 metres, inhabited by llamas, vicuñas and flamingos, and the occasional miserable village. The eventual descent into the small town of Chivay, set amid maize fields and a blaze of wild flowers, is m ore delightful. Here, the River Colca gouges a sensational scar through the mountains for more than 50km, surrounded by a lost paradise of Spanish villages, their churches battered by earthquakes and their tiny, dark women still dressed in voluminous Andean skirts and colourful hats.

The Colca Canyon was firsts "discovered" between the wars and wasn’t penetrated by rafters until 1981. It is said to be twice the depth of the Grand Canyon and the deepest ravine in the world, though surveys now regard Cotahuasi Canyon, further into the Andes, as being even deeper.

More to the point, though, Colca boasts one of the most glorious sights in all of nature: the Andean condor, the largest bird in the world . Its three-and-a-half-metre wingspan renders it too large to be able to take off from flat ground, so this majestic glider lives on and by the cliffs, its highways the updraughts of the canyon. On a good day, condors can be seen swirling round the Cruz del Cóndor lookout, sometimes almost at touching distance.

Near the village of Yanque, the guru of the Colca, Mauricio de Romana, keeps open house in the Parador del Colca, a renovated farm defying gravity on the very lip of the canyon.By the light of a hesitant electricity generator, he regales visitors and condor buffs with tales of conservationist heroism in defence of its wildness. One day in the future, Colca will be as celebrated as the Grand Canyon. Today, it must count as one of tourism’s bravest frontiers.

Anyone like myself, who recklessly demands the "best of Peru" in one week, should not trifle with this country: it is still a place of adventure. Peru is safe, but its best sights are protected from mass tourism by altitude and often primitive services, including poor internal airlines. A reliable ground operator is indispensable to those without fluent Spanish or the patience and leisure of a backpacker. Yet Peru is the queen of South America. No serious traveller can pass it by.

Simon Jenkins’ trip was designed and arranged by Aracari Travel.