The astonishing civilisation of the Incas is, of course, one of the greatest attractions of travel in Peru. So, on my way to the Andes, I spent two or three days criss-crossing Lima to gaze wide-eyed at its collections of Inca art and artefacts. But scraping a hasty acquaintance with the New World's greatest empire-builders was not that easy. Lima, and the flamboyant Latin American politics it entertains, kept getting in the way. Peru's seaside capital is hectic. Not even Francisco Pizarro, that most ambitious of conquistadors, could have imagined what his new city would eventually become. For Lima, established in the 1530s on the toppling of the vast Inca empire, began as an entrepot for a continent's plundered wealth and was the most elegant city in South America. It is no longer so. Today, with a population that has tripled in the past two decades, it is a vast, noisy, chaotic place of more than 8m. Here, slightly paw-marked and dilapidated, are pockets of former colonial elegance. There, green and well-tended, are enclaves of privilege and affluence. For the most part, though, Lima is a third-world sprawl where, in a wash of diesel haze, an over-stretched population struggles to get by. Did it concern me? Not much, at first - modern Peru was little more than a grimy urban backdrop seen through a taxi window. What claimed my attention was at the end of each ride - the remains of an older, grander society. At the Polli Collection I gazed at finely wrought jewellery looted from the imperial Inca tombs at Sipan, one of the most remarkable archaeological discoveries since Tutankhamun. At the Gold Museum, I marvelled, as did the first Spaniards, at the sheer opulence of solid gold breastplates, earrings, helmets, sacrificial knives, nose-pieces, sacred frogs and a hundred other objects. In the Larco Herrera Museum, I got lost - and slightly spooked - among endless aisles lined with more than 400,000 exquisite ceramic artefacts. Eagles, pumas, snakes, supernatural beings, spirits of rain and thunder, abstract life-forces, powerful, alien and unexpected. Here were the creations of a highly complex people who owed nothing whatsoever to western culture, and who, over millennia, had developed societies, religions and technologies entirely apart. It gave me a new sense of the word "civilisation". It was not long, though, before the new civilisation lying outside museum doors became more attention-grabbing than the old one inside. For who could ignore Peru's national elections, a drama that was gripping the entire city? "It's a cheat," my taxi driver fumed as we careened towards the Museo Nacional de Arqueologia. "El Chino has fixed the elections! There is no other way he could win!" Like everyone else with access to a radio, he was avidly following a tense and excruciatingly drawn-out electoral count. Who would win? Alberto Fujimori, "el Chino", the increasingly authoritarian incumbent who, in running for a constitutionally illegal third term, was defiantly flouting democratic rules? Or Alejandro Toledo, the unproved, populist firebrand who, like Fujimori before him, had promised to clean up Peruvian democracy? With acrimonious charges of fraud and ballot-rigging flying between opposing camps, passions in the city were rising high. I did not make it, on my last afternoon in Lima, to the Museo de Arte - the whole downtown area was jammed with Peruvians waving banners and shouting slogans as they streamed into the downtown Plaza San Martin to await final results. And then, abruptly, it was all over. The electoral commission announced a run-off election to be held several weeks in the future. And the next morning I was in an aircraft flying over the mountains to Peru's Sacred Valley. No change could have been greater. The Valle Sagrada lies more than 8,000ft up in the Andes, a 100-mile-long valley of outstanding beauty. In Inca times, it was the very heartland of an empire stretching 2,000 miles from Ecuador to Chile, and is dotted today with the remains of many of its most important settlements, sacred sites and ceremonial centres. It was also an important crop-producing area, where Inca master-builders undertook vast works of landscape engineering and irrigation that changed entire mountainsides. It is still farmed today. From my hotel room in the Posada del Inca - an old Spanish monastery lying not far from the remains of an Inca royal palace - I looked out on a rural idyll. On the far side of arched cloisters lay a patchwork of fields, bright green at the end of the rainy season. Hoes rhythmically rising and falling, tiny Indian women in bright red sweaters, long black braids and battered felt hats harvested the season's potato crop. Men trudged along the road bent double under loads of fodder. Naked children chased frogs in flooded fields. Closed in on all sides by cloud forest and mountain, the Sacred Valley seemed very far from Lima. At the far, narrow end of the valley, where the meandering Urubamba River suddenly begins its raging descent down the mountains to the Amazon lowlands, I visited Ollantaytambo. Built by Pachacuti, the greatest empire-builder of them all, it is the only still-intact, still-inhabited Inca settlement in Peru. Today, with a bit of huffing and puffing, you can still climb the steep defensive terraces that rise over the town to the temple structure high above. It was on these slopes in 1537 that Manco Inca, last of the imperial rulers, made his one successful stand in a great rebellion against conquering Spanish forces. At the temple complex on top, I wandered about, reflecting on some of the achievements Manco Inca had tried, and failed, to preserve. There was the Sun Temple, part of a complex cosmology in which the supreme Inca claimed divine descendence and through it, the right to imperial rule. There were huge monoliths of stones, precisely cut and transported with great effort from miles away. There were storage granaries, capable of feeding populations in time of drought. And there were stone-flagged paths, tiny arteries in the 20,000km of Inca trails that made up an im- perial communications system that rivalled Rome's. It was splendid. Ollantaytambo spoke eloquently of vast organisation; of a well-structured society; of firmly controlled ideology; of smoothly functioning bureaucracies and powerful armies. It spoke, above all, of civilisation based on unquestioned rule. Yet I could not help thinking of those shouting, banner-waving crowds far away in grimy, downtown Lima, and rather admiring them. Certainly the Incas would have been aghast at anything as messy as a Peruvian election. But that, too, I thought as I stumped down the terraces to the village below, is civilisation. More Information: Nicholas Woodsworth travelled to Peru as a guest of Cazenove and Loyd Expediciones, specialists in tailor-made private travel in Latin America, 3 Alice Court, 116 Putney Bridge Road, London SW15 2NQ. Tel: 020-8875 9666, fax: 020-8875 9444. He flew with Iberia Airlines, tel: 020-7830 0011. Tourist information is available from Peru's embassies overseas: in the UK call 020-7235 1917 and in the US +1 202-833 9860. Copyright © Financial Times group |
