Julian Allason - How To Spend It 
Financial Times Magazine, April 6, 2002

Guineapigs were capering about the hearth, oblivious of their impending fate on the spit. From niches in the grey stone walls the skulls of favourite ancestors grinned down. ³Inca,² muttered Marco, my guide, with a gesture that encompassed the sooty room and the family whose home this was. For most of the twentieth century archaeological expeditions had chased each other over the Andes, and through Peru¹s dense jungles in search of the Incas and their fabled lost city. But found only ruins. Now here in Ollantaytambo, I was face to face with the descendants of the race of conquerors whose empire of the sun had arisen so swiftly, only to be extinguished by the Conquistadors. Looking out into the ancient stone courtyard, where dogs and fowl wandered in and out of three similar houses, little appeared to have altered in six centuries.

The myth of the Inca, the great emperor who rose from the chilly depths of Lake Titicaca, still exerts real power in Peru today. Massive sites haunt the landscape, casting mysterious shadows that defy the efforts of archaeologists, and even Marco, to illuminate. To enhance legitimacy presidential candidates will claim direct descent from the imperial dynasty - a genealogical improbability, given the Conquistadors¹ efficiency in eliminating any relative of the defeated ruler around whom opposition might rally.

Marco and I take refuge in a grogshop. Whatever it lacks in elegance, it makes up in authenticity. The grog, offered by a woman in a bowler hat with a baby papoosed in her shawl, is authentically disgusting, and the floor covered in llama droppings and straw. This most perfectly preserved of Inca cities huddles in its grid of stonecut alleys and courtyards beneath a massive redoubt rising to 10,000 feet. It was from the precipitous terraces of this temple fortress cut into vertical mountainside that the last emperor inflicted defeat upon the Spanish in the final Inca rebellion. Ollantaytambo and its inhabitants have, one senses, yet to surrender to the invaders. But as I leave the town an ancient bus trundles up the rough road, the word turismo just decipherable on its side.

There are sound reasons why visitors to Peru¹s Sacred Valley of the Incas have been few until recently, and they include a vicious guerrilla war lasting more than a decade. There is equal logic in the travelers return now. They do so in some style, as a result of a remarkable gamble. In 1999 , when the political and economic future still looked uncertain, James Sherwood and his Orient-Express group began buying property in Peru, an investment considered insane by conventional hoteliers.

In consequence, what was formerly accessible to backpackers and climbing enthusiasts is now being opened up to grand tourists. Endemic problems, notably altitude sickness, are being tackled by the introduction of oxygen into the rooms at Sherwood¹s Monasterio hotel in Cuzco, the cultural capital. Frustrated by poor links to the world heritage site at Machu Picchu, a hundred miles away, Sherwood promptly bought, and restored, the railway, acquiring the small hotel close to Machu Picchu's summit for good measure.

Cuzco is the key to this renaissance. Sitting on the wooden balcony of one of the colonial buildings enclosing the Plaza de Armas I watch an extraordinary event unfold beneath. The great plaza, perhaps six times the size of Trafalgar Square, is alive with people, colourfully dressed to celebrate the feast of Corpus Christi. Immediately below me, born on a great silver palanquin, the archbishop kneels in prayer. He is preceded by a military band, a religious procession, dignitaries, dancers, and a colour party of police officers in dress uniform and sunglasses. Behind him follow ten giant statues of saints, each dancing to the staggering gait of thirty porters, all barefoot. Early that morning, after open air mass in an outlying village, I had vainly attempted to keep up with the porters as they ran towards the cathedral bearing the heavy statue of their church's patron, San Sebastiano.

This was no cultural show performed for tourists. Indeed I heard nothing but Spanish and the indigenous Quechuan language spoken that day, or into the night of feasting that followed, in which many more guinea pigs paid the ultimate price. In Cuzco the religion of Cortez and his conquerors is more perfectly preserved than in Spain, and God is praised with the glister of silver and precious stones so beloved of the Indian peoples, a taste first formed at the court of the Inca.

Appropriately I am staying at the Monasterio, a sixteenth century monastery converted into an hotel like no other in South America, and the jewel in Sherwood¹s Peruvian crown. The next morning the Archbishop sweeps through the cloisters flanked by an obsequey of chaplains, here to inspect his property over cups of strong coffee. Sun streams in, creating a microclimate of warmth, unfamiliar so high in the Andes, and for a moment the clerical presence returns the quadrangular building to its historic existence. There is, however, nothing lacking in the size and comfort of the monastic cells, now artfully converted into bedrooms. When I wander into the magnificent rococo chapel it is in use for a conference of IBM cyberneticists.

Heaven knows how the French chef procures crayfish and foie gras for the Restaurant Tupay¹s imaginative menu of Mediterannean and Peruvian specialities. Suffice it to say that it is ill-suited to fasting and abstinence, let alone trekking. But if one is to explore the mysteries of the Machu Picchu and the Sacred Valley, this is the base from which to do so.

During my stay I am befriended by Danytza, a Peruvian beauty from the palette of Goya. She it is who first mentions the treasure tunnels. Early records suggest that these run from Inca sites within Cuzco up to the great fortress - if it is indeed a fortress - of Sacsayhuaman above the city. But how to find the Inca sites? Easy: look for a spire, the Spaniards, having built a church atop every important Inca structure. Within the cloisters of Convento Santo Domingo is the Temple of the Sun and working there a team of high tech archaeologists led by Anselm Pi, Peru's Indiana Jones. With the help of ground penetrating radar he has just located the sealed entrance to the tunnel through which Spanish chroniclers record the escape of the Inca nobles - and their gold.

Peru¹s greatest treasure is Machu Picchu, described by the normally reticent Lonely Planet guide as, ³South America¹s most spectacular archaeological site². The discovery in 1911 of this ruined settlement, perched on an impregnable mountain outcrop thousands of feet above a bend in the Rio Urubamba, seemed to determine the location of the lost city of the Incas. The more recent finding of their true final stronghold in the remote jungle near Espiritu Pampa has served to create a new enigma, that of Machu Picchu's real purpose. Palace? Hareem? University? No one knows.

Booking into the small Machu Picchu Sanctuary Lodge at the entrance to the site offers advantages beyond a finedinner and the services of a resident shaman. To remain on the mountain at dusk once other visitors have departed is to experience its natural power; to witness the dawn there is approach the heart of the Inca mistery and its workship of the sun.

Nothing about Lima have prepared me for such a direct assault on the imagination. The Peruvian capital failed to live down to the expectations recreated by the sculptor Ana Bianchi's characterization of a "building site populated by muggers". In fact Lima contains much of cultural interest, including a magnificent colonial center in something like its original condition. Visitors will, however, do well to put up in Miraflores, the new financial and enterteinment district, shielded from the desolation of the impoverished barriadas. Althought modern, the Miraflores Park Hotel occupies a meditative position overlooking the misty south Pacific and provides an excellent launchpad for the adventures in the interior.

It was not until reaching Puno, on the shores of Lake Titicaca, that I felt I had finally shaken off the ghosts of Machu Picchu. Here, at the edge of the highest navigable lake in the world, a sky rendered indigo by paucity of oxygen blends into glacial waters. I felt breathless, as one might at an altitude of 12,350 feet. "We have evolved bigger hearts than you -and bigger lungs", explained my friend Ruben, a native of this high country, the Altiplano. The solution he proffered was coca tea, a supposedly non-narcotic drink brewed from the leaves of a potent coca plant.

Our boat carried us across the lake, past floating islands on wich whole families lived, men fishing, women in voluminous woolen skirts weaving textiles of psychedelic designs. We stopped to explore on foot the remote Llachon peninsula, where alpaca graze and campesinos till the land with hand ploughs. Over the launch of three different kinds of potatoes in an indigena native house, our host described a timeless village life based on llama herding and subsistence agriculture. At which point a mobile phone rang somewhere under his poncho. A gift from a government anxious to extend its writ even beyond the ambit of policeman and priest.

The destination was Suasi Island, one of the most isolated and peaceful retreats in the southern hemisphere, and as little known to Peruvians as westerners. Suasi lies close to the eastern shores of the 100-mile long lake, in the lee of a range of snow-capped mountains. Its simple but solar heat; cooking and the radiophone link also come courtesy of the Inca god. The whole island, perhaps a kilometer square, is a nature reserve where such rare sights as a stampede of alpaca are everyday occurrences in a landscape innocent of human interference.

Guests on Suasi were few: just me and Marisol Mosquera, surely Peru most knowledgeable traveler, and a glamorous advertisement for an English convent education. On the second day we were joined by an admirer, Capitano Carlos Saavedra, master of the MV Yavari, presently docked at Puno. We should, averred the captain, consider ourselves invited aboard to try his Pisco sours.

Thus, after an expedition to inspect the mysterious sun gate at the great megalithic city of Tiahuanaco in neighbouring Bolivia, marisol and I were piped aboard the MV Yaravi. We needed hardly have hastened, for despite heroic restoration of hull and engines, its was clear that the Yavari was going nowhere very soon. Built in Birmingham in 1862, the ship had been carried in bits across the Andes by mule, seeing long service on the lake with the Peruvian navy prior to decommissioning. Meriel Larken, a visiting Englishwoman, had discovered the hulk, and after enlisting the support of Prince Philip, commissioned Captain Saavedra to oversee its overhaul.

The heroic restoration of the Yaravi in its remote setting serves as a metaphor for a Peru's own determination to renew itself as an essential country to visit. Latin America specialists are optimistic about the country's future as a tourist destination. "The substantial investment in hotels and infrastructure should survive the occasional rumble in the jungle", says Christopher Wilmot-Sitwell of Cazenove & Loyd Expediciones. "Wath matters is that guests can now enjoy some of the most fascinating -and unfamiliar- sites in the continent in both comfort and safety."

Just so, although the impact on the descendants of the Incas remains to be seen. But this is a big country with no shortage of spirit, guinea pigs of mysteries. On the Yavari, the crew salute as the Peruvian flag is lowered at sunset. Below decks Captain Saavedra begins shaking up what are surely the best Pisco sours in the Andes.