Peru is a vast and diverse country, so with only two weeks I had to severely cut back on the list of places I wanted to go. Machu Picchu was obviously a high priority, as were the ruins of the Sacred Valley near Cusco. I decided to focus only on a small area of the south, which I was dismayed to find out is actually called the Gringo Trail. 

Trying not to read about any of the amazing places in the north, I started to narrow down the list. After reading about vicuñas in a travel magazine I had to find a way to see one in the wild. My hometown of Boise, Idaho is home to the World Center for Birds of Prey; so spotting endangered condors was also an important personal goal. 

I almost canceled the rest of my travel plans when I got to Cusco. I just fell in love with the place and didn’t want to leave.

I started out my time in Cusco by wandering around until I found an area I wanted to stay in. I ended up in San Blas, next to a quaint little plaza. Almost every shop and restaurant is designed for tourists, but that’s what I came here to do, so I shopped for postcards and visited places described in the guidebook.

My first day out of the city was a tour of the Sacred Valley. It was a bigger tour group than I had expected and I had never signed up for a tour that was actually a full size bus packed with strangers. This was not going to be a fun little group where I would get to know everybody. So I was pleasantly surprised when I realized that I was the only native English speaker on the bus. We had a few Colombians, a couple from Argentina, a few tourists from Mexico, a family of French-speakers who also spoke Spanish, a lot of Peruvians from Lima, and me. I was in linguistic heaven.

It was a fairly generic tour of the highlights in the Sacred Valley: silver artisan workshops in the town of Pisac, the Incan site of Pisac, the Incan and pre-Incan archeological area of Ollantaytambo, a Chinchero weavers’ workshop and the colonial Spanish church of the town of Chinchero. The guide was enthusiastic about the history of the Incan sites and about the traditional metal working and weaving techniques. Some of his routine was an obviously memorized script and his jokes were fairly lame, but overall he did a pretty good job. I learned a lot.

I finally tore myself away from Cusco and decided to go see the Colca Canyon because I was craving mountains and canyons. Living in Bangladesh the past year has me missing mountains quite a bit.

I took an overnight bus to Arequipa from Cusco. It was just as comfortable as I had heard. I checked in my luggage, got a seat worthy of first class on an international flight and was served a meal as if I were on a plane. The food was not first class, but I had already eaten and was mostly interested in sleep. Again, this was a lot like a nice airline. I got a wide choice of movies, tv shows and games on my individual screen. I was impressed by the busses in Turkey, but they have nothing on Peru.

Arequipa has a beautiful city center, with lots of colonial architecture. It was not an established city before the Spanish arrived, so they didn’t have to destroy much to build the city they wanted. Since there were no giant buildings made with perfectly carved stones, they also didn’t have as much to build with as they had in Cusco. Colonial Arequipeña buildings are made from giant blocks of sillar, cut volcanic stone that is as white as the ash that had compacted to create it. It was beautiful, blinding to the eyes and obviously why Arequipa is known as the White City.

I started out my exploration of the town with a visit to the nunnery. Before coming to Peru I read a lot about the history of nunneries in Peru, which were more like cities within the city than actual convents. (Daughters of the Conquistadores by Luis Martin) One of those “conventos grandes” the Monasterio de Santa Catalina de Sena housed hundreds of women who never intended to lead a chaste life of poverty and prayer. They wore fine clothes and jewelry. They wrote secular songs and had concerts. Their parties were famous.

In some ways, they had far more freedom closed off in the convent than they ever would have out in the real world. They bought and sold their individual homes within the convent walls. They could vote on matters that affected the community. They were not in the least controlled by husbands or fathers. Of course, many women also entered the convent to lead a life of prayer as a nun, but it was a life very different from those who just wanted to escape the control of men and the violence of conquest.

I paid for the tour of the monastery, which I highly recommend. It cost only 20 soles, lasted an hour and was a private tour with a very knowledgeable guide. She was a native Arequipeña and answered all my questions very thoroughly. After the tour I was free to spend as much time as I wanted going back through the alleys, homes, plazas, cafés and churches. I probably spent another two hours there after the tour. The café has excellent espresso and pastries, baked by the remaining 30 nuns.

After leaving the peaceful solitude of the convent, the noise and bustle of the city was a bit of a shock. I walked through the busy streets, admiring the colonial architecture and modernity of the city. Some parts of it reminded me of Istanbul, with wide walkable avenues full of modern shops, many of them international brands. The central Plaza de Armas was straight out of Spain and reminded me more of Seville than anything I had seen in Cusco.

The next day I set off early for a two day tour of the Colca Canyon. The very beginning was what I was most looking forward to: driving up to the high plateau above Arequipa to spot vicuñas. The guide explained that they were wild and that centuries of attempts at domestication had failed. They are similar to llamas and alpacas, although much more lithe, like an antelope. The only usable wool on them grows in a puff on the chest. It looks like a white pom-pom on a short haired animal, with the coloring of a deer.

According to the tour guide, the accepted method of shearing that pom-pom is to join hands in a solid line of up to a thousand people, then march off, singing and yelling at the top of your lungs. A crowd with enough noise, moving at a steady pace will frighten a family of vicuñas into standing still long enough for the line to close around it. Still singing and yelling, the circle walks them to a corral and draws closer to push them through the opening and shut them in the corral. This sounds far-fetched, although it is exactly what a journalist described in a travel magazine I had read.

Being a protected species, they get a check up from a vet after having the white chest fur shaved. The penalty for killing a vicuña is ten years in prison, and the wool is so expensive that the local villagers have a lot of incentive to keep the populations healthy.

After stopping for a few vicuña sightings, and a marshland with hundreds of llamas and alpacas grazing on thick mats of swamp weeds and slime, we made it to the high point of the drive. The guide warned not to try to jump or run when we got out of the bus. Having hiked up to about 15,000 feet the week before I wasn’t too worried about stepping off a bus at 16,000, but I was still careful not to move too quickly. I got my picture taken by the rock labeled 4910 meters, then climbed back on the bus to breathe as evenly and deeply as possible. A Polish tourist wasn’t as lucky and fainted when she tried to stand up for the photo op. Fortunately there were plenty of people to catch her and carry her back on the bus. The guide had a bottle of some kind of alcohol that he put under her nose to bring her back. It worked and she was fine the rest of the afternoon. The altitude was hard on most of the people in the group, who all recovered from their headaches when we went back down to a reasonable 10,000 feet for the next stop.

The afternoon was low-key with a walk to some pre-Incan ruins and a soak in some hot springs. The next morning we got up early to get out to the Colca Canyon for the other highlight of the trip: condors. 

The guide cautioned that as with all wildlife, he couldn’t guarantee anything. Some days there were a lot of condors, but sometimes the tour ended before any were spotted. He had a lot of interesting information about the life cycle of condors: they return to the canyon they hatched in to nest and a female usually lays two eggs every two years. Full grown juveniles are a dark brown until 8 years old when they finally gain the jet black plumage and white neck ruff of an adult. If they can’t find enough carrion to scavenge close to home, they will take off on trips for several days at a time. From Colca Canyon they can glide hundreds of kilometers out to the coast, to feast on a dead seal or whatever has washed up on the beach before returning home. There are only about forty left but the population is starting to stabilize after almost being extinct in the wild just a few decades ago.

You can walk right out to the cliff and sit on the edge with the wind rushing past you. The condors glide on the thermals and brush past the tourists, not even acknowledging your presence. They own that canyon. As hoped, the condors flew close and circled overhead, appearing to play on the currents of wind that swirled up out of the canyon. I saw two adults and five or six full sized juveniles which were a dark brown. They wheeled above me, drifted down into the canyon and caught a thermal to ride back up to the rim of the canyon. I took a few pictures but mostly sat back to watch them. That night I had to take another bus back to Lima, where my Peru adventure will end. I gazed across at the condors gliding close by, trying to catch their eyes, trying to understand how they see their home, making a promise to myself that I would come back.

Plaza de Armas

The center of historical Cusco is full of locals meeting up, tourists taking pictures, vendors selling everything from coffee and sandwiches to selfie sticks. Of course, the even present dogs seem to be in charge of the place.

The Sacred Valley

The archeological sites at Pisac, Moray and Ollantaytambo are all impressive for their original architecture and current state of preservation. The restored walls below, at Ollantaytambo, were not reconstructed with the same precision and care as the original, but they still give us a good idea of what it once was.

Alpacas

The high planes on the way to Colca Canyon are covered with alpacas. They are more adapted to higher altitudes than llamas because of their thicker wool and smaller mouthes and teeth which are better at eating smaller, high altitude plants.

Convent Condos

Like other convents in colonial Peru, the Santa Catalina convent, was a city within a city, where women could be in charge of their own lives. Women here could own property, buy and sell their own homes and vote. They could make decisions and had control over their own lives in a way that women on the outside could not.