Peru - Andrew, Debra & Lilly · June 22 – July 14, 2024
Peru had been on the list for a long time — long enough that when we finally booked it, we booked all of it. Three weeks, covering as much of the country as we could manage: the desert coast, the Nazca lines, the Sacred Valley, Machu Picchu, Lake Titicaca, and the Amazon. Sam decided not to come. He has since mentioned, more than once, that this was a mistake.
We started on the coast, where the landscape couldn't be more different from what most people picture when they think of Peru. The Huacachina oasis sits in the middle of enormous sand dunes — proper desert dunes, hundreds of feet high — and the way you see them is by dune buggy. Our driver clearly regarded the whole thing as a chance to induce maximum panic: careering along ridges, nosediving down sheer sand faces, everyone screaming in unison on every drop. After the buggies, belly boards. You lie flat and go. Debra, characteristically, chose the biggest run at the end. I watched from a safe distance.
[PHOTO: dune buggy on the sand dunes, Huacachina]
[PHOTO: Debra sandboarding the big dune]
From there, a flight over the Nazca lines. You can climb a tower to see them from the ground, and we did that too — but the tower just about shows you one or two shapes. The flight shows you everything: the spider, the hummingbird, the astronaut, the monkey, the hands. Lines that run for kilometres, perfectly straight, visible only from the air. How and why a pre-Inca civilisation created them, with no means of ever seeing the finished result, is one of those questions that sits with you.
[PHOTO: Nazca lines from the air]
The Sacred Valley was the heart of the trip. We had a guide and driver for the whole time — and they were exceptional, making all the difference between ticking off sites and actually understanding what you were seeing. We based ourselves in Ollantaytambo for several days, a town that's something of a living ruin in itself — Inca stonework still forms the walls of houses that people live in today, and a sun temple rises above the town on the terraced hillside. From there, we visited site after site across the valley: massive ancient cities, now just walls, but still extraordinary in their scale and precision. Wherever the Incas put a stone, it stayed.
[PHOTO: Ollantaytambo sun temple terraces]
[PHOTO: Sacred Valley ruins from above]
The food deserves its own mention. Little restaurants around the town square in Ollantaytambo with a simple but perfect formula: a big wooden board, a hot plate in the middle with your choice of meat or vegetables sizzling on it, and surrounding it a collection of small containers — roasted vegetables, dips, sauces, things you couldn't quite name but kept reaching for. We ate like that several evenings running and would happily do so again.
The Maras salt mines were one of those places that photographs don't quite prepare you for. High in the mountains above the valley, hot salty water seeps out of the hillside and is channelled into thousands of salt pans — terraces of shallow pools climbing the whole hillside, each one a slightly different shade of white or pink depending on its stage of evaporation. Little stone dams, clay-tamped edges, people moving slowly up the paths carrying heavy bags of salt. It has been worked this way, by the same communities, for centuries. There's something almost meditative about looking at it.
[PHOTO: Maras salt pans, hillside of white terraces]
Machu Picchu was the centrepiece, and we went in properly: the train from Ollantaytambo, then into the town at the base, where we met the owner of the guide company himself. Then the bus up the switchbacks to the gate. The thing about a place that famous is you arrive with such a heavy freight of images and expectations that it could easily disappoint — and it absolutely didn't. What no photograph really captures is the location: the ruins don't just sit on a mountain, they cling to a ridge with sheer drops on three sides, the peaks of the Andes stacked behind them into the cloud. It's dizzying in the best possible way. The llamas wander through the terraces as if entirely unbothered by the whole spectacle, which seems about right.
[PHOTO: Machu Picchu from the classic viewpoint, peaks behind]
[PHOTO: llama in the ruins]
Lake Titicaca hit differently. The altitude had been building — at one point on a bus journey we passed through a stretch at roughly the same elevation as the summit of Mount Rainier, and my body objected strongly. I spent a couple of days feeling genuinely awful: nauseous, alternately burning and freezing, sleeping badly. On Lake Titicaca we first visited the Uros people, who still live on the floating reed islands they construct and maintain themselves on the lake's surface — a way of life that stretches back centuries and continues today, these improbable little communities moored on the water. We also saw houses built on stilts, the water level of the lake changing so dramatically that you have to build for it.
Then we stayed a night on one of the islands with a local family, who met us off the boat and brought us into their home. That evening was party night: Debra and Lilly were dressed in traditional costume and danced with the family. I sat and watched, still fighting altitude sickness, shivering through what should have been a wonderful evening and was, despite everything, still pretty wonderful. The next morning we walked up and over the island for a music show and a tour — tough going at altitude, every uphill step an effort — but the views across the lake were extraordinary.
[PHOTO: floating reed islands, Lake Titicaca]
[PHOTO: Debra and Lilly in local costume on the island]
[PHOTO: view across Lake Titicaca from the island]
The Amazon was the final act, and it was a different world again. We were on a proper river boat — sit-down meals, waiters, a level of comfort you don't quite expect when you say "the Amazon." River dolphins surfaced beside us as we moved through the water, pink shapes rolling in and out of view. The routine was boat as base, small boats as transport: out every day in little craft through the tributaries, narrow channels under heavy canopy, to visit local communities. Each trip felt like pushing a little further into somewhere genuinely remote.
[PHOTO: river dolphins from the boat]
[PHOTO: small boat on an Amazon tributary]
Three weeks in Peru and we barely scratched it. Lilly came home full of stories. Sam came home full of regret.
Tags: travel, Peru, South America, 2024, family
