The Sun Gate

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Casa Ollanta, Ollantaytambo. 20.15.

Today’s mission: Inti Punku, one of a number of “sun gates” scattered throughout the Sacred Valley. Situated atop a clouded mountain spur of snowbound Huayanay at around 3.830m above sea level, it is a formidable hike from Ollantaytambo, requiring a climb of over a thousand metres.

Since I had no intention of hiking the Inca trail to the gringo hotspot of Machu Picchu, the Inti Punku of Ollantaytambo was always the end goal of this adventure – the great hike at the end of my labours. I was told by a guide the other day that, provided I was young and fit, it would be no problem whatsoever.

Young is never going to be a problem. Fitness, however, is an interesting concept. I wouldn’t exactly describe myself as unfit, but I also would freely admit that I don’t exactly do a lot of exercise – beyond running about all over the place like a bumblebee at work. So the Inti Punku would be my test in more ways than one.

I set out early, but not too early. Too early for breakfast at the hotel, but not so early that the road was dark. I was lucky with the weather today: while the sun came and went throughout the morning, I was shielded from its high altitude fury by a merciful cover of cloud for most of the ascent. It rained on my descent, true, but not in the same way I experienced in the rainforest – more of a constant light shower, which was actually quite refreshing.

All the way up to the Sun Gate, I climbed in the shadow of Wakaywillque, more commonly known as Nevado Verónica, the largest of the mountains in the Sacred Valley.

It’s not yet winter here in Peru, but the snows of Wakaywillque are here all year round. Glaciers cling to its peak like frozen tears – an apt description, as its Quechua name literally means “sacred tear”. It was so named, or so the story goes, after Manco Inca’s flight over the Abra Malaga pass, signalling the end of the reign of the Inca in Peru.

The empty frame of the Inti Punku looks out directly onto the mountain. The Inca sun gates were built with the summer solstice in mind, framing the Sun at its zenith on the right day of the year. But I can’t help but feel the fact that this one faces the mighty apu of Wakaywillque was an intentional decision on the part of its architects. It truly is a spectacular mountain.

Tourists do come up here, though not in the same numbers that visit the more famous Inti Punku at Machu Picchu. I passed one group of five gringos coming back down the mountain, topped and tailed by a red-shirted Peruvian guide, and another solitary traveler, also accompanied by her local sherpa. They seemed surprised to see me heading up the sun gate alone. It is not a hard path to follow, though the road is dreadfully steep and cannot be rushed.

It took me nearly four hours to reach the summit, which is only partly explained by constantly stopping to look and listen out for the mountain’s wildlife en route. At times I was stopping after every ten steps – a reflection of the altitude rather than my fitness, I should like to think. I have climbed a similar height before with Skiddaw back home in the Lake District, but that hike starts at around 68m above sea level, not 2.792m.

I clocked several new species during the ascent, including a mountain variety of cuy, but I was accompanied for most of the journey by hummingbirds. I counted several kinds: mostly sparkling violetears (they really are everywhere) but also lesser violetears, black-tailed trainbearers, white-bellied and giant hummingbirds, and – at the summit – an Andean hillstar. I have become quite used to the sight of them flitting about from branch to branch, holding themselves almost stationary in the air while feeding from flowers and launching themselves into the abyss of the valley on tiny, invisible wings. I shall miss them when I’m gone.

The time of the Inca is long gone, but it is clear that the locals continue to venerate the mountain and uphold its traditions. Niches in the wall of the Inti Punku contain offerings of coca leaves, dried but still pungent, while a more elaborate altar had been prepared in the largest window of the sun gate. The fruit was fresh – it can only have been laid out there less than a day ago. A bunch of wildflowers tied together with twine had been placed in one corner of the complex, facing the snowy peak of Wakaywillque.

I have heard stories of locals hiking up to these sacred places to make offerings to the old gods and the ancestors in other places, but I hadn’t seen it in practice until today. It only makes the Inti Punku a more magical place.

I think I saw a condor soaring high above the summit, but it was gone by the time I made it up there. There are other birds of prey in these mountains, but I’m fairly certain of what I saw. Nothing comes close to the size of the condor. The mountain caracaras, buzzard-eagles and Aplomado falcons that I encountered might as well be peons to that giant lord of the skies.

I gave myself nearly an hour at the summit, which I had entirely to myself. As the rain came down, I took shelter in the largest niche (which mirrors the gate itself) and had my lunch. I wondered how many others had come here over the many hundreds of years this sacred site has stood upon this ridge. What did they feel in this spot?

It took me a lot less time to go back down than it had to climb up: two hours and fifteen minutes compared to the four hour ascent. It helps that it is entirely downhill: there are no instances of climbing down and then back up again (which you certainly notice at this altitude).

I made it back to Ollantaytambo shortly after two and promptly fell asleep – I was quite spent after my exertions in the mountains. It is easily the most hiking I have done throughout the Peruvian adventure.

But it is done. I have sailed the Pacific in search of pelicans and penguins. I have walked the northernmost sands of the Atacama Desert. I have witnessed the majesty of the Andean condor at unbelievably close range and wandered the mirror lakes of the altiplano in search of South America’s three flamingos. I have beheld Cusco in its Inca glory, journeyed deep into the Peruvian Amazon and seen giant otters, macaws, tapirs, toucans and even uncontacted tribes with my own eyes. Now, as a final quest, I have climbed up to the Inti Punku and seen the entirety of the Sacred Valley under the deathless gaze of Wakaywillque.

I have achieved all that I set out to achieve. I can go home with my head held high.

There remains one last adventure before I arrive at my front door. I must return to Cusco, catch a flight back to Lima, and then journey to the legendary city that never sleeps – New York – where I have a few hours to explore one of the most famous cities on the planet before my final flight takes me back across the Atlantic to the familiar shores of England.

I have used every single day of my Easter holidays. By the time I make it home, I will have been on the road for twenty-three days. Work must resume mere hours after my return – but at least I go back to it knowing that I have not let even a single hour of my holidays go to waste.

I haven’t found Her. But then, I wasn’t looking for Her out here. I came here, quite selfishly, for me – and I could not be happier with how things have panned out.

I will ride this wave of adventure-fuelled optimism through the summer term with all of its ups and downs knowing that, whatever happens, I have rediscovered what it is to be alive once again, and to live for myself. I will treasure that to the end of my days. BB x

Boy Scout

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Casa Ollanta, Ollantaytambo. 20.49.

I’m feeling much restored after a full day’s rest. As fun as it has been to have an extremely active holiday – chasing condors, salvaging boats and traveling the length and breadth of Peru – I definitely needed a break before the long journey home. After all, I will soon be back to the grind of lesson planning and curriculum design, so an ease-in to normality isn’t such a bad idea.

It was not an entirely unproductive day. I checked in to my flight back to Lima, packed my rucksack with the things I’m not going to need anymore and bought some supplies. I also managed to do a little wayfinding for tomorrow’s hike up to the Inti Punku – and it is as well that I did so, as the main road to the only bridge across the Urubamba River is out due to maintenance work. There is a side street that leads there by another road, but it took a couple of attempts to find, which will save me some time tomorrow morning.

I scouted out the route ahead with the zoom lens (which I probably won’t take with me tomorrow, as it is a pretty monstrous ascent). It looks to be a fairly straightforward climb, though it does zigzag a bit past the first slope. High up on the ridge, only just visible against the white sky, was my target: the Sun Gate itself. Google and AllTrails estimate a three to four hour climb, making it a seven hour round trip, there or thereabouts. An early start, then. I will need to be prepared. Plenty of water, sun cream, a few snacks and – most importantly – I will need to take it slow. I’m a regular mountain goat on mountain trails back in Europe, but we’re already nearly three thousand metres up here, and I’m not foolish enough to race up the trail at this altitude.

I sat up on a boulder just beyond the trailhead for a while and watched the world go by. The PeruRail came chugging by, moving at a crawl along the ancient rails. No wonder it takes so long to reach Aguas Calientes, the town at the feet of Machu Picchu, some fifty kilometres to the west.

I was curious about the cost of getting to Aguas Calientes, even if I had no intention of seeing Machu Picchu itself, if only because the famous Inca citadel lies within the same cloud forests that form the border of Manu. In short, I wanted to wind the clock back a week.

The train is clearly half the experience, as a one-way ticket price starts at 84$ for the unsociable hours, rising into the hundreds if you end up on the luxurious Hiram Bingham train. Tickets for Machu Picchu itself – for the curious – aren’t actually as expensive as the train fare, but they do need booking months in advance. When I checked the website, the earliest available slot was the 6th June. So it clearly can be done for considerably cheaper than the tour companies suggest. This is good to know, in case I ever get the urge to see the place one day… if there should ever be an ebb in the flow of the hordes of tourists. Somehow, I doubt that day will ever come.

The animal spectacular that was Manu, Paracas and the Pántanos de Villa is over. Ollantaytambo is full of exotic people, who have traveled from all around the world to begin their journey toward one of the new wonders of the world, but it is not exactly teeming with exotic species. Or perhaps I’ve simply acclimatised so quickly that the exotic has become normal.

I can now map my surroundings by sound. The birds, I mean. When I first arrived in Lima, I was lost. It was like being in a country where you don’t speak the language. After three weeks, however, my hearing has adjusted, and I can tell most of the common species by sound – in particular, eared doves, rufous-collared sparrows, Chiguanco thrushes, tanagers and hummingbirds. As such, I was able to identify a different hummingbird this morning on my way out, purely because it didn’t sound like a sparkling violetear at all.

I suppose it’s the same trick that I have always used with accents. I’ve recently stopped trying to alter my Spanish accent to the Peruvian, largely because it makes my Spanish sound less Spanish and more gringo. I didn’t grow up learning to use the letter S in place of the letters C and Z and I won’t start now.

Changing my accent isn’t something new. I do it all the time, even in English. The register I use varies wildly, depending on my location. The accent I employ when I’m dealing with parents at work is very different to the one I use when hailing a taxi, or when I find myself in the north of England. A friend of mine once said I was the only southerner he’d met who made their accent more northern – the reverse is a lot more common.

I may be a language teacher, but I’m not really a proper linguist – not in the strictest, grammarian sense. What I am is a pretty decent mimic, which makes accent acquisition relatively straightforward, and a good accent can mask a number of errors. But I’m done trying to adapt my Spanish out here. It’s taken years and a lot of listening to get my castellano to the stage where I can dupe even native speakers into thinking I’m a Spaniard, provided they hear me before they see me, and I’m not about to let go of that gift over an awkward desire to blend in.

I haven’t got as much reading done out here as I’d planned. I’ve been so busy during the days and I’ve fallen asleep within minutes of my head hitting the pillow each night, which hasn’t exactly made for good reading time. I fell asleep listening to Witi Ihimaera’s Whale Rider. It didn’t grab me like I hoped it might. Tonight I’ll give Michelle Paver’s Rainforest a try. She never misses – and now, perhaps, I will be able to picture the world she describes with my own memories.

Wish me luck on the hike tomorrow – I’m going to need it as much as I will need the oxygen! BB x

Mines and Mountains

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Casa de Ollanta, Ollantaytambo. 6.04.

My time in Peru is drawing to its end. In two days’ time, I will leave this beautiful country with its cloud forests, its condors and its coca tea and return to a land of Teams, terms and checking my emails on an hourly basis. I’m not vapid enough to lust after a life spent on the road – I strongly believe that at some point you have to be a responsible citizen and work for your community – but I always dread the returning shackles of my communication-based existence, with or without an adventure to sweeten the deal. I wish, if wishing were not in vain, that Teams and emails had never come to blight this world, to become a scourge for people like me – but the world is thus. Thus have we made the world.

I left Cusco at the slovenly hour of 6.40am yesterday with all of my belongings on my last organised tour of the trip: a guided tour of the Inca and pre-Inca sites of Chinchero, Moray, Maras and the unfinished citadel of Ollantaytambo, the last stop on my journey. It worked out cheaper than hiring a ride to Ollantaytambo direct from Cusco, and after six days in the Amazon I didn’t feel up to navigating the very affordable local bus service (which I’m sure is very reliable, but works entirely on know-how, which I am definitely lacking on this first visit to Peru).

Chinchero, the first stop on the tour, involved a visit to a local cooperative, where we were shown how cochineal dye was made. It was obviously geared toward the tourist trade, but it allowed me to lay my hands on a decent souvenir: a snug alpaca wool jumper (which I definitely appreciate here in Ollanta, which is a lot colder than the other places I have been).

Chinchero is what Cusco used to be: a quiet Andean town where a lot of the population speak Quechua and learn Spanish. But change is coming. To relieve the strain on Cusco’s Alejandro Velasco Astete airport – and improve tourist traffic to nearby Machu Picchu – the Peruvian government is building a brand new international airport just outside the city. When it is complete – most likely in 2028 – it will be both Peru’s second international airport (after Lima) and the second-highest airport in South America (after Bolivia’s La Paz). Construction is about 40% complete, but has ground to a halt in the last few months as the country’s politics have shifted to the presidential election – which, at the time of writing, is still to be decided, some three days after the election took place (though it looks likely that Keiko Fujimori will win the day).

It would mean that any future intentions of visiting Manu will be a lot more straightforward, but I do worry for Machu Picchu. Can it handle the tide that is coming? Will the proximity of an international airport help this region to prosper, or will it only usher in more and more day-trippers who have come here just to gawp at the view and take the perfect selfie – only to plaster it on their dating app profiles to look well-travelled, the way my generation once did with the Tiger Temple and Elephant Jungle Sanctuary in Thailand?

Our guide had the most mellifluous voice, whether he was speaking in Spanish or in American-accented English. It was almost hypnotic. He also really knew his stuff: I learned a lot about all of the places we visited during the day, even if I did wander off on occasion. A pair of American kestrels were nesting within the Chinchero ruins, and I had to observe these beautiful falcons for a little while. I had brought the zoom, after all – best it had some use on this fundamentally landscape-oriented adventure.

After Chinchero, we made for the bizarre terraces of Moray. These curious laddered circles carved into the earth are part of a potentially enormous complex that has yet to be fully uncovered. They were, I believe, a kind of pre-Columbian hothouse, an intricate agricultural system where each layer had a separate microclimate to the one immediately above, and could therefore be used to grow a large variety of crops. You can tell the difference for yourself just moving up and down the hillside, where the temperature rises and falls quite noticeably.

I’d seen the terraces of Moray countless times on GetYourGuide and various colourful billboards around Cusco city, but something I hadn’t appreciated were the tiny steps built into the walls, allowing passage from the lowest level right the way up to the top. I had always assumed people just climbed up and down – but then, the average Peruvian is very short, with men reaching a general maximum of 5’6”. I’d feel like a giant for the first time in my life if it weren’t for all these gangling Americans and German tourists spoiling my fun.

Tragically, perhaps that’s why my dating apps have really exploded out here. Maybe there really is something to be said for being 5’7” in a country where that isn’t considered short. Shallow, humbling, but potentially enlightening.

From Moray, we made a short hop through the town of Maras to the nearby salt mines upon which Maras’ fortunes were built. About 3,500 square basins of crystallised salt protrude from the mountainside, supplied by a saltwater stream that bubbles up from the rocks higher up. There were once five thousand of these salt wells, but erosion and regular earthquakes have destroyed many of them over the years, and the locals are (understandably) very protective of further exploration of what has been their primary source of income for potentially hundreds of years.

We’re still not quite out of the rainy season, so the mines aren’t in full working order just yet – that comes in July – but there were still a few local men toiling under the sun, shifting great sacks full of salt and restoring some of the dried-up salt wells.

After a buffet lunch in Urubamba, the driver took us to our last stop of the tour: Ollantaytambo, the usual staging post for travelers making for the Inca trail to Machu Picchu (or taking the easier route by train). Ollantaytambo sits between two formidable cliffs, into which have been built a number of watchtowers, fortresses and storehouses, with the aim of protecting this vital Inca town in the heart of the Sacred Valley.

That’s not the only thing they carved into the mountainside either. Under the right light, it’s possibly to make out the unmistakable profile of a face between the two military buildings on the mountain’s western face. It’s possible that the design is a mistake of nature, but from the way the rock is worn around the base of what would be its nose – and it is an extremely Peruvian nose – it’s a lot more likely it was carved out of the rock by the ancient settlers of the Sacred Valley, in imitation of an apu, an Andean spirit or mountain god.

Quite how they achieved this Rushmore-esque feat hundreds of years ago on a gradient that would make Philippe Petit blanch is beyond my ability to understand – but I can’t help but admire those ancient Andean stonemasons. It almost makes the nearby Skylodge suites hanging from the mountainside seem like a joke – almost.

Well, it’s 9am and I’ve had breakfast. I guess I should go out and do some exploring. I’m taking it easy today before trekking up to the Inti Punku (the Sun Gate) tomorrow in what will be my final adventure here in Peru, as was always the plan.

It helps that it’s cloudy. On a sunnier day, I might feel I was wasting the opportunity for some serious mountain-gazing. But after more than two weeks of constant activity (I really have been doing something adventurous every single day), I think I can justify a relaxed itinerary just this once. BB x

Paradise Lost

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Casa Tunki, Cusco. 23.20.

I’m back in Cusco. Same hotel, same room, same bed, even. I’m not sure if that makes the return better or worse. It’s like I never left… and yet so much has happened in the last six days. Can it really be true that I was in the Amazon Rainforest for nearly a week? Did I really see giant otters, quetzals, caimans and tapirs, or did I just dream it all?

In case you hadn’t picked it up already, I’m feeling genuinely quite sad. I’ve not had that feeling about leaving a place behind for a long time. It’s probably a combination of fatigue, consecutive 4.30am starts and extremely busy days, coupled with a legion of mosquito bites (the damned things seemed immune to even the highest factor DEET), but I imagine tangled up in all of that physical strain is also a genuine sense of loss.

I have never been to a place like Manu before. Where there are so many species of animal all around you all the time that you can barely keep track. Doñana comes close, but Doñana is relatively accessible. Bus timings aside, I could reach El Rocío within twenty-four hours of leaving my front door in England. Manu lies on the other side of the world and beyond: a full two to three days’ ride by boat and car from Cusco, over the Andes and far along the Madre de Diós River.

I will leave Peru in a few days’ time knowing I have seen and done all I came to see and do. I will be happy about that. But there is a Manu-sized hole in my heart. i didn’t feel this way about Bwindi, or Queen Elizabeth National Park, or Białowieza Forest. But I feel it here. I cannot explain why it affects me so. But it has.

We left Bonanza Lodge at daybreak. The fishing boat was where we had left it the night before, cleaned of all the silt and stones and shining in the sunlight. Our boat was moored a little way downriver – we had to move it to give ourselves space to haul the skiff out of the water last night.

I dozed on and off during the four hour journey to Atalaya. We stopped a couple of times at sandbars for loo breaks. The weather could hardly have been better, and the river had shrunk considerably, creating islands where there had been none before. My only regret with Manu is that we had not set out on a day like today. The things we might have seen!

We got to Atalaya Port just after nine, where we encountered a couple of other tour groups: one headed into Manu, the other headed back to Cusco (a three-day variant). Quite what they expected to see or achieve in three days when it takes at least one and a half to reach the park is beyond me, though perhaps they came for the hot springs. The bunch of loutish English fellas who got off their tour bus and went straight to the bar to buy booze and cigarettes gave a strong indication that they had not come all the way out here to see cocoi herons and black-faced antthrushes.

We said goodbye to our captain Felipe and his boat boy, Hugh, sending them off with tips for their service. I noticed that Felipe cut the motor every time he saw me angle my lens at something while we were out on the river. I almost stopped shooting because of that, so as not to inconvenience the others, but in my heart I was extremely grateful for his charity.

We saw the Río Madre de Diós one last time from the mirador where we had stood a few days ago, on a far wetter and cloudier day, before it vanished behind the trees, out of sight and out of mind, but not out of memory.

Having climbed steadily for most of the morning, the road from Atalaya forks sharply up into the cloud forests that mark the edge of the Andes. We stopped for lunch at a spot halfway up to Acjanaco (the pass over the mountains) where Rive had wanted to pause on the way down, only it had been raining hard then. Now, the sun was shining, so we could enjoy a short hike to see the twin waterfalls of Pachayoq – which may mean “master of the earth” in Quechua, if my work on piecing together their various suffixes is correct.

I guess I dawdled, because by the time I came down, the others had vanished. Rive too – but I soon realised where they had gone when I heard him whistle for my attention. They had gone up the road on Rive’s command, as he had found the thing he had brought us here for in the first place: not lunch, not waterfalls, but the real gem of the cloud forest: a quetzal.

Like the hoatzin, the quetzal is a bird whose name originated in the Nahuatl language of pre-Colombian Mexico. There, they were highly prized by both the Aztec and the Mayans for their spectacular green feathers. Moctezuma, one of the last Aztec emperors, had a headdress made up of more than four hundred.

Here in Peru, however, they are a shy bird of the cloud forests, and eagerly sought after by all the tour groups who pass this way. Lucky for us, Rive knew exactly where to look.

It would be the last wild encounter of the tour – and what an incredible find to end the trip. Certainly a lot more than “just another bird – like we haven’t seen enough already”, as the English louts from Atalaya brayed aloud over our shoulders while waiting for their cook to set the table.

After Acjanaco, the scenery changes instantly. The endless rainforest is gone. The slopes on the south side of the Andes are comparatively naked, marked by a few terraces and patches of eucalyptus trees. It is still beautiful – far more impressive than anything in Somerset – but it is not Manu.

I will recover from this maudlin reverie, I promise. But it does feel a little like saying goodbye to a lover who you fear you may never see again. I will simply have to make sure that is not the case. I’m stubborn like that.

We reached Cusco shortly after five – an impressively swift journey, considering twelve hours prior we had been deep in the rainforest on the other side of the mountains. Our driver Ale dropped us off one by one: first Jace, the Danish girls Katrin and Isabella and our guide Rive; then the German couple, Vera and Robert; and then me. I said a fond farewell to our chef Bernadino, who has been the beating heart of this expedition, never deprived of his enormous smile. I will miss that man – and not just because of his sumptuous cooking.

Farewell, Manu. It has been an honour. Tomorrow, I will head to Ollantaytambo, the last stage of my journey, for a few days of peace and quiet in the Sacred Valley. Between my work snapping away for all of six days and our exertions salvaging the boat yesterday, I think I have earned them. BB x

Strangers in the Forest

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Bonanza Lodge, 20.13.

The great Amazonian adventure is almost over. Like the macaws flying in shrieking groups across the river, I too will soon be traveling away from here. I am starting to get cold feet about leaving this place. I don’t have a choice, as I’m with an organised tour, and getting here without one would be next to impossible, but I can’t help feeling greatly attached to this place. There is something eternal about forests that pulls you in. Maybe it’s an inherited memory from years ago, before our ancestors left the shelter of the trees and walked out into the world.

Which is a very fitting image for what happened today.

Dawn breached like a golden whale through the clouded sky, bathing the forest in its hopeful glow. I haven’t had as many Amazonian sunrises as I’d have liked due to the inclement weather, but this morning made up for it.

We stopped off at the ranger station to sign out and fill out a couple of surveys. The posters in there about the pet trade stabbed at my heart like they did the first time – and, just like then, I seriously wondered what I was doing teaching when I could be out here, fighting for what I believe in. If I hadn’t pinned all my hopes on finding Her and raising a family, this is where I would be. Somewhere like this, anyway.

Flights of fancy aside, we set out for the river confluence we forded the other day, only this time we sailed downriver for a kilometre or so to reach Boca Manu, Rive’s hometown, so that he could vote in the presidential election.

I had almost forgotten that the rest of the world was still turning within the timeless shelter of these mighty kapok trees. Here, life goes on as it has done for millions of years. The sun rises over a misty canopy and sets to the shriek of macaws and the chirping of a thousand crickets. Politics feels so petty in a place like this.

Boca Manu is a world away from Cusco. This largely native community sits on the edge of the national park, where the Manu river meets the mighty Madre de Dios. So fierce is the flow of the combined rivers that the town is steadily retreating into the forest. The jetty is a few slabs of wood fastened to several oil drums with a plank bridge leading up to a tiled section of the riverbank that was once a couple of houses, long since lost to the river. Only the scaffold of a single wall remains, and it has been converted into an advertising post for the local ferrymen.

My companions set out for a walk into town while Rive went to cast his vote for one of the thirty-six contenders for Peru’s next president. I followed, albeit at a distance. From the way people stared, I don’t think Boca Manu gets many visitors. It’s certainly wouldn’t be on the itinerary if not for today being election day.

For the second time on this trip, I saw a case of jungle domestication. If I hadn’t met the resident macaw at Bonanza, I might have been more startled when a red howler monkey suddenly appeared out of nowhere, slipping through a farm gate and into a kitchen window, before the monkey’s owner, a small boy not much taller than the monkey itself, came back out with the howler wrapped protectable around his back.

It would be so easy to judge with a European eye, and yet I am sure these animals mean more to the locals here because they can name them. In our rush to become civilised, we have become worryingly nature-blind in the West. If I should be so lucky as to have children of my own one day, I will try to teach them what I know. When you a put a name to something (or even someone), it suddenly matters a whole lot more than it did before.

I dozed off on the boat, but was stirred back out of my reverie by a slightly cautious word from Rive: “Native people, on the bank of the river”.

I looked with my eyes first. Sure enough, there they were: brown figures at the forest’s edge, watching us. A man and woman, dressed in little but string and strips of cloth, flanked by a couple of grinning children. They stared at us at first, and then waved enthusiastically in our direction. A fifth child watched from the shadow of the trees, one finger in his mouth, unflinching.

I counted five, but Rive assured us that there would be a great deal more hidden away in the trees who would appear if we got too close. We respected the law of the land and moved on, feeling the curiosity of their eyes burning into our backs as we sailed on up the river.

Manu National Park is home to an unknown number of indigenous uncontacted tribes, some of the last people on Earth to remain beyond the reach of civilisation. Some were driven into these protected forests by conflict with farmers and miners over the Brazilian border. Others have been here since long before the borders of the park were drawn.

A Proto-Arawak people, the uncontacted tribes are divided into family groups throughout the vast area of forest stretching west from the river to the cloud forests at the foot of the Andes. They are only very rarely encountered on visits to Manu, which is all to the good, as their interactions with us in the past have not always been friendly. Camera traps around the lakes show that they have been known to trail visiting tourists on their walks through the forest, running silently through the trees and making their presence known only by their splayed footprints in the mud and, sometimes, bows, arrows and woven baskets left behind in a panic.

It’s dark out there now. I wonder what that family is called. What hopes and ambitions those young children have. The tribes are known to fight and each other over each other’s women – an important economic force in these communities, since more women means more babies, and more babies means a stronger community. Another side note that we have chosen to ignore in the West.

Back at Bonanza, the weather continued to be exceptionally kind – an apology, perhaps, for all those days of rain.

We had two hours to rest. I spent them exploring the grounds, chasing after a sunbittern that was lurking around the flooded ditch by the lodge and watching an adorable troop of squirrel monkeys feeding in the trees just behind my cabin. I’d forgotten how hard they can be to photograph as they move numbly through the canopy, especially once they’ve become used to your presence and no longer stop to stare at you out of curiosity.

I wonder – do they look at us the same way we looked looked at those native people at the edge of the forest?

After a chat with Rive about the natives over a bowl of Bernadino’s homemade snacks, we went into the forest to look for bats roosting in the great kapok tree. The flooded creek was still nearly waist high in parts, so we couldn’t reach the observation tower to watch the parrots flying in to roost at sunset, which was a shame. Seeing a different kind of bat made up for it though.

Instead, Rive suggested going to help the lodge’s boys retrieve their sunken fishing boat from the river’s edge. We had noticed it on the day we arrived, visible only by its prow sticking out of the water. Weighed down with the sheer volume of rain the night before we arrived, it had tipped over and the river had done the rest, filling it with silt and stones.

I was delayed because I had set out into the forest to try to track down a tinamou that was calling just metres from the forest path. They’re exceptionally hard to locate, though, being cryptically camouflaged and calling from the shelter of the thickest parts of the undergrowth. To make up for my lateness, I stripped down to my shorts once I got there and got into the river up to my neck with the rest of the men.

It took a team of twelve men in the water and another support team of gringos on the rope up on dry land the best part of half an hour (and no shortage of pivoting and digging) to get the job done. Led by our captain, a burly native man from Atalaya who engineered a makeshift tourniquet using logs and thick rope to drag the skiff closer to the shore, we eventually managed to haul the fishing boat up and out of the mud. It felt good to be helpful, rather than just coming and going through Manu like any other passive tourist.

I also learned at first hand why the uncontacted tribes have remained so, with civilisation so close at hand. Swimming from one side of the sunken skiff to the other, I found myself more than a metre from the riverbank. It dropped steeply all of sudden, deeper than I could reach, and the force of the current dragged me downriver. The only reason I didn’t get carried far was because I wasn’t that far out and I had the boat to hold on to.

I’m not the most powerful swimmer, but I don’t think even the strongest swimmer could fight a current that strong. In the dry season, the river isn’t quite as high, but it still flows with the cumulative force of hundreds of miles of rainwater, and the ground here is sloped as it climbs up into the cloud forests and becomes the Andes once again, adding to its momentum. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a river where the water wasn’t level before today. I’ve certainly never been in one that was quite so strong.

Dinner felt earned after that – as did the cold shower immediately afterwards. I stuck around outside for a while before heading back into my lodge to sleep, as the night sky was too good to miss. Accompanied by the eerie flash of fireflies below the skyline, an enormous arm of the Milky Way cut right overhead, flanked by strange new constellations that I’ve only ever read about in books, like the Southern Cross. I might have seen it briefly in Uganda, too, but I was only south of the Equator for a few days. And anyway, that was a very long time ago.

I don’t know when I’ll see a sky this clear again. The only light here comes from the dim lamps in one or two of the lodges, and the nearest town, Boca Manu, is many miles away to the north. So here, deep in the Amazon rainforest, you can see the night sky as it was always intended to be: immense, magical and unspoiled, like the rainforest all around me.

I don’t want to go. My clothes would really appreciate being somewhere higher and drier (especially after my dip in the river), but this place has got into my heart like nowhere else in Peru – and I’ve adored pretty much every part of this country that I have seen.

But going is tomorrow’s business, not tonight’s. I should get some sleep – we have an early start and a long journey tomorrow. I’ll let the rainforest sing me go sleep one last time. BB x

River Wolves

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Bonanza Lodge, Manu NP. 14.29.

Some days are red letter days. I should have known today would be one of those days when I woke up and it wasn’t raining.

After three days and nearly sixty-six hours of on-and-off rain, the sun had returned. The forest looks so different in the sunlight. I had almost forgotten what being dry felt like.

Our destination this morning was the macaw clay lick or collpa in search of parrots. Bernardino sent us off with a packed breakfast and Rive led us deep into the surrounding rainforest, with the caution that the macaws would not come in the numbers that they do in the dry season, owing to the abundance of fruit-bearing trees at this time of year. As such, I wasn’t expecting much – so I wasn’t overly disappointed when the only psitticaforme to put in an appearance (beyond the distant flyby pairs of macaws) was a couple of orange-cheeked parrots. They were adorable to watch, but they weren’t quite the spectacle that this place sees in the hotter months.

Eager to find us something to celebrate, Rive went out into the rainforest and came running back a half-hour later with the news that he had found a Fer-de-lance snake – the deadliest snake in South America and one of the most dangerous denizens of the Amazon – near the mammal clay lick a short distance away. Leaving our supplies in the macaw hide, we set out after him.

Sure enough, it was sitting right where Rive had found it: a beautiful and deadly viper, whose untreated bite is fatal. I didn’t need to worry about getting close enough for a good photo, as the lens was the perfect safeguard.

While we waited out the final hours, a troupe of squirrel monkeys and an accompanying pair of capuchins kept us company. I had been hoping for a close encounter with some of South America’s monkeys since we entered the park, and I wasn’t disappointed.

Back at the lodge, Rive called in a few favours and managed to secure us a couple of extra hours on the lagoon so that we could search for the otters again. Visits to the lake are strictly controlled by the rangers, but since we had laboured fruitlessly under a downpour the day before, Rive was given the green light to take us out again.

While the sun was shining (and the forest was suddenly absolutely sweltering) we rushed to wash and dry our clothes – they were, it must be said, a mass of damp and sweaty fabric by this point. While I was coming and going, one of the lodge groundskeepers approached with a smile and asked me something I didn’t at first understand: “¿quiere el gripotú?”. It was only when I realised that – just like our guide – he was saying a bird’s name in English that I gathered he was offering to show me a great pottoo. It was high up in the tallest tree, unmoving, looking for all the world like an extension of the branch upon which it was sitting, but this Leandro was able to point it out. I was very grateful – hard as they are to find, I was hoping to see one of these cryptic creatures out here.

After another incredible spread put on by our chef Bernadino, we set out. Hoping for a change of fortune, I doubled back and took my rosary this time. Maybe the Lady of the Marshes would give us the luck we needed to find the river wolves of the Cocha Salvador.

And she did. We had hardly been standing at the dock on the concha when our boatman called out “otter otter!”. We got into the catamaran and drifted out into the lake, but didn’t need to paddle the thing far – the otters came straight to us!

Giant otters are found only in South America. The largest of them – the dominant male and female of each family – can grow to an astounding two metres in length. They were hunted to near extinction a few decades ago when overfishing and the demand for otter fur purses led many wily Peruvians to export their pelts for great profit, but in places like Manu they have been able not only to survive but to thrive. Hundreds of otters are estimated to live in the conchas along the Manu river, with each family staking out a territory of their own.

They’re very endearing to watch, whether they’re hunting, eating or just playing around. The locals call them lobos – wolves – rather than nutrias (the Spanish word for otter) on account of their habit of forming family packs around a dominant male and female, but when they’re hauled out of the water and rolling around looking for a comfy spot, they look a lot more like very long cats.

Another tour group was waiting for us to return with the catamaran, so we couldn’t hang out with the otters all afternoon – which is just as well, because my arms got absolutely mauled by the lake’s biting flies, which didn’t seem to be bothered by the DEET I had applied before setting out. My right arm in particular looks like a measles case. We were dropped off at the second of the lake’s two docks, putting a large roost of long-nosed bats to flight from under the jetty as we arrived. I hoped to catch one in flight, but I got luckier: one of them landed on a tree by the jetty and clung to the trunk, watching me from those tiny, beady eyes. It only took off when one of my companions returned from the forest and stepped out onto the jetty.

Before heading back to the lodge, Rive took us on a night walk through the forest. The rainforest is a magical place in the first half hour after sunset: a symphony of birds coming off shift and insects and amphibians taking their place. Tinamous whistling mournfully in the undergrowth and woodcreepers echoing their cries from the canopy. The descending hoot of a pygmy-owl, the beautifully sad song of the ant-thrush and the piping calls of poison frogs from the leaf litter. What an incredible place this is!

Incredible – and also incredibly dangerous. As if the poison frogs weren’t enough, we found an enormous cane toad, many tremendously large spiders and two scorpions, including this especially monstrous individual clinging to a tree trunk near the river. I’ve been checking my boots and shoes twice as carefully ever since!

Bernadino had prepared another incredible feast for dinner, which felt like a triumph after the day’s work. Rive was pleased: essentially, we had ticked every box so far but the jaguar, and that was always going to be a Herculean task during the rainy season, with the sandbars all submerged by the swollen river and the mornings much too rainy to encourage any of the great beasts out into the open.

Tomorrow we begin the twenty-hour trek back to Cusco. Eight hours in the boat as far as Bonanza and then another twelve from there. I am very happy with all that I have seen, and I am ready to return to civilisation, but I still want to come back. In my heart I know that I am not finished with Manu. It has been a very special place. Someday, I hope I will see this place again. It is already imprinted upon my heart like so many places: a lighting tree in Huelva, a porch in Boroboro, a smooth boulder on the cliff at Finisterre.

Someday, Manu. Someday. BB x

Strange New World

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Jaguar Ecolodge, Manu NP. 20.07.

Shortly after eight this morning, we crossed over into the Reserved Zone. After three days of travel through Manu’s enormous national park, we have finally arrived at the inner sanctum – where the wild things truly are.

If it had stopped raining for even a minute or so of the eight hour journey upriver, we might have seen a lot more of those wild things than we did. As it was, the rains had swollen the river to a monstrous size, swallowing up most of the sandbanks, so the only creatures that were much in evidence were the water birds – who probably would have been there anyway.

All the same, it is hard to describe just how incredible this place truly is. The mountains are far behind us now, concealed by the clouds that covered our approach. Now it is only the river and the forest in every possible direction.

It’s surprising how quickly you get used to the sight of free-flying macaws; birds that until now I have only ever seen as captives of the pet trade. Pet parrots are such a thing – or at least, they were in my childhood – that seeing them wild almost feels like the reverse of normality.

So many of the iconic birds live here in Manu: blue-and-yellow, red-and-green and the iconic scarlet macaw. There was a scarlet macaw at the Bonanza lodge this morning, in fact, sheltering from the rain. A “free pet”, according to our guide, who comes to the lodge because of the prospect of handouts (and, evidently, shelter). There is little need for a cage when the animal is already in its natural habitat, I guess.

I realised only when we got to our destination – the Jaguar Eco Lodge – that I have finally lost my first object of this trip. Frustratingly, it’s my card reader. It’s not the end of the world – I’ve managed every other adventure without it – but it does make blogging on the go a lot less feasible as I can’t share the photos I’ve been taking on the go. I guess you’ll just have to wait. I’ll have to backdate these posts anyway, as I’m already three days behind – power has been a precious commodity, WiFi even more so m, and more importantly, I haven’t wanted to waste even a second on my phone when I’m out here in one of the most beautiful places on earth.

After a five o’clock start, we got back into the boat and sailed downriver to Boca Manu, where the Madre de Diós meets the Manu river. Our first port of call was the ranger station, where we were officially signed in and registered. Of the 29 rangers that work within the park, 11 come from the native communities that live within its borders. That much was plain from the personnel at the station, who looked about as far removed from Europeans as the modern world allows.

They were exceptionally kind. If we were not on a guided tour, I would have liked to stop and chat for a while. After all, I once wanted to be a park ranger myself. If it hadn’t been for my dismal mathematical ability and my lacklustre scores in Biology – coupled with my desire to raise a family – I might even have followed that path.

Manu is home to 1.030 species of birds. That’s an astonishing one tenth of the birds that can be found in the entire planet. So I might be forgiven for being a little glum at the prospect of the seemingly endless rain continuing for a third day, grounding most of the park’s birds deep within the cover of the trees.

At least a few of the shorebirds were gracious enough to put in an appearance, on what little of the shore remained, including a few handsome cocoi herons, wood storks and a jabiru, a marabou-esque migrant from Brazil.

We even had the good fortune to see the sandy-coloured nightjars that usually roost on the sandbars. They had sought refuge on a sunken tree, and looked rather disgruntled at their change of roost.

After another unbelievably good lunch on the boat courtesy of our chef Bernadino, we made straight for the nearby horseshoe lake of Cocha Salvador in search of giant otters. The usual location, Cocha Otorongo, has been out of bounds ever since it was raided by one of the local uncontacted tribes eight months ago.

There are signs in various places warning you to stay away from the tribes, not so much because of the risk to your own life through conflict, but because of the far greater risk to theirs of disease.

It feels strange to be in a part of the world where there are still people in the forest who remain free and out of step with the world. I don’t know what to make of it.

Powerboats are not allowed on the horseshoe lakes or cochas out of respect for the local wildlife. There is a catamaran for use by guides and their groups, provided you bring your own paddles. We couldn’t see the otters from the jetty, so we set out along its south arc in search.

The cochas are a sanctum like nowhere else I have ever known. I must have counted over a hundred species of animal and bird in the space of a couple of hours, despite the driving rain that returned to lash us throughout our quest. There were at least four species of kingfisher out and about, and an impressive young tiger-heron, which wasn’t as skittish as herons often are and allowed us to float right past.

My companions looked utterly despondent as the hours went by, the rain came down harder and the otters remained invisible. But I was having a great time, though I would have traded an hour of the day for a little sunshine, if only to make the conditions for photography a little better (I had to crank my shutter speed right down and force a steady hand to compensate for how dark it was beneath those clouds).

Another American bird that kept us company on our jaunt around the lake was the anhinga, an extended version of the cormorant, whose habit of swimming so low in the water that only its long neck breaks the surface has given it the alternative name of “snakebird”.

However, while the otters remained beyond our grasp, my primary target for the day was met over and and over again: the utterly bizarre hoatzin, a plant-eating bird that looks like an unholy cross between a hawk, a parrot, a pigeon, a chicken and a cormorant. Understandably, perhaps, this half-breed is in its own family. I’m not sure any other bird family would admit it as it of their own.

It really is, quite literally, the ugly duckling of the bird world. And I absolutely love them in their weirdness.

The otters never did appear, but we were finally relieved of the rain and rewarded with a stunning Amazonian sunset as we sailed back upriver to the lodge. We even encountered a family of night-monkeys on the walk back to camp, but my lens couldn’t handle the darkness all too well. I guess I’ll just have to keep trying! There’s always tomorrow’s night walk.

That’s on write-up done. Onto the next one. BB x

Deluge

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Bonanza Lodge, Manu NP. 14.00.

After a full week of clear skies, Peru has decided to remind me that we are still in the rainy season.

When Sirius, the Dog Star, disappeared beneath a looming dark shroud and the first drops of rain began to fall, I knew we were in for a tropical storm, but I underestimated both its ferocity and its stamina. The heavens opened around eight o’clock last night and it was well past nine the following morning when it finally stopped. The reprieve was brief – brief enough to see us up the Madre de Diós river to our base camp at Bonanza Lodge, at any rate – before the rains returned with a vengeance. As I write, I do not know how long this spell will last, but I can only pray it is a passing tempest.

If it rains this hard again, our chances of seeing anything at the clay lick tonight are next to zero. We may even have to swim there.

This explains the look of concern on the manager’s face and her repeated plea to stay positive. I knew I was chancing it coming here in the rainy season, but the driest season is also the busiest, and I did so want to avoid the crowds. Besides, it’s not like I had the economy of choice. As a teacher my hands are tied when it comes to holidays.

So here I am, deep in the Amazon, bracing myself for a long, dark and probably very wet night.

Mary, mother of God. The river that brought me here was named for you. Show mercy and spare us from this endless downpour.

Fourteen Hours Later

The rain has returned. We were spared for the afternoon and most of the evening, but shortly before midnight it came down hard. It’s not torrential, but it is constant, beating down upon the iron roof of the lodge like a thousand furious fists.

But we did it. We saw the tapirs. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t worth bringing the camera, but I wasn’t to know. They’re tremendously skittish for such great beasts. A couple of seconds of Rive’s flashlight beam was enough to send them lurching off into the trees.

I’ll need to be up and ready to leave after five, so there’s little point in sleeping now. I might as well write and record.

After docking at Bonanza Lodge, we had an hour or so to prepare a night kit and then we set out into the forest after Rive, our guide. He packed light: a couple of strong torches and a machete. I don’t suppose you need much more to cut a path through the forest, day or night.

The rain had swelled the river considerably, so naturally it had a similar effect on the creeks between the lodge and the clay lick. Some of them had makeshift bridges laid across them. Others didn’t. The water was never as high as we had feared – that is, chest height – but it did reach well above the tops of my boots, so as well as wading through the water, we had to stop after each crossing to empty out half the contents of the creek.

All around us was the forest. In the dying light of the afternoon, it is a truly magical place. The flash of electric blue of a morpho butterfly. The eerie descending trill of an ant-thrush. The hooting call of some kind of monkey, faraway, indistinct. The ominous croak of cane toads and the repeated growl of a crested owl from somewhere high up in the canopy. Crickets – everywhere. Every now and again, the enormous roots of a magnificent kapok tree, the true lord of the rainforest, towering above the canopy.

I often needed to remind myself to look down at the path ahead, which was perilous – if not for the thick, sucking mud around the creeks, then for the armies of tropical insects all about. Leafcutter ants marching in single file along branches that might have acted as guide ropes. Spiders the size of butterflies lurking in webs strung out across the path. At least once, I saw a bullet ant, a fearsome denizen of the forest, recognisable by both its size and its solitary habits. Their bite is what gave them their name. A creature best given a very wide berth.

We reached the clay lick shortly after dusk, just as the light was beginning to fail. The watchtower sits well above the forest floor, overlooking a muddy clearing, pockmarked with the sunken wells of animal prints. A large bird – like a guan, but even bigger – kept us company as we laid out the mattresses and mosquito nets and laid out for a long vigil. Rive said it was a blue-throated piping-guan. I couldn’t see in the dark, so he showed himself once again a bloody good guide.

I might have got some sleep here or there. Or I might not. I’m not sure. I know I was woken when the first tapir arrived, and that I was already awake when the second appeared. I know that my camera struggled to lock onto the great beast, despite the brilliance of Rive’s torch beam.

Rive gave us the order around three o’clock to return to camp. Leading the way with light and knife, he escorted our sodden party back through the woods. I cared little for wet feet this time and simply plowed through the creeks up to my thighs. When the rest of you is already soaking, wading through a river isn’t as bad as it sounds.

We made it back to camp within forty minutes or so. I’ve left my boots out to dry on the steps, upside-down, and have used my shirt to dry their insides as best I can – they’ll be more useful from here on out than my hiking shoes. In a minute, I’ll need to be up and dressed again. The rain hasn’t let up, and it’s showing no signs of doing so, but we still have a long way to go. Two days of travel around its border and we aren’t even in the reserve yet. That’s just how big Manu is.

Was it worth it? To see a tapir – a secretive creature of the forest? Absolutely. To have even a glimpse at what Vietnam must have been like? Of course. But for me, the best of all was the soundscape. No YouTube video could ever recreate the all-encompassing magic of the rainforest at night.

Dawn is here – but I can’t see it. Maybe the deluge will stop before midday today. All I can do is hope. BB x

Into the Jungle

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Rainforest Lodge, Manu NP. 17.57.

I probably didn’t get enough sleep last night. I woke up several times between eleven and four and, in the end, I gave up trying to get to sleep. Honestly? I genuinely haven’t been this excited for a very long time.

Let me describe it to you. I’m sitting in a very comfy chair in Rainforest Lodge, on the edge of the Amazon Rainforest. No – within that rainforest. We hit the Amazon when the stands of eucalyptus trees died away on the southern slope of the Andes to be replaced with mile after mile of endless indigenous forest.

Frogs croaking. Crickets chirping. The shriek of macaws flying in to roost. The heavy wingbeat of a guan, a kind of Amazonian turkey. I can still see its silhouette up in one of the trees above the main lodge. Earlier, I heard the piping song of a toucan, and the quiet hoot of a faraway tinamou. And up above, enormous banks of cloud, like I’ve never seen before – unless it was in wildlife documentaries about this vast forested part of the world.

Rive, our guide, picked me up from Casa Tunki shortly after five thirty. It was a fairly quiet drive out of Cusco, as we had a lot of ground to cover. We passed Huacarpay early doors – I’m glad I’m not shelling out 180$ for a private tour to that place. It looked like a bit of a step down from Lima’s Pantanos de Villa (which, though a whim decision, really was top notch).

We made two stops. One in Paucartambo for breakfast, and another just before at the Chullpas of Ninamarca, a collection of pre-Inca tombs the Spanish ransacked years ago – but that the locals still visit with offerings in memory of their ancestors from time to time.

The Manu Road is famous for the quality of its birdwatching. Of the more than a thousand species that can be found in Manu, some five hundred or so can be encountered along the road. We didn’t see anywhere near that many of them, but that’s mostly because of the rain that came down hard during our passage of the long and winding road down through the mountains.

The forest seems infinite, and we haven’t even reached the reserved zone yet. These are what are known as the “habitable quarters” – the zona cultural. Already, in the last hour alone, I have seen more species than I could ever hope to see in Taunton in a single year.

This is a very special place.

We took a short walk along the road (as the rain came down) in search of cloud forest species. Most of them kept well hidden, though our guide did locate an Andean guan watching us from the side of the road.

We had a lot more luck after lunch with the hunt for Peru’s national bird, the Andean Cock-of-the-Rock (in case I didn’t already have enough Andean birds on my list). The breeding season may not be for several months – kicking off in September – but the local males keep a strict routine at their lek, cleaning their favourite perches and practising their dances for when the females come looking.

They’re fairly hard to miss, being a shade of orange so loud they might well be visible in the dark. I’m going into Manu without expectations – the thing I wanted to see most of all was a condor, and I was truly blessed on that front – but it was really special to see a bird so important to the Peruvians that they made it their national bird.

The lodge itself is an explosion of rainforest life. I’m having to lean heavily on the Merlin app to help me identify what I can hear: toucans, tinamous, tanagers, parrots, macaws, honeycreepers, earthcreepers and oropendolas. None of which I’ve ever seen or heard before.

I can’t see any charging stations, so I’d better leave it there. We set out early tomorrow for the Madre de Dios river at Atalaya. I have signal, which I wasn’t expecting (a begrudging thanks to Elon Musk’s Skylink) but I might run out of power at some point. So I’ll stop writing now and enjoy the sounds of the rainforest for a while. Dinner isn’t until seven – and I know it will be incredible, because our chef Bernardino is an absolute legend.

Wish me luck! BB x

N.B. Dinner was amazing, the night sky is even better (I saw a shooting star!) and there’s a changing station in the lodge – but not tomorrow, so I need to be prepared. But right now it’s raining with biblical proportions out there, so I’ll wait a bit for my phone to finish charging before making a break for it to my cabin!

The Drums of War

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Casa Tunki, Cusco. 14.12.

I can’t believe what I’m seeing in the news today. It’s like the world is going to Hell. Here in Cusco, you’d never know there was a terrible war taking place far away, over the mountains, across the ocean and the great sea of sand. Trump might have a habit of talking big game, but he is backed by the mightiest nation on the planet. I fear for the people of Iran.

As if I didn’t already feel cut off from everything that is going on, I am about to go off grid for six whole days. I don’t imagine there’s much signal in the Amazon rainforest, and I would rather not use up my phone battery trying to find out. During that time, Peru will elect its next president and Trump’s deal with have to be met – or else.

Once again, I find myself wondering with no small amount of irony that the most dangerous stretch of my South American adventure will be the layover in New York.

But isn’t that what this was all about? To get away from it all for a bit – from work, from loneliness, from the depressing chaos of global politics?

Having bought the boleto turístico, and with one day more in Cusco than I’d originally planned, I decided to go all in. 130 soles for 16 sites may sound good, but at 20 soles each, the average traveler is more likely to save money by paying at each site. Some are far away, like Tipón and Pikillaqta, four are in the Sacred Valley, one of them is in the middle of a roundabout in one of the busiest streets of downtown Cusco and two of them are art galleries.

However – I bought the ten day pass, so now I have to get my money’s worth. Tipón and Pikillaqta are too far away to be reached without hiring a guide and a vehicle, but I reckon I can do everything else on this ticket. At least now it feels like a proper challenge!

With Sacsayhuamán already achieved, first on my list was the Museo Histórico Regional. It’s worth visiting solely because it was the house of the incredible Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, a 16th century Peruvian nobleman for whom the expression “main character energy” might have been coined. Though Spanish by birthright, he was also the great-grandson of the Inca Huayna Capac, one of the last rulers of the Inca Empire known as the Tahuantinsuyo. Raised primarily by his Inca mother and uncle, he developed a profound admiration for his heritage and, assisted by the lavish education his Spanish father provided for him, he became the first great writer of the Americas. At 21, he left Peru for Spain, fought for the Crown in the Morisco Rebellion, and published many books about his native land and its people.

Understandably, El Inca is venerated here in Peru as both a defender of the native people and one of Cusco’s most illustrious native sons, whose works were influential for many famous statesmen and philosophers.

Another of Cusco’s greatest heroes is Tupac Amaru II, also of royal descent, who started a rebellion against the Spanish after witnessing multiple abuses of power at the expense of the indigenous peoples of Peru through his work as a muleteer. Unlike El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, however, Tupac Amaru met a grisly end, torn apart in a public execution in Cusco’s Plaza Mayor as a punishment for his resistance.

It’s worth noting that Tupac Amaru II was the first public figure to abolish the slavery of Black people in the Spanish Americas. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why Afeni Shakur decided to give her son the name of this legendary figurehead of indigenous resistance, knowing that such a powerful name could only inspire the young 2Pac to great things.

While it’s not on the list, I had to head downtown to find the enormous mural I’d seen on my way into town on my first night. I love a mural, especially when it tells a story, and one day I’d love to see Diego Rivera’s historical paintings in Mexico City. But for now, Cusco has its own retelling of the history of its people.

There are just so many details to pick up. The way the Spanish soldiers merge with the bodies of their horses, like centaurs, in imitation of the confusion the mounted soldiers caused among the natives, who had never seen a horse before. The war dog held on a chain by a Cistercian monk. The conquistadors gambling with dice over their stolen gold. The indigenous painter portraying the scene as a righteous conquest aided by a winged Santiago, under the instruction of a Spanish cleric. The bolas weapons of the Inca and the Spanish cannon.

You could read a hundred accounts of the Spanish conquest of Peru and still learn more from a painting like this.

This morning, I ticked off another two on the list: Puka Pukara, the Red Fort, and Tambomachay, the Resting Place. You’ll be offered a visit to these by any of the guides hanging around Sacsayhuamán, and they’re well served by the white servicio turístico vans – but, me being me, I decided to walk there.

It’s not that far. Tambomachay, the further of the two, is about an hour and a half from the centre of Cusco. It is mostly uphill, however, and I was lucky the weather was on my side: be it a favour of the Lady of the Marshes or no, I was protected from the sun by a merciful cover of cloud all the way there and back. I had my rosary on as I often do when I’m not sure if the road is safe or not, so I’ll chalk it up to a little divine intervention.

Even on foot, I still got there before the bulk of the morning’s tourist traffic arrived. It was worth the hike – steep though it was – to see a part of Cusco that I might otherwise have missed.

It also gave me the chance to check out Huayllarqocha’s small wetland reserve, which will have to be my substitution for Huacarpay. I didn’t see any of the grebes that supposedly live here, but I did see an Andean flicker (an American species of woodpecker) and a number of Andean ducks, a smart relative of the Ruddy Duck that can be found in North America.

Now that I’ve had some rest, I should go and pick up my washing from the lavandería down the road. After that, I should pack for tomorrow, before checking out the two art galleries and, with any luck, a performance of local music and dance at the Centro Qosqo de Arte Nativo.

I’m not sure if you’ll hear from me tomorrow. Like I said, going into the Amazon may well mean going completely off-grid. Either way, I’ll try to keep writing. The next six days are likely to be red letter days, both here in Peru and out there in the wider world.

Hasta la próxima. BB x