The wonders of Peru
|
||
 All Along Destinations Get in gear Going Strong Outbound Real deals Sensible traveler Taking Off Where they went
|
||
To Linda Bowman, Peru is one of the most fascinating places on earth. "It has the greatest number of ecosystems in the world, from the Pacific Ocean to high, dry mountains, valleys with different microclimates, and glaciers that are second only to the Himalayas in height." Archeology is another of Bowman's interests, and Peru, of course, is rich in remains.
In September, she took her third trip in four years to the South American country. Her first two trips were archeology related, one with Elderhostels and one with Earthwatch. This year Bowman, 61, of Dorchester, and Lucille Bisagno, 72, of Petaluma, Calif., whom she had met on the Elderhostel tour, designed their own two-week trip with the help of Tropical Nature Travel (www.tropicalnaturetravel
.com, 877-888-1770). The women started in Chachapoyas, a northern city of 17,500 on the east side of the Andes Mountains. "It's called the eyebrow of the jungle," Bowman said. She had heard from people at Earthwatch about the area, first civilized around 800 and conquered by the Incas in the late 1400s. Bowman, an administrative assistant at the MIT library, sat in on an MIT course about the people of the ancient Andes. "The Incas were brilliant," she said.
Their first five nights were spent at Estancia El Chillo, a small lodge. "It had been a farm and was expanded. It was very rustic, and the courtyard had lots of orchids. It was just great."
Wild orchids were one of the many plants spotted during the trip, said Bowman, a former horticulturist with Community Gardening in Boston. "There's incredible diversity."
Their guide was fluent in English, and they also traveled with a driver, who was not. They often were on bumpy dirty roads. "The scary part was the hilly parts and going around curves," Bowman said.
One day they visited the town of Trita and the nearby burial site of Carajia, where visitors can look up at the hillside and see sarcophagi, or ancient coffins. There were also masks about 18 inches high that "looked like robed figures. It's all up on a cliff, where it's hard to get at. Also, people put their burial sites high up so their ancestors would be looking down on them."
Curious young girls followed them from the village, Bowman said. "One of them had just pulled a couple leaves off a plant, like reed leaves, and was weaving them together into a square while we went along."
The town of Trita "was incredible," she said. "There was a communal barn, and the old ways of land ownership and farming existed. The whole village held the farmland, and it was prosperous."
For the next stage of their journey, they flew south to "the white city" of Arequipa, Peru's second-largest urban area with 620,000 people, and considered the intellectual capital.
"It's in an area with very many volcanoes," Bowman said. "The city is beautiful. Many buildings were made with white stone."
Bowman loved Santa Catalina, a convent that was built as a self-enclosed city for the nuns. "It feels like going through a maze and is painted the most beautiful shade of coral, on stucco walls. It's beautifully preserved," she said. Nuns still live in a confined area, and the convent opened to the public only a few decades ago.
From there they traveled a few hours to Colca Canyon, purportedly the deepest in the world. "It's not terribly wide, and it's not as colorful as the Grand Canyon, but it has huge areas of agricultural terraces. In this area, they're still farmed," she said.
Most people visit for trekking, "but the other high point is to see the condors fly up from the canyon," which she did along with 100 or so other tourists.
The birds "wait for the morning sun to start the air currents. As hot air rises in the canyon, they catch the waves so they can get up high enough. We saw about 10 of them. Of course, if you get real close they're not that pretty, because they're actually buzzards."
Send suggestions to ddaniel@globe.com.
