Peru wishlist

Si, voy a ir Perú, finalmente!

So the first week of January I'll be taking time off from grad school to travel to Peru. Most people would immediately associate Peru with Machu Pichhu, and even those that do not know the name, will have seen and liked the iconic picture of a lost and ruined Inca city on terraced hill slopes, framed by the backdrop of a very green and sharply rising uniquely shaped hill, at some point.  But there's a lot more to Peru than Machu Pichhu, and the history of its civilizational grandeur goes back much  further than the Imperial Incas and their gargantuan Andean empire of Tahuantinsuyu. In fact if given the choice to visit any one South American country, I would blindly pick Peru.  It is not a huge country like Brazil or Argentina, but within a reasonable chunk of area, it encompasses astounding geographical diversity.  On the western Pacific coast, it is mainly desert,  from where the cordilleras of the Andes rise sharply forming the central spine of the country and the heartland of the Inca empire, and further east there is lush rainforest, jungle rivers running down from the wet windward mountain slopes in a mad rush to conceive the mighty Amazon.  Before developing any sort of practically feasible itinerary that'd let me do some sort of justice to this place, I followed my habit of daydreaming, romanticizing and remembering childhood fantasies garnered from picture books on history and wildlife, and adventure stories, and came up with a list of the top-10 things I'd ideally like to see in Peru!  Yes, very greedily touristy, I know.

1)  play with penguins in las Islas Ballestas  :  This beautiful set of islands just off the western coastal town of Pisco are branded as a poor man's Galapagos.  There are conducted boat tours to show off the islands' resident population of sea lions and penguins.

2) fly over giant sand dunes  :  The area around Nazca, famous for the giant patterns drawn on the desert floor by the ancient Nazca people for unknown reasons,  also features some of the highest sand dunes in the world. Nearby Huacachina is a meeting place for hippie types who get a nightlife going  in the desert and sandboard the dunes by day. Very gringo! But the idea of a very sandy duny desert several miles off the seashore is pretty neat. The lines are pretty but I'd prefer to look at them in books rather than take an aeroplane joyride over the desert exclusively for them.  They are just lines, which with some imagination become macaws or monkeys. It doesn't interest me unless the desert vista from the skies is really impressive.

3) colonial city in the shadow of looming volcanos :  One of the staple things I always like about visiting Latin American countries, is walking around the oldworld Spanish colonial city. The  town square with the giant cathedral, the charming mercados, the strange mix of the old and new, the people with their attention to living life aesthetically as evident from the brightly painted walls and the almost nonstop latin music (part of this I say sarcastically of course) :  the colorfully tragic spectacle of one culture that has brutally forced itself upon another.  Arequipa seems to fit the bill, and it's surrounded by giant volcanic mountains to add to the ambience. The nearby Colca canyon is supposedly deeper than the Grand Canyon in places. Arequipa also features the "Ice Maiden" Juanita, one of the star Inca era mummies.

4) sailing in the highest lake : Lake Titicaca has always impressed people , being such a big lake so high up.   Pictures of the Andean altiplano (high plateau) with bright sunshine and a vast shimmering expanse of rich blue water, reminds me of Ladakh, with llamas in place of lamas.  Unfortunately the more exciting Titicaca destinations seem to be on the Bolivian side, but I could still stop by this lake which I've heard so much about.

5) walk the stone streets of Cuzco :  The sacred capital city of the imperial Incas, which the Spanish couldn't quite exactly obliterate all traces of, has huge forts, and houses and cobbled streets built by the intricately well organized system of labor that the Inca lords had put in place.  Most of the population here is indigenous, Runa-speaking and looks back with pride upon its Inca heritage.

6) explore Machu Pichhu : A short but expensive trainride away from Cuzco, I hope I get some gorgeous pics of this place looking resplendent and verdant in the rain and mist.  Hiking around should be fun but I'll leave the more slippery sections to more intrepid souls. (My sentences are constructed in the indicative mood here because this is about the only place that I am sure of visiting right now.)

7) Watch Macaws in Puerto Maldonado :  This is jungle country, in the extreme east of Peru, and has one of the best organized rainforest tourism in the Amazon jungle I think.  The high points are walking over a really high canopy bridge, which lets you look at the treetop wildlife as well as pump some adrenalin looking down, and the macaw licks, where hundreds of these brilliantly colored birds straight out of my childhood picture books, congregate to look for dietary supplements.

8) Sail down the Amazon to Iquitos : This city is in the middle of nowhere, being the largest city in  the world that cannot be reached by road!  This is off the beaten tourist trail, and its history as a rubber boomtown raised right in the middle of the jungle probably inspired the epic movie Fitzcarraldo. A slow cruise on one of the merchant boats down the Amazon, which already begins to look awe-inspiring here, or one of its many tributaries, maybe into Brazil, meeting shy Amazon tribes on the way, could be a life-changing experience.

9) clamber up to Kuelap : The hills in the north feature the highest peak in Peru :  Huascaran. Not being a climber, I'd skirt round it and take myself to the majestic ruins of Kuelap, an epic in stone created by the Chachapoyan culture, deservedly the second-most famous ruin complex after Machu Pichhu.  Peruvian precolonial history comes in three major "horizons", a fancy term archaelogists have given to the major cultural eras they've found based on pottery and artefacts. Each horizon comes with its distinctive style of art. Earlier it used to be colorful ceramic pottery, but by the time of the Incas stone masonry was the prized art form, and they learnt to integrate their simple looking colossal structures made of piled-up blocks of stone with the natural lines of the landscape.  Kuelap and Machu Pichhu bear ample testimony to this.

10) Gape at the magnificient Moche : The Moches were one of the cultures from the older "horizons" and they have a quirky style of pottery that makes them my favorite pre-Inca culture.  It turns out that these guys had built some giant pyramids in the northern coast, near Chimbote.  The Inca did not like pyramids the way the Mesoamericans did, but Peru just has to have it all.

Now comes the sobering bit.  Doing this whole deal would take at least a month, and with the kind of time I have, I'll have to stick to the so-called "Gringo trail", the very touristy circuit that takes one from Lima to Cuzco, down the coast and across the hills.  Then add on the practicalities, the dicey mountain roads in the rains, the  constraints imposed by security issues, bus schedules, flight delays, acclimating to high altitudes, and potential traveler's diarrhoea from eating uncertain food,  and I am going to be forced to be picky.

This time I had to scale down the scope and ambitions of my plans, because I was apprehensive of traveling alone, this being my first extensive solo trip to some foreign locale. While being by myself will always let me follow my interests and appreciate the real things better, I'd generally prefer to be part of  a team when it comes to handling the boring practicalities. This also gives me some sort of insularity and a sense of security from the more unpleasant aspects of travel, and I mean an irritating fellow tourist as much as I do the criminal who preys on tourists.  Anyway so I have to be more proactive in dealing with people,  joining groups as and when needed, disassociating myself from the less pleasant types when not needed (hopefully a notebook to scribble journal entries in, and a cheap ipod would suffice in achieving some level of insularity), and play the game as it evolves.  If I like the deal, I might travel alone for longer periods in future, and do all I want to do. But ok that never happens!   Right now, Cuzco and Machu Pichhu remain at the core of my plans. The rest is all up to the travel gods.  I might sacrifice a pumpkin or two to them with the earnest prayer that my passport not get stolen, pretty please.