Category: Peru Bob

During my time in Peru, I’ve been amazed at how the natural world infused the Incans’ worldview. Machu Picchu looks like a condor when viewed from neighboring heights. The mountain near Picara is a crouching puma. And the Sacred Valley mirrors the heavens.

The Incans saw the familiar in the world around them, and they used their architecture to reflect those images back at nature.

I caught a glimpse of how strongly this impulse lives in the local people while walking near the Urubamba River with Hernan, a local woman and her two children. The woman pointed up at the cliffs in the distance and insisted she saw the shape of a car there. After squinting a bit toward the heights, I finally saw what she was talking about. This descendant of the Incans still looks for the familiar in the local geography, and if the similarities are more likely to take the shape of a diesel-breathing car than a soaring condor, so be it.

While in Peru, Wes and I wanted to sample the local delicacy called cuy, or guinea pig. We’d already seen them being raised in a local home. Now we wanted to get a taste of one.

Hernan and I have just finished a rambling hike down out of the hills that rise up out of the Urubamba River valley, and we’re standing on the main road.

“Want to go down to the river?” Hernan asks.

“Sure.”

We cross the road, and Hernan asks a woman there about the easiest way to get down to the water. She points the way and begins walking with us, smiling broadly. As we turn onto a trail that runs past her adobe home, her 10-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter join us. Most of the discussion in in Spanish and directed at Hernan, but when she learns I speak un poquito de Spanish she makes an effort to include me as we walk single-file on a narrow path that runs through corn fields toward the Urubamba.