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The sky is pitch black, and the only sounds in the cloud forest are the sounds of insects. My guide, John Alba, leads me on his three-hour walk from the town of Cocatimba to Gocta Falls, one of the highest free-falling waterfalls in the world. On a dark path, you have no choice but to trust Alba completely. I take one careful step at a time on the steamy ground where I think I heard Alba’s last voice. Night falls as you arrive in a lush valley, and sunlight falls on the rushing water surrounded by endless cliffs. No other souls are visible. These are the words of Rocio Flores, owner of Gocta Natura Reserve, the ecolodge where I am staying. “People say this is like Cusco to him 30 years ago.”
Most people who visit Peru head straight to the highlands of Machu Picchu or the Sacred Valley to the south to see the engineering feats of the Incas. But here in the northern region of Amazonas, the climate is more tropical than in the Andes, and the most famous original inhabitants were the Chachapoyas, who were eventually driven out by the Incas. My partner Henry is Peruvian, and for the past ten years we have traveled with him to enjoy its major attractions, including trekking to Machu Picchu, floating along the Amazon River, and diving into bowls of ceviche in Lima. I have visited my home country many times. But until now, all I knew about this corner of the country were rumors of untouched ruins lost in the wild jungle.
On my first solo trip to Peru, I wanted to explore new terrain. Like many Peruvians, Marisol Mosquera, founder of Aracari Travel, is keen to show travelers that there’s more to this country than Machu Picchu, which is why I want to explore some of Peru’s lesser-known We enlisted her team to help us plan a 10-day adventure through hit songs. After exploring the ancient ruins of Amazonas, swoop down to Puno and Arequipa. There, Andean tradition and Spanish architecture combine against the backdrop of a volcanic landscape. Mosquera decided that the north was the natural place for me to start. The richness of Amazonas is like a landscape before dawn, shrouded in mystery and gradually revealed.
“This area may be one of the richest in Peru archeologically,” says Rob Dover, the first guide I paired with at Aracari. We are near the city of Chachapoyas, near the desolate site of Cambourin, on a mountain peak covered with wildflowers. Here, the remains of Chachapoya and his 500-year-old settlement, marked by the footprints of the Incas, stand facing the howling winds. The only other visitors are two grazing mares. In Amazonas, “it’s more rare to find nothing at the top of a mountain than to find something at the top,” Dover said.
Over the next few days, with the help of binoculars and many experts, my eyes have been trained to find those things. On the two-and-a-half hour drive from Cocatimba to La Jalca, the region’s first Spanish settlement, Dover and I join Peter Lerce, a German-born archaeologist who has spent most of his life in Amazonas. As we walked, he clocked over a dozen Inca and pre-Incan structures, all the while keeping his eye on explorers like American Jean Savoy, who started coming here in the 1960s in search of El Dorado. A wicked smile spread across his face as he spoke. Savoy is credited with “discovering” many of Peru’s ancient settlements, including Gran Villaya, a vast area with more than 30 ruins. “It’s easy to say, ‘A new city in Amazonas!’ It’s the lost city of Amazonas! There are ruins everywhere,” Lerche says. “Once counted, he had more than 250 ruins in southern Amazonas.” Some are unmarked and unnamed. With so few visitors elsewhere, nature is starting to take them back. The exception is Kuelap. This is such an impressive place that travel companies and tourism authorities hope to divert tourists away from Machu Picchu in the coming years. The high-altitude cable car, which opened in 2017, has made it more accessible. But visiting many of these places requires an experienced guide who knows where to look and who can give you an educated guess as to what exactly you’re looking for. in.
Despite what they left behind, Chachapoya itself remains a mystery. There is little written record of them or how they communicated. “Although linguistic research has been done, the only language that remains are words that are used only here and have no other origin,” Dover says.even those words chachapoya It wasn’t theirs. That’s what the Incas called them.
While there’s a lot we don’t know about how they lived, experts know a lot about how the Chachapoyas died. In 1997, farm workers at Lake Condor, a few hours south of Cocatimba, made a great discovery when they discovered a cave in the nearby mountains. They excavated a tomb containing more than 200 of his mummies. They were perfectly preserved for more than five centuries thanks to the cool and dry microclimate of the caves. Dr. Sonia Guillén, who looks after these animals at the Reymebamba Museum, explains that very few animals survived in the Andes because Spanish priests destroyed what they could find in order to introduce Catholicism to the region. do. “These mummies happened to be hidden for 500 years.”
Gillen knows each face well. A 13-year-old girl with her swollen eyes and long black hair is believed to have been her victim. Weavers identified by tools tucked into the cloth that encases the fabric. He was a bird catcher, and the net was pressed tightly against his body. Recently, Gillen and her team noticed that people have measuring instruments in their hands. “We make discoveries every day,” she says. I’m trying to imagine a world in which these mummies existed. How can we, when their teeth, nails and skin are all completely intact and yet we don’t know the language they spoke? And what else could be hiding in this hill, if their existence was unknown to us 30 years ago?
Mosquera took me south from Amazonas, through the jungle and into the Andean highlands. I expected Arequipa, a colonial city of Spanish-style buildings made of white volcanic stone, to be my jumping-off point for Puno on the shores of Lake Titicaca. However, the last flames of the political protests that began in December 2022 continue to burn. Instead, I will be staying in Arequipa, Peru’s second largest city. Its culinary tradition, most Peruvians would agree, far exceeds that of Lima. The center of Arequipa is walkable, making it easy to zigzag between historic monasteries and great food. I start at the place I always start when visiting Arequipa: Picanteria. These home-style restaurants are known for exquisite dishes such as rocoto he relleno, a spicy stuffed pepper bubbling with meat and cheese, and chupe de camarones, a creamy crawfish soup. There’s also a version of the country’s beloved purple corn drink, chicha his molada. In Arequipa, it is made by fermenting local black corn called guiñapo.
These dishes bridge the gap between before and after the Spanish arrived. The little black spuds in La Nueva Palomino Picanteria’s soup are chuños, which communities older than the Chachapoyas learned how to freeze-dry using frost. Evidence of this has been found across the Bolivian border at the ruins of Tiwanaku, founded in 110 AD. And chicha is the drink of the Incas, something I was reminded of when I met Franz Grupp Castello, director of the Santuarios Andinos Museum. In an air-conditioned museum just steps away from the street performers and ice cream vendors that crowd Arequipa’s main square, he takes me to see an Inca mummy named Juanita. It is believed that she was probably sacrificed around 1480, when she was 12 to 14 years old. When she was discovered in 1995 after the eruption of Mount Ampat, she was so well preserved that her hair still framed her young face. Traces of chicha were found in her stomach.
When I asked Grupe-Castello if he had seen the Reimebamba mummies, he said he was surprised at the idea that more than 200 of them could be gathered in one place. You will soon realize that there are many people in Lima who also don’t know about Juanita. As I discover new parts of this country that I thought I knew well, I realize that many of the people who call this country home are also just getting to know this country.
We end our trip by returning to Lima and spending the weekend anticipating familiar streets. But Mosquera introduced me to his “friend in town” Angie Pelosi, who deftly guided me from Michelin-starred restaurants in Barranco and Miraflores. Instead, she drives 30 minutes along the coast to the port city of Callao. Here you’ll find a port town with iconic salsa singers, great seafood, and a laid-back reputation. Pelosi is part of the team thinking about what can be done here. She helped found Callao Her Monumental, a space for aspiring artists focused on the local community.
We tour exhibits that reflect the crime and violence of Callao, the destruction of the Amazon, and the living influence of the same culture I have been learning about all week. Pelosi shakes her head at the repeated setbacks that have hindered construction of the Callao monument and the country’s overall approach to preserving and promoting culture, past and present. “Everything stopped because of COVID-19,” she says. “Well then, Mr. President. Then the march. Then the flood. We have not yet recovered and have already been hit five other times.”
Peru has faced many challenges in recent years. But as we walk along the waterfront in Callao’s seaside neighborhood of La Punta, where sailboats come and go in the harbor and locals clamber up the rocky beaches, we both realize just how much Peruvians are Marvel at how much love you have. When future archaeologists look back on this moment, I hope they will understand more about Pilsen’s clinking bottles and children splashing off piers than we do about Chachapoya. I wish they could have seen me, unable to leave Callao without joining the crowd, impulsively buying a swimsuit from a street vendor and running blindly into the sea.
How this journey took place
For a long time, I considered Marisol Mosquera to be my Peru travel guru. So it was very gratifying and liberating to hand over the reins to her team at Arakari Travel. All I told them was that I wanted to experience an underrated alternative to Peru’s most popular destinations. They did the rest, creating his 10-day itinerary that took me to remote ruins across Amazonas and unexpected places in Lima. No matter how adventurous my days were, I always had a calming landing each night, with cool boutique hotels and soothing eco-resorts preparing me for the next long day. But it was the moments in between that ultimately made the difference. It was like when I saw Raul, my agent in Lima, take care of my luggage and hand me my boarding pass every time I passed through the airport on my way to my next destination.
This article was published in the November 2023 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Click here to subscribe to the magazine.