“Mama!” the guard says. We follow his pointing finger to see a plump yellow bird sunning herself on a rock wall. Smiling and nodding, we look back to the guard, whose main job seems to be to keep tourists from…
Yolandi looks across the table at my cazuela in confusion. “Whoever heard of soup without bread?” she asks rhetorically. I consider my bowl of herb-flecked broth, extra yellow from spicy splashes of aji amarillo sauce. Submerged in its substantial depths…
It would have been easy to cobble together a salad from the edibles that we brush by while exploring the Incan ruins of Ollantaytambo in Peru’s Sacred Valley. Lush from the late seasonal rains, there are pea-sized Peruvian bush tomatoes,…
As we watched the sun disappear in quiet Ollantaytambo, Peru, one persistent hat vendor left their cart out in hopes of a sale. In the off season, no one came to buy. But when they do, this vendor is ready.
During our stay at Hotel Sol y Luna in Peru’s Sacred Valley, we head over to its sister facility, Wayra, for dinner. We’re warmed outside and in by the fireplace adjacent to our table and our bottle of cabernet sauvignon…
Before we flew to Peru, we found out that Bono had recently stayed and dined at Hotel Sol y Luna, our hotel in Urubamba, in the heart of the Sacred Valley. We took this as a good sign. Bono is…
As our Inca Rail train pulls of Machu Picchu town, I realize my hands are…well, they’re not clean. There’s Incan dirt under my nails. Also, my jeans are spattered with mud. My jacket is soaked through with the rain that…
Before I got to Machu Picchu, Peru, I knew I wanted to keep people out of most of my photos. Including people in travel photos can deliver a sense of scale, time, place, or emotion. But, at a world wonder…
Unless he was a much better secret keeper than his writings suggest, Mark Twain never tramped through the jungly ruins of Machu Picchu, “discovered” shortly after his death in 1910. Yet, here we are at Machu Picchu and there’s Twain—or…
When your family is going through rough times like mine is, you read into everything each person says, because there’s so much being left unsaid. Shortly before Todd and I left for Peru, I visited my family in New York….
