Ever in motion on bargained time
At the crossroads to Maras, it’s just us versus one understandably smug taxi driver named David. With no competition or civilization in sight, we abandon all hope of negotiating a lower fare. Instead, we do what we wish we could…
Cairns for Moray’s Incan engineers
I’ve always liked concentric circles. I don’t really know why. Perhaps it’s a preference I developed during my formative years, spent surrounded by the lingering psychedelic style of the late 1970s. Maybe it’s more about how the shape simultaneously shows…
We were getting along so well. Until you said THAT.
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…
Livin’ large like Bono at Hotel Sol y Luna
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…
Riding the Machu Picchu recovery train
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…
The innocents abroad
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…
Blue times at Machu Picchu
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….
The train journey to Machu Picchu
Traveling to Peru at the end of the rainy season in March meant that we would be risking some serious damp downsides. Instead of hiking the steep and expensive Inca Trail through a potential mess of mud and mist, we…
Aboot how scars are formed
People get weird on planes. Particularly on flights taken in developing countries, on unproven domestic airlines, on planes winging the windy, turbulent path into Peru’s lofty Sacred Valley. So when Jenn—one of the Canadian lesbians I’m seated between—rarely turns from…
A misorder of a magnitude to be reckoned with
Café Tostado doesn’t look like much from the outside. Indeed, it looks like nothing from the outside. Just a dark, empty, doorwound in a whitewashed cement facade, like so many other storefronts in Lima’s Barranco district. No clouds of drool-inducing…
