NYLON - January 2008 - (Page 136) en route MACHU GRACIAS Peru might be plagued by a lot of things (giant spiders, earthquakes), but it’s also home to some of the world’s most awe-inspiring archaeological treasures, and more llamas than you can shake a stick at. By April Long to archeology buffs to the sort of people who like to ride llamas and hang from the sides of glaciers by their ankles. The eleventh-highest country in the world, it does take time and patience to acclimatize to the altitude, but the local coca leaf tea (which tastes like delicious dirty grass) helps mitigate the effects. Yes, it is the same coca that cocaine comes from, but you’d have to drink gallons of the tea to experience any narcotic effect (no doubt, there are those who have tried). An alternative is to chew wads of leaves, which will numb your mouth and give you green drool. Most visitors arrive in Lima first, but it’s usually recommended that you skip it (unless you like noisy, polluted cities, in which case, party on) and head straight to Cusco. Called “the navel of the world” by the Incas, the city is the best point from which to explore the country. It’s a unique mix of pre-Columbian and colonial architecture built by Spanish Conquistadors atop the ruins of Inca temples, with some baroque cathedrals thrown in for good measure—don’t miss San Blas, the artists’ quarter, the stately Plaza de Armas, or the formidable ruin of Sacsay-huaman (pronounced, ahem, “sexy woman”) on the hills above of the city. From Cusco, you can take a train south to the floating villages of Lake Titicaca on the Bolivian border, head east into the rainforest, or proceed through the Sacred Valley of the Incas to Machu Picchu. We choose the rainforest option first, and hop a quick flight to Puerto Maldonado, a frontier shanty-town on the edge of the jungle Perhaps more so than any other South American country, Peru has a dark and mysterious past. Its history is rife with tales of bloodshed and strange occurrences—travelers are told of unfaithful jungle-tribe women being tied to trees and bitten to death by vicious ants, of Andean children kicked alive into graves by Spanish missionaries, of lik’ichiris, who roam the highlands at night, ambushing unsuspecting tourists and siphoning out their body fat. (This last one, of course, might not be true). It’s easy to understand why the culture is so steeped in folklore and superstition—at 500,000 square miles, it is vast, unknowable terrain, harboring ancient secrets from the fabled “lost city of the Incas” Machu Picchu to the mystifying Nazca lines (animal shapes carved into the earth that are so gigantic they can only be seen from the air—the source of countless alienvisitation theories). Even in the last year, Peru’s headline-grabbing moments have been either tragic (the catastrophic earthquake last August) or macabre (the toxic Andromeda Strain-like meteor that landed crashed into a mountain in September). It is, in short, a place where strange things happen—and that’s only part of its magic. Encompassing the colossal Andean mountain range, lush tropical rainforests, and miles of low-lying coastline, Peru is one of the most ecologically diverse countries in the world: 80 percent of the worlds’ ecosystems are present within its borders. That makes it a choose-your-own-adventure place to visit: it’s a paradise for everyone from knitwear fans that might very well be what the end of the world looks like: dusty pueblo huts with nothing but corrugated tin for roofs, people walking the unpaved streets barefoot carrying enormous bundles on their backs, Mad Max-looking characters zipping around on black-exhaustcoughing mopeds. A low, long boat conveys us up the Madre de Dios River, which cuts a broad swathe through the Peruvian rainforest, to the Inkaterra Reserva Amazonica, a huddle of bungalows in the heart of the Tambopata Nature Preserve (a region famous for having more species of butterflies and birds—including toucans and vivid turquoise-winged Macaws— than anywhere else of its size on earth). The Reserva Amazonica is certainly one of the most authentic jungle-lodge experiences Location: West Coast of South America Population: 29 million Official language: Spanish, Quecha Currency: Nuevo Sol (approximately 3.4 to the U.S. dollar) photographs by april long
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