Heady heights
Text and photography by Sohrab Golsorkhi-Ainslie and Alice Ray
A ten-day tour through Peru reveals how the country’s mix of ancient cultures, colonial remnants and 21st-century modernism makes for a potent cocktail.
DAY 1: PISCO SOUR
We spent the first day of our trip in the Peruvian capital, Lima. At Belmond’s Miraflores Park hotel we were offered the iconic national cocktail, the pisco sour. This drink was invented by accident in the 1920s by an American bartender, Victor Vaughen Morris, at his bar in downtown Lima, when he ran out of whiskey and decided to substitute the local spirit in his whiskey sour. In the classic version they serve at the hotel’s Tragaluz bar, pisco quebranta is mixed with sweet lime juice, sugar syrup and egg white. Angostura bitters are drizzled on top as a garnish.
DAY 3: TEXTILES
During our stay in Rio Sagrado we met Lucy, a member of a weaving co-op in Chinchero dedicated to conserving and teaching traditional craft techniques. Lucy showed us how textiles are created. A combination of sheep and alpaca wools are cleaned with saqta root, a natural local soap that has been used for centuries. A variety of plants, minerals and even a small insect called the cochinilla are used to dye the wool. The cochinilla, which is found inside the fleshy leaves of the prickly pear, is dried and ground to produce up to 18 different tones of red. Lemon juice and salt are used to fix the dyes. The spun wool is woven using a warp-faced technique that means the design is visible on both sides of a textile. Larger designs, such as wraps and blankets, can take three or more months to make.
The chassis of the Hiram Bingham train was built in South Africa and its warm wood-panelled interior created by French company Compagnie Des Internationales Wagons-Lits. Its gentle climb up to Machu Picchu allows the visitor to gently acclimatise to the atmosphere, as you soar through Peru’s snow-capped mountains.
DAY 4: THE HIRAM BINGHAM & MACHU PICCHU
On our fourth day we boarded the luxurious Hiram Bingham train, named for the American archaeologist who “discovered” our next destination, Machu Picchu, in 1911. The Incan site was well known to the locals but had been swallowed up by the forest and made invisible to the outside world after sudden abandonment sometime after the arrival of the Spanish in the middle of the 16th century. That there is no mention of the site in any Spanish records suggests it remained hidden from them, perhaps due to its remote location and the likelihood that Incas destroyed the trails leading to the site.
DAY 5: WAQANKI ORCHID
To reach Machu Picchu you walk or take a bus from the village at the bottom of a valley up a steep and winding mountain road. Belmond runs the only hotel at the entrance to Machu Picchu, Sanctuary Lodge, surrounded by an impressive orchid garden maintained by Leonidas Torres. The symbol of the hotel is based on the Waqanki orchid, which only grows in Machu Picchu. Waqanki is a Quechua word that means “you will cry” – the orchid, Torres explained, is named as such because the shape of its flower resembles a teardrop. The story goes that an Inca princess fell in love with a common warrior against the wishes of her father. The king was so incensed that he contrived a reason to send the warrior off to war, never to return. The princess’s sadness was felt so deeply by the mountain gods that her tears were transformed into the Waqanki orchid we see today.
DAY 6: CUSCO ART AND POTTERY
The Monasterio hotel in the city of Cusco is a former monastery built at the end of the 16th century on top of the foundations of an earlier Incan palace destroyed by an earthquake. The walls of every room, corridor and the San Antonio de Abad Chapel display works by artists working in the tradition of the Cusco School. During the Spanish colonial period, Cusco attracted artists from Europe working in the baroque style of the time. The Cusco School style that emerged at this time is a genuine mestizo art – local artists started to produce works in the baroque style but blended symbolism from their own indigenous artistic traditions (see the suspiciously tropical angel wings opposite).The Spanish colonial period could never completely erase these indigenous traditions even if they might contort their political context.
Monasterio envelops a central courtyard in which a 300-year-old cedar tree grows. This means that the tree was a young sapling in 1724, when Spanish rule over the country was threatened by several large-scale revolts. Sanctuary Lodge also sits in Peru’s ancient flora and fauna, with its magnificent orchid garden that thrums with hummingbirds.
DAY 7: TROUT
The very first story we were told after we landed in Lima was how Gastón Acurio invented modern Peruvian cuisine in the 1990s. According to our guide, Acurio pioneered a modern fusion cuisine after a spell working and training in kitchens in Paris. In Peru he drew on the abundance of unique local produce (there are famously over 4,000 varieties of potatoes), with influences drawn from waves of Chinese and later Japanese migrants in the second half of the 19th century onwards. Today the forefront of Peruvian cooking is represented by the restaurant Central, run by Pía León and Virgilio Martínez. On our seventh day in Peru we ate at Mauka, the restaurant at Belmond’s second hotel in Cusco, Palacio Nazarenas where the menu and dining concept was developed by León. Chef Leonel Almanza prepared a dish that combined locally caught and cured river trout (prepared in a sashimi style), cucumber, prickly pear and lupin beans.
DAY 8: LAKE TITICACA AND RAQCH’I
Our first full day aboard the Andean Explorer. At full capacity the train consists of 11 sleeping carriages, 2 dining carriages, 2 bars and a spa ferrying up to 40 guests along a set of private tracks between Cusco and Arequipa, the largest city in the south, via Puno on the banks of Lake Titicaca to the east. Our first stop was Raqch’i, an Incan archaeological site, featuring dozens of cylindrical structures that would have stored communal food supplies for residents of the surrounding area. Our guide explained how the Incan empire operated by the principle of ayni – a concept of reciprocity and mutualism that is common to many Andean cultures. When the Incan empire expanded to new territories they quickly undertook infrastructure projects including roads and storage structures to which able-bodied men from other parts of the empire were expected to contribute, according to llankay – another core principle found in Andean culture that views idleness as a kind of theft. Yes, our guide explained, the Incan empire used or threatened force, but they also created the infrastructure to provide food security and enable trade, which helped to sustain a large and uniquely stable empire until the Spanish arrived.
DAY 9: SUMBAY CAVE PAINTINGS
Towards the end of our journey the train stopped in what seemed
like the middle of nowhere. Porters emerged from behind some rocks with a set of stairs and we were guided between cracks in the landscape to the base of a small ravine. The cave paintings at Sumbay are over 6,000 years old. It is thought that the first wave of humans must have migrated south from North America at least 12,000 years ago. Notably,
the paintings at Sumbay seem to depict already domesticated llamas, suggesting that a stable culture was already in place. All other animals at Sumbay are depicted running, while the llamas alone are shown standing still next to a human, presumably a shepherd.
Visitors can ride out on horseback from Las Casitas, which takes the form of 20 individual dwellings nestled in the Andean hills. Up here, condors wheel in the air as the sun sets over the canyons. The Andean Explorer also traverses the highest rail route in the world, so that passengers will watch the La Raya mountain range rise in the distance as they perch on seats made with alpaca wool.
DAY 10: CONCRETE FACTORY
The end of our itinerary took us on a brief detour to Las Casitas hotel in the remote Colca Valley for the night. Towards the end of a four-hour drive to Arequipa we noticed what seemed to be a dusty skyscraper city in the distance, a Mad Max vision of cylindrical towers and raised walkways in the middle of a rocky plain. As we got closer and our sense of scale was re-established by the surrounding buildings we discovered that this was in fact a cement factory built by the government in the 1960s, one of many state-run industries that were privatised and sold off by president Alberto Fujimori’s neoliberal government in the 1990s. A friendly insurance broker from New York that we met on the Andean Explorer explained that Fujimori introduced a tax on all finished buildings during the 1990s which seems to have encouraged people to leave their homes apparently incomplete. As we drove into Arequipa our guide gave us a commentary on the “Fujishock” years, recent migration to the city and the informal housing that has expanded unchecked from the downtown to surround the once-suburban airport, from which we departed on the first leg of our long journey home. .
