If you know your South American geography, then when you think of Peru, two or three things probably come to mind:  Machu Picchu, the Amazon, and the Nazca lines.  We saw only one of these iconic places in Peru, but found a country full of other worthwhile sites and experiences.

Philosophically, the thing that struck me the most about Peru, was the contrasts:  urban/rural, rich/poor, coast/highlands, Spanish/Quechua.  (Quechua, pronounced Ketch-u-wa, are the native people of Peru.)  In the morning, you can be in a community high in the Andean mountains, that has no electricity or running water, and where people live much like they did at the time the Spanish first arrived (in the early 1500s), and in the afternoon, after a short drive, you can be in downtown Cusco, a city of around half-a-million people, with restaurants that wouldn’t be out of place in downtown Toronto (except for the characteristic Peruvian spices in the food).

Unlike North America, the native people of Peru weren’t herded into reservations.  So there is still a widespread Quechua presence in the rural areas, and even in the cities.  The Incan civilization may have been destroyed, but the people live on, and many Peruvians speak the Quechua language as their native tongue.

There are many western influences of course, and to a North American they can seem incongruous.  One of the taxis that we hired for the day to take us to some sites near Cusco, had the radio tuned to a station that seemed to play only North American pop songs from the 1970s and 1980s.  However the announcer and commercials were all in Spanish.

Physically, the thing that struck me the most about Peru was the mountains.  Cusco is 3,300m above sea level, and the nearby “Sacred Valley”  is full of mountains everywhere you look.  At first it reminded me a little of the Austrian Alps.  The entire region is beautiful and stunning.

The Sacred Valley is an area north and east of Cusco that is full of historic Incan sites.  It was a major Incan area due to the river, and the very fertile land.  The Urubamba river runs through the whole region, all the way to Machu Picchu, and it eventually feeds the Amazon, flowing across South America to the Atlantic ocean.  The Incans saw the river as a mirror of the milky way in the night sky.

We spent eight nights in the Sacred Valley, at the historic town of Ollantaytambo, where the streets were laid down by the Incans.  As I told Clara, Ollantaytambo is to Cusco, like “cottage country” is to people who live in Toronto.  Except Muskoka isn’t dotted with stone monuments and ruins made by the native Canadians.

The stonework of the Incans is truly remarkable.  They were essentially a bronze age civilization, and yet the could carve and shape stones with an amazing degree of precision.  The best work was always reserved for the religious areas, or the royal residences.  The stones were individually shaped to interlock with each other on the inside of the wall, yet on the exterior all you see are two perfectly straight edges lined up.  Or not…in some structures, like the enormous Saqsaywaman near Cusco, the edges are not straight, and the stones are gigantic, some well over 100 tons!  Yet each stone is shaped to perfectly fit with its neighbours.  Our tour guide said that the Dominican priests declared that Saqsaywaman could only have been built by demons, and they ordered it destroyed.  Thankfully a large part of the site survives to this day.

Machu Picchu is the most famous Incan site, and it deserves every bit of its fame.  I don’t think it is the most impressive Incan site in terms of engineering, but what is truly incredible about Machu Picchu is the setting.  It is on a mountain, surrounded by other mountains.  Everywhere you look, the view is breathtaking.  It must have been a remarkable place to live.  Machu Picchu was the reason Peru first landed on the itinerary for our trip and now that we’ve been there, I can say that it would have been worth the trip to Peru if going there were the only thing that we had done.

Coming from New York City to rural Peru was quite a culture shock.  It was a good way to mark the start of the non-North American part of our trip (which is of course the vast majority).  There was no doubt that we had departed, and were now in a different place.  The biggest contrast was definitely with home! We learned a lot of things about Peru, some mundane, some not, but many that you may not know:

• Guinea pigs are a traditional dish in Peru.  In Ollantaytambo, one of the restaurants had an enclosure with guinea pigs just outside the door, much like restaurants in Toronto might have a lobster tank near the entrance.
• Dogs roam free in rural Peru, and even in the cities, similar to how cats roam in North America.  No one walks their dog on a leash.  Instead, dogs just go all over the place, wherever they want, at all hours of the day, unattended (see the post about Cliff the dog that joined us for part of one hike in Ollantaytambo).  And there are a lot of dogs!  They are everywhere in the rural areas.
• Many rural areas did not have roads until the last couple decades.  If you came to Cusco in the 1980s, and you wanted to get to the historic site of Pisac, (now barely an hour away by car), you would have had to hike nine hours by foot along the traditional trail that has been used since ancient times.
• Other than the intercity roads, and the newer parts of Cusco (and presumably other cities), all the roads are cobblestone.  And we’re not talking about quaint, neat rows of cobblestones.  We’re talking bumpy, uneven, hundreds-of-years-old, cobblestones.
• In Peru, you don’t flush the toilet paper.  Instead every toilet has a garbage bin beside it for that purpose.
• There is no refrigerated, pasteurized milk in Peru.  All the milk has been through an ultra-high-temperature (UHT) pasteurization process, and is distributed in tetra paks at room temperature.  Needless to say, this was not a hit with Clara and Jill!
• Especially in the rural areas, almost all the food had a characteristic flavour, due to the regular use of certain spices (coriander?) no matter what the dish was, be it soup or hamburger.
• Especially in the rural areas, hamburger doesn’t mean hamburger, at least as we understand it.  Hamburguesa Pollo is a chicken burger, Hamburguesa Carne is a hamburger. And usually it’s really a sandwich, not anything a North American would call a burger.
• There is no cheddar cheese anywhere in Peru, as far as we could tell.  There are some cheeses that are similar to mozzarella, but not quite the same.  Consequently, while they have pizzas, some of which I would say are quite good, none really taste like the pizza that we know.  It’s also impossible to find a grilled cheese sandwich that meets the girls’ expectations.
• Seatbelts in rear seats are not standard!

I will write more about our Peruvian adventures in a separate narrative post.