perú has only 2 seasons; the rainy and the dry. we were there in the former and we did get wet, more than once… on machu picchu we got wet more than once in a sitting. but in general our luck held and beyond one of our 4 flights being delayed, it never rained enough to alter our plans.

when we arrived at our last stop in puerto maldonado, we’d just missed successive days of rain that flooded much of the jungle and raised the river. on the road to our boat, the puddles followed like streams along the road.

on land, with very few exceptions, puerto maldonado is not a world of cars. up to and including the taxis, it’s a city run almost exclusively on two wheels, and the roads sound like a thousand purring cats running at random.

the boat’s like a giant rotored canoe and it heads upstream on the tambopata river, 3 hours away from the roads and the motorcyle sounds, which are replaced by the constant ping of animals and insects in the jungle. on the way, a guide counts 30 macaws in a tree. in a few days the way back, with the current, will take half the time.

the lodge’s rooms have no electricity or hot water. they’re lit by candles and the windows that surround us are made of mosquito netting rather than glass, though the craftier creatures still make their way in. the dining hall has a generator which lights the place a few hours a day. it also has beer, which for the country is expensive, but in a place you can only get to by a river, they’re worth it.

on the first night, surrounded by green that twists and grows over and through itself, shin-deep in rainwater, walking, we immediately see monkeys, though it’s too dark to record. we see tarantulas and frogs and a sleeping bird that hangs like a bat. an hour into walking, we turn off our flashlights and just stand and listen. the sounds are overpowering.

the 2nd day, i’m waist-deep in el gato, a smaller river that feeds into tambopata. the current in front of me seems absurd, so i step forward to feel its pull. i’m immediately dragged 100 yards off and barely grab the end of a boat before i’m pulled out to the massive main current. trying to walk back to the place i was standing safely before i got stupid, i’m confronted by a mass of jagged bamboo that blocks my way. i climb above it, through knee-deep mud to get back, and then to make things worse, i try to swim across the current of el gato to the other side.

i’m not the first. the boat captain’s name is henry, and if you were to picture a shorter, scarier and less-green cousin to kirby’s verion of the HULK, you’d have him. he dives and swims out at an angle past his intended destination, so that when he hits the current it straightens him out and bring him right where he wants. one of our guides follows up, not as quickly but making it over. they move the boat across the river, to up the ante. if they don’t make it again, we can’t get back. henry swims back and forth without stopping and then beckons to the foreigners. we all fail. when i’m up, i stop to think for a second and it’s more than i have handy. i get stuck even further down and deeper mud brings me back. though he made it earlier, on his 2nd try, the lodge’s bartender gets stuck in the middle of the river, in a spot between currents. he will wait there 40 minutes until henry, laughing, decides to go and get him. just before it’s time to start the boat, henry, safely where he needs to be, jumps off and swims across away and back again.

late that night, henry will stop the boat when the guide sees a single red eye glow from the reflection of his flashlight on the side of the river. he leans out into the darkness and when he leans back, he’s holding a tiny cayman alligator.

on the last day we hike 8 miles through the jungle, to a lake surrounded by jungle on the one side and palm trees on the next. we fish for piranhas with raw beef tied to a stick. i’m unsuccessful, although 2 different breeds come out by local hands that throw them back. the way we take back is shorter, but where we’re knee deep in spots coming in, here the flood has hidden bridges and trees and comes up at points to our shoulders. we empty our boots when it gets drier, but it never stays that way… at one spot, our bags on our heads, we sludge 10+ minutes chest-deep in rain from a week ago, our guide dragging his machete in front of him, looking for snakes and anything else in the way.

minutes later, he puts his hand up to stop our talking and the ridiculous noise of our wet socks absorbing and expelling water in rubber boots. we hear an impossibly loud clamor and small trees and branches getting crushed in the path of something up ahead. when we stop, it stops, and when we move it starts again, ever closer. we keep moving, but slowly, intermittent black patches flashing by too quickly to see. all of a sudden, though we’ve stopped, it starts louder than ever, and in a clearing we watch over 100 wild boars thunder away from us in perfect formation. when the noise disappears at a distance, our guide makes us wait again, a single boar has stayed behind and is waiting to make sure the rest are safe from us.

BOARS! from Ivan Brandon on Vimeo.

more pictures HERE

we woke up at dawn, more or less, and caught a 4 and half hour snail-crawl train that brought us the 60 or so miles from cusco to aguas calientes, the small town that lives below the mountains that surround machu picchu. once there, a bus zig zags at what seems like inappropriate speed up a “road” scraped out of the side of a mountain, feigning collision several times with other buses doing the same act in the opposite direction. we climb ever ridiculously higher along a path that in the movies leads mostly off the side into an explosion. the view of the valley and river, now far below, are incredible.

turning one particular bend, we catch our first glimpse of the enormous structures, perched impossibly and precariously high. on cue, the bus driver slows enough to let everyone goggle. it’s immediately clear why the spaniards never found this place, close as it was to their preferred spot of cultural mutilation. it seems impossible that anyone found it at all, much less that it exists.

where the cultural remains of the assorted dead cultures throughout peru are mostly in ruins through time and things like the spaniards smashing temples to build their churches atop… machu picchu is almost completely untouched and intact. when they discovered the ancient city less than 100 years ago, there were people still living there.

over 2 hours pass and cover most of 2 of the structures and our group breaks for lunch, but we decide to stay. kristyn and i climb every last piece of the 3rd and then above that, we continue up the mountain. it starts to rain. the tiny trail is muddy and awkward… the left covered with branches and thorns and the right plummeting down forever to the river, thousands of feet below. it’s oppressively hot, and i don’t know if i’m wetter from the rain or my own sweat. we climb as far as is humanly possible without equipment, and we reach the inca bridge and a view that goes down further than i’ve ever seen with my own eyes. i’m exhausted…i’ve never been more wet or more amazed at nature, human or otherwise.

more pictures HERE

we took a 9 hour bus from puno to cusco, through temples destroyed by colonization and mountains over 2 miles high.

cusco’s the hub for all the things that most want to see when they think of perú… it leads to the sacred incan valley through the andes which holds ruins, temples, fortresses… it’s got a fountain of youth you can drink from.

and cusco leads to machu picchu, the only part of the inca empire the spanish didn’t find and make a mess of.

it’s a poor city that’s incredibly safe… it’s the part of perú that touches the most tourist feet. it speaks for itself, so i’ll keep this one brief and point you to pictures.

here: assorted andes mountains, the fortress of sacsayhuaman, the incan city of ollantaytambo, the baths at tambomachay…

in the sacred valley, it was carnival… and the kids all over the valley lined up for miles along the sides of the roads. the kids had hoses, buckets and waterguns with which they drenched eachother and our bus.

a LOT more pictures HERE

lake titicaca dominates 2 giant pieces each of bolivia and perú, posing as an ocean to anyone that isn’t flying high enough to see that it isn’t. on the perúvian side, a pre-incan tribe called the uros took thousands of meters of totora reeds and out of them built boats, homes and the very land they lived on. over time, they melded with the aymara tribe, and now they speak aymara instead of uro. that and spanish, and kechua, and for you, a little english. they live there still.

today, 40 or so islands float together, each one housing a family that cares for itself and trades with others. they raise guinea pigs and fish and cook on fires made on stones. they built their beds, too, and their lives out of weeds that grow from the bottom of the lake, and through everything the modern world has seen, they’ve endured without police, without written laws. should a family fight, one will cut off their part of the island and float off to bind their land to another cluster where they’re more welcome. it is another world altogether.

i ride a totoro boat around the cluster, and at the last minute, pulling away, a little uros girl jumps off her island to join us. she eats candy and says almost nothing until a duck makes noise at an island up ahead then shouts CALLATE PATO.

more pictures HERE

pound for pound, puno is probably my favorite city in perú. it’s about 2 and a half miles above sea level, and what it lacks in oxygen it makes up for in monstrous lakes and black markets.

from puno, you get to titicaca, to umaya, to sillustani. you get to the hand made uros islands, which are probably the most unique and amazing things i’ve ever seen.

click the top image to open a monstrous look at lake titicaca, cobbled from 5 pictures.

more days in, the more the world here looks less and less like any world i know. arequipa’s a small town with a ridiculous altitude and livestock on every other corner. almost everywhere, you can see incan and pre-incan terraces… tiny walls meant to prevent soil from washing away and to capture water and help to grow whatever needs growing. i learned to roll coca leaves here, to combat heights and headaches and a laundry list of supposed ills that chewing supposedly cures.

much of the city is broken in some way or other… buildings that were never finished to avoid paying taxes or destroyed by one of their many earthquakes. most everywhere, there’s someone trying to sell you something made out of alpaca fur, or clay.

lima, perú is almost always overcast, although it rarely ever rains.
we arrived sunday night at an ungodly hour, after 15+ combined hours of transit and waiting. a poster at customs tells us that children are neither for purchase or sale.

it’s not like any part of south america we’ve been to up to this point… beyond the implicit human trafficking, there’s a chili’s and a starbucks and whatever else, it’s a tourist world, for sure, and though the exchange rate heavily favors our dollar, the businesses occasionally look to get a leg up where they can.

probably the first thing we notice is there are exponentially more police here than where we’re living in rosario. in one of the squares, a military cop hands us a local map with a smile, riot police lean across a far wall. all four corners of the square are inhabited by assault vehicles; 1 set to repel protesters with water, the rest with automatic weapons. i ask if the protests are common, or violent, and our guide says they’re neither, but maybe he’s trying to make us feel better.

lima’s a modern city sprinkled with some of the oldest things you’ll ever see, turn a corner and you’ll run into a pre-incan pyramid older than christ. they have what equates to brazilian favelas, but their name for them is much more… optimistic? they call them “pueblo joven” as in a place that’s young and not quite on its feet yet.