The Sacred City of Cahuachi
Most people who know Peru are familiar with the Nasca Lines, those wonderful geoglyphs that are properly appreciated only from the air. Less famous is the city of Cahuachi, an adobe brick complex mostly visited now by grave robbers, who over the decades have trashed the innumerable burials in their relentless quest for gold. Objects [...]
Lodging and Traveling: The Andean Countries of South America
Moving within the Andean countries of South America requires a certain adaptability. The rigors of travel are formed by both geography and culture, and distances are deceptively longer than they appear on a map. A person can pull out a map and measure the space between two towns and think, “Well, how far can that [...]
Pachacamac: Animator of the World
Any itinerary of Peru worth the expense should include Pachacamac, one of the great cultural and religious sites of the Americas. The name, which is of uncertain Quechua origin, translates loosely as “Animator of the World.” At this place the great civilizations of South America would pay their respects to the Earth Mother and her [...]
Lima, City on a Binge
National Geographic Magazine once called Lima “a city on a binge.” This was during the heady days of the 1970s and oddly prophetic of decades to come. In the early days, the capital of Peru was still a run-down post-colonial town. Street vendors choked the downtown old city, whose structures reeled from centuries of decay. [...]
The Reeds of Huanchaco, Peru
NOTE: This work, written originally as fiction and published in a now-defunct North Carolina literary magazine, WORDS OF WISDOM, has been modified to better recreate our travelers’ reality at the time these events took place in 1979. A singular experience may give us a tantalizing glimpse of the Garden of Eden, but we are eventually [...]
The Demise of Machu Picchu
1) The Intihuatana – Notice the crack in the upper post from the Peruvian beer commercial film shoot a few years ago: Photo by Shawn Herring The first time I visited the famous “lost city” in 1978 my travel companions and I disembarked from a local train at a one-room rail depot in a [...]
Peru: To the Cloud Forest from Cusco
One of the most exciting journeys you can make anywhere in South America is to go from the mountains to the rain forest, either headed east to the Amazon from the Andes, or, in Colombia and Ecuador, toward the west and the Pacific lowlands. The route in Peru from Cusco to the Manu Reserve area [...]
Projects in the Peruvian Amazon: An Interview with Davarian Hall
By Kit Herring After 10 years of road trips across the USA and sailing to islands of the Caribbean, Davarian Hall visited the country of Peru in 1982 as a travel writer and photographer. His work was subsequently published in publications such as National Geographic Traveler Magazine and, with the advent of the World Wide [...]
