Experiential travel has various definitions. For me, it means to travel with your senses fully engaged. I wrote about this some years ago. How much of our travel is fully engaged? How many times when we travel are we half there and half somewhere else?
Why aren’t we fully engaged when we travel?
In part, it comes down to trip planning, in part to how you act when you are on a trip. Planning to squeeze too much into a trip does not allow you to slow down and experience places fully. Walking along glued to your phone, in a place you have paid thousands of dollars to visit, does not allow you to experience the place fully either.
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A 5-part series of Peruvian Experiences
You cannot travel physically to Peru at the moment. So here are some ways you can experience a little of Peru, one sense at a time: sight, sound, taste, touch, smell. Part one is sound.
Experience Peru by Sound
Do you know what your town sounds like? Do you know what your town sounded like five, ten, twenty years ago? Think about the sounds you grew up with as a child and compare them to the sounds your children grow up with today. The soundscape of a place changes with time.
Élder Olave, a young Cusqeñean, set out to record the sounds of Cusco before they were lost forever. In these days of COVID-19 lockdowns, where the streets and skies are empty, these recordings remind us of how much sound is a part of our everyday life. It reminds us of how many pleasant sounds we do not consciously notice and how many unpleasant and unnecessary sounds, we simply accept.
Ambient Noise
One of the recordings is the sound of a plane taking off over Cusco. How many older people remember times when that was not a constant of their soundscape? Another recording is filled with the sound of combis, the small local buses, arriving at the bus stop, shouting out the names of the places they are going. Another records the siren of an ambulance stuck in traffic. All sounds which assault your ears every time you step out into the street but are very much the sounds of Peru.
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Welcome Noise
Then there are the sounds that make you feel alive, the click of dancers’ feet at a local festival, the energy of the chants at a “Ni Una Menos” protest, as thousands marched to demand an end to violence against women. There are the sounds of church bells, of street singers, of people going about their business in a particular street. Sounds that let you know you are very much here in Cusco, Peru.
You can hear Élder’s recordings of Cusco’s soundscape on his Soundcloud stream. He is also in charge of a project to create an archive of Cusco’s soundscape for the Ministry of Culture.
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Experience Peru by sight
Alta Moda, or High Fashion, is a photo project by Mario Testino. Originally from Lima, he made his name with photos that depicted a fantasy world of high fashion, an unattainable glamour that we mortals could never hope to achieve. Perhaps his most famous photoshoot was that of Princess Diana, the last before her death. This was the inverse of his fashion shoots- he made royalty human.
In 2012 Testino set up the Museo Mario Testino (MATE) in Barranco, Lima. He wanted to take Peruvian artists and culture to the world and bring international art to Peru. MATE displays an evolving selection of Testino’s work and other people’s work. It is here I found some of the most powerful images of Peru.
Alta Moda is a series of photographs Testino took between 2007 and 2012 depicting the traditional clothing of Cusco. If you hike the Lares trek or are in Cusco at the time of a festival, you can see many people wearing similar clothing. Each area has a particular style. However, most people would never have considered this clothing glamorous. Until Testino came along. Not recently at least.
Once upon a time, this clothing would have been considered glamorous. When the conquistadors arrived, hungry for gold, the Inca did not gift them gold, but textiles, which the ancient civilizations of Peru considered more valuable than gold.
After the conquest, local culture became devalued in the eyes of many. To be seen dressed in traditional clothing, or speaking traditional languages was to be seen as a peasant, an uneducated farmer, someone who could never hope to attain the dizzy height of city dwellers who took their fashion lead from Europe.
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Generations of children grew up having their language and culture squeezed out of them. Sometimes literally, sometimes by educational policies, sometimes by well-intentioned parents who wanted a “better life” for their children.
In the last decade or so there have been advances. Movements have sprung up to restore people’s pride in their culture: in Cusco, all schools are obliged to teach Quechua; the traditional skirts called polleras reached international markets thanks to fellow B-Corps
Las Polleras de Agus, and Quechua language films such as Retablo, won international prizes. There is a long way to go until equality is reached and the traditional is seen as beautiful by all, but Testino’s photos help.
The pieces of clothing in the photos are handmade. In their threads and ornament, they carry language and history. Full of symbology, they tell the informed observer exactly who the woman that wears it is.
There are two photos I find particularly striking. One of a woman from Chayhuatire and one of a woman from Paruro. Testino has succeeded not only in elevating their culture, but he has succeeded in elevating the women themselves. Displayed at near life-size, in the gallery of MATE, they remain two of the most powerful images of Peru I know.
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You can see the photos here, or watch Testino explain how he made them here.
Today we look at the tastes of Peru.
What Are the Flavors of Peru?
Step aboard any flight from Cusco to Lima and you will see locals stuffing large yellow plastic bags into the overhead locker.
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Hidden behind the coaches in Cusco’s airport car park lie a set of market stands. These stands sell two things: pale white rounds of cheese and large yellow plastic bags.
Inside these bags lie wheels of soft, sweet, aniseed-flavored bread from the village of Oropesa, twenty kilometers south of Cusco. Eaten with the young, salty cheese it makes a delicious breakfast or supper.
Anyone traveling from Cusco to Lima is expected to bring these two items as a gift for family who left behind the hills of Cusco for a new life in the capital. It is a reminder of home, a gift from their past to their present.
Here in Peru, there is no one Peruvian cuisine, rather a selection of regional cuisines to which people are incredibly loyal; no-one cooks ceviche in Cusco. You love the food you grew up with, the food your grandmother made; this food becomes part of your DNA, however far from home you travel.
So if you ask what Peru tastes like, the answer is, “it depends.”
This is what Peru tastes like to me:
I did not grow up in Peru, so my memories were made later, but there is one dish that contains more memories of Peru for me than any other. One dish that has been a constant throughout my 16 years here: arroz con huevo, rice with egg.
Arroz con huevo does not belong to any particular region of Peru, you can find it throughout much of Latin America. But here in Peru, you can always find it.
First experiences
I first tried arroz con huevo back in 2004, in the market at Aguas Calientes. When you finished an Inca Trail, you had time to kill before your train left. Some spent the time shopping; some went to the lukewarm springs; others ordered overpriced food and beers at one of the many small restaurants.
But the place everyone in the know went, was the local market. Here, for 6 soles you could buy a large plate of arroz con huevo: A heap of boiled rice topped with two fried eggs. Beside it on the plate; a lettuce leaf and a salad composed of onions and tomatoes, sliced into batons and dressed with vinegar, cheap oil and salt.
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For 1 sol extra you could get fresh cut chips, hot and crisp if you were lucky, warm and limp if you were not.
For 2 soles more you could get a lump of steak on top, the juices of the meat filtering through the rice to mix with the yolk of the egg broken by your fork. There was no knife, there never is. Just a fork, wrapped in a square single-ply napkin, taken from a communal plastic cutlery holder.
From the hills to the jungle and back again
When the trekking season ended, I spent some months in the jungle beyond Machu Picchu, at the farm of my now ex-in-laws. Each day, without fail, arroz con huevo would be served for at least one, perhaps two of the daily meals. Eggs gathered from the hens were dropped into a battered old frying pan, deep with oil, perched over the smoky fire that burned all day long in the mud-baked stove. Accompanying them: hot, sweet, sticky bananas or slices of plantain— their drier, savory cousin.
2006, my first trip to Choquequirao, just two of us, myself and Juan Carlos, our bike guide. Arriving at the campsite we asked the owner if she could cook us lunch. She said she could if we didn’t mind arroz con huevo. We sat on the ground and devoured it, hungry from the climb. That night she made us dinner, arroz con huevo, the next day she made us breakfast, arroz con huevo. Each as delicious as the last, each served with a heap of freshly cooked chips on the side.
Thirteen years later I returned to Choquequirao with a friend from England. We arrived at the same campsite as 13 years earlier. “Are you hungry the owner asked?” “Definitely” we replied. “Good, I’ll cook you something.”
Half an hour later we sat on the low wooden bench, at the old wooden table sliced from a Eucalyptus tree. Before us lay two steaming plates: boiled rice, two fried eggs, and hot fresh chips.
What does Peru taste like to you?
What does Peru feel like?
Alpaca
Put on your alpaca sweater, next to your skin if you dare. Close your eyes and take a moment to remember. To remember the cute alpacas you saw while trekking, to remember the jolly, but slightly pushy saleswoman from who you bought your sweater.
Perhaps it was Pisac market, perhaps at the ruins of Tambo Machay? Remember how you bargained over the price and got them down from fifty soles to forty. How they held your notes up to the sun to check them before stuffing them inside their hat. How you and your group went out to dinner that night, proudly sporting your new alpaca sweaters.
Rough hands
If you have been washing your hands as much as you should be, stop a moment. Run one hand over the back of your other hand. Remember that baby-soft skin you used to have? It’s long gone, you now have Andean hands.
Here above 10,000 feet (3000 meters), the air is dry. Within days you notice your hands and cheeks becoming drier, somewhat rougher. If you have trekked the Inca trail, you will remember shaking the hands of the porters in the final ceremony, abrasive hands, and slightly embarrassed handshakes.
Cacti
Do you have a pet cactus plant in your house? You do? Great. Now stick your hand into it.
It is easy to ignore the diversity of cacti in the Peruvian landscape until you come too close to one. Each cactus has its own cruel way of leaving its mark on your skin.
Maybe you tried the bright red tuna fruits when you were here? Harvesting them is like extreme blackberry picking. Reaching to pluck one from the plant does not cause any immediate damage to your hand. Then you notice: your hand is full of hair-like spines, which you slowly extract one by one for the next half you.
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Then there are the cacti that lie in wait alongside the path, waiting to catch you as you pass. You stop to pull it off, but you can’t. The little barbed hooks have you. Every action has a reaction. As you try to pull one spine out, another sinks further into your skin. The only way to free yourself from this criss-cross of spines is to cut them and remove them, one painful pull at a time. Perhaps you still have the scars.
What does Peru feel like to you?
What is the scent of Peru?
If you had to make a perfume that encapsulates Peru, what would you include?
Citrus and sea salt
Fresh lime, squeezed onto ceviche, as the sun bears falls into the Pacific once more.
Earth
Freshly turned earth, dotted by piles of newly excavated potatoes.
Jungle
Hot moist air filled with the scent of plant matter breaking down, to continue the cycle of life.
Wet alpaca
Peru’s very own musk, as a smoky fire burns, in a low stone house, high in the hills.
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What would be your scent of Peru?
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