Above the Clouds: A Photo Essay from the Peruvian Andes
Arrival
In the quiet of an early-morning train station, I watched a man arrive on his way to work. His traditional clothing glowed more fluorescently than his modern surroundings.
When I first arrived to the Andes, I felt surrounded by contradictions that I couldn’t reconcile. Andeans are traditional and modern; pagan and Catholic; transparent and enigmatic.
The people who inhabit these mountains have one foot in the present and one in the past. They are deeply connected to their Incan roots through dress, dance, food, and religion.
Flashes of their heritage emerge in the most unlikely of places–even at 4:30 am, in a small train station.
Cuzco
From the moment I stepped onto its old, stone streets, Cuzco felt familiar.
It doesn’t have much in common with an American city: open-air markets instead of Walmarts, narrow roads with a conspicuous lack of traffic lights, and everything built on those pin-straight, Incan foundations that have weathered more centuries than America has even existed.
Maybe it’s the people that made it feel like home; welcoming, showing, smiling, teaching. I had countless conversations with waiters and drivers who asked about my life, and shared a piece of theirs- always patiently tolerating my slow Spanish.
These conversations are the music that made the streets of Cuzco feel like home; a song woven in English, Spanish, and Quechua; a symphony hidden high in the mountains.
Before then, the great aeroplane crossed great seas, jungles, and deserts. Everything was symmetry; everything was ready on the earth’s surface; everything from above was a path, until, in the middle of heaven and earth, your planetary snow lodged itself, freezing the towers of earth.
The landscape itself is arguably the most spectacular on earth. The Andes are like elegant, soaring white wings.
The Peruvian Andes… came to hold the promise of an endless succession of extreme and sublime landscapes.
Wildlife
You never know what you’ll find in the Andean cordillera.–but dogs are a good guess.
Chuscos, or street dogs, are everywhere in Peru; lying on crowded corners, wagging through jewellery shops, and yes, napping on the peaks of the mountains.
After climbing to almost 16,000 feet, I marvelled at this small puppy. I still don’t know how he reached the top of such a remote mountain, but clearly he was tired after such a long hike.
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Inti
Each night in the small town of Ollantaytambo, the setting sun illuminates a sheer mountainside and
the ancient Incan storage houses built into its face.
The Incas intertwined themselves so closely with the Andes that their terraces and fortresses look as if they grew up alongside the mountain grasses.
Other sacred places, like this mountain, are aligned with the sun, moon, and stars,
During the winter solstice, the sun lights up the left side of this mountain, perfectly illuminating the shape of a face that the Incas worshipped as their creator god, Inti.
To be nestled below this mountain and bathed in its golden glow is a surreal, peaceful feeling.
Commute
A man walks to his family’s plots in the Salt Mines of Maras.
These salt mines have been used by different peoples since 700 BC, eventually falling into the hands of the Incas and later, the Peruvian state. In 1980, local communities fought to regain control of the mines.
Today, plots are passed down through local families. When we visited, we saw multiple men extracting salt, walking the thin borders between their plots like balance beams. Our guide told us this work is extremely taxing: sun and salt take a toll on the body, and men used to work without any protective clothing.
The entrance fee to see the mines is around $5 USD. Each Christmas, the families share the annual income equally.
Inheritance
On the way back from the mines, we stopped at one of the identical stalls lining the walkway. A woman quickly bundled up her baby, handing her a flute, so she could give our group samples of the salt her husband mined.
I couldn’t count the number of stalls I saw in my time in the Andes, all selling almost the same products to tourists. Behind each counter was a woman, usually dressed in traditional clothing, glued to her phone.
I wondered if these women ever got bored, waiting to sell a drink or a small purse. I wondered what they did before they had phones to make the long days pass a little more quickly.
I wondered if this baby would take over her mother’s job when she was older and keep her father’s salt plots in their family for another generation.
Read More: Great Spectacles: Sites of Splendour
Machu Picchu
No words can fully describe the majesty of a Wonder of the World.
But I’m a writer, so I’ll do my best.
After seven hours of hiking Incan trails through the towering, green, blazing Andes Mountains, you reach a final set of stairs. This is the Sun Gate. Everything slows in this moment. It is quiet; you can hear your breath, and the wind, and nothing more.
Your final steps lead you onto a huge stone platform. When you look down, your breath catches. Huge, solitary, glittering. A crown jewel, encircled in stone. It’s impossible to separate the creation from the created.
The Incas called this place Huayna Picchu, which means “new” or “young.” Somehow this ancient place seems forever young, as it allows itself to be rediscovered again and again.
Rainbow Mountain
The Rainbow Mountain is almost inaccessible. 3 hours from Cuzco, and 16,000 feet of elevation-it’s hard to imagine anyone living here.
And yet, they do.
Local Andeans keep alpacas on farms dotting ice-cold valley rivers, and grow the only crop that can survive: potatoes. To supplement their income, they guide tourists on horses to the top of Rainbow Mountain.
The guides (some teenagers, others over 60) are paid per trip, so they run up and down the 1,500 feet of elevation change to earn enough. A few sell food at the peak, where frigid winds blow through the snowy pass.
During the presidential election, each Peruvian had to vote–or be fined. These locals had to walk over 2 hours to a polling place, forfeiting a day of work. Many didn’t know who the candidates
were.
The Dance Lives On
While we stayed in Cuzco, a huge dance competition was taking place across the city.
Each night, the squares filled up with Andean youth from towns near and far, dressed in woven patterns, felt hats, and little colourful balloons.
Drums and flutes often clashed with clanging church bells as children performed traditional dances to gathered crowds.
This little girl sat on her father’s shoulders-too young to participate this year, but soon, it will be her turn to learn the dances of old.
A week is not nearly enough time to understand life in the Andes. It’s unexpected, changing, stagnant, hard, joyful, and thoroughly unexplainable.
It is beautiful. It lives on.
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