Long the preserve of backpackers and shoestring travelers, Peru is now emerging into a more upscale travel industry, with the infrastructure and quality of services to suit even the best-heeled global jetsetter. The following suggestions would make a perfect bookend to a business trip, a honeymoon or a luxury tour of Peru.
Sleeping Close Enough to Machu Picchu, You Can Taste It
Built in 1980 and renovated in 2001 when it was purchased by Orient-Express, the Machu Picchu Sanctuary Lodge is built among the tree line so close to the Machu Picchu ruins that you can almost see it from your window.
An option for rooms with terrace views of Machu Picchu and Huanya Picchu mountain peaks. Each terrace includes patio furniture and personalized catering which allows you taste both the authentic Peruvian cuisine, and the mountain air.
Join in one of the hotels guided hikes into the famous ruins, or around one of the other nearby lesser known ruins. Or just enjoy your time relaxing in your stately suite, equipped with mini-bar, king sized beds, and laundry service.
Sailing With a view of The Ocean: New Luxury Real Estate
20 years ago, Asia, Peru was no more than a simple fishing town with a good reputation among surfers. However, Asia has reinvented itself, in recent decades, to be what The New York Times called “The Miami of South America”.
One of the newest additions to this small beach paradise will be the massive La Jolla Resort and Condominium Complex. La Jolla will feature marinas, private beaches, tennis courts, palm tree gardens, and reliable security for the entire grounds.
Three larger buildings will contain apartments and condos, while a large number of town houses with cover the ground between said buildings and the massive swimming pool/artificial Laguna. Which, once completed, will be big enough to go sailing in. Sail boats will available for rent.
Lima’s World Class Country Club & Golf Course
“Exclusive & Tranquil” boasts La Planicie Country Club, in La Molina, and rest assured, exclusive and tranquil it certainly is. Embedded in one of the wealthier districts of the city, you’ll find yourself far enough removed from the city to get relief from city noise.
Immerse yourself in a relaxing game of golf. 18 holes of the most pristine green grass you’ll find in the region and not much rough to speak of. You’ll find a nice international crowd and even a few international tournaments. La Planicie also hosts courts for Tennis, Squash, Fronton, and Table Tennis for the kids.
Unwind in one of the outdoor pools, or one of the indoor saunas. Also make sure to visit the on-location cosmetics salon, and the lounge bar aptly named “Hole #19” All within the confines of the greater Lima area, and providing you with sprawling desert mountain view that can be easily forgotten whilst touring the inner districts.
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Mind the guinea pig! Peru named South America's best destination for foodie breaks
In a part of the world famed for its cuisine, it was always going to be a tough call.
But Peru has beaten off stiff competition from its South American neighbours to be named the continent's Leading Culinary Destination.
The accolade was presented at the Caribbean and The Americas ceremony at the World Travel Awards, set up to 'acknowledge, reward and celebrate excellence across all sectors of the tourism industry'.
Peru mountains
Peak perfection: There's a dish for every landscape in Peru - in the jungle, wild game and fried banana goes down a treat
The worldwide awards will be announced in December.
Other nominees for the South American prize included Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela.
Peruvian cuisine - which includes quinoa, a staple with health enthusiasts - is growing in popularity on the world's gastronomic stage.
The country has a long culinary history, dating back to the Incas and beyond.
Causa
Delicacy: Causa is made with mashed potato, shrimps and peppers and looks as colourful as Peru itself
Chef Gastón Acurio
Final touches: Chef Gastón Acurio has been driving Peruvian cuisine around the world (file photo)
From the rice, fowl and goat dishes in the north coastal regions, to the potato, sweetcorn, chilli pepper and guinea pig of the Andes, there's a gastronomic tradition to match every landscape.
Cultural changes have also helped to shape the cooking, with Spanish, Arab, African, Chinese and Italian influences infusing recipes.
This summer saw the opening of chef Virgilio Martinez's Lima London in Fitzrovia, and fellow native Gastón Acurio has launched restaurants in a number of South American capitals and farther afield in San Francisco and Madrid.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Martinez said: 'I think we are starting to see Peruvian restaurants everywhere, but when I last went to London I found that, even though the whole gastronomic scene is amazing, there was very little contact in terms of food, arts or culture between Peruvians and Londoners.
'The food revolution in Lima is increasing and we need to make a noise about it.'
The winners are voted for by consumers, who nominate from a list compiled by travel experts.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-2206022/Peru-named-South-Americas-best-destination-foodie-break.html#ixzz271qoaAuW
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
But Peru has beaten off stiff competition from its South American neighbours to be named the continent's Leading Culinary Destination.
The accolade was presented at the Caribbean and The Americas ceremony at the World Travel Awards, set up to 'acknowledge, reward and celebrate excellence across all sectors of the tourism industry'.
Peru mountains
Peak perfection: There's a dish for every landscape in Peru - in the jungle, wild game and fried banana goes down a treat
The worldwide awards will be announced in December.
Other nominees for the South American prize included Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela.
Peruvian cuisine - which includes quinoa, a staple with health enthusiasts - is growing in popularity on the world's gastronomic stage.
The country has a long culinary history, dating back to the Incas and beyond.
Causa
Delicacy: Causa is made with mashed potato, shrimps and peppers and looks as colourful as Peru itself
Chef Gastón Acurio
Final touches: Chef Gastón Acurio has been driving Peruvian cuisine around the world (file photo)
From the rice, fowl and goat dishes in the north coastal regions, to the potato, sweetcorn, chilli pepper and guinea pig of the Andes, there's a gastronomic tradition to match every landscape.
Cultural changes have also helped to shape the cooking, with Spanish, Arab, African, Chinese and Italian influences infusing recipes.
This summer saw the opening of chef Virgilio Martinez's Lima London in Fitzrovia, and fellow native Gastón Acurio has launched restaurants in a number of South American capitals and farther afield in San Francisco and Madrid.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Martinez said: 'I think we are starting to see Peruvian restaurants everywhere, but when I last went to London I found that, even though the whole gastronomic scene is amazing, there was very little contact in terms of food, arts or culture between Peruvians and Londoners.
'The food revolution in Lima is increasing and we need to make a noise about it.'
The winners are voted for by consumers, who nominate from a list compiled by travel experts.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-2206022/Peru-named-South-Americas-best-destination-foodie-break.html#ixzz271qoaAuW
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
Monday, November 07, 2005
scoLegendary Inca city is named as the top wonder of the modern world
The pyramids, the sole survivor of the ancient Seven Wonders of the World, only make it into eighth place in an updated list of modern marvels.
The Inca city of Machu Picchu in Peru was voted the 21st century's top wonder by readers of travel magazine Wanderlust.
Second on the list was the vast temple complex of Angkor in Cambodia, with India's Taj Mahal third and the ancient city of Petra in Jordan fourth.
The last three places in the new seven wonders' list were taken by the Grand Canyon in Arizona, the Great Wall of China and the Galapagos Islands off Ecuador.
Extraordinary
Wanderlust's editor-in-chief Lyn Hughes said: "It is no surprise that our readers chose such extraordinary places for the definitive new list of the seven wonders.
"To explore any of these seven fully requires a great sense of adventure, but they truly represent the most amazing travel experiences on the planet."
British wonders making it on to the Wanderlust list included the Scottish Highlands (41st), Stonehenge (50th) and the London Eye (50th).
The official top seven 'new' wonders:
Machu Picchu, Peru
Angkor, Cambodia
Taj Mahal, India
Petra, Jordan
Grand Canyon, USA
Great Wall of China
Galapagos Islands, Ecuador
The seven wonders of the ancient world (in no particular order) were:
The Great Pyramid at Giza
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus
The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus
The Statue of Zeus at Olympia
The Colossus of Rhodes
The Lighthouse at Alexandria
The Inca city of Machu Picchu in Peru was voted the 21st century's top wonder by readers of travel magazine Wanderlust.
Second on the list was the vast temple complex of Angkor in Cambodia, with India's Taj Mahal third and the ancient city of Petra in Jordan fourth.
The last three places in the new seven wonders' list were taken by the Grand Canyon in Arizona, the Great Wall of China and the Galapagos Islands off Ecuador.
Extraordinary
Wanderlust's editor-in-chief Lyn Hughes said: "It is no surprise that our readers chose such extraordinary places for the definitive new list of the seven wonders.
"To explore any of these seven fully requires a great sense of adventure, but they truly represent the most amazing travel experiences on the planet."
British wonders making it on to the Wanderlust list included the Scottish Highlands (41st), Stonehenge (50th) and the London Eye (50th).
The official top seven 'new' wonders:
Machu Picchu, Peru
Angkor, Cambodia
Taj Mahal, India
Petra, Jordan
Grand Canyon, USA
Great Wall of China
Galapagos Islands, Ecuador
The seven wonders of the ancient world (in no particular order) were:
The Great Pyramid at Giza
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus
The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus
The Statue of Zeus at Olympia
The Colossus of Rhodes
The Lighthouse at Alexandria
Travel in the ancient land of the Incas
Getting to Machu Picchu in high style
Diana KorteSpecial to the Denver Post
Machu Picchu is the spectacular Inca archeological ruins located 8,000 feet high in the Andes on a narrow ridge near the Equator. This other-worldly three square miles is surrounded by towering peaks in Peru at the edge of the Amazon rain forest. It's the most visited destination in South America, with about 1,000 travelers each day, many from North America and Europe.
HOW IT ALL BEGAN
The story of Machu Picchu begins with Inca builders and engineers in the 1460s who created the temples, homes and waterways of this mountain retreat.
Beyond its breathtaking beauty, a great deal of its allure is the mystery of why Machu Picchu is here and why was it abandoned by the Incas. The Incas left no written language to describe it, nor does it appear in any chronicles of the Spanish conquerors who arrived in the 1530s. The theory supported by many archaeologists today is Machu Picchu was built as a mountain retreat for Pachacuti, the greatest of Inca emperors, sort of an early Camp David, a retreat away from the busy streets of the Inca capital, Cusco. There are other theories, including devastating diseases, about why it was abandoned, but it's believed that Machu Picchu was mostly forgotten even before the Spanish conquerors came 70 years later.
This Andean hideaway stayed hidden from Western travelers for some four centuries until Yale University's Indiana Jones-like Hiram Bingham, who was looking for the Lost City of the Incas, climbed up Machu Picchu's precipitous mountainside in 1911. He was guided by a local Quechua boy who lived nearby with his family. Machu Picchu wasn't the lost city Bingham was looking for, but he put it on the tourist map.
STOPPING IN CUSCO FOR PIPED-IN OXYGEN
To get to this remote cloud forest area of high-altitude jungle, travelers first arrive in sea-level Lima. After a day or so of museum and cathedral hopping, next they fly to bustling Cusco, Peru's former Inca capital, located at 11,000 feet in the mountains. The Monasterio Hotel there, once a Jesuit seminary dating from the 1500s and before that an Inca Palace, offers piped-in oxygen in guest rooms at night to help travelers acclimate to the altitude. The traditional cure for altitude adjustment here is cups of coca tea, an ancient herbal remedy.
Some of the finest structures of the Inca Empire, a sovereignty that stretched the distance from Seattle to San Diego, are in this city of a quarter of a million people. Cusco, also known as Cuzco, is one of the highest cities in the world and was a thriving capital, according to Spanish documents, that quite astonished the invaders with its structural workmanship and beauty in the 1500s.
After a day or two in Cusco with its colonial churches, Inca monuments and markets, travelers board railway cars in the morning for a several-hours ride. The blue-liveried Orient-Express PeruRail train travels 3,000 feet down in altitude to the towering Machu Picchu ruins at 8,000 feet while moving through incomparable scenery of peaks, valleys and rural life.
Periodically, the train stops for the local women who line up along the train tracks to sell their colorful and inexpensive dolls, ponchos, alpaca blankets, rugs and other items to tourists who enthusiastically shop through open train windows.
Once the train arrives in Aguas Calientes, there's a 15-minute walk through the marketplace and a 30-minute bus ride that twists and turns up the side of a mountain to the entrance of the Machu Picchu Park.
PAGO A LA TIERRA IN MACHU PICCHU
When we awoke at the Machu Picchu Sanctuary Lodge, the only hotel permitted in this ancient citadel, the clouds were so dense that we couldn't see the ruins, much less the surrounding mountains. By mid-morning, though, the wispy clouds, sometimes as fine as curling cigarette smoke, would sporadically part and reveal Machu Picchu glowing in the sunshine.
here was the bench that overlooks the ruins, the mountains and the valley with the raging waters of the Urubamba River 1,500 feet below. As I sat there enjoying the view, every few minutes another guide with a group would come by, each explaining his own Machu Picchu theories. Other travelers from around the world would also come and sit for a while, too. One of them was a Brit who had walked the Inca Trail the previous three days and was, as he said, resting his tired legs. This 26-mile trail was constructed at the time Machu Picchu was created and is considered one of the finest historical and cultural hikes in the world.
Today's hikers can start at the beginning of the trail outside Cusco or take a train part of the way and then walk the rest.
By 3 in the afternoon all but the handful of people staying at the Sanctuary Lodge (capacity is 31 guests) or are traveling on the Orient Express Hiram Bingham train have left on the last bus to either catch a return train to Cusco or stay in one of the lodges in the valley below.
After dinner by candlelight where we sampled grilled alpaca -- which tastes like tender beef -- our group gathered flashlights and walked back into the park under a cloudy sky. After 15 minutes we arrived at the Guardhouse, an original building that has three walls and is open on one side. About a dozen of us sat on a built-in stone ledge. In the middle, a woman shaman-in-training was waiting for us. She was 30-something, of medium height, clothed in traditional Peruvian dress who showed us the traditional "Pago a la Tierra," or payment to the earth Inca ceremony, that dates back 1,000 years.
The Guardhouse was lit by several dozen candles as she explained in English this ancient religious ceremony. She put numerous items on a table in front of us, among them flower petals, plastic figurines and rice. At the end of the ceremony, after asking us all to think of a wish, she bundled the offerings in paper and tied the package with ribbon, to be burned later.
LUXURY TRAVEL HIGH IN THE ANDES
Travelers have come to Peru for generations, but now they come more than ever in all price ranges. This is true in part because on the world stage of tourism, Peru is deemed a safe destination. In addition, travelers can journey to Machu Picchu in high style, a welcome innovation that's not wildly pricey. This destination's required overnight stops all have newly renovated Orient-Express hotels. In Lima it's the boutique Miraflores Park Plaza Hotel located a few feet from the sea. In Cusco it's the historic Hotel Monasterio, and in the park it's the one-of-a-kind Machu Picchu Sanctuary Lodge.
Abercrombie & Kent, that put our tour package together, provided all guides and ground support for us. Our tour also included flights by LanPeru, an affiliate of South America's prosperous LanChile Airlines.
Orient-Express in conjunction with PeruRail also started the Hiram Bingham train in September, 2003, that's proven quite popular. It travels from Cusco to Machu Picchu and is decked out in 1920s Pullman opulence. This four-car train leaves the station at 9 a.m., while all other trains leave at 6 a.m.
Travelers are given brunch, a tour of the ruins with a guide and afternoon tea. They don't have to leave until near sundown, hours after all park visitors have left except those lucky ones staying at the Sanctuary Lodge.
On the way back to Cusco, train guests are given cocktails, dinner and entertainment.
Not only is a visit to history-rich Peru one that ranges from ancient mystical ceremonies to soaring Andean vistas, now you can do it style in these days of increased travel to South America.
Diana KorteSpecial to the Denver Post
Machu Picchu is the spectacular Inca archeological ruins located 8,000 feet high in the Andes on a narrow ridge near the Equator. This other-worldly three square miles is surrounded by towering peaks in Peru at the edge of the Amazon rain forest. It's the most visited destination in South America, with about 1,000 travelers each day, many from North America and Europe.
HOW IT ALL BEGAN
The story of Machu Picchu begins with Inca builders and engineers in the 1460s who created the temples, homes and waterways of this mountain retreat.
Beyond its breathtaking beauty, a great deal of its allure is the mystery of why Machu Picchu is here and why was it abandoned by the Incas. The Incas left no written language to describe it, nor does it appear in any chronicles of the Spanish conquerors who arrived in the 1530s. The theory supported by many archaeologists today is Machu Picchu was built as a mountain retreat for Pachacuti, the greatest of Inca emperors, sort of an early Camp David, a retreat away from the busy streets of the Inca capital, Cusco. There are other theories, including devastating diseases, about why it was abandoned, but it's believed that Machu Picchu was mostly forgotten even before the Spanish conquerors came 70 years later.
This Andean hideaway stayed hidden from Western travelers for some four centuries until Yale University's Indiana Jones-like Hiram Bingham, who was looking for the Lost City of the Incas, climbed up Machu Picchu's precipitous mountainside in 1911. He was guided by a local Quechua boy who lived nearby with his family. Machu Picchu wasn't the lost city Bingham was looking for, but he put it on the tourist map.
STOPPING IN CUSCO FOR PIPED-IN OXYGEN
To get to this remote cloud forest area of high-altitude jungle, travelers first arrive in sea-level Lima. After a day or so of museum and cathedral hopping, next they fly to bustling Cusco, Peru's former Inca capital, located at 11,000 feet in the mountains. The Monasterio Hotel there, once a Jesuit seminary dating from the 1500s and before that an Inca Palace, offers piped-in oxygen in guest rooms at night to help travelers acclimate to the altitude. The traditional cure for altitude adjustment here is cups of coca tea, an ancient herbal remedy.
Some of the finest structures of the Inca Empire, a sovereignty that stretched the distance from Seattle to San Diego, are in this city of a quarter of a million people. Cusco, also known as Cuzco, is one of the highest cities in the world and was a thriving capital, according to Spanish documents, that quite astonished the invaders with its structural workmanship and beauty in the 1500s.
After a day or two in Cusco with its colonial churches, Inca monuments and markets, travelers board railway cars in the morning for a several-hours ride. The blue-liveried Orient-Express PeruRail train travels 3,000 feet down in altitude to the towering Machu Picchu ruins at 8,000 feet while moving through incomparable scenery of peaks, valleys and rural life.
Periodically, the train stops for the local women who line up along the train tracks to sell their colorful and inexpensive dolls, ponchos, alpaca blankets, rugs and other items to tourists who enthusiastically shop through open train windows.
Once the train arrives in Aguas Calientes, there's a 15-minute walk through the marketplace and a 30-minute bus ride that twists and turns up the side of a mountain to the entrance of the Machu Picchu Park.
PAGO A LA TIERRA IN MACHU PICCHU
When we awoke at the Machu Picchu Sanctuary Lodge, the only hotel permitted in this ancient citadel, the clouds were so dense that we couldn't see the ruins, much less the surrounding mountains. By mid-morning, though, the wispy clouds, sometimes as fine as curling cigarette smoke, would sporadically part and reveal Machu Picchu glowing in the sunshine.
here was the bench that overlooks the ruins, the mountains and the valley with the raging waters of the Urubamba River 1,500 feet below. As I sat there enjoying the view, every few minutes another guide with a group would come by, each explaining his own Machu Picchu theories. Other travelers from around the world would also come and sit for a while, too. One of them was a Brit who had walked the Inca Trail the previous three days and was, as he said, resting his tired legs. This 26-mile trail was constructed at the time Machu Picchu was created and is considered one of the finest historical and cultural hikes in the world.
Today's hikers can start at the beginning of the trail outside Cusco or take a train part of the way and then walk the rest.
By 3 in the afternoon all but the handful of people staying at the Sanctuary Lodge (capacity is 31 guests) or are traveling on the Orient Express Hiram Bingham train have left on the last bus to either catch a return train to Cusco or stay in one of the lodges in the valley below.
After dinner by candlelight where we sampled grilled alpaca -- which tastes like tender beef -- our group gathered flashlights and walked back into the park under a cloudy sky. After 15 minutes we arrived at the Guardhouse, an original building that has three walls and is open on one side. About a dozen of us sat on a built-in stone ledge. In the middle, a woman shaman-in-training was waiting for us. She was 30-something, of medium height, clothed in traditional Peruvian dress who showed us the traditional "Pago a la Tierra," or payment to the earth Inca ceremony, that dates back 1,000 years.
The Guardhouse was lit by several dozen candles as she explained in English this ancient religious ceremony. She put numerous items on a table in front of us, among them flower petals, plastic figurines and rice. At the end of the ceremony, after asking us all to think of a wish, she bundled the offerings in paper and tied the package with ribbon, to be burned later.
LUXURY TRAVEL HIGH IN THE ANDES
Travelers have come to Peru for generations, but now they come more than ever in all price ranges. This is true in part because on the world stage of tourism, Peru is deemed a safe destination. In addition, travelers can journey to Machu Picchu in high style, a welcome innovation that's not wildly pricey. This destination's required overnight stops all have newly renovated Orient-Express hotels. In Lima it's the boutique Miraflores Park Plaza Hotel located a few feet from the sea. In Cusco it's the historic Hotel Monasterio, and in the park it's the one-of-a-kind Machu Picchu Sanctuary Lodge.
Abercrombie & Kent, that put our tour package together, provided all guides and ground support for us. Our tour also included flights by LanPeru, an affiliate of South America's prosperous LanChile Airlines.
Orient-Express in conjunction with PeruRail also started the Hiram Bingham train in September, 2003, that's proven quite popular. It travels from Cusco to Machu Picchu and is decked out in 1920s Pullman opulence. This four-car train leaves the station at 9 a.m., while all other trains leave at 6 a.m.
Travelers are given brunch, a tour of the ruins with a guide and afternoon tea. They don't have to leave until near sundown, hours after all park visitors have left except those lucky ones staying at the Sanctuary Lodge.
On the way back to Cusco, train guests are given cocktails, dinner and entertainment.
Not only is a visit to history-rich Peru one that ranges from ancient mystical ceremonies to soaring Andean vistas, now you can do it style in these days of increased travel to South America.
Temples, Tombs & Pyramids: Peruvian Archaeology At Its Best
The Incan kings made some sound decisions when it came to choosing a home for their empire. Peru is a country built on the foundations of mystical ancient civilizations, with the rugged mountains of the Andes, the lush rainforests of the Amazon, bountiful wildlife, palm-treed desert oases, coastal beaches and a rich and thriving contemporary Latin culture. For the traveler, it offers a little of everything and for the history enthusiast, it represents a magical journey into the past.
Peru is such a unique destination, that it can be even better the second time around. Rutahsa Adventures (tel. 931/520-7047; www.rutahsa.com), purveyors of unique Latin American tours, is offering a new specialized tour to Peru, geared towards those who may have already been to Cusco and Machu Picchu and are looking for a more in-depth cultural experience. "The Ancient Cultures of Northern Peru" tour will begin on May 23, 2006, but like most Rutahsa trips, this one will undoubtedly sell out, so you may wish to book early to secure your place.
Northern Peru abounds in stunning Andean scenery and fewer tourists. For archaeology and anthropology buffs, this trip is second to none in its attention to detail and opportunity to visit isolated yet culturally significant sacred sites featuring a multitude of pyramids, temples and tombs.
On this 14-day adventure, visit the city of Huaraz, the Baños Termales (natural hot springs baths) in the village of Monterrey, Yungay, Llanganuco lakes, the town of Trujillo (home to two famous pre-Columbian cultures, the Moche and the Chimu), the beach resort town of Huanchaco, Chiclayo, the town of Chachapoyas (home to the mysterious cloud people), Leymebamba, the spectacular valley of the Río Marañón, Marañón River, Celendín and Cajamarca.
Archaeological highlights (and there are many) include Chavín de Huantar (home to the oldest known pre-Incan civilization in Peru), Sechín (and circumstances permitting, the "Great Wall of Peru"), the great pyramids of Huaca de la Luna and Huaca del Sol (the largest pre-Columbian structure in South America dated from 600-400 BC), Chan Chan (capital of the Chimu kingdom), Túcume (the infamous site of Sipán, considered the Tutankhamen tomb of Latin America and the New World's richest unlooted tomb), the National Museum of the Royal Tombs of Sipán in Chiclayo, a horse ride up to the citadel of Kuelap (a pre-Inca mountain fortress), the ruins of Molinete, the pre-Inca remains near Cajamarca (and the site of tragic downfall of the Incan Empire at the hand of the conquistadors), the ancient stone aqueducts of Cumbe Mayo, and Las Ventanas de Otuzco (The Windows of Otuzco), a necropolis of niches carved into volcanic cliff faces.
This special trip is priced at $1,922 per person (with 10 to 12 participants) or the price will come down to $1,778 per person if 13 to 16 travelers participate (land-only). This price includes all hotels (double occupancy rooms), airport transfers, ground transportation, domestic airfare from Cajamarca to Lima, entry fees, bilingual guide service, and various meals (continental breakfasts at most hotels and picnic lunches on certain outings). A single supplement of $235 applies. Airfare to Lima is additional. For a fully detailed itinerary of this trip, visit www.rutahsa.com/peru-06-n.html.
Upon returning to Lima, trip participants who wish to continue on to Cusco and the heart of the Inca Empire may also sign up for Rutahsa Adventures' "Cultural Adventure in the Inca Empire and keshwa chaca Excursion" starting the following day (June 6, 2006). This trip features visits to Cusco, the Sacred Valley, and the mysterious Machu Picchu with an extra special excursion to view the annual rebuilding of the last remaining Inca straw suspension bridge (the keshwa chaca). This trip is priced at $2,025 (for 10 to 12 participants) or $1,927 (for 13 to 16 people). Rutahsa can also arrange extensions for travelers who wish to fly over the Nasca Lines, hike the Inca Trail, or visit the Peruvian Amazon.
If you're after a brief Peruvian interlude taking in the famed Machu Picchu, Latin America 4 Less (tel. 800/480-0707; www.latinamerica4less.com) has a few perfect short getaways. The Machu Picchu "Lost City of The Incas" tour includes round-trip International airfare, round-trip plane ticket from Lima to Cusco, one-night hotel accommodations in Lima, two-nights in Cusco and one in Machu Picchu, all transfers and tours as per itinerary, daily breakfast and various other meals as per itinerary. This package is priced at $1,069 from Miami, $1,239 from New York or $1,119 from Los Angeles with a single supplement of $148. Trips depart on October 27, November 10 and November 30, 2005, February 16 and March 16, 2006.
The "Great Peru Experience" tour is a six-day adventure that takes you to Lima, Cusco, Machu Picchu, Puno, and Juliaca. This package is priced at $1,415 from Miami, $1,585 from New York or $1,465 from Los Angeles with a $235 single supplement. Tours depart daily and include round-trip International airfare, flights from Lima to Cusco and Juliaca to Lima, one-night hotel accommodations in Lima, two-nights in Cusco, one-night in Aguas Calientes (Machu Picchu) and two nights in Puno, all transfer as per itinerary, half-day guided City tour in Cusco and nearby ruins, full-day Machu Picchu Tour, train transportation, guided excursions to the Uros Islands in Titicaca Lake and to Sillustani in Puno and daily breakfasts.
The eight-night "Peru Enigmatic" tour features visits to Lima, Cusco, the Sacred Valley, Machu Picchu, Puno and Juliaca. The package includes round-trip International airfare, flights from Lima to Cusco and Juliaca to Lima, eight-nights hotel accommodations (two-nights in Lima, two-nights in Cusco, one-night in the Sacred Valley, one-night in Aguas Calientes and two-nights in Puno), all transfers as per itinerary, half-day guided tour of Cusco and nearby ruins, half-day guided tour at Machu Picchu, half day guided tour of Lake Titicaca, daily breakfast and meals as per itinerary. This trip is priced at $1,676 from Miami, $1,846 from New York or $1,726 from Los Angeles with a $336 single supplement. Tours depart on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays.
Each of these tours must be booked by October 31, 2005.
Gate One Travel (tel.800/682-3333; www.gate1travel.com) is featuring a discounted nine-day Peru Inca Special from $699 per person plus taxes. The package includes round-trip flights from Miami to Lima with Lan Peru (other departure cities available for additional cost), round-trip flights from Lima to Cusco, seven-nights hotel accommodations (three in Lima and four in Cusco), all transfers, seven breakfasts and one dinner, sightseeing in air-conditioned modern motor coach, services of English speaking local guides and entrance fees per itinerary. This price is valid for departures on January 10, February 14, March 14, April 11 and May 23, 2006. Other departure dates available for additional cost. Add $171 from New York, Philadelphia or Boston, and $259 from Chicago. Bookings must be completed by December 28, 2005.
Intra Tours (tel. 800/334-8069; www.intratours.com), discount flight specialists to Latin America, currently has the following deals from various cities to Lima:
Miami: $440
Atlanta: $582
Detroit: $597
San Francisco: $631
Boston: $653
New York: $673
Taxes are additional. Monday to Thursday departures with a Saturday night stay required (maximum 90-day stay). Valid for travel from now until December 9, 2005 and from January 14 to March 31, 2006.
For more information about traveling in Peru, visit www.peru.org.pe/defaulteng.htm and www.frommers.com/destinations/peru.
Talk with fellow Frommer's travelers on our Peru Message Boards today.
Related Information:
Trip Dates: Varies per provider
Destinations: Lima, Cusco, Sacred Valley, Machu Picchu, Puno and Lake Titicaca
Provider: Multiple Providers
Peru is such a unique destination, that it can be even better the second time around. Rutahsa Adventures (tel. 931/520-7047; www.rutahsa.com), purveyors of unique Latin American tours, is offering a new specialized tour to Peru, geared towards those who may have already been to Cusco and Machu Picchu and are looking for a more in-depth cultural experience. "The Ancient Cultures of Northern Peru" tour will begin on May 23, 2006, but like most Rutahsa trips, this one will undoubtedly sell out, so you may wish to book early to secure your place.
Northern Peru abounds in stunning Andean scenery and fewer tourists. For archaeology and anthropology buffs, this trip is second to none in its attention to detail and opportunity to visit isolated yet culturally significant sacred sites featuring a multitude of pyramids, temples and tombs.
On this 14-day adventure, visit the city of Huaraz, the Baños Termales (natural hot springs baths) in the village of Monterrey, Yungay, Llanganuco lakes, the town of Trujillo (home to two famous pre-Columbian cultures, the Moche and the Chimu), the beach resort town of Huanchaco, Chiclayo, the town of Chachapoyas (home to the mysterious cloud people), Leymebamba, the spectacular valley of the Río Marañón, Marañón River, Celendín and Cajamarca.
Archaeological highlights (and there are many) include Chavín de Huantar (home to the oldest known pre-Incan civilization in Peru), Sechín (and circumstances permitting, the "Great Wall of Peru"), the great pyramids of Huaca de la Luna and Huaca del Sol (the largest pre-Columbian structure in South America dated from 600-400 BC), Chan Chan (capital of the Chimu kingdom), Túcume (the infamous site of Sipán, considered the Tutankhamen tomb of Latin America and the New World's richest unlooted tomb), the National Museum of the Royal Tombs of Sipán in Chiclayo, a horse ride up to the citadel of Kuelap (a pre-Inca mountain fortress), the ruins of Molinete, the pre-Inca remains near Cajamarca (and the site of tragic downfall of the Incan Empire at the hand of the conquistadors), the ancient stone aqueducts of Cumbe Mayo, and Las Ventanas de Otuzco (The Windows of Otuzco), a necropolis of niches carved into volcanic cliff faces.
This special trip is priced at $1,922 per person (with 10 to 12 participants) or the price will come down to $1,778 per person if 13 to 16 travelers participate (land-only). This price includes all hotels (double occupancy rooms), airport transfers, ground transportation, domestic airfare from Cajamarca to Lima, entry fees, bilingual guide service, and various meals (continental breakfasts at most hotels and picnic lunches on certain outings). A single supplement of $235 applies. Airfare to Lima is additional. For a fully detailed itinerary of this trip, visit www.rutahsa.com/peru-06-n.html.
Upon returning to Lima, trip participants who wish to continue on to Cusco and the heart of the Inca Empire may also sign up for Rutahsa Adventures' "Cultural Adventure in the Inca Empire and keshwa chaca Excursion" starting the following day (June 6, 2006). This trip features visits to Cusco, the Sacred Valley, and the mysterious Machu Picchu with an extra special excursion to view the annual rebuilding of the last remaining Inca straw suspension bridge (the keshwa chaca). This trip is priced at $2,025 (for 10 to 12 participants) or $1,927 (for 13 to 16 people). Rutahsa can also arrange extensions for travelers who wish to fly over the Nasca Lines, hike the Inca Trail, or visit the Peruvian Amazon.
If you're after a brief Peruvian interlude taking in the famed Machu Picchu, Latin America 4 Less (tel. 800/480-0707; www.latinamerica4less.com) has a few perfect short getaways. The Machu Picchu "Lost City of The Incas" tour includes round-trip International airfare, round-trip plane ticket from Lima to Cusco, one-night hotel accommodations in Lima, two-nights in Cusco and one in Machu Picchu, all transfers and tours as per itinerary, daily breakfast and various other meals as per itinerary. This package is priced at $1,069 from Miami, $1,239 from New York or $1,119 from Los Angeles with a single supplement of $148. Trips depart on October 27, November 10 and November 30, 2005, February 16 and March 16, 2006.
The "Great Peru Experience" tour is a six-day adventure that takes you to Lima, Cusco, Machu Picchu, Puno, and Juliaca. This package is priced at $1,415 from Miami, $1,585 from New York or $1,465 from Los Angeles with a $235 single supplement. Tours depart daily and include round-trip International airfare, flights from Lima to Cusco and Juliaca to Lima, one-night hotel accommodations in Lima, two-nights in Cusco, one-night in Aguas Calientes (Machu Picchu) and two nights in Puno, all transfer as per itinerary, half-day guided City tour in Cusco and nearby ruins, full-day Machu Picchu Tour, train transportation, guided excursions to the Uros Islands in Titicaca Lake and to Sillustani in Puno and daily breakfasts.
The eight-night "Peru Enigmatic" tour features visits to Lima, Cusco, the Sacred Valley, Machu Picchu, Puno and Juliaca. The package includes round-trip International airfare, flights from Lima to Cusco and Juliaca to Lima, eight-nights hotel accommodations (two-nights in Lima, two-nights in Cusco, one-night in the Sacred Valley, one-night in Aguas Calientes and two-nights in Puno), all transfers as per itinerary, half-day guided tour of Cusco and nearby ruins, half-day guided tour at Machu Picchu, half day guided tour of Lake Titicaca, daily breakfast and meals as per itinerary. This trip is priced at $1,676 from Miami, $1,846 from New York or $1,726 from Los Angeles with a $336 single supplement. Tours depart on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays.
Each of these tours must be booked by October 31, 2005.
Gate One Travel (tel.800/682-3333; www.gate1travel.com) is featuring a discounted nine-day Peru Inca Special from $699 per person plus taxes. The package includes round-trip flights from Miami to Lima with Lan Peru (other departure cities available for additional cost), round-trip flights from Lima to Cusco, seven-nights hotel accommodations (three in Lima and four in Cusco), all transfers, seven breakfasts and one dinner, sightseeing in air-conditioned modern motor coach, services of English speaking local guides and entrance fees per itinerary. This price is valid for departures on January 10, February 14, March 14, April 11 and May 23, 2006. Other departure dates available for additional cost. Add $171 from New York, Philadelphia or Boston, and $259 from Chicago. Bookings must be completed by December 28, 2005.
Intra Tours (tel. 800/334-8069; www.intratours.com), discount flight specialists to Latin America, currently has the following deals from various cities to Lima:
Miami: $440
Atlanta: $582
Detroit: $597
San Francisco: $631
Boston: $653
New York: $673
Taxes are additional. Monday to Thursday departures with a Saturday night stay required (maximum 90-day stay). Valid for travel from now until December 9, 2005 and from January 14 to March 31, 2006.
For more information about traveling in Peru, visit www.peru.org.pe/defaulteng.htm and www.frommers.com/destinations/peru.
Talk with fellow Frommer's travelers on our Peru Message Boards today.
Related Information:
Trip Dates: Varies per provider
Destinations: Lima, Cusco, Sacred Valley, Machu Picchu, Puno and Lake Titicaca
Provider: Multiple Providers
Giant Fin, Big Mouth: Diving Tete-a-Tete in the Galapagos
(Bloomberg) -- Near the edge of a rocky plateau 70 feet below the ocean's surface, I'm groping for sharp, barnacle- encrusted rocks with my gloved hands, when suddenly, our dive guide Jaimie signals us to let go.
Our group of eight divers kicks furiously into the blue waters off the Galapagos Islands, trying to make headway into the open ocean. Hundreds of hovering small, red snapper-like Pacific creole fish seem to observe our efforts. We can't see much else, beyond our own bubbles.
As Jaimie excitedly rattles his underwater noisemaker, we kick even harder. I'm frantically trying to catch my breath, when my eyes identify big, white spots that appear to be floating. As my vision adjusts, I make out a giant back fin, then a massive tail. It's a 45-foot, 8-ton whale shark -- the biggest fish in the sea, an underwater Mack truck.
My husband and I are on a two-week diving trip to these fertile islands, located 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador. This is a view of the Galapagos Charles Darwin didn't get when he sailed there aboard the Beagle in 1835 and began to formulate the theories of evolution he later published in ``The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.''
Tete-a-Tete
The Galapagos are the Nature Channel live. Today, 97 percent of its 13 islands, 42 islets and innumerable rock formations have been declared a national park, limiting fishing to certain areas and quotas (still, 100,000 people visited last year alone). The surrounding seas, 50,000 square miles of Pacific Ocean, constitute the second-largest marine reserve in the world, after the Great Barrier Reef off of Australia.
Here a lucky diver undeterred by cold waters and strong currents can enjoy a once-in a-lifetime chance for a tete-a-tete with sharks and 150-year-old turtles the size of coffee tables.
During our two-week stay aboard Peter Hughes's Sky Dancer, a 110-foot vessel geared toward diving, we dove off Darwin and Wolf Island -- solitary rock formations located 250 nautical miles north of the central islands -- where we were surrounded by hundreds of 7- to 10-foot hammerhead and Galapagos sharks, swimming in wall-like formations just feet away, eerily eyeing us with their sideways-protruding eyes.
Big Mouths
On this particular day, I am just a few arm lengths away from touching this whale shark, a huge yet peaceful fish. My husband Matt is indeed so close that he is accidentally brushed by the gigantic tail fin and tossed off track in his efforts to film this leviathan. He manages to catch up with the creature, which seems completely indifferent to our presence, and gets a close-up of its 6-foot-wide mouth, slightly opened to filter the waters for krill and other small prey.
Even the most seasoned divers among us forget to check dive computers for depth and air levels as we try to keep pace with this mythic Goliath for at least a few moments before it slowly dives to greater depths and fades out of sight.
The Galapagos islands are bathed in nutrient-rich waters carried to the archipelago by several currents, including the warmer Panama current from the north, the Cromwell from the east and the cold Humboldt from the south.
Spectacular Variety
In this dynamic ecosystem, whale and hammerhead sharks and cold-water species of game fish from the southern waters of Peru, Chile and Antarctica co-exist with a profusion of warm- water and tropical fish.
Although a whale shark sighting was the silent goal for most of our dive boat's 16 members, it was regularly matched by the sheer volume and spectacular variety of other Galapagos denizens.
Ripping currents thrust us closely past a pod of bottlenose dolphins, schools of elegant, white-spotted eagle rays, clouds of schooling barracuda, as well as friendly hawksbill and green sea turtles.
The Galapagos are a celebration of the bizarre. I witnessed a manta ray with a 14-foot wingspan catapulting itself completely out of the water as if trying to fly. Galapagos penguins darted about at arm's length, catching and eating small red baitfish that hid in rock crevices.
Begging Boobies
Yet this place easily converts even the most hard-core divers into land tourists. About 60 percent of the trip was interspersed with hikes across some of the islands.
I saw three giant albatross juveniles engage in play fighting like overgrown puppies, completely indifferent to our presence, and blue-footed boobies feed their begging chicks.
Above sea level, the Galapagos mirror the underwater volcanic rock deserts. The surface consists mainly of melancholic landscapes with wind-swept coastlines, leafless trees and low-growing brush that hug the red and black volcanic earth that has been ground over millions of years into fine powder by the constant assault from wind and water.
The rugged islands are littered with generally unafraid, approachable animals. On land, we cautiously navigate our way around matriarchal sea lions with their nursing pups, bright red Sally Lightfoot crabs and thousands of dinosaur-like marine iguanas that litter the rocky shores like ancient relics.
Tortoise Meat
For centuries, humans have been attracted to these remote islands. In the 16th-century pirates arrived to fill their ships with the large turtles, stacking them upside down for fresh meat, as tortoises can live without food or water for one year. Following the pirates were ex-convicts and luckless mainland settlers who were looking for new beginnings on the Galapagos, also called the Islas Encantadas, or Enchanted Islands.
As settlers also introduced foreign species to the islands, including goats, dogs and pigs, many native species were wiped out or brought close to extinction, such as Lonesome George, the only remaining member of the Pinta Island sub-species of tortoises.
As we return in our dinghy to the main boat after one of our last dives at Darwin Island, Jaimie signals us to don our masks and fins for an impromptu snorkel.
We slip silently into the water. I stretch out my arms and legs and bob on the water's surface, breathing calmly while taking in a magical view. Hundreds of melonhead whale swim over to inspect me, as their piercing songs echo through the water.
To contact the reporter on this story:
Nadja Brandt in Los Angeles at nbrandt@bloomberg.net
Our group of eight divers kicks furiously into the blue waters off the Galapagos Islands, trying to make headway into the open ocean. Hundreds of hovering small, red snapper-like Pacific creole fish seem to observe our efforts. We can't see much else, beyond our own bubbles.
As Jaimie excitedly rattles his underwater noisemaker, we kick even harder. I'm frantically trying to catch my breath, when my eyes identify big, white spots that appear to be floating. As my vision adjusts, I make out a giant back fin, then a massive tail. It's a 45-foot, 8-ton whale shark -- the biggest fish in the sea, an underwater Mack truck.
My husband and I are on a two-week diving trip to these fertile islands, located 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador. This is a view of the Galapagos Charles Darwin didn't get when he sailed there aboard the Beagle in 1835 and began to formulate the theories of evolution he later published in ``The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.''
Tete-a-Tete
The Galapagos are the Nature Channel live. Today, 97 percent of its 13 islands, 42 islets and innumerable rock formations have been declared a national park, limiting fishing to certain areas and quotas (still, 100,000 people visited last year alone). The surrounding seas, 50,000 square miles of Pacific Ocean, constitute the second-largest marine reserve in the world, after the Great Barrier Reef off of Australia.
Here a lucky diver undeterred by cold waters and strong currents can enjoy a once-in a-lifetime chance for a tete-a-tete with sharks and 150-year-old turtles the size of coffee tables.
During our two-week stay aboard Peter Hughes's Sky Dancer, a 110-foot vessel geared toward diving, we dove off Darwin and Wolf Island -- solitary rock formations located 250 nautical miles north of the central islands -- where we were surrounded by hundreds of 7- to 10-foot hammerhead and Galapagos sharks, swimming in wall-like formations just feet away, eerily eyeing us with their sideways-protruding eyes.
Big Mouths
On this particular day, I am just a few arm lengths away from touching this whale shark, a huge yet peaceful fish. My husband Matt is indeed so close that he is accidentally brushed by the gigantic tail fin and tossed off track in his efforts to film this leviathan. He manages to catch up with the creature, which seems completely indifferent to our presence, and gets a close-up of its 6-foot-wide mouth, slightly opened to filter the waters for krill and other small prey.
Even the most seasoned divers among us forget to check dive computers for depth and air levels as we try to keep pace with this mythic Goliath for at least a few moments before it slowly dives to greater depths and fades out of sight.
The Galapagos islands are bathed in nutrient-rich waters carried to the archipelago by several currents, including the warmer Panama current from the north, the Cromwell from the east and the cold Humboldt from the south.
Spectacular Variety
In this dynamic ecosystem, whale and hammerhead sharks and cold-water species of game fish from the southern waters of Peru, Chile and Antarctica co-exist with a profusion of warm- water and tropical fish.
Although a whale shark sighting was the silent goal for most of our dive boat's 16 members, it was regularly matched by the sheer volume and spectacular variety of other Galapagos denizens.
Ripping currents thrust us closely past a pod of bottlenose dolphins, schools of elegant, white-spotted eagle rays, clouds of schooling barracuda, as well as friendly hawksbill and green sea turtles.
The Galapagos are a celebration of the bizarre. I witnessed a manta ray with a 14-foot wingspan catapulting itself completely out of the water as if trying to fly. Galapagos penguins darted about at arm's length, catching and eating small red baitfish that hid in rock crevices.
Begging Boobies
Yet this place easily converts even the most hard-core divers into land tourists. About 60 percent of the trip was interspersed with hikes across some of the islands.
I saw three giant albatross juveniles engage in play fighting like overgrown puppies, completely indifferent to our presence, and blue-footed boobies feed their begging chicks.
Above sea level, the Galapagos mirror the underwater volcanic rock deserts. The surface consists mainly of melancholic landscapes with wind-swept coastlines, leafless trees and low-growing brush that hug the red and black volcanic earth that has been ground over millions of years into fine powder by the constant assault from wind and water.
The rugged islands are littered with generally unafraid, approachable animals. On land, we cautiously navigate our way around matriarchal sea lions with their nursing pups, bright red Sally Lightfoot crabs and thousands of dinosaur-like marine iguanas that litter the rocky shores like ancient relics.
Tortoise Meat
For centuries, humans have been attracted to these remote islands. In the 16th-century pirates arrived to fill their ships with the large turtles, stacking them upside down for fresh meat, as tortoises can live without food or water for one year. Following the pirates were ex-convicts and luckless mainland settlers who were looking for new beginnings on the Galapagos, also called the Islas Encantadas, or Enchanted Islands.
As settlers also introduced foreign species to the islands, including goats, dogs and pigs, many native species were wiped out or brought close to extinction, such as Lonesome George, the only remaining member of the Pinta Island sub-species of tortoises.
As we return in our dinghy to the main boat after one of our last dives at Darwin Island, Jaimie signals us to don our masks and fins for an impromptu snorkel.
We slip silently into the water. I stretch out my arms and legs and bob on the water's surface, breathing calmly while taking in a magical view. Hundreds of melonhead whale swim over to inspect me, as their piercing songs echo through the water.
To contact the reporter on this story:
Nadja Brandt in Los Angeles at nbrandt@bloomberg.net
Networking in the valley of the Incas
By Jonathan Levi International Herald Tribune
WILLOQ, Peru It isn't every day that a Jew becomes a Catholic godfather to a polytheistic Peruvian 5-year-old, high above the Sacred Valley of the Incas. Danny Posen, an American and international businessman married to a Swiss woman, knows more about the rituals of drinking mare's milk in Mongolia and vodka on the shores of Lake Baikal than of reading the Torah in a synagogue. The colonial church of Willoq may not be a typical Catholic church. Its wooden door is padlocked for most of the year - it was last opened in February for Carnival. And little Miguelito, known as Imasutiki in Quechua, the local language since the days of the Incas, may not understand why the Catholic Trinity is monotheistic and his family's worship of the gods of the earth, the sun and the moon is not. Nevertheless, the ceremony, held recently in this community of 127 families, in the Pachamanca Valley, was just the latest incarnation of a kind of networking that has been practiced since the time of the Incas, long before Pizarro brought the cross and the gun. Willoq, in the dry season, is a 45-minute drive up a rutted dirt road from the town of Ollantaytambo, the last train stop on the run from the ancient Inca capital of Cuzco to Machu Picchu. The valley is punctuated by the roofless storehouses of Incas long dead and their signature terraced fields. The rare truck shares the road with pigs and oxen and dogs and the occasional farmer carrying a 25-kilogram, or 55-pound, caquitaclla, a foot plow whose design and function has barely changed in 500 years. Life in the pueblos of the Sacred Valley seems willfully primitive, lacking tractors for cultivation and even simple pulley systems for transporting loads up the steep inclines. Yet until Peru's Agrarian Reform in 1969, Willoq and much of the valley were the property of the family of the secretary to Andrés Avelino Cáceres, president of Peru at the end of the 19th century. The people of Willoq worked as tenant farmers, essentially slaves, with little incentive to develop their little plots of land. Posen's love affair with Peru began in the early 1980s, when he was a 20-something commodities trader sent by his company to the lead and zinc mines of South America. Although he left Peru for Europe 15 years ago, he continued to oversee South American operations. It was in that capacity that he interviewed a chic young French woman who had a single-minded desire to work in Peru. It wasn't long afterward that Marie-Helène Miribel called Posen and said she was tired of Lima and miniskirts and wanted to open a small hotel in Urubamba, halfway between Cuzco and Machu Picchu. "I was mad about horses and paragliding," Miribel said. "Urubamba had ponies and mountains. It was only natural." Seven years later, in collaboration with Posen, Miribel has made the Hotel Sol y Luna a thriving concern of 30 bungalows, that has hosted presidents and ambassadors. It was on a trip to buy ponchos and other textiles for the hotel's shop, that Miribel and Posen met Miguelito. On Sundays, the plaza is full of local women wearing colorful lopsided sombreros and trading potatoes; mestizo women from the salt mines of Moray wearing tall, white hats and trading their coarse iodized product; and women in straw hats from the jungle, just 20 kilometers, or about 12 miles, over the mountain range, trading medicinal herbs for use against asthma and prostate cancer. Men are only an ornament at the market, relaxing at the side of the road with jerrycans full of chicha, a homemade corn beer, after a week of carrying tents and backpacks for tourists over the Inca Trail. On the Wednesday in June when Posen and Miribel arrived, the plaza was empty, but within five minutes of their arrival, the word was out. The women of the village ran from their fields and snatched up armfuls of ponchos and runners and hats that they had woven on foot looms. Miribel had had great success with Willoq textiles in her shop and was a popular visitor. As Posen followed Miribel on her rounds, the bell above the school rang, and suddenly 200 children exploded onto the plaza for recess, joining their mothers or playing soccer with a half-inflated ball. Posen stooped down to talk to one little boy in Spanish and was immediately enchanted. His enchantment didn't miss the eyes of the boy's mother. Within seconds, Posen had agreed to stand as Miguelito's godfather on his next trip to the Sacred Valley. Posen was hardly the first gringo to pass through Willoq. The Peruvian tourist industry, once reduced to a few intrepid backpackers in the 1980s and '90s during the bloody war between the terrorists of the Shining Path and the soldiers of the Peruvian government, is stretching the country's ingenuity. Every day, 84 travelers plonk down $500 for a day trip aboard the luxurious Orient-Express Hiram Bingham train to Machu Picchu on a route that backpackers have traditionally taken for $65. And with a limit of 500 people a day on the Inca Trail, to help conserve the trail and its surrounding high plateau, a three-month waiting list has made the intrepid backpackers of yesteryear less visible than the notoriously shy vicuñas. But Posen was a gringo with a connection to the valley. And connections are what count in a pueblo whose livelihood depends on trade more than sale. "The people of the pueblo don't sell their animals to the people of the jungle for money, or buy salt for Peruvian sole," explained Ana Zamalloa Herrera, a guide from Cuzco who spends much of her time in the small villages of the Sacred Valley. "They trade - pigs for potatoes, blankets for corn. The purpose of finding a good godmother or godfather for your child is to create a spiritual connection with people from other communities." In Willoq, that often means finding a godparent in the larger town of Ollantaytambo, who will care for and feed the child when he is in high school - a facility that Willoq lacks. There was certainly no aura of gold-digging four months later as Posen and Miribel walked past a grazing pony toward the stucco and stone church. Stooping over the lintel, they stepped out of the noonday sun into the blackened church, lighted by only a dozen candles, but packed with nearly 100 villagers decked out in ponchos and blouses adorned with dozens of white buttons and safety pins in honor of the occasion. Miribel led Posen up to the front bench of the church, beneath rafters adorned with drying herbs. A Catholic from the French town of Châteauneuf-de-Galaure in the Drôme Department, Miribel had offered to be godmother to Miguel. Padre César stood at a wooden table, facing the congregation with the old stone colonial altar behind him. Store-bought dolls, some clothed in Catholic ceremonial robes, some in Incan blankets stood as icons of the Virgin Mary and other saints. With healthy cheeks and a Cuzco haircut, Padre César looked more like the Argentine soccer player Diego Maradona than a local boy from Urubamba. But he opened the Mass with a hymn in Quechua. And his sermon on baptism - also in Quechua - owed less to the Gospels than to a farmer's almanac. "Today we are planting a seed in this boy," he began. "Why do we plant seeds?" "To make things grow," a woman near the front answered. "What happens next to the seeds?" Padre César asked. "They grow roots," another parishioner answered, "... they grow leaves ... they make seeds of their own ... " "The people up here have no problem absorbing the lessons of the church," says Zamalloa. "The Incas conquered the local tribes because they knew how to absorb. They carried the gods of the conquered people into the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco and gave them their own altars." And so the congregation knelt to pray to the Virgin Mary, as later at the celebratory barbecue of roast guinea pig and potatoes, it would pour the first drop of wine on the ground for Mother Earth, the Pachamama. And it watched in fascination as Padre César poured holy water over Miguel's thick hair and made the sign of the cross on his forehead with a damp thumb. "No other priests bother coming up here," Padre César said afterward. "If the people want to worship Mother Earth, bury bits of money and cigarettes near the mouths of springs or in the fields in August, that doesn't bother me. What worries me is what the men of the pueblo hear from foreigners when they are working as porters on the Inca Trail. 'What is this yin?' they ask me. 'What is this yang?' That confuses them." All the while, Posen and Miribel stood beaming. Posen mumbled in Spanish that he would teach Miguel to renounce Satan and worship the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and Miribel added her voice. Both of them knew that the money they would leave in Willoq to finance the roof of a new high school was equally important, as was the connection they were making between the pueblo and the hotel that might one day employ their godchild. It was little Miguel who watched the ceremony with a calm that was unique. He stood straight, the top of his head lower even than Posen's waist, his wind-burned cheeks raised to Padre César. Throughout the ceremony the candle in his 5-year-old hand burned and dripped wax on his fingers. But Miguelito didn't flinch, armored, perhaps, with the stoic incomprehension of his ancestors. WILLOQ, Peru It isn't every day that a Jew becomes a Catholic godfather to a polytheistic Peruvian 5-year-old, high above the Sacred Valley of the Incas. Danny Posen, an American and international businessman married to a Swiss woman, knows more about the rituals of drinking mare's milk in Mongolia and vodka on the shores of Lake Baikal than of reading the Torah in a synagogue. The colonial church of Willoq may not be a typical Catholic church. Its wooden door is padlocked for most of the year - it was last opened in February for Carnival. And little Miguelito, known as Imasutiki in Quechua, the local language since the days of the Incas, may not understand why the Catholic Trinity is monotheistic and his family's worship of the gods of the earth, the sun and the moon is not. Nevertheless, the ceremony, held recently in this community of 127 families, in the Pachamanca Valley, was just the latest incarnation of a kind of networking that has been practiced since the time of the Incas, long before Pizarro brought the cross and the gun. Willoq, in the dry season, is a 45-minute drive up a rutted dirt road from the town of Ollantaytambo, the last train stop on the run from the ancient Inca capital of Cuzco to Machu Picchu. The valley is punctuated by the roofless storehouses of Incas long dead and their signature terraced fields. The rare truck shares the road with pigs and oxen and dogs and the occasional farmer carrying a 25-kilogram, or 55-pound, caquitaclla, a foot plow whose design and function has barely changed in 500 years. Life in the pueblos of the Sacred Valley seems willfully primitive, lacking tractors for cultivation and even simple pulley systems for transporting loads up the steep inclines. Yet until Peru's Agrarian Reform in 1969, Willoq and much of the valley were the property of the family of the secretary to Andrés Avelino Cáceres, president of Peru at the end of the 19th century. The people of Willoq worked as tenant farmers, essentially slaves, with little incentive to develop their little plots of land. Posen's love affair with Peru began in the early 1980s, when he was a 20-something commodities trader sent by his company to the lead and zinc mines of South America. Although he left Peru for Europe 15 years ago, he continued to oversee South American operations. It was in that capacity that he interviewed a chic young French woman who had a single-minded desire to work in Peru. It wasn't long afterward that Marie-Helène Miribel called Posen and said she was tired of Lima and miniskirts and wanted to open a small hotel in Urubamba, halfway between Cuzco and Machu Picchu. "I was mad about horses and paragliding," Miribel said. "Urubamba had ponies and mountains. It was only natural." Seven years later, in collaboration with Posen, Miribel has made the Hotel Sol y Luna a thriving concern of 30 bungalows, that has hosted presidents and ambassadors. It was on a trip to buy ponchos and other textiles for the hotel's shop, that Miribel and Posen met Miguelito. On Sundays, the plaza is full of local women wearing colorful lopsided sombreros and trading potatoes; mestizo women from the salt mines of Moray wearing tall, white hats and trading their coarse iodized product; and women in straw hats from the jungle, just 20 kilometers, or about 12 miles, over the mountain range, trading medicinal herbs for use against asthma and prostate cancer. Men are only an ornament at the market, relaxing at the side of the road with jerrycans full of chicha, a homemade corn beer, after a week of carrying tents and backpacks for tourists over the Inca Trail. On the Wednesday in June when Posen and Miribel arrived, the plaza was empty, but within five minutes of their arrival, the word was out. The women of the village ran from their fields and snatched up armfuls of ponchos and runners and hats that they had woven on foot looms. Miribel had had great success with Willoq textiles in her shop and was a popular visitor. As Posen followed Miribel on her rounds, the bell above the school rang, and suddenly 200 children exploded onto the plaza for recess, joining their mothers or playing soccer with a half-inflated ball. Posen stooped down to talk to one little boy in Spanish and was immediately enchanted. His enchantment didn't miss the eyes of the boy's mother. Within seconds, Posen had agreed to stand as Miguelito's godfather on his next trip to the Sacred Valley. Posen was hardly the first gringo to pass through Willoq. The Peruvian tourist industry, once reduced to a few intrepid backpackers in the 1980s and '90s during the bloody war between the terrorists of the Shining Path and the soldiers of the Peruvian government, is stretching the country's ingenuity. Every day, 84 travelers plonk down $500 for a day trip aboard the luxurious Orient-Express Hiram Bingham train to Machu Picchu on a route that backpackers have traditionally taken for $65. And with a limit of 500 people a day on the Inca Trail, to help conserve the trail and its surrounding high plateau, a three-month waiting list has made the intrepid backpackers of yesteryear less visible than the notoriously shy vicuñas. But Posen was a gringo with a connection to the valley. And connections are what count in a pueblo whose livelihood depends on trade more than sale. "The people of the pueblo don't sell their animals to the people of the jungle for money, or buy salt for Peruvian sole," explained Ana Zamalloa Herrera, a guide from Cuzco who spends much of her time in the small villages of the Sacred Valley. "They trade - pigs for potatoes, blankets for corn. The purpose of finding a good godmother or godfather for your child is to create a spiritual connection with people from other communities." In Willoq, that often means finding a godparent in the larger town of Ollantaytambo, who will care for and feed the child when he is in high school - a facility that Willoq lacks. There was certainly no aura of gold-digging four months later as Posen and Miribel walked past a grazing pony toward the stucco and stone church. Stooping over the lintel, they stepped out of the noonday sun into the blackened church, lighted by only a dozen candles, but packed with nearly 100 villagers decked out in ponchos and blouses adorned with dozens of white buttons and safety pins in honor of the occasion. Miribel led Posen up to the front bench of the church, beneath rafters adorned with drying herbs. A Catholic from the French town of Châteauneuf-de-Galaure in the Drôme Department, Miribel had offered to be godmother to Miguel. Padre César stood at a wooden table, facing the congregation with the old stone colonial altar behind him. Store-bought dolls, some clothed in Catholic ceremonial robes, some in Incan blankets stood as icons of the Virgin Mary and other saints. With healthy cheeks and a Cuzco haircut, Padre César looked more like the Argentine soccer player Diego Maradona than a local boy from Urubamba. But he opened the Mass with a hymn in Quechua. And his sermon on baptism - also in Quechua - owed less to the Gospels than to a farmer's almanac. "Today we are planting a seed in this boy," he began. "Why do we plant seeds?" "To make things grow," a woman near the front answered. "What happens next to the seeds?" Padre César asked. "They grow roots," another parishioner answered, "... they grow leaves ... they make seeds of their own ... " "The people up here have no problem absorbing the lessons of the church," says Zamalloa. "The Incas conquered the local tribes because they knew how to absorb. They carried the gods of the conquered people into the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco and gave them their own altars." And so the congregation knelt to pray to the Virgin Mary, as later at the celebratory barbecue of roast guinea pig and potatoes, it would pour the first drop of wine on the ground for Mother Earth, the Pachamama. And it watched in fascination as Padre César poured holy water over Miguel's thick hair and made the sign of the cross on his forehead with a damp thumb. "No other priests bother coming up here," Padre César said afterward. "If the people want to worship Mother Earth, bury bits of money and cigarettes near the mouths of springs or in the fields in August, that doesn't bother me. What worries me is what the men of the pueblo hear from foreigners when they are working as porters on the Inca Trail. 'What is this yin?' they ask me. 'What is this yang?' That confuses them." All the while, Posen and Miribel stood beaming. Posen mumbled in Spanish that he would teach Miguel to renounce Satan and worship the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and Miribel added her voice. Both of them knew that the money they would leave in Willoq to finance the roof of a new high school was equally important, as was the connection they were making between the pueblo and the hotel that might one day employ their godchild. It was little Miguel who watched the ceremony with a calm that was unique. He stood straight, the top of his head lower even than Posen's waist, his wind-burned cheeks raised to Padre César. Throughout the ceremony the candle in his 5-year-old hand burned and dripped wax on his fingers. But Miguelito didn't flinch, armored, perhaps, with the stoic incomprehension of his ancestors. WILLOQ, Peru It isn't every day that a Jew becomes a Catholic godfather to a polytheistic Peruvian 5-year-old, high above the Sacred Valley of the Incas. Danny Posen, an American and international businessman married to a Swiss woman, knows more about the rituals of drinking mare's milk in Mongolia and vodka on the shores of Lake Baikal than of reading the Torah in a synagogue. The colonial church of Willoq may not be a typical Catholic church. Its wooden door is padlocked for most of the year - it was last opened in February for Carnival. And little Miguelito, known as Imasutiki in Quechua, the local language since the days of the Incas, may not understand why the Catholic Trinity is monotheistic and his family's worship of the gods of the earth, the sun and the moon is not. Nevertheless, the ceremony, held recently in this community of 127 families, in the Pachamanca Valley, was just the latest incarnation of a kind of networking that has been practiced since the time of the Incas, long before Pizarro brought the cross and the gun. Willoq, in the dry season, is a 45-minute drive up a rutted dirt road from the town of Ollantaytambo, the last train stop on the run from the ancient Inca capital of Cuzco to Machu Picchu. The valley is punctuated by the roofless storehouses of Incas long dead and their signature terraced fields. The rare truck shares the road with pigs and oxen and dogs and the occasional farmer carrying a 25-kilogram, or 55-pound, caquitaclla, a foot plow whose design and function has barely changed in 500 years. Life in the pueblos of the Sacred Valley seems willfully primitive, lacking tractors for cultivation and even simple pulley systems for transporting loads up the steep inclines. Yet until Peru's Agrarian Reform in 1969, Willoq and much of the valley were the property of the family of the secretary to Andrés Avelino Cáceres, president of Peru at the end of the 19th century. The people of Willoq worked as tenant farmers, essentially slaves, with little incentive to develop their little plots of land. Posen's love affair with Peru began in the early 1980s, when he was a 20-something commodities trader sent by his company to the lead and zinc mines of South America. Although he left Peru for Europe 15 years ago, he continued to oversee South American operations. It was in that capacity that he interviewed a chic young French woman who had a single-minded desire to work in Peru. It wasn't long afterward that Marie-Helène Miribel called Posen and said she was tired of Lima and miniskirts and wanted to open a small hotel in Urubamba, halfway between Cuzco and Machu Picchu. "I was mad about horses and paragliding," Miribel said. "Urubamba had ponies and mountains. It was only natural." Seven years later, in collaboration with Posen, Miribel has made the Hotel Sol y Luna a thriving concern of 30 bungalows, that has hosted presidents and ambassadors. It was on a trip to buy ponchos and other textiles for the hotel's shop, that Miribel and Posen met Miguelito. On Sundays, the plaza is full of local women wearing colorful lopsided sombreros and trading potatoes; mestizo women from the salt mines of Moray wearing tall, white hats and trading their coarse iodized product; and women in straw hats from the jungle, just 20 kilometers, or about 12 miles, over the mountain range, trading medicinal herbs for use against asthma and prostate cancer. Men are only an ornament at the market, relaxing at the side of the road with jerrycans full of chicha, a homemade corn beer, after a week of carrying tents and backpacks for tourists over the Inca Trail. On the Wednesday in June when Posen and Miribel arrived, the plaza was empty, but within five minutes of their arrival, the word was out. The women of the village ran from their fields and snatched up armfuls of ponchos and runners and hats that they had woven on foot looms. Miribel had had great success with Willoq textiles in her shop and was a popular visitor. As Posen followed Miribel on her rounds, the bell above the school rang, and suddenly 200 children exploded onto the plaza for recess, joining their mothers or playing soccer with a half-inflated ball. Posen stooped down to talk to one little boy in Spanish and was immediately enchanted. His enchantment didn't miss the eyes of the boy's mother. Within seconds, Posen had agreed to stand as Miguelito's godfather on his next trip to the Sacred Valley. Posen was hardly the first gringo to pass through Willoq. The Peruvian tourist industry, once reduced to a few intrepid backpackers in the 1980s and '90s during the bloody war between the terrorists of the Shining Path and the soldiers of the Peruvian government, is stretching the country's ingenuity. Every day, 84 travelers plonk down $500 for a day trip aboard the luxurious Orient-Express Hiram Bingham train to Machu Picchu on a route that backpackers have traditionally taken for $65. And with a limit of 500 people a day on the Inca Trail, to help conserve the trail and its surrounding high plateau, a three-month waiting list has made the intrepid backpackers of yesteryear less visible than the notoriously shy vicuñas. But Posen was a gringo with a connection to the valley. And connections are what count in a pueblo whose livelihood depends on trade more than sale. "The people of the pueblo don't sell their animals to the people of the jungle for money, or buy salt for Peruvian sole," explained Ana Zamalloa Herrera, a guide from Cuzco who spends much of her time in the small villages of the Sacred Valley. "They trade - pigs for potatoes, blankets for corn. The purpose of finding a good godmother or godfather for your child is to create a spiritual connection with people from other communities." In Willoq, that often means finding a godparent in the larger town of Ollantaytambo, who will care for and feed the child when he is in high school - a facility that Willoq lacks. There was certainly no aura of gold-digging four months later as Posen and Miribel walked past a grazing pony toward the stucco and stone church. Stooping over the lintel, they stepped out of the noonday sun into the blackened church, lighted by only a dozen candles, but packed with nearly 100 villagers decked out in ponchos and blouses adorned with dozens of white buttons and safety pins in honor of the occasion. Miribel led Posen up to the front bench of the church, beneath rafters adorned with drying herbs. A Catholic from the French town of Châteauneuf-de-Galaure in the Drôme Department, Miribel had offered to be godmother to Miguel. Padre César stood at a wooden table, facing the congregation with the old stone colonial altar behind him. Store-bought dolls, some clothed in Catholic ceremonial robes, some in Incan blankets stood as icons of the Virgin Mary and other saints. With healthy cheeks and a Cuzco haircut, Padre César looked more like the Argentine soccer player Diego Maradona than a local boy from Urubamba. But he opened the Mass with a hymn in Quechua. And his sermon on baptism - also in Quechua - owed less to the Gospels than to a farmer's almanac. "Today we are planting a seed in this boy," he began. "Why do we plant seeds?" "To make things grow," a woman near the front answered. "What happens next to the seeds?" Padre César asked. "They grow roots," another parishioner answered, "... they grow leaves ... they make seeds of their own ... " "The people up here have no problem absorbing the lessons of the church," says Zamalloa. "The Incas conquered the local tribes because they knew how to absorb. They carried the gods of the conquered people into the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco and gave them their own altars." And so the congregation knelt to pray to the Virgin Mary, as later at the celebratory barbecue of roast guinea pig and potatoes, it would pour the first drop of wine on the ground for Mother Earth, the Pachamama. And it watched in fascination as Padre César poured holy water over Miguel's thick hair and made the sign of the cross on his forehead with a damp thumb. "No other priests bother coming up here," Padre César said afterward. "If the people want to worship Mother Earth, bury bits of money and cigarettes near the mouths of springs or in the fields in August, that doesn't bother me. What worries me is what the men of the pueblo hear from foreigners when they are working as porters on the Inca Trail. 'What is this yin?' they ask me. 'What is this yang?' That confuses them." All the while, Posen and Miribel stood beaming. Posen mumbled in Spanish that he would teach Miguel to renounce Satan and worship the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and Miribel added her voice. Both of them knew that the money they would leave in Willoq to finance the roof of a new high school was equally important, as was the connection they were making between the pueblo and the hotel that might one day employ their godchild. It was little Miguel who watched the ceremony with a calm that was unique. He stood straight, the top of his head lower even than Posen's waist, his wind-burned cheeks raised to Padre César. Throughout the ceremony the candle in his 5-year-old hand burned and dripped wax on his fingers. But Miguelito didn't flinch, armored, perhaps, with the stoic incomprehension of his ancestors. WILLOQ, Peru It isn't every day that a Jew becomes a Catholic godfather to a polytheistic Peruvian 5-year-old, high above the Sacred Valley of the Incas. Danny Posen, an American and international businessman married to a Swiss woman, knows more about the rituals of drinking mare's milk in Mongolia and vodka on the shores of Lake Baikal than of reading the Torah in a synagogue. The colonial church of Willoq may not be a typical Catholic church. Its wooden door is padlocked for most of the year - it was last opened in February for Carnival. And little Miguelito, known as Imasutiki in Quechua, the local language since the days of the Incas, may not understand why the Catholic Trinity is monotheistic and his family's worship of the gods of the earth, the sun and the moon is not. Nevertheless, the ceremony, held recently in this community of 127 families, in the Pachamanca Valley, was just the latest incarnation of a kind of networking that has been practiced since the time of the Incas, long before Pizarro brought the cross and the gun. Willoq, in the dry season, is a 45-minute drive up a rutted dirt road from the town of Ollantaytambo, the last train stop on the run from the ancient Inca capital of Cuzco to Machu Picchu. The valley is punctuated by the roofless storehouses of Incas long dead and their signature terraced fields. The rare truck shares the road with pigs and oxen and dogs and the occasional farmer carrying a 25-kilogram, or 55-pound, caquitaclla, a foot plow whose design and function has barely changed in 500 years. Life in the pueblos of the Sacred Valley seems willfully primitive, lacking tractors for cultivation and even simple pulley systems for transporting loads up the steep inclines. Yet until Peru's Agrarian Reform in 1969, Willoq and much of the valley were the property of the family of the secretary to Andrés Avelino Cáceres, president of Peru at the end of the 19th century. The people of Willoq worked as tenant farmers, essentially slaves, with little incentive to develop their little plots of land. Posen's love affair with Peru began in the early 1980s, when he was a 20-something commodities trader sent by his company to the lead and zinc mines of South America. Although he left Peru for Europe 15 years ago, he continued to oversee South American operations. It was in that capacity that he interviewed a chic young French woman who had a single-minded desire to work in Peru. It wasn't long afterward that Marie-Helène Miribel called Posen and said she was tired of Lima and miniskirts and wanted to open a small hotel in Urubamba, halfway between Cuzco and Machu Picchu. "I was mad about horses and paragliding," Miribel said. "Urubamba had ponies and mountains. It was only natural." Seven years later, in collaboration with Posen, Miribel has made the Hotel Sol y Luna a thriving concern of 30 bungalows, that has hosted presidents and ambassadors. It was on a trip to buy ponchos and other textiles for the hotel's shop, that Miribel and Posen met Miguelito. On Sundays, the plaza is full of local women wearing colorful lopsided sombreros and trading potatoes; mestizo women from the salt mines of Moray wearing tall, white hats and trading their coarse iodized product; and women in straw hats from the jungle, just 20 kilometers, or about 12 miles, over the mountain range, trading medicinal herbs for use against asthma and prostate cancer. Men are only an ornament at the market, relaxing at the side of the road with jerrycans full of chicha, a homemade corn beer, after a week of carrying tents and backpacks for tourists over the Inca Trail. On the Wednesday in June when Posen and Miribel arrived, the plaza was empty, but within five minutes of their arrival, the word was out. The women of the village ran from their fields and snatched up armfuls of ponchos and runners and hats that they had woven on foot looms. Miribel had had great success with Willoq textiles in her shop and was a popular visitor. As Posen followed Miribel on her rounds, the bell above the school rang, and suddenly 200 children exploded onto the plaza for recess, joining their mothers or playing soccer with a half-inflated ball. Posen stooped down to talk to one little boy in Spanish and was immediately enchanted. His enchantment didn't miss the eyes of the boy's mother. Within seconds, Posen had agreed to stand as Miguelito's godfather on his next trip to the Sacred Valley. Posen was hardly the first gringo to pass through Willoq. The Peruvian tourist industry, once reduced to a few intrepid backpackers in the 1980s and '90s during the bloody war between the terrorists of the Shining Path and the soldiers of the Peruvian government, is stretching the country's ingenuity. Every day, 84 travelers plonk down $500 for a day trip aboard the luxurious Orient-Express Hiram Bingham train to Machu Picchu on a route that backpackers have traditionally taken for $65. And with a limit of 500 people a day on the Inca Trail, to help conserve the trail and its surrounding high plateau, a three-month waiting list has made the intrepid backpackers of yesteryear less visible than the notoriously shy vicuñas. But Posen was a gringo with a connection to the valley. And connections are what count in a pueblo whose livelihood depends on trade more than sale. "The people of the pueblo don't sell their animals to the people of the jungle for money, or buy salt for Peruvian sole," explained Ana Zamalloa Herrera, a guide from Cuzco who spends much of her time in the small villages of the Sacred Valley. "They trade - pigs for potatoes, blankets for corn. The purpose of finding a good godmother or godfather for your child is to create a spiritual connection with people from other communities." In Willoq, that often means finding a godparent in the larger town of Ollantaytambo, who will care for and feed the child when he is in high school - a facility that Willoq lacks. There was certainly no aura of gold-digging four months later as Posen and Miribel walked past a grazing pony toward the stucco and stone church. Stooping over the lintel, they stepped out of the noonday sun into the blackened church, lighted by only a dozen candles, but packed with nearly 100 villagers decked out in ponchos and blouses adorned with dozens of white buttons and safety pins in honor of the occasion. Miribel led Posen up to the front bench of the church, beneath rafters adorned with drying herbs. A Catholic from the French town of Châteauneuf-de-Galaure in the Drôme Department, Miribel had offered to be godmother to Miguel. Padre César stood at a wooden table, facing the congregation with the old stone colonial altar behind him. Store-bought dolls, some clothed in Catholic ceremonial robes, some in Incan blankets stood as icons of the Virgin Mary and other saints. With healthy cheeks and a Cuzco haircut, Padre César looked more like the Argentine soccer player Diego Maradona than a local boy from Urubamba. But he opened the Mass with a hymn in Quechua. And his sermon on baptism - also in Quechua - owed less to the Gospels than to a farmer's almanac. "Today we are planting a seed in this boy," he began. "Why do we plant seeds?" "To make things grow," a woman near the front answered. "What happens next to the seeds?" Padre César asked. "They grow roots," another parishioner answered, "... they grow leaves ... they make seeds of their own ... " "The people up here have no problem absorbing the lessons of the church," says Zamalloa. "The Incas conquered the local tribes because they knew how to absorb. They carried the gods of the conquered people into the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco and gave them their own altars." And so the congregation knelt to pray to the Virgin Mary, as later at the celebratory barbecue of roast guinea pig and potatoes, it would pour the first drop of wine on the ground for Mother Earth, the Pachamama. And it watched in fascination as Padre César poured holy water over Miguel's thick hair and made the sign of the cross on his forehead with a damp thumb. "No other priests bother coming up here," Padre César said afterward. "If the people want to worship Mother Earth, bury bits of money and cigarettes near the mouths of springs or in the fields in August, that doesn't bother me. What worries me is what the men of the pueblo hear from foreigners when they are working as porters on the Inca Trail. 'What is this yin?' they ask me. 'What is this yang?' That confuses them." All the while, Posen and Miribel stood beaming. Posen mumbled in Spanish that he would teach Miguel to renounce Satan and worship the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and Miribel added her voice. Both of them knew that the money they would leave in Willoq to finance the roof of a new high school was equally important, as was the connection they were making between the pueblo and the hotel that might one day employ their godchild. It was little Miguel who watched the ceremony with a calm that was unique. He stood straight, the top of his head lower even than Posen's waist, his wind-burned cheeks raised to Padre César. Throughout the ceremony the candle in his 5-year-old hand burned and dripped wax on his fingers. But Miguelito didn't flinch, armored, perhaps, with the stoic incomprehension of his ancestors.
WILLOQ, Peru It isn't every day that a Jew becomes a Catholic godfather to a polytheistic Peruvian 5-year-old, high above the Sacred Valley of the Incas. Danny Posen, an American and international businessman married to a Swiss woman, knows more about the rituals of drinking mare's milk in Mongolia and vodka on the shores of Lake Baikal than of reading the Torah in a synagogue. The colonial church of Willoq may not be a typical Catholic church. Its wooden door is padlocked for most of the year - it was last opened in February for Carnival. And little Miguelito, known as Imasutiki in Quechua, the local language since the days of the Incas, may not understand why the Catholic Trinity is monotheistic and his family's worship of the gods of the earth, the sun and the moon is not. Nevertheless, the ceremony, held recently in this community of 127 families, in the Pachamanca Valley, was just the latest incarnation of a kind of networking that has been practiced since the time of the Incas, long before Pizarro brought the cross and the gun. Willoq, in the dry season, is a 45-minute drive up a rutted dirt road from the town of Ollantaytambo, the last train stop on the run from the ancient Inca capital of Cuzco to Machu Picchu. The valley is punctuated by the roofless storehouses of Incas long dead and their signature terraced fields. The rare truck shares the road with pigs and oxen and dogs and the occasional farmer carrying a 25-kilogram, or 55-pound, caquitaclla, a foot plow whose design and function has barely changed in 500 years. Life in the pueblos of the Sacred Valley seems willfully primitive, lacking tractors for cultivation and even simple pulley systems for transporting loads up the steep inclines. Yet until Peru's Agrarian Reform in 1969, Willoq and much of the valley were the property of the family of the secretary to Andrés Avelino Cáceres, president of Peru at the end of the 19th century. The people of Willoq worked as tenant farmers, essentially slaves, with little incentive to develop their little plots of land. Posen's love affair with Peru began in the early 1980s, when he was a 20-something commodities trader sent by his company to the lead and zinc mines of South America. Although he left Peru for Europe 15 years ago, he continued to oversee South American operations. It was in that capacity that he interviewed a chic young French woman who had a single-minded desire to work in Peru. It wasn't long afterward that Marie-Helène Miribel called Posen and said she was tired of Lima and miniskirts and wanted to open a small hotel in Urubamba, halfway between Cuzco and Machu Picchu. "I was mad about horses and paragliding," Miribel said. "Urubamba had ponies and mountains. It was only natural." Seven years later, in collaboration with Posen, Miribel has made the Hotel Sol y Luna a thriving concern of 30 bungalows, that has hosted presidents and ambassadors. It was on a trip to buy ponchos and other textiles for the hotel's shop, that Miribel and Posen met Miguelito. On Sundays, the plaza is full of local women wearing colorful lopsided sombreros and trading potatoes; mestizo women from the salt mines of Moray wearing tall, white hats and trading their coarse iodized product; and women in straw hats from the jungle, just 20 kilometers, or about 12 miles, over the mountain range, trading medicinal herbs for use against asthma and prostate cancer. Men are only an ornament at the market, relaxing at the side of the road with jerrycans full of chicha, a homemade corn beer, after a week of carrying tents and backpacks for tourists over the Inca Trail. On the Wednesday in June when Posen and Miribel arrived, the plaza was empty, but within five minutes of their arrival, the word was out. The women of the village ran from their fields and snatched up armfuls of ponchos and runners and hats that they had woven on foot looms. Miribel had had great success with Willoq textiles in her shop and was a popular visitor. As Posen followed Miribel on her rounds, the bell above the school rang, and suddenly 200 children exploded onto the plaza for recess, joining their mothers or playing soccer with a half-inflated ball. Posen stooped down to talk to one little boy in Spanish and was immediately enchanted. His enchantment didn't miss the eyes of the boy's mother. Within seconds, Posen had agreed to stand as Miguelito's godfather on his next trip to the Sacred Valley. Posen was hardly the first gringo to pass through Willoq. The Peruvian tourist industry, once reduced to a few intrepid backpackers in the 1980s and '90s during the bloody war between the terrorists of the Shining Path and the soldiers of the Peruvian government, is stretching the country's ingenuity. Every day, 84 travelers plonk down $500 for a day trip aboard the luxurious Orient-Express Hiram Bingham train to Machu Picchu on a route that backpackers have traditionally taken for $65. And with a limit of 500 people a day on the Inca Trail, to help conserve the trail and its surrounding high plateau, a three-month waiting list has made the intrepid backpackers of yesteryear less visible than the notoriously shy vicuñas. But Posen was a gringo with a connection to the valley. And connections are what count in a pueblo whose livelihood depends on trade more than sale. "The people of the pueblo don't sell their animals to the people of the jungle for money, or buy salt for Peruvian sole," explained Ana Zamalloa Herrera, a guide from Cuzco who spends much of her time in the small villages of the Sacred Valley. "They trade - pigs for potatoes, blankets for corn. The purpose of finding a good godmother or godfather for your child is to create a spiritual connection with people from other communities." In Willoq, that often means finding a godparent in the larger town of Ollantaytambo, who will care for and feed the child when he is in high school - a facility that Willoq lacks. There was certainly no aura of gold-digging four months later as Posen and Miribel walked past a grazing pony toward the stucco and stone church. Stooping over the lintel, they stepped out of the noonday sun into the blackened church, lighted by only a dozen candles, but packed with nearly 100 villagers decked out in ponchos and blouses adorned with dozens of white buttons and safety pins in honor of the occasion. Miribel led Posen up to the front bench of the church, beneath rafters adorned with drying herbs. A Catholic from the French town of Châteauneuf-de-Galaure in the Drôme Department, Miribel had offered to be godmother to Miguel. Padre César stood at a wooden table, facing the congregation with the old stone colonial altar behind him. Store-bought dolls, some clothed in Catholic ceremonial robes, some in Incan blankets stood as icons of the Virgin Mary and other saints. With healthy cheeks and a Cuzco haircut, Padre César looked more like the Argentine soccer player Diego Maradona than a local boy from Urubamba. But he opened the Mass with a hymn in Quechua. And his sermon on baptism - also in Quechua - owed less to the Gospels than to a farmer's almanac. "Today we are planting a seed in this boy," he began. "Why do we plant seeds?" "To make things grow," a woman near the front answered. "What happens next to the seeds?" Padre César asked. "They grow roots," another parishioner answered, "... they grow leaves ... they make seeds of their own ... " "The people up here have no problem absorbing the lessons of the church," says Zamalloa. "The Incas conquered the local tribes because they knew how to absorb. They carried the gods of the conquered people into the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco and gave them their own altars." And so the congregation knelt to pray to the Virgin Mary, as later at the celebratory barbecue of roast guinea pig and potatoes, it would pour the first drop of wine on the ground for Mother Earth, the Pachamama. And it watched in fascination as Padre César poured holy water over Miguel's thick hair and made the sign of the cross on his forehead with a damp thumb. "No other priests bother coming up here," Padre César said afterward. "If the people want to worship Mother Earth, bury bits of money and cigarettes near the mouths of springs or in the fields in August, that doesn't bother me. What worries me is what the men of the pueblo hear from foreigners when they are working as porters on the Inca Trail. 'What is this yin?' they ask me. 'What is this yang?' That confuses them." All the while, Posen and Miribel stood beaming. Posen mumbled in Spanish that he would teach Miguel to renounce Satan and worship the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and Miribel added her voice. Both of them knew that the money they would leave in Willoq to finance the roof of a new high school was equally important, as was the connection they were making between the pueblo and the hotel that might one day employ their godchild. It was little Miguel who watched the ceremony with a calm that was unique. He stood straight, the top of his head lower even than Posen's waist, his wind-burned cheeks raised to Padre César. Throughout the ceremony the candle in his 5-year-old hand burned and dripped wax on his fingers. But Miguelito didn't flinch, armored, perhaps, with the stoic incomprehension of his ancestors. WILLOQ, Peru It isn't every day that a Jew becomes a Catholic godfather to a polytheistic Peruvian 5-year-old, high above the Sacred Valley of the Incas. Danny Posen, an American and international businessman married to a Swiss woman, knows more about the rituals of drinking mare's milk in Mongolia and vodka on the shores of Lake Baikal than of reading the Torah in a synagogue. The colonial church of Willoq may not be a typical Catholic church. Its wooden door is padlocked for most of the year - it was last opened in February for Carnival. And little Miguelito, known as Imasutiki in Quechua, the local language since the days of the Incas, may not understand why the Catholic Trinity is monotheistic and his family's worship of the gods of the earth, the sun and the moon is not. Nevertheless, the ceremony, held recently in this community of 127 families, in the Pachamanca Valley, was just the latest incarnation of a kind of networking that has been practiced since the time of the Incas, long before Pizarro brought the cross and the gun. Willoq, in the dry season, is a 45-minute drive up a rutted dirt road from the town of Ollantaytambo, the last train stop on the run from the ancient Inca capital of Cuzco to Machu Picchu. The valley is punctuated by the roofless storehouses of Incas long dead and their signature terraced fields. The rare truck shares the road with pigs and oxen and dogs and the occasional farmer carrying a 25-kilogram, or 55-pound, caquitaclla, a foot plow whose design and function has barely changed in 500 years. Life in the pueblos of the Sacred Valley seems willfully primitive, lacking tractors for cultivation and even simple pulley systems for transporting loads up the steep inclines. Yet until Peru's Agrarian Reform in 1969, Willoq and much of the valley were the property of the family of the secretary to Andrés Avelino Cáceres, president of Peru at the end of the 19th century. The people of Willoq worked as tenant farmers, essentially slaves, with little incentive to develop their little plots of land. Posen's love affair with Peru began in the early 1980s, when he was a 20-something commodities trader sent by his company to the lead and zinc mines of South America. Although he left Peru for Europe 15 years ago, he continued to oversee South American operations. It was in that capacity that he interviewed a chic young French woman who had a single-minded desire to work in Peru. It wasn't long afterward that Marie-Helène Miribel called Posen and said she was tired of Lima and miniskirts and wanted to open a small hotel in Urubamba, halfway between Cuzco and Machu Picchu. "I was mad about horses and paragliding," Miribel said. "Urubamba had ponies and mountains. It was only natural." Seven years later, in collaboration with Posen, Miribel has made the Hotel Sol y Luna a thriving concern of 30 bungalows, that has hosted presidents and ambassadors. It was on a trip to buy ponchos and other textiles for the hotel's shop, that Miribel and Posen met Miguelito. On Sundays, the plaza is full of local women wearing colorful lopsided sombreros and trading potatoes; mestizo women from the salt mines of Moray wearing tall, white hats and trading their coarse iodized product; and women in straw hats from the jungle, just 20 kilometers, or about 12 miles, over the mountain range, trading medicinal herbs for use against asthma and prostate cancer. Men are only an ornament at the market, relaxing at the side of the road with jerrycans full of chicha, a homemade corn beer, after a week of carrying tents and backpacks for tourists over the Inca Trail. On the Wednesday in June when Posen and Miribel arrived, the plaza was empty, but within five minutes of their arrival, the word was out. The women of the village ran from their fields and snatched up armfuls of ponchos and runners and hats that they had woven on foot looms. Miribel had had great success with Willoq textiles in her shop and was a popular visitor. As Posen followed Miribel on her rounds, the bell above the school rang, and suddenly 200 children exploded onto the plaza for recess, joining their mothers or playing soccer with a half-inflated ball. Posen stooped down to talk to one little boy in Spanish and was immediately enchanted. His enchantment didn't miss the eyes of the boy's mother. Within seconds, Posen had agreed to stand as Miguelito's godfather on his next trip to the Sacred Valley. Posen was hardly the first gringo to pass through Willoq. The Peruvian tourist industry, once reduced to a few intrepid backpackers in the 1980s and '90s during the bloody war between the terrorists of the Shining Path and the soldiers of the Peruvian government, is stretching the country's ingenuity. Every day, 84 travelers plonk down $500 for a day trip aboard the luxurious Orient-Express Hiram Bingham train to Machu Picchu on a route that backpackers have traditionally taken for $65. And with a limit of 500 people a day on the Inca Trail, to help conserve the trail and its surrounding high plateau, a three-month waiting list has made the intrepid backpackers of yesteryear less visible than the notoriously shy vicuñas. But Posen was a gringo with a connection to the valley. And connections are what count in a pueblo whose livelihood depends on trade more than sale. "The people of the pueblo don't sell their animals to the people of the jungle for money, or buy salt for Peruvian sole," explained Ana Zamalloa Herrera, a guide from Cuzco who spends much of her time in the small villages of the Sacred Valley. "They trade - pigs for potatoes, blankets for corn. The purpose of finding a good godmother or godfather for your child is to create a spiritual connection with people from other communities." In Willoq, that often means finding a godparent in the larger town of Ollantaytambo, who will care for and feed the child when he is in high school - a facility that Willoq lacks. There was certainly no aura of gold-digging four months later as Posen and Miribel walked past a grazing pony toward the stucco and stone church. Stooping over the lintel, they stepped out of the noonday sun into the blackened church, lighted by only a dozen candles, but packed with nearly 100 villagers decked out in ponchos and blouses adorned with dozens of white buttons and safety pins in honor of the occasion. Miribel led Posen up to the front bench of the church, beneath rafters adorned with drying herbs. A Catholic from the French town of Châteauneuf-de-Galaure in the Drôme Department, Miribel had offered to be godmother to Miguel. Padre César stood at a wooden table, facing the congregation with the old stone colonial altar behind him. Store-bought dolls, some clothed in Catholic ceremonial robes, some in Incan blankets stood as icons of the Virgin Mary and other saints. With healthy cheeks and a Cuzco haircut, Padre César looked more like the Argentine soccer player Diego Maradona than a local boy from Urubamba. But he opened the Mass with a hymn in Quechua. And his sermon on baptism - also in Quechua - owed less to the Gospels than to a farmer's almanac. "Today we are planting a seed in this boy," he began. "Why do we plant seeds?" "To make things grow," a woman near the front answered. "What happens next to the seeds?" Padre César asked. "They grow roots," another parishioner answered, "... they grow leaves ... they make seeds of their own ... " "The people up here have no problem absorbing the lessons of the church," says Zamalloa. "The Incas conquered the local tribes because they knew how to absorb. They carried the gods of the conquered people into the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco and gave them their own altars." And so the congregation knelt to pray to the Virgin Mary, as later at the celebratory barbecue of roast guinea pig and potatoes, it would pour the first drop of wine on the ground for Mother Earth, the Pachamama. And it watched in fascination as Padre César poured holy water over Miguel's thick hair and made the sign of the cross on his forehead with a damp thumb. "No other priests bother coming up here," Padre César said afterward. "If the people want to worship Mother Earth, bury bits of money and cigarettes near the mouths of springs or in the fields in August, that doesn't bother me. What worries me is what the men of the pueblo hear from foreigners when they are working as porters on the Inca Trail. 'What is this yin?' they ask me. 'What is this yang?' That confuses them." All the while, Posen and Miribel stood beaming. Posen mumbled in Spanish that he would teach Miguel to renounce Satan and worship the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and Miribel added her voice. Both of them knew that the money they would leave in Willoq to finance the roof of a new high school was equally important, as was the connection they were making between the pueblo and the hotel that might one day employ their godchild. It was little Miguel who watched the ceremony with a calm that was unique. He stood straight, the top of his head lower even than Posen's waist, his wind-burned cheeks raised to Padre César. Throughout the ceremony the candle in his 5-year-old hand burned and dripped wax on his fingers. But Miguelito didn't flinch, armored, perhaps, with the stoic incomprehension of his ancestors. WILLOQ, Peru It isn't every day that a Jew becomes a Catholic godfather to a polytheistic Peruvian 5-year-old, high above the Sacred Valley of the Incas. Danny Posen, an American and international businessman married to a Swiss woman, knows more about the rituals of drinking mare's milk in Mongolia and vodka on the shores of Lake Baikal than of reading the Torah in a synagogue. The colonial church of Willoq may not be a typical Catholic church. Its wooden door is padlocked for most of the year - it was last opened in February for Carnival. And little Miguelito, known as Imasutiki in Quechua, the local language since the days of the Incas, may not understand why the Catholic Trinity is monotheistic and his family's worship of the gods of the earth, the sun and the moon is not. Nevertheless, the ceremony, held recently in this community of 127 families, in the Pachamanca Valley, was just the latest incarnation of a kind of networking that has been practiced since the time of the Incas, long before Pizarro brought the cross and the gun. Willoq, in the dry season, is a 45-minute drive up a rutted dirt road from the town of Ollantaytambo, the last train stop on the run from the ancient Inca capital of Cuzco to Machu Picchu. The valley is punctuated by the roofless storehouses of Incas long dead and their signature terraced fields. The rare truck shares the road with pigs and oxen and dogs and the occasional farmer carrying a 25-kilogram, or 55-pound, caquitaclla, a foot plow whose design and function has barely changed in 500 years. Life in the pueblos of the Sacred Valley seems willfully primitive, lacking tractors for cultivation and even simple pulley systems for transporting loads up the steep inclines. Yet until Peru's Agrarian Reform in 1969, Willoq and much of the valley were the property of the family of the secretary to Andrés Avelino Cáceres, president of Peru at the end of the 19th century. The people of Willoq worked as tenant farmers, essentially slaves, with little incentive to develop their little plots of land. Posen's love affair with Peru began in the early 1980s, when he was a 20-something commodities trader sent by his company to the lead and zinc mines of South America. Although he left Peru for Europe 15 years ago, he continued to oversee South American operations. It was in that capacity that he interviewed a chic young French woman who had a single-minded desire to work in Peru. It wasn't long afterward that Marie-Helène Miribel called Posen and said she was tired of Lima and miniskirts and wanted to open a small hotel in Urubamba, halfway between Cuzco and Machu Picchu. "I was mad about horses and paragliding," Miribel said. "Urubamba had ponies and mountains. It was only natural." Seven years later, in collaboration with Posen, Miribel has made the Hotel Sol y Luna a thriving concern of 30 bungalows, that has hosted presidents and ambassadors. It was on a trip to buy ponchos and other textiles for the hotel's shop, that Miribel and Posen met Miguelito. On Sundays, the plaza is full of local women wearing colorful lopsided sombreros and trading potatoes; mestizo women from the salt mines of Moray wearing tall, white hats and trading their coarse iodized product; and women in straw hats from the jungle, just 20 kilometers, or about 12 miles, over the mountain range, trading medicinal herbs for use against asthma and prostate cancer. Men are only an ornament at the market, relaxing at the side of the road with jerrycans full of chicha, a homemade corn beer, after a week of carrying tents and backpacks for tourists over the Inca Trail. On the Wednesday in June when Posen and Miribel arrived, the plaza was empty, but within five minutes of their arrival, the word was out. The women of the village ran from their fields and snatched up armfuls of ponchos and runners and hats that they had woven on foot looms. Miribel had had great success with Willoq textiles in her shop and was a popular visitor. As Posen followed Miribel on her rounds, the bell above the school rang, and suddenly 200 children exploded onto the plaza for recess, joining their mothers or playing soccer with a half-inflated ball. Posen stooped down to talk to one little boy in Spanish and was immediately enchanted. His enchantment didn't miss the eyes of the boy's mother. Within seconds, Posen had agreed to stand as Miguelito's godfather on his next trip to the Sacred Valley. Posen was hardly the first gringo to pass through Willoq. The Peruvian tourist industry, once reduced to a few intrepid backpackers in the 1980s and '90s during the bloody war between the terrorists of the Shining Path and the soldiers of the Peruvian government, is stretching the country's ingenuity. Every day, 84 travelers plonk down $500 for a day trip aboard the luxurious Orient-Express Hiram Bingham train to Machu Picchu on a route that backpackers have traditionally taken for $65. And with a limit of 500 people a day on the Inca Trail, to help conserve the trail and its surrounding high plateau, a three-month waiting list has made the intrepid backpackers of yesteryear less visible than the notoriously shy vicuñas. But Posen was a gringo with a connection to the valley. And connections are what count in a pueblo whose livelihood depends on trade more than sale. "The people of the pueblo don't sell their animals to the people of the jungle for money, or buy salt for Peruvian sole," explained Ana Zamalloa Herrera, a guide from Cuzco who spends much of her time in the small villages of the Sacred Valley. "They trade - pigs for potatoes, blankets for corn. The purpose of finding a good godmother or godfather for your child is to create a spiritual connection with people from other communities." In Willoq, that often means finding a godparent in the larger town of Ollantaytambo, who will care for and feed the child when he is in high school - a facility that Willoq lacks. There was certainly no aura of gold-digging four months later as Posen and Miribel walked past a grazing pony toward the stucco and stone church. Stooping over the lintel, they stepped out of the noonday sun into the blackened church, lighted by only a dozen candles, but packed with nearly 100 villagers decked out in ponchos and blouses adorned with dozens of white buttons and safety pins in honor of the occasion. Miribel led Posen up to the front bench of the church, beneath rafters adorned with drying herbs. A Catholic from the French town of Châteauneuf-de-Galaure in the Drôme Department, Miribel had offered to be godmother to Miguel. Padre César stood at a wooden table, facing the congregation with the old stone colonial altar behind him. Store-bought dolls, some clothed in Catholic ceremonial robes, some in Incan blankets stood as icons of the Virgin Mary and other saints. With healthy cheeks and a Cuzco haircut, Padre César looked more like the Argentine soccer player Diego Maradona than a local boy from Urubamba. But he opened the Mass with a hymn in Quechua. And his sermon on baptism - also in Quechua - owed less to the Gospels than to a farmer's almanac. "Today we are planting a seed in this boy," he began. "Why do we plant seeds?" "To make things grow," a woman near the front answered. "What happens next to the seeds?" Padre César asked. "They grow roots," another parishioner answered, "... they grow leaves ... they make seeds of their own ... " "The people up here have no problem absorbing the lessons of the church," says Zamalloa. "The Incas conquered the local tribes because they knew how to absorb. They carried the gods of the conquered people into the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco and gave them their own altars." And so the congregation knelt to pray to the Virgin Mary, as later at the celebratory barbecue of roast guinea pig and potatoes, it would pour the first drop of wine on the ground for Mother Earth, the Pachamama. And it watched in fascination as Padre César poured holy water over Miguel's thick hair and made the sign of the cross on his forehead with a damp thumb. "No other priests bother coming up here," Padre César said afterward. "If the people want to worship Mother Earth, bury bits of money and cigarettes near the mouths of springs or in the fields in August, that doesn't bother me. What worries me is what the men of the pueblo hear from foreigners when they are working as porters on the Inca Trail. 'What is this yin?' they ask me. 'What is this yang?' That confuses them." All the while, Posen and Miribel stood beaming. Posen mumbled in Spanish that he would teach Miguel to renounce Satan and worship the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and Miribel added her voice. Both of them knew that the money they would leave in Willoq to finance the roof of a new high school was equally important, as was the connection they were making between the pueblo and the hotel that might one day employ their godchild. It was little Miguel who watched the ceremony with a calm that was unique. He stood straight, the top of his head lower even than Posen's waist, his wind-burned cheeks raised to Padre César. Throughout the ceremony the candle in his 5-year-old hand burned and dripped wax on his fingers. But Miguelito didn't flinch, armored, perhaps, with the stoic incomprehension of his ancestors. WILLOQ, Peru It isn't every day that a Jew becomes a Catholic godfather to a polytheistic Peruvian 5-year-old, high above the Sacred Valley of the Incas. Danny Posen, an American and international businessman married to a Swiss woman, knows more about the rituals of drinking mare's milk in Mongolia and vodka on the shores of Lake Baikal than of reading the Torah in a synagogue. The colonial church of Willoq may not be a typical Catholic church. Its wooden door is padlocked for most of the year - it was last opened in February for Carnival. And little Miguelito, known as Imasutiki in Quechua, the local language since the days of the Incas, may not understand why the Catholic Trinity is monotheistic and his family's worship of the gods of the earth, the sun and the moon is not. Nevertheless, the ceremony, held recently in this community of 127 families, in the Pachamanca Valley, was just the latest incarnation of a kind of networking that has been practiced since the time of the Incas, long before Pizarro brought the cross and the gun. Willoq, in the dry season, is a 45-minute drive up a rutted dirt road from the town of Ollantaytambo, the last train stop on the run from the ancient Inca capital of Cuzco to Machu Picchu. The valley is punctuated by the roofless storehouses of Incas long dead and their signature terraced fields. The rare truck shares the road with pigs and oxen and dogs and the occasional farmer carrying a 25-kilogram, or 55-pound, caquitaclla, a foot plow whose design and function has barely changed in 500 years. Life in the pueblos of the Sacred Valley seems willfully primitive, lacking tractors for cultivation and even simple pulley systems for transporting loads up the steep inclines. Yet until Peru's Agrarian Reform in 1969, Willoq and much of the valley were the property of the family of the secretary to Andrés Avelino Cáceres, president of Peru at the end of the 19th century. The people of Willoq worked as tenant farmers, essentially slaves, with little incentive to develop their little plots of land. Posen's love affair with Peru began in the early 1980s, when he was a 20-something commodities trader sent by his company to the lead and zinc mines of South America. Although he left Peru for Europe 15 years ago, he continued to oversee South American operations. It was in that capacity that he interviewed a chic young French woman who had a single-minded desire to work in Peru. It wasn't long afterward that Marie-Helène Miribel called Posen and said she was tired of Lima and miniskirts and wanted to open a small hotel in Urubamba, halfway between Cuzco and Machu Picchu. "I was mad about horses and paragliding," Miribel said. "Urubamba had ponies and mountains. It was only natural." Seven years later, in collaboration with Posen, Miribel has made the Hotel Sol y Luna a thriving concern of 30 bungalows, that has hosted presidents and ambassadors. It was on a trip to buy ponchos and other textiles for the hotel's shop, that Miribel and Posen met Miguelito. On Sundays, the plaza is full of local women wearing colorful lopsided sombreros and trading potatoes; mestizo women from the salt mines of Moray wearing tall, white hats and trading their coarse iodized product; and women in straw hats from the jungle, just 20 kilometers, or about 12 miles, over the mountain range, trading medicinal herbs for use against asthma and prostate cancer. Men are only an ornament at the market, relaxing at the side of the road with jerrycans full of chicha, a homemade corn beer, after a week of carrying tents and backpacks for tourists over the Inca Trail. On the Wednesday in June when Posen and Miribel arrived, the plaza was empty, but within five minutes of their arrival, the word was out. The women of the village ran from their fields and snatched up armfuls of ponchos and runners and hats that they had woven on foot looms. Miribel had had great success with Willoq textiles in her shop and was a popular visitor. As Posen followed Miribel on her rounds, the bell above the school rang, and suddenly 200 children exploded onto the plaza for recess, joining their mothers or playing soccer with a half-inflated ball. Posen stooped down to talk to one little boy in Spanish and was immediately enchanted. His enchantment didn't miss the eyes of the boy's mother. Within seconds, Posen had agreed to stand as Miguelito's godfather on his next trip to the Sacred Valley. Posen was hardly the first gringo to pass through Willoq. The Peruvian tourist industry, once reduced to a few intrepid backpackers in the 1980s and '90s during the bloody war between the terrorists of the Shining Path and the soldiers of the Peruvian government, is stretching the country's ingenuity. Every day, 84 travelers plonk down $500 for a day trip aboard the luxurious Orient-Express Hiram Bingham train to Machu Picchu on a route that backpackers have traditionally taken for $65. And with a limit of 500 people a day on the Inca Trail, to help conserve the trail and its surrounding high plateau, a three-month waiting list has made the intrepid backpackers of yesteryear less visible than the notoriously shy vicuñas. But Posen was a gringo with a connection to the valley. And connections are what count in a pueblo whose livelihood depends on trade more than sale. "The people of the pueblo don't sell their animals to the people of the jungle for money, or buy salt for Peruvian sole," explained Ana Zamalloa Herrera, a guide from Cuzco who spends much of her time in the small villages of the Sacred Valley. "They trade - pigs for potatoes, blankets for corn. The purpose of finding a good godmother or godfather for your child is to create a spiritual connection with people from other communities." In Willoq, that often means finding a godparent in the larger town of Ollantaytambo, who will care for and feed the child when he is in high school - a facility that Willoq lacks. There was certainly no aura of gold-digging four months later as Posen and Miribel walked past a grazing pony toward the stucco and stone church. Stooping over the lintel, they stepped out of the noonday sun into the blackened church, lighted by only a dozen candles, but packed with nearly 100 villagers decked out in ponchos and blouses adorned with dozens of white buttons and safety pins in honor of the occasion. Miribel led Posen up to the front bench of the church, beneath rafters adorned with drying herbs. A Catholic from the French town of Châteauneuf-de-Galaure in the Drôme Department, Miribel had offered to be godmother to Miguel. Padre César stood at a wooden table, facing the congregation with the old stone colonial altar behind him. Store-bought dolls, some clothed in Catholic ceremonial robes, some in Incan blankets stood as icons of the Virgin Mary and other saints. With healthy cheeks and a Cuzco haircut, Padre César looked more like the Argentine soccer player Diego Maradona than a local boy from Urubamba. But he opened the Mass with a hymn in Quechua. And his sermon on baptism - also in Quechua - owed less to the Gospels than to a farmer's almanac. "Today we are planting a seed in this boy," he began. "Why do we plant seeds?" "To make things grow," a woman near the front answered. "What happens next to the seeds?" Padre César asked. "They grow roots," another parishioner answered, "... they grow leaves ... they make seeds of their own ... " "The people up here have no problem absorbing the lessons of the church," says Zamalloa. "The Incas conquered the local tribes because they knew how to absorb. They carried the gods of the conquered people into the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco and gave them their own altars." And so the congregation knelt to pray to the Virgin Mary, as later at the celebratory barbecue of roast guinea pig and potatoes, it would pour the first drop of wine on the ground for Mother Earth, the Pachamama. And it watched in fascination as Padre César poured holy water over Miguel's thick hair and made the sign of the cross on his forehead with a damp thumb. "No other priests bother coming up here," Padre César said afterward. "If the people want to worship Mother Earth, bury bits of money and cigarettes near the mouths of springs or in the fields in August, that doesn't bother me. What worries me is what the men of the pueblo hear from foreigners when they are working as porters on the Inca Trail. 'What is this yin?' they ask me. 'What is this yang?' That confuses them." All the while, Posen and Miribel stood beaming. Posen mumbled in Spanish that he would teach Miguel to renounce Satan and worship the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and Miribel added her voice. Both of them knew that the money they would leave in Willoq to finance the roof of a new high school was equally important, as was the connection they were making between the pueblo and the hotel that might one day employ their godchild. It was little Miguel who watched the ceremony with a calm that was unique. He stood straight, the top of his head lower even than Posen's waist, his wind-burned cheeks raised to Padre César. Throughout the ceremony the candle in his 5-year-old hand burned and dripped wax on his fingers. But Miguelito didn't flinch, armored, perhaps, with the stoic incomprehension of his ancestors.
Working tours
Crooked Trails allows visitors to live and work in local villages in Peru, Nepal and elsewhere
Heidi Dietrich
From the Puget Sound Business Journal
When Chris Mackay traveled through Thailand with a tour groupsix years ago, she drank tea and slept on bamboo floors at the homes of the hill tribal natives.
"I felt like I was in National Geographic," Mackay said. "I wanted other people to experience this."
Devoted to the idea of complete cultural immersion, Mackay and fellow female traveler and environmentalist Tammy Leland decided to found Seattle-based Crooked Trails. The ecotourism company takes travelers to live and volunteer in communities around the globe.
"The best thing is seeing the changes in people when they come back from our trips," Mackay said. "They say, 'You changed my life.' I say, 'No, you changed your life.'"
Crooked Trails trips, which also include more generic sightseeing, allow travelers to experience five-day home stays in villages. In Nepal, the group usually helps build a school. In Peru, villagers welcome the travelers into their homes and teach them how to cook Peruvian food. In exchange for the hospitality, the native people are paid for the visits. Crooked Trails never visits a community unless it is welcome.
The kind of responsible tourism that Leland and Mackay believe in continues in the sightseeing component of each trip. Crooked Trails hires local guides and asks clients to filter their own water so not to leave water-bottle waste behind.
Crooked Trails trips are part of rapidly growing tourism segment called community tourism or ecotourism. These tours often focus on the environment and emphasize doing no damage to the local culture.
Mainstream tourism companies are increasingly seeing ecotourism as a lucrative niche, said Jeremy Garrett, founder and principal of Waterbury, Vermont-based sustainable tourism consulting firm NaTour Communications.
"People want to do more than sit on the beach and drink mai tais," Garrett said. "They want to learn."
Megan Lane, who owns a business development company in Seattle, went on a 21-day Crooked Trails trip to Peru because she liked the way the group gave something back to the communities they visited.
"We weren't just showing up and taking pictures," Lane said. "We were there to work with them."
Leland and Mackay met while attending an environmental education graduate program at Western Washington University in Bellingham. After reading a book on the effect of tourism in the Himalayas, both women decided to travel to England together to take a class taught by the author. That course, which focused on the positive and negative effects of tourists on a local economy, laid the initial groundwork for Crooked Trails.
Upon finishing her degree at Western in 1995, Mackay decided to travel the world. She had become hooked on travel after seeing India at age 16 and met the love of her life abroad. Mackay's Scottish husband, also named Chris, was her hang-gliding instructor during a tandem flight in Nepal. The pair became engaged after just three months.
Mackay ran out of money after nine months of her around-the-world trip, but before she returned to the United States, she discovered the tour group that took visitors to meet the indigenous tribes in the highlands of Thailand. The guide and owner of the tribal tours was looking for someone to take over the business. So, the following year, Mackay and Leland went to Thailand and made the trips their own. They asked the rural communities what they needed, and then, with the villagers' permission, brought in tourists to build bridges, community center, and other municipal projects.
Mackay and Leland named the company Crooked Trails and signed up for a business license in Washington. During the school year, the pair taught environmental education in Seattle middle schools, and during the summer, they took tourists to Thailand.
Two years later, Mackay and Leland added the Peru trips. Since then, they've brought on India, Thailand and Kenya, and they plan to soon add Bolivia, Chile and Ecuador. Last year Crooked Trails ran 10 trips, and next year the company plans to do 20. Revenue this year will exceed $250,000, Mackay said.
As business grew, Leland and Mackay dropped their teaching jobs and Mackay stopped guiding trips. While Leland leads Crooked Trails groups across Peru, Mackay runs the company out of her West Seattle home. The deal suited both women, as Mackay wanted to have children and is now raising her baby daughter, Trinity.
Mackay admits she knew nothing about running a business, accounting or marketing before starting Crooked Trails. In the beginning, almost all the firm's travelers were friends of Mackay and Leland.
Universities have become one major source of business, as Leland and Mackay now organize sustainable business practice trips for the University of Washington and University of Delaware and ecotourism trips for Western Washington University.
Contact: hrdietrich@bizjournals.com • 206-447-8505x112
Heidi Dietrich
From the Puget Sound Business Journal
When Chris Mackay traveled through Thailand with a tour groupsix years ago, she drank tea and slept on bamboo floors at the homes of the hill tribal natives.
"I felt like I was in National Geographic," Mackay said. "I wanted other people to experience this."
Devoted to the idea of complete cultural immersion, Mackay and fellow female traveler and environmentalist Tammy Leland decided to found Seattle-based Crooked Trails. The ecotourism company takes travelers to live and volunteer in communities around the globe.
"The best thing is seeing the changes in people when they come back from our trips," Mackay said. "They say, 'You changed my life.' I say, 'No, you changed your life.'"
Crooked Trails trips, which also include more generic sightseeing, allow travelers to experience five-day home stays in villages. In Nepal, the group usually helps build a school. In Peru, villagers welcome the travelers into their homes and teach them how to cook Peruvian food. In exchange for the hospitality, the native people are paid for the visits. Crooked Trails never visits a community unless it is welcome.
The kind of responsible tourism that Leland and Mackay believe in continues in the sightseeing component of each trip. Crooked Trails hires local guides and asks clients to filter their own water so not to leave water-bottle waste behind.
Crooked Trails trips are part of rapidly growing tourism segment called community tourism or ecotourism. These tours often focus on the environment and emphasize doing no damage to the local culture.
Mainstream tourism companies are increasingly seeing ecotourism as a lucrative niche, said Jeremy Garrett, founder and principal of Waterbury, Vermont-based sustainable tourism consulting firm NaTour Communications.
"People want to do more than sit on the beach and drink mai tais," Garrett said. "They want to learn."
Megan Lane, who owns a business development company in Seattle, went on a 21-day Crooked Trails trip to Peru because she liked the way the group gave something back to the communities they visited.
"We weren't just showing up and taking pictures," Lane said. "We were there to work with them."
Leland and Mackay met while attending an environmental education graduate program at Western Washington University in Bellingham. After reading a book on the effect of tourism in the Himalayas, both women decided to travel to England together to take a class taught by the author. That course, which focused on the positive and negative effects of tourists on a local economy, laid the initial groundwork for Crooked Trails.
Upon finishing her degree at Western in 1995, Mackay decided to travel the world. She had become hooked on travel after seeing India at age 16 and met the love of her life abroad. Mackay's Scottish husband, also named Chris, was her hang-gliding instructor during a tandem flight in Nepal. The pair became engaged after just three months.
Mackay ran out of money after nine months of her around-the-world trip, but before she returned to the United States, she discovered the tour group that took visitors to meet the indigenous tribes in the highlands of Thailand. The guide and owner of the tribal tours was looking for someone to take over the business. So, the following year, Mackay and Leland went to Thailand and made the trips their own. They asked the rural communities what they needed, and then, with the villagers' permission, brought in tourists to build bridges, community center, and other municipal projects.
Mackay and Leland named the company Crooked Trails and signed up for a business license in Washington. During the school year, the pair taught environmental education in Seattle middle schools, and during the summer, they took tourists to Thailand.
Two years later, Mackay and Leland added the Peru trips. Since then, they've brought on India, Thailand and Kenya, and they plan to soon add Bolivia, Chile and Ecuador. Last year Crooked Trails ran 10 trips, and next year the company plans to do 20. Revenue this year will exceed $250,000, Mackay said.
As business grew, Leland and Mackay dropped their teaching jobs and Mackay stopped guiding trips. While Leland leads Crooked Trails groups across Peru, Mackay runs the company out of her West Seattle home. The deal suited both women, as Mackay wanted to have children and is now raising her baby daughter, Trinity.
Mackay admits she knew nothing about running a business, accounting or marketing before starting Crooked Trails. In the beginning, almost all the firm's travelers were friends of Mackay and Leland.
Universities have become one major source of business, as Leland and Mackay now organize sustainable business practice trips for the University of Washington and University of Delaware and ecotourism trips for Western Washington University.
Contact: hrdietrich@bizjournals.com • 206-447-8505x112
Potatoes originated in PeruAsian News InternationalWashington, October 5,2005
Where did the potatoes, that you relish almost everyday in some form or the other, originate? Don't know the answer? Well, no one did, until recently, when a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences revealed that the international dietary staple originated in Peru.
Humans have cultivated potatoes for long, but there had been a great controversy about its origin. A team led by a USDA potato taxonomist stationed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has for the first time demonstrated a single origin in southern Peru for the cultivated potato.
The scientists analyzed DNA markers in 261 wild and 98 cultivated potato varieties to assess whether the domestic potato arose from a single wild progenitor or whether it arose multiple times.
"In contrast to all prior hypotheses of multiple origins of the cultivated potato, we have identified a single origin from a broad area of southern Peru. The multiple-origins theory was based in part on the broad distribution of potatoes from north to south across many different habitats, through morphological resemblance of different wild species to cultivated species, and through other data. Our DNA data, however, shows that in fact all cultivated potatoes can be traced back to a single origin in southern Peru," said David Spooner, the USDA research scientist who led the study. The earliest archaeological evidence suggests that potatoes were domesticated from wild relatives by indigenous agriculturalists more than 7,000 years ago.
"When researchers discover an important trait - for example, that a certain species is resistant to disease then everything related to that species becomes potentially useful. We can screen samples to see if related germplasm has similar resistance, in which case we may be able to guide plant breeders to germplasm to use in breeding programs," Spooner said.
And beyond the agricultural benefits, Spooner's study has helped to rewrite a small but important chapter of evolutionary history.
"Books are written about questions of how crops originate. Sometimes statements are repeated so often that they are accepted as fact. This is a way to get people to reconsider long-held assumptions of the origin of the potato, and stimulate us to reconsider the origins of other crops using new methods," he said.
Humans have cultivated potatoes for long, but there had been a great controversy about its origin. A team led by a USDA potato taxonomist stationed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has for the first time demonstrated a single origin in southern Peru for the cultivated potato.
The scientists analyzed DNA markers in 261 wild and 98 cultivated potato varieties to assess whether the domestic potato arose from a single wild progenitor or whether it arose multiple times.
"In contrast to all prior hypotheses of multiple origins of the cultivated potato, we have identified a single origin from a broad area of southern Peru. The multiple-origins theory was based in part on the broad distribution of potatoes from north to south across many different habitats, through morphological resemblance of different wild species to cultivated species, and through other data. Our DNA data, however, shows that in fact all cultivated potatoes can be traced back to a single origin in southern Peru," said David Spooner, the USDA research scientist who led the study. The earliest archaeological evidence suggests that potatoes were domesticated from wild relatives by indigenous agriculturalists more than 7,000 years ago.
"When researchers discover an important trait - for example, that a certain species is resistant to disease then everything related to that species becomes potentially useful. We can screen samples to see if related germplasm has similar resistance, in which case we may be able to guide plant breeders to germplasm to use in breeding programs," Spooner said.
And beyond the agricultural benefits, Spooner's study has helped to rewrite a small but important chapter of evolutionary history.
"Books are written about questions of how crops originate. Sometimes statements are repeated so often that they are accepted as fact. This is a way to get people to reconsider long-held assumptions of the origin of the potato, and stimulate us to reconsider the origins of other crops using new methods," he said.
Ecotourism company makes the Green List
Alaska tour company wins prestigious Conde Nast award
By MELISSA DEVAUGHNAnchorage Daily News
Published: November 6, 2005 Last Modified: November 6, 2005 at 04:10 AM
GIRDWOOD -- When Kirk Hoessle of Alaska Wildland Adventures discovered his company had been chosen as the highest-ranking outdoor tour operator in the world by a high-end glossy travel magazine this fall, he thought, "Wow. That's cool."
Then he got back to work.
Others aren't quite so nonchalant. They say that Wildland Adventures' winning Conde Nast's 11th annual Green Award as ecotourism guide of the year says a lot about changes happening in Alaska's outdoor-travel industry.
Today, people want more out of their vacations, local experts say. Alaska's greatest asset remains its outdoors splendor, but it's no longer enough to load throngs of people aboard a bus for a sightseeing drive.
Outdoor tourism is changing.
People aren't as driven to go combat fishing for that big king salmon if they can find some solitude -- even if it means a smaller fish. And they no longer just want to see a bear and take a photo. Now, they're interested in the animal's habitat, its routines, its physiological makeup.
"Ecotourism is definitely on the upswing nationally and internationally," said Wendy Sailors, executive director of Alaska Wilderness Recreation and Tourism Association. "You'll see it called nature-based tourism, too.
"But another thing that is happening is a rise in educational and cultural tourism. People want a return for their money."
Hoessle has been a leader among Alaska tourism operators moving in this direction. Even the grounds around his Cooper Landing lodge have been transformed into something of a self-guided nature walk. As guests follow boardwalks and trails through the woods and along the Kenai River, there are signs to identify trees and shrubs, explaining their roles in the local ecosystem.
A non-native evergreen tree is even identified as a species transplanted by an earlier owner of the property and scheduled to be removed before it can reproduce and become what biologists call an "invasive species.''
Out on the river, Hoessle puts seasonal employees schooled as amateur naturalists and historians behind the oars of his company's sightseeing float trips on rafts down the Kenai. From the time the rafts leave Cooper Landing until they pull out at Jim's Landing or Skilak Lake, the oarsmen seldom stop talking about the bald eagles that perch in the trees, the three species of salmon that dominate the returns to the river, the bears that sometimes come out along the shores, the first people who arrived in the area thousands of years ago.
Hoessle said at first, he did not appreciate the implications of receiving the Conde Nast Green Award for operating in this fashion. He's not a good self-promoter, he said, and the way his employees run his company is based simply on a long-held belief in environmental responsibility, not the prospect of getting noticed.
"When my ex-business-partner (Jim Wells) and I started this company, we made a commitment to give back some of what we made to the environment that we were using," Hoessle said "We figured Patagonia gives away 10 percent of its profits and still offers quality products, so why couldn't we?"
Hoessle and his staff has grown over the years to 85 people in the summer. As they continued their operations guided by this core belief, they gained the attention of vacation-seekers who recognized their efforts.
For Alaska Wildland Adventures, the company's strong point is environmental responsibility -- they use cloth products and real plates rather than paper, they compost the leftover food at their Kenai Wilderness Lodge, they recycle everything from plastics to glass, despite the added effort of getting it to the proper recycling facilities.
For other outdoor-oriented companies, that commitment might be cultural or educational or spiritual. The opportunities are endless, noted Sailors.
"People go on vacation because they want to have a great time, but they end up getting an education with us, too," Hoessle said. "They see the recycling, the composting, and they absorb it without it being preached in their face. We lure them in with the activities but blow them away with the other aspects of how we operate.
"It's the best form of environmental education."
John Kreilkamp, vice president of Alaska Land Operations at Cruise West, the company founded by tourism pioneer Chuck West, said his company is committed to educational outdoor adventures that teach guests about the cultural diversity in Alaska. Unlike the large cruise-ship companies, Cruise West travels to small villages.
"We're going into 24 small communities statewide from Diomede to Metlakatla and Hyder, the Pribilofs and Savoonga, for instance," Kreilkamp said. "We even go into the Russian Far East, and Diomede looks uptown compared to some of these places."
Kreilkamp said if his company had one focus, or core belief, it would be cultural education.
"That's what so many of our guests who are well-traveled are into these days," Kreilkamp said. "They are not there for the glitz, glam and gambling; they're there for more learning, adventure, cultural, history environment."
For instance, Kreilkamp said Cruise West evening programs have nothing to do with dressing up and dancing. Rather, they usually include on-board guest speakers and outdoors veterans. Former Alaska Gov. Jay Hammond was one such regular. Pioneer adventurer Dick Griffith is another.
"Now that man can captivate an audience," Kreilkamp said of Griffith. "The people couldn't believe his stories."
Sailors, of Alaska Wilderness Recreation and Tourism Association, said this kind of interaction -- in which travelers can appreciate a truer-to-real-life depiction of Alaska -- is the best thing that can happen for the outdoors. The general public does not often connect the value of responsible tourism with public policy that can change the very wild lands that people seek out, she said.
Sailors uses the proposed Pebble Mine project as an example. If copper, molybdenum and gold mining begins in the Iliamna Lake region and fish populations are harmed, as some fishermen fear, how will people there make a living? What can they do to continue offering quality outdoor experiences while still living where they were born and raised?
"We're trying to guide Alaska tourism so that people realize we have options that are sustainable and a sure thing," Sailors said.
Sailors said AWRTA and other travel organizations such as Alaska Travel Industry Association are encouraging Alaskans to promote their version of the outdoors through educational and cultural programs.
Ever since Conde Nast published its four-page spread on environmentally responsible ecotourism, Hoessle said he has better appreciated what his company has done almost as second nature the past 20 years. His company garnered only one small paragraph as a sidebar to the main story on the best resort in the world, but the judging process was exhaustive, he said.
First they had to be invited to apply -- how they were nominated, Hoessle said he still does not know. Alaska Wildland's final score in the rating process was 75, which combined averages for guest satisfaction, nature preservation and local contributions to the communities in which they do business. Journeys International in Peru came in second, followed by Guerba World Travel, which leads treks in Africa, Latin America and Asia, among other places.
"There were a lot of follow-up questions," Hoessle said. "From all accounts, they really did their homework."
While national and international tour operators who offer Alaska trips among their menu of destinations have been recipients of the award, this is the first time a locally owned and Alaska-based company has made the cut, said Brooke Wilkinson, executive assistant editor at Conde Nast Traveler. It's a prestigious group to be a part of, she added.
In today's tightening market, where outdoor tour operators are competing with more and more companies for clients, the award could be a boon, Hoessle said.
"It's one of those things where it might help people make their decision," Hoessle said. "If they're comparing Company A and our company, this might be enough to make them want to go with us."
Sailors said Alaska Wildland's award is good for Alaska outdoor tourism as a whole. Hopefully it sends a message that people can have an enjoyable vacation without feeling preached upon, she said.
"One thing that the conservation community as a whole is looking at is that stigma that goes with the term 'conservation' -- that extreme tree-hugger connotation," Sailors said.
"We're trying to get the public in general to see it more as 'responsible tourism,' not ecotourism. Responsible tourism to me means you're being careful about what you're using so the resource is there 100 years from now, not just 10 years from now."
Melissa DeVaughn is a Daily News reporter. She can be reached at mdevaughn@adn.com.
By MELISSA DEVAUGHNAnchorage Daily News
Published: November 6, 2005 Last Modified: November 6, 2005 at 04:10 AM
GIRDWOOD -- When Kirk Hoessle of Alaska Wildland Adventures discovered his company had been chosen as the highest-ranking outdoor tour operator in the world by a high-end glossy travel magazine this fall, he thought, "Wow. That's cool."
Then he got back to work.
Others aren't quite so nonchalant. They say that Wildland Adventures' winning Conde Nast's 11th annual Green Award as ecotourism guide of the year says a lot about changes happening in Alaska's outdoor-travel industry.
Today, people want more out of their vacations, local experts say. Alaska's greatest asset remains its outdoors splendor, but it's no longer enough to load throngs of people aboard a bus for a sightseeing drive.
Outdoor tourism is changing.
People aren't as driven to go combat fishing for that big king salmon if they can find some solitude -- even if it means a smaller fish. And they no longer just want to see a bear and take a photo. Now, they're interested in the animal's habitat, its routines, its physiological makeup.
"Ecotourism is definitely on the upswing nationally and internationally," said Wendy Sailors, executive director of Alaska Wilderness Recreation and Tourism Association. "You'll see it called nature-based tourism, too.
"But another thing that is happening is a rise in educational and cultural tourism. People want a return for their money."
Hoessle has been a leader among Alaska tourism operators moving in this direction. Even the grounds around his Cooper Landing lodge have been transformed into something of a self-guided nature walk. As guests follow boardwalks and trails through the woods and along the Kenai River, there are signs to identify trees and shrubs, explaining their roles in the local ecosystem.
A non-native evergreen tree is even identified as a species transplanted by an earlier owner of the property and scheduled to be removed before it can reproduce and become what biologists call an "invasive species.''
Out on the river, Hoessle puts seasonal employees schooled as amateur naturalists and historians behind the oars of his company's sightseeing float trips on rafts down the Kenai. From the time the rafts leave Cooper Landing until they pull out at Jim's Landing or Skilak Lake, the oarsmen seldom stop talking about the bald eagles that perch in the trees, the three species of salmon that dominate the returns to the river, the bears that sometimes come out along the shores, the first people who arrived in the area thousands of years ago.
Hoessle said at first, he did not appreciate the implications of receiving the Conde Nast Green Award for operating in this fashion. He's not a good self-promoter, he said, and the way his employees run his company is based simply on a long-held belief in environmental responsibility, not the prospect of getting noticed.
"When my ex-business-partner (Jim Wells) and I started this company, we made a commitment to give back some of what we made to the environment that we were using," Hoessle said "We figured Patagonia gives away 10 percent of its profits and still offers quality products, so why couldn't we?"
Hoessle and his staff has grown over the years to 85 people in the summer. As they continued their operations guided by this core belief, they gained the attention of vacation-seekers who recognized their efforts.
For Alaska Wildland Adventures, the company's strong point is environmental responsibility -- they use cloth products and real plates rather than paper, they compost the leftover food at their Kenai Wilderness Lodge, they recycle everything from plastics to glass, despite the added effort of getting it to the proper recycling facilities.
For other outdoor-oriented companies, that commitment might be cultural or educational or spiritual. The opportunities are endless, noted Sailors.
"People go on vacation because they want to have a great time, but they end up getting an education with us, too," Hoessle said. "They see the recycling, the composting, and they absorb it without it being preached in their face. We lure them in with the activities but blow them away with the other aspects of how we operate.
"It's the best form of environmental education."
John Kreilkamp, vice president of Alaska Land Operations at Cruise West, the company founded by tourism pioneer Chuck West, said his company is committed to educational outdoor adventures that teach guests about the cultural diversity in Alaska. Unlike the large cruise-ship companies, Cruise West travels to small villages.
"We're going into 24 small communities statewide from Diomede to Metlakatla and Hyder, the Pribilofs and Savoonga, for instance," Kreilkamp said. "We even go into the Russian Far East, and Diomede looks uptown compared to some of these places."
Kreilkamp said if his company had one focus, or core belief, it would be cultural education.
"That's what so many of our guests who are well-traveled are into these days," Kreilkamp said. "They are not there for the glitz, glam and gambling; they're there for more learning, adventure, cultural, history environment."
For instance, Kreilkamp said Cruise West evening programs have nothing to do with dressing up and dancing. Rather, they usually include on-board guest speakers and outdoors veterans. Former Alaska Gov. Jay Hammond was one such regular. Pioneer adventurer Dick Griffith is another.
"Now that man can captivate an audience," Kreilkamp said of Griffith. "The people couldn't believe his stories."
Sailors, of Alaska Wilderness Recreation and Tourism Association, said this kind of interaction -- in which travelers can appreciate a truer-to-real-life depiction of Alaska -- is the best thing that can happen for the outdoors. The general public does not often connect the value of responsible tourism with public policy that can change the very wild lands that people seek out, she said.
Sailors uses the proposed Pebble Mine project as an example. If copper, molybdenum and gold mining begins in the Iliamna Lake region and fish populations are harmed, as some fishermen fear, how will people there make a living? What can they do to continue offering quality outdoor experiences while still living where they were born and raised?
"We're trying to guide Alaska tourism so that people realize we have options that are sustainable and a sure thing," Sailors said.
Sailors said AWRTA and other travel organizations such as Alaska Travel Industry Association are encouraging Alaskans to promote their version of the outdoors through educational and cultural programs.
Ever since Conde Nast published its four-page spread on environmentally responsible ecotourism, Hoessle said he has better appreciated what his company has done almost as second nature the past 20 years. His company garnered only one small paragraph as a sidebar to the main story on the best resort in the world, but the judging process was exhaustive, he said.
First they had to be invited to apply -- how they were nominated, Hoessle said he still does not know. Alaska Wildland's final score in the rating process was 75, which combined averages for guest satisfaction, nature preservation and local contributions to the communities in which they do business. Journeys International in Peru came in second, followed by Guerba World Travel, which leads treks in Africa, Latin America and Asia, among other places.
"There were a lot of follow-up questions," Hoessle said. "From all accounts, they really did their homework."
While national and international tour operators who offer Alaska trips among their menu of destinations have been recipients of the award, this is the first time a locally owned and Alaska-based company has made the cut, said Brooke Wilkinson, executive assistant editor at Conde Nast Traveler. It's a prestigious group to be a part of, she added.
In today's tightening market, where outdoor tour operators are competing with more and more companies for clients, the award could be a boon, Hoessle said.
"It's one of those things where it might help people make their decision," Hoessle said. "If they're comparing Company A and our company, this might be enough to make them want to go with us."
Sailors said Alaska Wildland's award is good for Alaska outdoor tourism as a whole. Hopefully it sends a message that people can have an enjoyable vacation without feeling preached upon, she said.
"One thing that the conservation community as a whole is looking at is that stigma that goes with the term 'conservation' -- that extreme tree-hugger connotation," Sailors said.
"We're trying to get the public in general to see it more as 'responsible tourism,' not ecotourism. Responsible tourism to me means you're being careful about what you're using so the resource is there 100 years from now, not just 10 years from now."
Melissa DeVaughn is a Daily News reporter. She can be reached at mdevaughn@adn.com.
Wednesday, December 22, 2004
Orient-Express, new luxury travel brochure
Orient-Express Hotels, Trains & Cruises has launched its 2006 'Journeys of Distinction' brochure of exclusive trains and cruise tours to its 150 top travel agents at a lunch on board the British Pullman carriages of the Orient-Express, London.
The new brochure showcases the company's unique portfolio of luxury trains and cruise experiences across Europe, South East Asia and Peru as well as cross referencing its UK Day Trains and The Royal Scotsman, which will feature in their own stand alone UK brochure out later in the year. A new dedicated travel agent extranet site, www.oeh.com, was also unveiled at the event which will give these top selected agents private access to detailed product information on all the company's hotels, trains and cruises as well as the ability to build customised brochures and newsletters to send to their key clients. David Hester Director of Sales & Marketing Orient-Express Hotels, Trains & Cruises said:
'We are immensely proud of our new brochure - stylish journeys aboard our legendary trains have never been more in demand. This special event for the UK's top luxury travel agents celebrates their support this year and introduces many new initiatives to make our partnerships with them even stronger in the years to come.''We hope that the new extranet site will be a big hit. It has been developed alongside our key travel agent partners to offer support and training and to give them valuable knowledge of our portfolio of exclusive experiences,' added David Hester. The 2006 'Journeys of Distinction' brochure highlights a number of new packages including the NEW Orient-Express signature package 'Venetian Celebration'.
5-star VeniceThis 6 night itinerary includes one night at The Dorchester, London with private check-in and taxi transfer the next morning to London Victoria to board the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express for the overnight journey to Venice. On arrival in Venice transfer to the Hotel Cipriani and spend 4 nights in a stunning lagoon view room, before flying back to the UK. The package also includes a morning walking tour and afternoon motor boat tour of Venice with a personal guide as well as a final dinner at CIP's Club, the Cipriani's latest restaurant offering.
This ultimate VSOE package costs from £4,385 per person. A new 3 night southbound itinerary aboard the Eastern & Oriental Express is also featured for the first time. This enhanced southbound route between Bangkok and Singapore will now depart on Sunday evening and arrive into Singapore on Wednesday morning and take in the famous wooden trestle viaduct at Tham Kasae, north of Kanchanaburi, one of Thailand's most scenic stretches of railway. The new timetable will also give guests a more convenient evening arrival/departure time into Kuala Lumpur for those wishing to enjoy the delights that the Malaysian capital has to offer. Prices start from £990 per person. The Thai Explorer departures will be increased from 7 to 11 departures for 2006 due to the popularity in this recent addition to the E&OE schedule. The northbound route from Singapore to Bangkok will continue as a 2 night journey following the existing itinerary.
Indo-China packagesThree new Indo-China extension packages are also featured this year which can be taken pre or post a journey on board the Eastern & Oriental Express or the Road To Mandalay river cruise ship in Myanmar (Burma). Visit Luang Prabang in Laos or Ankor Wat in Cambodia and stay at the Pansea Orient-Express properties there whilst visiting the key sites in the area. Alternatively travel between Thailand and Laos on an adventurous Mekong River Cruise which will allow you to enjoy the famous Golden Triangle with a stay at the Anantara Resort at Chiang Rai followed by two days cruising to Luang Prabang with an overnight stop en-route at the Luang Say Lodge at Pakbeng, located right on the banks of the river. Prices start from £350 per person. For further information on all Orient-Express experiences call 0845 077 2222 or visit www.orient-express.com.
The new brochure showcases the company's unique portfolio of luxury trains and cruise experiences across Europe, South East Asia and Peru as well as cross referencing its UK Day Trains and The Royal Scotsman, which will feature in their own stand alone UK brochure out later in the year. A new dedicated travel agent extranet site, www.oeh.com, was also unveiled at the event which will give these top selected agents private access to detailed product information on all the company's hotels, trains and cruises as well as the ability to build customised brochures and newsletters to send to their key clients. David Hester Director of Sales & Marketing Orient-Express Hotels, Trains & Cruises said:
'We are immensely proud of our new brochure - stylish journeys aboard our legendary trains have never been more in demand. This special event for the UK's top luxury travel agents celebrates their support this year and introduces many new initiatives to make our partnerships with them even stronger in the years to come.''We hope that the new extranet site will be a big hit. It has been developed alongside our key travel agent partners to offer support and training and to give them valuable knowledge of our portfolio of exclusive experiences,' added David Hester. The 2006 'Journeys of Distinction' brochure highlights a number of new packages including the NEW Orient-Express signature package 'Venetian Celebration'.
5-star VeniceThis 6 night itinerary includes one night at The Dorchester, London with private check-in and taxi transfer the next morning to London Victoria to board the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express for the overnight journey to Venice. On arrival in Venice transfer to the Hotel Cipriani and spend 4 nights in a stunning lagoon view room, before flying back to the UK. The package also includes a morning walking tour and afternoon motor boat tour of Venice with a personal guide as well as a final dinner at CIP's Club, the Cipriani's latest restaurant offering.
This ultimate VSOE package costs from £4,385 per person. A new 3 night southbound itinerary aboard the Eastern & Oriental Express is also featured for the first time. This enhanced southbound route between Bangkok and Singapore will now depart on Sunday evening and arrive into Singapore on Wednesday morning and take in the famous wooden trestle viaduct at Tham Kasae, north of Kanchanaburi, one of Thailand's most scenic stretches of railway. The new timetable will also give guests a more convenient evening arrival/departure time into Kuala Lumpur for those wishing to enjoy the delights that the Malaysian capital has to offer. Prices start from £990 per person. The Thai Explorer departures will be increased from 7 to 11 departures for 2006 due to the popularity in this recent addition to the E&OE schedule. The northbound route from Singapore to Bangkok will continue as a 2 night journey following the existing itinerary.
Indo-China packagesThree new Indo-China extension packages are also featured this year which can be taken pre or post a journey on board the Eastern & Oriental Express or the Road To Mandalay river cruise ship in Myanmar (Burma). Visit Luang Prabang in Laos or Ankor Wat in Cambodia and stay at the Pansea Orient-Express properties there whilst visiting the key sites in the area. Alternatively travel between Thailand and Laos on an adventurous Mekong River Cruise which will allow you to enjoy the famous Golden Triangle with a stay at the Anantara Resort at Chiang Rai followed by two days cruising to Luang Prabang with an overnight stop en-route at the Luang Say Lodge at Pakbeng, located right on the banks of the river. Prices start from £350 per person. For further information on all Orient-Express experiences call 0845 077 2222 or visit www.orient-express.com.
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