Photos by Eftichios Tsaousidis
Edited by Harrys Pourouzidis
Earth seems vast to us, the small human beings. Its lands feel endless, its sky immeasurable, its peoples and civilisations countless. And there are places upon this spherical crust that radiate magic and spirituality, places where the customs and traditions of their native peoples disappear into the abyss of the past, leaving behind only crumbs of their former grandeur for us, the modern ones, to admire.
One such distant place is Peru. And now the time has come for photographs taken twenty years ago to see the light of day and carry us across both space and time.
I have got from my upbringing in Peru.
Thessaloniki — Frankfurt — Lima
The flight seemed endless. It took us thirty hours before we finally set foot on the soil of Lima. At the airport, a small van was waiting for us, along with two willing young men who lifted our suitcases and took us to the hotel, where our travel agent, Nilo, was expecting us.
Exhausted, we went straight to bed without much ceremony. The next morning, we set out to discover Lima and the district of Miraflores, with its great cliffs looking out over the Pacific Ocean, as well as the Museo Oro del Perú.
Pisco
That afternoon we set off for Pisco, where we first came into contact with the civilisation of the Paracas. Before the city took this name, it was called Santa Maria Magdalena, while its port was named Pisco, just like the nearby valley.
As an important station in the transporting alcohol, little by little the sailors of that great age of pirates abandoned the city’s original name and simply kept the name Pisco, probably because two syllables are easier to say than nine.
There, in the province of Pisco, which in the Quechua language means “bird”, lie the famous Ballestas Islands, or, as the people of Paracas proudly call them, the Peruvian Galapagos. They are home to sea lions, little penguins, and a great variety of water birds.
Access to the Paracas National Wildlife Reserve is possible only by boat, and our guide, delighted to learn that the Peruvian footballer Olivares was playing for PAOK at the time, made our tour even more interesting.
Huacachina Oasis - Nazca
By noon the next day, we found ourselves having lunch in the village of Huacachina, built around an oasis and surrounded by sand dunes rising as high as 500 metres. There we watched young sandboarders climb up, exhausted, only to enjoy a slide lasting a few seconds.
We spent the night in the city of Nazca. Our accommodation was an old farm whose owners had discovered that converting it into a hotel was more profitable.
In the morning, we visited Chauchilla Cemetery, where the macabre sight of open tombs allowed our silence to speak of human mortality.
Our Cessna was waiting to fly us over the Nazca Lines, that so much has been written about their origins. Unfortunately, I was not able to photograph those marvellous geoglyphs, perhaps because I had run out of film, perhaps because I had forgotten the camera in my travel bag, or perhaps because the sight was so enchanting that I wanted to enjoy it rather than view it through a lens.
Arequipa
Night had fallen when the bus, with its elegant attendants, picked us up to take us to Arequipa, suspended at an altitude of 2,325 metres in southern Peru. The journey lasted all night, and perhaps that was for the best, because the mountain roads might have raised our heart rates had we been able to see where we were going.
Halfway through the route, we changed drivers and continued towards Peru’s second-largest city.
It was the Feast of the Dormition, and fortune smiled on us: the city was holding celebrations for its founding in 1540. Back then, it was still called “Beautiful Village of Our Lady of the Assumption,” but a year later, in 1541, King Charles V of Spain ordered that it be renamed the City of Arequipa.
Groups from Brazil, Argentina, and other neighbouring Latin American countries danced through the streets in colourful traditional and not-so-traditional costumes, moving to the rhythms of samba and other local sounds.
The night arrived just as noisily. A couple, drunk on Pisco Sour, yes, their national alcoholic drink is also called Pisco, struck up a conversation in the middle of the street, as the woman was carrying a sleeping baby on her back.
Nearby, a kind lady asked me to photograph her. She confessed that it was the first time she had ever had her picture taken, something that surprised me deeply, considering her age. With that photograph, she was making her own quiet family rebellion. Something so simple to us was yet denied to her until that day way into her life.
Chivay
The next day found us in Chivay, an Indigenous village in the Colca Valley, home to the beautiful canyon of the same name. At 3,600 metres above sea level, Chivay is a stopping point for those hoping to see condors rising from the depths of the canyon, riding the warm air currents, as there are hot springs very close by.
The route offered photographs of a landscape entirely different from those we knew. Along the banks of the Colca River, we saw alpacas, eagles, and, of course, a few shy condors flying far from us with their magnificent wings spread wide.
We returned late that night to Arequipa, since the following day we would take a twenty-minute flight to visit the city of Juliaca and nearby Lake Titicaca.
Titicaca Lake - Uros Islands - Isla Taquile
After landing in Juliaca, we decided to try our hand at meditation and enter into spiritual contact with the Indigenous ancestors of this land, drawing energy from the world around us.
We spent the night in Puno, on the shores of Lake Titicaca, where the gourmet restaurant’s specialities included grilled skinned trout and guinea pig.
Titicaca is the largest lake in South America, straddling the border between Peru and Bolivia at 3,830 metres above sea level. At this altitude, the water and air are strikingly clear. The lake’s depth was lower in earlier times; a temple, terraces, walls, and roads have been found beneath its surface.
The lake is regarded as the cultural birthplace of the Inca civilisation. According to local folklore, the sun sent its son, Manco Capac, and the moon sent her daughter, Mama Ocllo, to emerge there and found the Inca Empire.
The next day, we loaded ourselves into boats to visit the Uros, who live on floating islands on the lake’s surface.
The tribe proudly claims to be the master of the lake, living on more than 120 floating islands made from totora reeds. Each island lasts for around thirty years if properly maintained. Over time, the water rots the reeds, so the Uros build a new island and allow the old one to sink to the bottom of the lake.
To build an island, in which two to six families houses reside, the Uros first gather large pieces of totora, which often float on the surface during the rainy season. Several pieces drift together, and their roots and reeds naturally intertwine to form a layer about one to two metres thick, called khili.
From the same material, the Uros also build the boats they use in their daily lives. The island settlements were originally defensive in purpose, as they could be moved if a threat appeared. The largest island even maintained a watchtower, as did most of the smaller ones.
We continued to Taquile Island, home to an Indigenous island community that now lives mainly from tourism. The men of the island are famous for knitting handmade textiles, which their wives sell in the coop building.
Cusco
The following morning, we took the train to Cusco. On a single track, at an altitude of more than 4,000 metres, in the middle of nowhere, when two trains meet one another, gives travelling indigenous vendors the opportunity to sell their goods.
The journey seemed endless, as did the vast valleys of the Andes. Night had already fallen when we arrived in the historic capital of the Inca Empire.
The next morning, we visited Sacsayhuaman, with its cyclopean walls, built by the Incas in the fifteenth century. Constructed from stones up to 8.2 metres high and weighing many tonnes, with zigzagging walls more than 300 metres long, Sacsayhuaman is a feat of human engineering.
The Spanish chronicler Pedro Cieza de León states that 20,000 men worked to create this citadel. The workers cut the stones with such precision and placed them beside one another without mortar, creating an astonishing earthquake-resistant system.
We left Cusco and Sacsayhuaman behind and travelled north to Pisac, in the Sacred Valley of the Incas, and then west to see Ollantaytambo and the Temple of the Sun.
Aguas Calientes
The third day dawned in Cusco, and we boarded the train once more heading to the small town of Aguas Calientes, “hot waters,” for those who enjoy literal translation, in order to visit the legendary Machu Picchu.
The town did not exist until the railway was built and was first used as a centre for workers. It soon became a tourist place for “pilgrims.” The summit of Machu Picchu lies only six kilometres away, or about an hour and a half on foot for the more athletic types.
In the Quechua language, machu means old, while picchu means pyramid. We stood speechless before the greatness of the monument we saw.
Machu Picchu is not simply an archaeological wonder; it is also an architectural masterpiece. There are more than 200 buildings known so far, intelligently divided into urban and agricultural sectors, as well as an upper and lower city. This legendary city proves that very few other examples of Inca architectural design and construction can compare with it.
Αμαζόνιος
But the greatest adventure had yet to come. We returned to Lima by plane, and from there flew again, this time to Iquitos, where Andres, our indigenous guide, was waiting for us. We boarded a speedboat and travelled for three hours through torrential rain until we reached our camp on a tributary of the Amazon, near the meeting point of the Ucayali and Marañón rivers, which form the Amazon itself. At that point, the river was one kilometre wide and 22 metres deep. The schedule called for a five-day tour, which may have seemed long at the time, but in hindsight was far too short to truly experience the grandeur of a natural world unlike anything else on earth.
The next day, we set out on a five-hour route through the rainforest, where Andres showed us how to cut tree trunks in order to drink their water. We travelled along the river, saw dolphins playing on its surface, and learned how to fish for piranhas, which we also had to opportunity to taste.
One night, in absolute darkness, our guide woke us and had us get into canoes to see small alligators, their ruby eyes flashing in the light of his lantern. He also told us that the river level had fallen by around seven metres, pushing the larger crocodiles towards other waters.
At our camp, we had a playful monkey for company, who would not leave anyone in peace, as well as large parrots that perched on logs and examined us without the slightest fear. On the fourth day, we visited two indigenous villages and gained a small taste of their everyday life. The next day, we returned to Belén in Iquitos, and from there to Lima.
Epilogue
Back in Katerini, everything seemed rather dull. Twenty-three days later, nothing in the life of the city had changed. But when time passed and the rolls of film returned from the photo lab, now printed on paper, the mind travelled back once more. Back to all those places, the people, the culture, and the magnificent nature that had been carved forever into memory, as if not a single day had gone by.
