Above is a photo taken during a sunday procession in the square of my favourite Peruvian town. Chachapoyas is on the edge of the towering Andes just before the land plunges into the Amazon jungle. It is a remote and lush area where the people are still interested in tourists, keen to talk and fiercely proud.
The markets there are full of the incredible range of produce available in an area where there is plentiful tropical sun and rain as well as a large number of different climates close together due to the variations in altitude. As well as the fruits above, the beans are also amazing including both coffee and cocoa, as well as fava, orca and kinds displaying every colour of the rainbow inbetween. It is an area that has been heavily inhabited for a long time and as you hike through the mountains and the cloud forest you find yourself on the top of a ridge confronted by the ruins of ancient cities that have been overrun by the verdant green that is everywhere.
On one of our first days here we went on a day hike up to the third highest water fall in the world. this walk took us through the cloud forest you can see above. Full of giant palms, enormous ferns and orchids whereever you look. The cloud forest is broken and sparse in places and in the photo below you can see the waterfall we were hiking up to in the background.
As we hiked further up the valley the size of the waterfall gradually became apparent as we glimpsed it through the breaks in the canopy above us.
The volume of water in the fall was not vast, as you imagine some parallel to Niagara, but the height was breath taking. As we approached it we had to hide inside ponchos and plastic sheets. At the back of the valley it was as if you were in the middle of a raging storm, everything soaking wet with fine rain being lashed across us by gusts of wind. Above us the water looked like an avalanche as it poured over the lip and broke up into a falling, billowing cloud of spray. Only returning to the expected form of a river as it struck the rocks around the plunge pool thousands of feet below.
Once we had hiked back down we found a welcome meal waiting for us at the village at the foot of the valley. It was a meal of chicken that had lived such a full free range life that its meat was dark, tough and flavoured more like game than what we know as chicken. The meal was served in the room below where the ever present image of Che Guevara was painted above the door next to a speaker so large it was as if one of his speeches was about to begin booming out at any second, flattening everyone round the table.
We now had a taste for trekking and decided to take a little bit further. We headed up into the cloud forest for four days trekking following ancient trade routes passing a number of abandoned and unexplored hilltop cities and finishing in Kuelap, the greatest of the mountain top fortresses built by the pre conquest civilizations.
We began our trek heading up into the mountains through the forest on paths like the one above. It was just idyllic and we lost ourselves in the vistas that would loom up out of the clouds as we reached the top of each pass.
The unpredictability of the weather only added to the magical atmosphere we found in this world. Cloud forest is a form rainforest and nature made it very clear that this was a wild part of the world. Brilliant sunshine would become raging thunderstorms in just a few minutes and would pass just as quickly. We spent alot of time hiding in Ponchos and waterproofs and pushing to get into the next valley where the weather would be entirely different.
On the second day of the trek we were due to climb nearly two thousand meters and so mules had been hired to make sure we made it up to the pass. The idea was that each of us would sit on the back of a tiny mule, our feet pratically dragging on the ground. The owners of the mules would walk along beside geeing up the animals and making sure they weren’t distracted by the undergrowth for too long with some gentle encouragement involving freshly cut switches on the backs of their legs. As I realised how steeply the path was climbing and descending and the trouble the mule was having with my weight on his back, I rapidly went off the whole idea. Not only that but we were not moving any faster than a normal walking pace and the saddle I was sat on appeared to have been constructed from pieces of wood especially selected not to compliment the human form.
I spent the rest of the day walking alongside and inbetween the mules. Everyone else joined me for shorter or long stints. When the path became particularly treacherous or someone felt particularly sorry for their mule the group of walkers would swell. Much of the path had been worn into a kind of giant mud stepping stones. The mules who transported goods back and forth between the settlements along side the route trod in same spots and had worn mud filled troughs between which were high ridges of mud. In the photo below you can see Erika leading her mule across just such a section of the climb.
On the last day of the trek we came to the most amazing castle I have ever visited. It is a fortress built on the top of a mountain using three times the amount of stone required for the great pyramids of Egypt. It was built without metal tools or the wheel. As it loomed up out of the forest and cloud the sheer size and location blew me away. Surrounded by llamas, covered by the invasive green of the forest with a 360 degree view of some of the highest mountains in the world it could hardly fail to inspire.
