02 May 2024

Peru

We offer a wide choice of cheap flights to Peru together with Peru hotels, tours and self-drive itineraries.

Other South America Reviews

Journey to the Mountain of the Gods

For the creator of Midsomer Murders, Foyle's War and the Alex Rider spy series, it was a fabulous chance to spent time with his son on a holiday to Peru. Not to mention dealing with the heat, the altitude, the crocodiles and the aliens. The adventure starts here...

1 The magnificent Machu Picchu 2 Cuzco center 3 An inhabitant of the rainforest

ARE WE THERE YET? The Andes: 12,000ft up, on the spectacular Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. Beside me, my 15-year- old son Nicholas. Ahead, and incredibly high above us, the lip of the mountain which the locals call Dead Woman’s Pass.

The name may be prophetic, There’s little oxygen and any exertion brings dizziness, a pounding headache and desperate shortage of breath.

As we pass through the cloud forest, a cooling mist hangs in the air. We need it. The heat is well into the 80s during the day, then mocks us by dropping to zero at night.

Are we there yet? I ask my son for the tenth time. It’s all right, Dad. You can make it…

We’ve been only a few days in Peru, but the train already seems a lifetime away. Was it only a few weeks ago that I was back in Kent starting shooting for the fourth series of Foyle’s War?

The newest script for the TV series is set in 1942. It finds the Americans getting used to the cold weather and endless drizzle of the south coast; after a long winter in England I knew how they felt. I needed a break.

I had to research a new novel, Evil Star. Part of a series, it follows a 14-year old boy in search of a mystical gate about to release various demons into the world. The gate is in Peru, so off I went.

Taking Nicholas was a last minute thought. There’s a danger, in our increasingly busy lives, that adults and children grow apart all too quickly. It would be the perfect bonding session to go somewhere truly foreign, with no meeting for me, no MTV or Playstation for him.

Writing the book, I would benefit from his insights. And frankly, I needed someone to carry the tent.

Not that it was necessary on the Inca trail. When I first walked it, 20 years ago, you just got off the train at the point call Km88 and set off.

Epic scenery

Since then, it’s become so hugely popular and well-trodden, particularly by Britons, that the Peruvian government has regulated and protected the walk in a way that some might find overbearing but which is also truly ingenious.

You enter through a checkpoint, one of several on the route. You need a licensed guide, a passport and a £25 ticket. Plastic bottles are counted at the start so none can be discarded along the way. You must book at least a month in advance.

There are actually more porters than hikers on the trail. I blush to admit that Nick and I were accompanied by seven swarthy Peruvians including a cook, and a guide. But of course, I hired them all only because I was worried about him.

Despite all this, once you’re walking it’s easy to lose yourself in the adventure. The scenery is so epic, the mountains and glaciers so vast, that you’re on your own much of the day.

There are Inca ruins along the way, none more lovely than Huinay Huayna, a city clinging impossibly to the mountain’s edge and inaccessible by bus or train.

And there’s Machu Picchu itself, the last Inca stronghold, discovered by Hiram Bingham in 1911 and one of the most spectacular archaeological sites in the world.

It’s a self-contained city of palaces, temples and houses, gloriously situated high in the mountains. The whole place is shrouded in mystery. No one is quite sure how or when it was built or why it was so suddenly abandoned.

Miserable after midday, when the number of visitors rises into the thousands, it is best viewed from high above, passing through the majestic ruins of Intipunku, the gate of the sun, just after dawn.

We know almost nothing about the Incas. They never learned to write, we don’t know why, and almost every aspect of their culture was comprehensively trashed by the Spanish.

Teenagers are rarely impressed by a lot of old stones and Nick is no different. But he stayed there for five hours and didn’t complain.

There are beach holidays and there are culture holidays but Peru, the third largest country in South America, has just about everything including aliens.

E.T landing site

We started in Lima, then travelled south to Nazca, which is where much of my book is set. This is the home of the Nazca lines, one of the world’s greatest puzzles: huge, mathematically precise lines, drawn in the desert around the time of Christ and visible only from the air.

According to Erich Von Daniken, author of Chariots of the Gods, they were originally meant to be an extra-terrestrial landing site. We flew over them in a 12-seater Cessna.

Only a day later we were in Ica, walking up giant sand dunes. The next day found us in Picsom on the bay of Paracas, where a three-hour boat ride took us to the Ballestas Islands, also known as the poor man’s Galapagos.

Surrounded by thousands of birds, dolphins and sea lions, our boat nosed around a landscape eroded by water and wind into something wild and other-worldly.

Back in Lima and a two-hour flight east to the rainforests of the Amazon basin and a two-day visit that would have made the whole trip worthwhile itself. We landed at the run-down town of Puerto Maldonado and continued by a dug-out canoe down the Madre de Dios (mother of god) river.

Don’t the names say it all? I was sucked into the world of German film-maker, Werner Herzog. The ship he immortalised in Fitzcarraldo can still be seen in the nearby jungle. But for Nick it was Steven Spielberg and Indiana Jones.

A difference of age and points of reference but no matter. This was an adventure.

We stayed at the Reserva Amazonica, a collection of 41 bungalows on stilts.

The rainforest is teeming with things that will bite you, sting you or simply scare you to death. A tree in the centre of the compound was home to a dozen tarantulas, each one the size of your hand. But the mosquito nets and expertise of the people who run the place makes you feel, broadly, safe.

We were taken on a sunset walk through the jungle by our guide, Juan, and saw ants, spiders, snakes, weird plants and monkeys – all of them either beautiful or deadly (or, surprisingly often, both). Watching the sun come down over the Madre de Dios is a sight that will remain with me forever.

An adventure movie

The next day Juan took us in a dug-out canoe through the jungle and into a lake straight out of an adventure movie set.

We paddled ourselves, first along a tiny creek with the jungle pressing in on both sides. We emerged into an expanse of silver-black water, surrounded by mangroves, eerily silent and still. Nick announced he wanted to swim.

I should have mentioned sternly that this might not be sensible. Don’t they have piranhas here? Instead, I stripped down to my Calvin Kleins and followed.

The water was deliciously cool. We swam for 20 minutes, puzzled by tourists in a second canoe who shouted at us and gesticulated.

The truth is that (as the old joke goes) if there weren’t piranhas in the lake it was because the crocodiles had eaten them all. Just after we got back in the boat a crocodile, two metres long, swam past.

I remonstrated with Juan but he was unfazed. The water was also infected with yellow fever, he said, and more dangerous than crocodiles. So what was I complaining for?

Our next stop, after a short flight, was Cuzco at 3,416m, the capital of the Inca empire and the starting point for the Inca Trail

Cuzco is a backpacker heaven with dozens of cheap restaurants and hotels. It hasn’t changed much in 20 years. I have, which is why we stayed in the absurdly luxurious and insanely expensive Hotel Monasterio, a few blocks north of the central Plaza de Armas.

From Cuzco we explored the Sacred Valley, taking in the imposing Inca fortification at Ollantaytambo and the ruins of the great ceremonial centre at Sacsayhauman.

Cuzco and the neighbouring town of Pisac are famous for markets and souvenirs made from the fleece of the alpaca, a small camel-like creature. But you soon realise that about 90 per cent of the goods may seem just a little bit naff once you get them home.

But our adventure had been far from that – an awe-inspiring exploration of a place as far removed from the 1940s England of Foyle’s War as I could get.

sAs for Nick and me… he’ll hate me for saying it, but I think we both benefited enormously.

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