Peruvian Stalagmites Hold Clues To Climate Change

ScienceDaily (May 16, 2009) — How will the Netherlands, dominated by water, be affected by future climate change? Dutch researcher Martin van Breukelen hopes to answer that question by analyzing stalagmites from the South American Amazon tributaries in Peru as a way to reconstruct climate changes in the past.

Information that can be used to test climate models is stored in various forms: in ice formations, plant remnants, oceans and caves. Limestone formations in caves, so-called speleothemes, provide insights into the land climate. The best-known speleothemes are stalagmites, standing formations and stalactites, hanging formations. Van Breukelen discovered stalagmites in South America that provide information about the climate over the past 13,000 years.

In order to study climate change, Van Breukelen analyzed the accumulation of oxygen isotopes in both the cave water and the stalagmite. A small quantity of fossil cave water is enclosed in the core of the stalagmite, so-called fluid inclusions. The entrapped water is just as old as the carbonate of the stalagmite in which it is trapped. The isotope ratio of this fossil water can be measured using an extraction technique. As this water has been entrapped for thousands of years it provides unique information about the climatic history.

Much climate research on the land and sea is based on the measurement of subtle changes in the ratio between stable oxygen isotopes in, for example, ice or stone formations. Isotopes of an element can have different numbers of neutrons but always contain the same number of protons. Light isotopes (¹⁶O) respond differently to climate change than heavier isotopes (¹⁸O). Climate changes result in an altered ratio of the ¹⁶O and ¹⁸O isotopes. The ratio of the different isotopic elements oxygen, carbon and hydrogen provides a lot of useful information about the climatic history. Van Breukelen uses this information to reconstruct the changes in temperature and precipitation.

Climate research reveals that even without human influence the Earth's climate was changeable in the past. To what extent humans have influenced climate change since the industrial revolution remains unclear. It should be remembered that studies into climatic history can provide insights into the natural behaviour of the climate in the past. Additionally current climate models can only be improved if more historical data become available so that the accuracy of these models can be tested. The research method used by Van Breukelen that examines stalagmites is vitally important for climate research. This method allows the accurate reconstruction of independent temperature changes and precipitation patterns from thousands of years ago.

Van Breukelen's research was funded by a grant from the NWO division WOTRO Science for Global Development. WOTRO focuses on funding innovative scientific research into development issues, especially sustainable development and poverty alleviation.

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Adapted from materials provided by NWO (Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research).

First Evidence Of Pre-industrial Mercury Pollution In The Andes

ScienceDaily (May 18, 2009) — The study of ancient lake sediment from high altitude lakes in the Andes has revealed for the first time that mercury pollution occurred long before the start of the Industrial Revolution.

University of Alberta Earth and Atmospheric Sciences PhD student Colin Cooke's results from two seasons of field work in Peru have now provided the first unambiguous records of pre-industrial mercury pollution from anywhere in the world and will be published in the May 18th Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

"The idea that mercury pollution was happening before the industrial revolution has long been hypothesised on the basis of historical records, but never proven," said Cooke whose research was funded by the National Geographic Society.

Cooke and his team recovered sediment cores from high elevation lakes located around Huancavelica, which is the New World's largest mercury deposit. By measuring the amount of mercury preserved in the cores back through time, they were able to reconstruct the history of mercury mining and pollution in the region.

"We found that mercury mining, smelting and emissions go back as far as 1400 BC," said Cooke. "More surprisingly, mining appears to have began before the rise of any complex or highly stratified society. This represents a departure from current thinking, which suggests mining only arose after these societies emerged," said Cooke.

Initially, mercury pollution was in the form of mine dust, largely resulting from the production of the red pigment vermillion. "Vermillion is buried with kings and nobles, and was a paint covering gold objects buried with Andean kings and nobles," said Cooke. However, following Inca control of the mine in 1450 AD, mercury vapour began to be emitted.

"This change is significant because it means that mercury pollution could be transported over much greater distances, and could have been converted into methylmercury, which is highly toxic," said Cooke.

"All of these results confirm long-standing questions about the existence and magnitude pre-industrial mercury pollution, and have implications for our understanding of how mining and metallurgy evolved in the Andes," said Cooke.

Cooke is an interdisciplinary scientist researching human impacts on the environment. His research combines paleolimnology (the study of ancient lake sediments) with the fields of archaeology, and geochemistry. The research team included Prentiss Balcom from the University of Connecticut (USA), Harald Biester from the University of Braunschweig (Germany), and Alexander Wolfe from the University of Alberta

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Adapted from materials provided by University of Alberta, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

EBay Has Unexpected, Chilling Effect On Looting Of Antiquities, Archaelogist Finds

ScienceDaily (May 9, 2009) — Having worked for 25 years at fragile archaeological sites in Peru, UCLA archaeologist Charles "Chip" Stanish held his breath when the online auction house eBay launched more than a decade ago.

"My greatest fear was that the Internet would democratize antiquities trafficking, which previously had been a wealthy person's vice, and lead to widespread looting," said the UCLA professor of anthropology, who directs the UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.

Indeed, eBay has drastically altered the transporting and selling of illegal artifacts, Stanish writes in an article in the May/June issue of Archaeology, but not in the way he and other archaeologists had feared.

By improving access to a worldwide market, eBay has inadvertently created a vast market for copies of antiquities, diverting whole villages from looting to producing fake artifacts, Stanish writes. The proliferation of these copies also has added new risks to buying objects billed as artifacts, which in turn has worked to depress the market for these items, further reducing incentives to loot.

"For most of us, the Web has forever distorted the antiquities trafficking market in a positive way," Stanish said.

Looting, which is illegal, is widely recognized as destructive to cultural heritage because it can remove from public ownership tangible links to a people's past. In addition, looting is perceived as the enemy of scholarship because it typically is done without regard to any appropriate methods that allow scientists to date objects and to place them in a larger, more meaningful context.

One of the world's premiere authorities on Andean archaeology and supervisor, at UCLA, of the one of the world's largest collections of working archaeologists, Stanish has been tracking objects billed as antiquities on eBay for more than nine years. His conclusions also are informed by experiences with the U.S. customs service, which occasionally asks him to authenticate objects. In addition, Stanish has visited a number of workshops in Peru and Bolivia that specialize in reproductions of pottery and has interviewed these artisans. While his background is in South American archaeology, he has tracked eBay listings of antiquities from many cultures.

"Chinese, Bulgarian, Egyptian, Peruvian and Mexican workshops are now producing fakes at a frenetic pace," he writes.

When he first started tracking eBay's sales of antiquities, Stanish focused mainly on objects related to his field. At the time, the ratio of real artifacts to fakes was about 50-50, he estimates. About five years later, 95 percent were fakes. Now, he admits, he can't always tell, because the quality of the fakes has improved so much.

He estimates that about 30 percent of "antiquities" currently for sale on eBay are obvious fakes, in so much as creators mix up iconography and choose colors and shapes for visual effect rather than authenticity. Another 5 percent or so are genuine treasures. The rest fall in the ambiguous "I would have to hold it in my hand to be able to make an informed decision" category, he writes. Stanish admits himself to occasionally being duped by fakes encountered in shops in areas where both looted items and fakes are sold.

The advent of eBay has had the biggest impact on the antiquities market by reducing the incentive to unearth precious treasures in the first place, Stanish has found.

"People who used to make a few dollars selling a looted artifact to a middleman in their village can now produce their own 'almost-as-good-as-old' objects and go directly to a person in a nearby town who has an eBay account," he said. "They will receive the same amount or even more than they could have received for actual antiquities."

As a result of the rise of a ready market, many of the primary purveyors have shifted from looting sites to faking antiquities.

In addition to linking craftsmen with a market for cheap fakes, eBay has tended to have a depressing effect on prices for real looted artifacts, further discouraging locals from pillaging precious sites.

"The value of ... illicit digging decreases every time someone buys a 'genuine' Moche pot for $35, plus shipping and handling," he writes. (An authentic antiquity would sell for upwards of $15,000.)

So far, authentication techniques have struggled to keep abreast of increasingly sophisticated fakes, Stanish said. Pottery can still be authenticated reliably, although the process is costly. In addition, forgers tend to only guarantee the authenticity of their pieces as long as no form of "destructive" analysis is used. While just a tiny flake of pottery is required for thermoluminescence dating — the gold standard for pottery — the process is technically considered destructive, Stanish points out, so the test invalidates such warrantees, no matter its conclusion.

Thanks to laser technology and chemical processes for forming antique-appearing patinas, stone and metal, reproductions are "almost impossible" to authenticate using today's technology, Stanish writes. However, the prospect of authentication techniques eventually catching up with today's fakes is also having a chilling effect on the market for antiquities, by dramatically adding to the risk of illicit, high-end trafficking.

"Who wants to spend $50,000 on an object 'guaranteed' to be ancient by today's standards, when someone can come along in five years with a new technology that definitively proves it to be a fake," he asks.

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Adapted from materials provided by University of California - Los Angeles.

Dwarf In The Elfin Forests: Tiniest Frog In South America’s Andes Mountains

ScienceDaily (Apr. 6, 2009) — It fits on a fingertip: Noblella pygmaea is a midget frog, the smallest ever found in the Andes and among the smallest amphibians in the world. Only its croaking was to be heard from the leaves on the mossier ground of the “elfin forests” in the highlands of Manu National Park, before German and Peruvian herpetologists discovered the tiny little thing in south-eastern Peru.

The popular name of the new species is fitting: Noble’s Pygmy Frog has an average length of 11.4 millimeters. It was introduced in a paper recently published in the journal Copeia by Edgar Lehr, a German herpetologist at the Senckenberg Natural History Collection Dresden, and the Swiss-Peruvian ecologist Alessandro Catenazzi from the University of California at Berkeley, USA. The pygmy that fits on a fingertip was discovered during field work in the Wayqecha Research Station. Not only its small size left it undiscovered for so long. Its predominantly brown colour camougflages Noblella perfectly. But Noble’s Pygmy Frog could be spotted with the assistance of the members of the native communities adjacent to the Manu National Park.

Manu National Park is well known as “hotspot” in the lowland rainforests, a place of exuberant diversity; however the biosphere reserve also preserves vast areas of montane cloud forests, where the sempiternal mists envelop and often conceal plants and animals. In the countless ecological niches many of them were able to evolve undisturbed and are highly adapted to the cold and permanently humidity at a daily average temperature of 11° Celsius. Genetic studies show that the diversity of amphibians in general and especially in this region is highly underestimated. That is why Edgar Lehr and Alessandro Catenazzi think that Noblella pygmaea is only one of many undiscovered amphibians in the Andes mountain area. The scientists expect to find other new species during the next few years.

Currently the midget frog is one of the smallest vertebrates ever found above 3000 metres, where most species tend to be larger than congeneric or similar species in lowland areas. Noblella pygmaea inhabits the cloud forest, the montane scrub and the high-elevation grasslands at a height from 3025 to 3190 metres above sea level. Beside its size the remarkably long forefinger is a notable distinguishing feature that was not found at other pygmy frogs in the mountains of Peru. The females lay only two eggs of approximately four millimeter in diameter. In contrast to most amphibian species these eggs are laid in moist, terrestrial microhabitats, such as in moss or leave litter, and are protected from insect predators by the mother frog. It is noteworthy also that embryos do not change into aquatic tadpoles, but immediately after the hatching lead a fully terrestrial life.

Whilst the scientists cannot give a reason for Noblella’s minute size, it is apparently advantageous. Maybe it is perfectly adopted to its special niche. The fact, that the species is not forced to leave its habitat – not even for egg deposition – might protect it from natural enemies. Despite living in the Manu Biosphere Reserve the survival of the midget frog and of other amphibians is uncertain. Several adverse influences such as anthropogenic habitat changes and the effects of global warming, which among other things facilitates the dispersal of the highly virulent pathogenic fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis threaten amphibians of the Andean region. Fotunately the fungus, which has become epidemic, has not been noticed on Noblella so far. Possibly because of its terrestrial life Noblella is less exposed to the fungus than stream-dwelling frogs.

Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis is suspected to be the cause of the extinction of many frog species in Ecuador and northern Peru and is currently decimating populations of high-elevation frogs in southern Peru. Up to now no effective means are known for stopping the expansion of fungal infections in the region. Researchers hope that the large topographic heterogeneity of the Andes cordilleras will provide refugia where the fungus is unable to cause massive population declines in amphibian species, thus ensuring the survival of the dwarf in the Andean "elfin forests."

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Adapted from materials provided by Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum, via AlphaGalileo.

Evidence From Dirty Teeth: Ancient Peruvians Ate Well

ScienceDaily (Dec. 3, 2008) — Starch grains preserved on human teeth reveal that ancient Peruvians ate a variety of cultivated crops including squash, beans, peanuts and the fruit of cultivated pacay trees. This finding by Dolores Piperno, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the National Museum of Natural History, and Tom Dillehay, professor of archaeology at Vanderbilt University, sets the date of the earliest human consumption of beans and pacay back by more than 2,000 years and indicates that New World people were committed farmers earlier than previously thought.

In northern Peru’s Ñanchoc Valley, Dillehay and colleagues recovered human teeth from hearths and floors of permanent, roundhouse structures. Human bone, plant remains and charcoal closely associated with the teeth are approximately 6,000 to 8,000 years old according to carbon- dating techniques.

Piperno examined 39 human teeth, probably from six to eight individuals. “Some teeth were dirtier than others. We found starch grains on most of the teeth. About a third of the teeth contained large numbers of starch grains,” Piperno said.

To identify the starch grains, Piperno compared the particles in tooth scrapings with her modern reference collection of starch grains from more than 500 economically important plants. “We found starch from a variety of cultivated plants: squash, Phaseolus beans—either limas or common beans, possibly, but not certainly the former, pacay and peanuts,” said Piperno. “Parts of plants that often are not evident in archeological remains, such as the flesh of squash fruits and the nuts of peanuts, do produce identifiable starch grains.”

Starch from squash found on the teeth affirms that early people were eating the plants and not simply using them for nonfood purposes, such as for making containers or net floats. Whether or not some of the earliest cultivated plants, such as squashes, were grown as dietary items has been a long-debated question among students of early agriculture.

Evidence that foods had been cooked was also visible on some of the starch grains. “We boiled beans in the lab to see what cooked starch grains looked like—and recognized these gelatinized or heat-damaged grains in the samples from the teeth,” said Piperno. Starch from raw and roasted peanuts looks similar, probably because it is protected within the hull.

Starch grains from four of the crops were found consistently through time indicating that beans, peanuts, squash and pacay were important food sources then, as they are today. “Starch analysis of teeth, which, unlike other archaeobotanical techniques, provides direct evidence of plant consumption, should greatly improve our ability to address other important questions in human dietary change relating to even earlier time periods,” said Piperno.

The results of this study appear online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the week of Dec. 1-5, 2008.

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Adapted from materials provided by Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Oil And Gas Projects In Western Amazon Threaten Biodiversity And Indigenous Peoples

ScienceDaily (Aug. 14, 2008) — The western Amazon, home to the most biodiverse and intact rainforest left on Earth, may soon be covered with oil rigs and pipelines.

According to a new study, over 180 oil and gas "blocks" – areas zoned for exploration and development – now cover the megadiverse western Amazon, which includes Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and western Brazil. These oil and gas blocks stretch over 688,000 km2 (170 million acres), a vast area, nearly the size of Texas.

For over three years, researchers from two U.S. non-profit organizations – Save America's Forests and Land Is Life – and scientists from Duke University tracked hydrocarbon activities across the region and generated a comprehensive map of oil and gas activities across the western Amazon. The result is an alarming assessment of the threats to the biodiversity and indigenous peoples of the region.

"We found that the oil and gas blocks overlap perfectly with the most biodiverse part of the Amazon for birds, mammals, and amphibians," said study co-author Dr. Clinton Jenkins of Duke University. "The threat to amphibians is of particular concern because they are already the most threatened group of vertebrates worldwide."

The study also found that the oil and gas blocks are concentrated in the most intact part of the Amazon. Even national parks are not immune; exploration and development blocks cover the renowned Yasuní National Park in Ecuador and Madidi National Park in Bolivia.

"The most dynamic situation is unfolding in the Peruvian Amazon," warned lead author Dr. Matt Finer of Save America's Forests.

The study reports that 64 oil and gas blocks cover approximately 72% of the vast Peruvian Amazon (~490,000 km2 or ~121 million acres), an area much larger than California. All but eight of these blocks have appeared since 2003, when Peru launched a major effort to boost exploration across the Amazon. National parks are off limits to hydrocarbon activities in Peru, but oil and gas blocks do overlap a variety of other types of protected areas.

Many of the oil and gas blocks in the western Amazon overlap titled lands of indigenous peoples and encroach on the territories of indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation. These isolated peoples have chosen to live in the forests without contact with the outside world. They are extremely susceptible to outside illnesses due to lack of natural resistance.

In the second part of the study, the researchers delve into the most cutting policy issues related to oil and gas activities in the Amazon.

The authors highlighted new access roads as the greatest single threat from hydrocarbon development. Roads trigger deforestation, colonization, overhunting, and illegal logging in previously remote areas.

"The elimination of new oil access roads could significantly reduce the impacts of most projects," said Finer, echoing one of the studies' main conclusions.

The analysis points out that the current environmental assessment process is inadequate due to a lack of independence in the review process and a lack of comprehensive analyses of the long-term, cumulative, and synergistic impacts of multiple oil and gas projects across the wider region. The authors stress the need for regional Strategic Environmental Assessments in order to correct this situation.

The study also addresses the complex policy issues related to indigenous peoples.

"The way that oil development is being pursued in the Western Amazon is a gross violation of the rights of the indigenous peoples of the region" said Brian Keane of Land is Life, "International agreements and Inter-American human rights law recognize that indigenous peoples have rights to their lands, and explicitly prohibit the granting of concessions to exploit natural resources in their territories without their free, prior and informed consent."

The authors also detail the growing conflict of hydrocarbon activities slated for the territories of indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation.

Finally, the study highlights the role of the international community. Growing global energy demand is driving the search for more oil and gas in the Amazon and companies from the U.S., Canada, Europe, and China are carrying out most of the development.

"Filling up with a tank of gas could soon have devastating consequences to rainforests, their peoples, and their species" remarked co-author Dr. Stuart Pimm of Duke University.

Ecuador's innovative Yasuní-ITT Initiative is held up as a potentially precedent-setting example of how the global north and south can collaborate on both protecting the Amazon and combating climate change. The initiative is the Government of Ecuador's limited-time offer to keep its largest untapped oilfields unexploited in exchange for financial compensation from the international community.

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Journal reference:

1. Finer et al. Oil and Gas Projects in the Western Amazon: Threats to Wilderness, Biodiversity, and Indigenous Peoples. PLoS One, 2008; 3 (8): e2932 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0002932

Adapted from materials provided by Public Library of Science, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Rock Art Marks Transformations In Traditional Peruvian Societies

ScienceDaily (Aug. 6, 2008) — Most rock paintings and rock carvings or petroglyphs were created by ancient and prehistoric societies. Archaeologists have long used them to gain clues to the way of life of such peoples. Certain rock frescos − such as the renowned Lascaux and Chauvet cave paintings or the petroglyphs of Scandinavia and North America − have already yielded substantial information on our ancestors' daily lives.

However, for other regions of the world like Latin America studies are still fragmentary. In Peru, where many sites have already been located, mystery still cloaks the signification and role of these concentrations of cave paintings and petroglyphs. One of these sites, Toro Muerto, in the South of the country, contains over 4000 carved blocks scattered over several dozen hectares.

Discoveries made in different areas of the country over recent years by Peruvian and international researchers are keys to improved understanding of the meaning behind these artistic representations which were realized over a long period from 10 000 BP to the arrival of the first Spanish Conquistadors in the XVIth Century, or even beyond that time, as in the Cuzco area.

Analysis of the distribution and characteristics of these sites brought out a distinction between the art produced in the coastal valleys from that of the Andean Cordillera uplands. The extensive sites with rocks carved in the open air are concentrated mainly on the Pacific facing slopes, whereas the scenes painted in caves or under shelters predominate in the high regions and on the Amazon side.

These preferences as to the supports and techniques used reflect associated ritual practices which are probably rather different. Study of the oldest rock paintings and their dating by indirect methods (carbon 14 dating of remains of in situ burnt charcoal) showed them to be the work of hunter-gatherers who occupied the region between 7000 and 3000 BC The motifs are small and most often painted in red. They depict hunting scenes involving wild camelid species, such as the guanaco, and also human-like silhouettes. The latter are portrayed with animal-like rather than human faces. Such figures are usually armed with sticks, bows or assegais and sometimes carry nets.

The most ancient sites show a predominance of naturalistic representations of dead or wounded animals. However, a second set dated at 4000 to 5000 years BC eulogizes fertility. This time the images are large, drawn with the abdomen enormously swollen, sometimes containing a foetus. This stylistic development, which seems to coincide with the beginnings of animal husbandry in the high upland regions of Peru, appear to symbolize the emergence of pastoralism and the change in man—animal relationships that came along with this practice.

These research studies also brought into relief periods that were quite distinct in terms of stylistic evolution of carved figures. Whereas the most ancient motifs, associated with the rise of the first great Andean civilizations (2500-300 BC) essentially reproduced complex figures bearing high symbolic and spiritual content, depicting mythical, often monster-like, animals and supernatural beings, the later carvings characteristically appear in abundance and testify to a simplification of morphological features. The simplicity and relative abundance of these petroglyphs, which depict animals of the local fauna and also scenes from daily life, suggest a degree of generalization of rock carving practices to further sections of the society.

The largest sites dating from this era, which contain several hundred carved rocks with dozens of motifs, probably played a significant role in societies' cultural and social life, both at local and regional level. Their location, and some of the rituals that took place, may have been linked to areas of production and trade routes of prized commodities such as coca or salt. Other, geographical, factors like the confluence of two rivers or the proximity to communication routes also appear to have significantly influenced the context and purpose of these artistic representations.

A more extensive study of these archaeological sites, still strongly subjected to vandalism and erosion, is paramount. These vestiges testify to the ideological and social changes that occurred over a period of almost 8000 years, and can further understanding of the way of life and beliefs of peoples who were among the New World's first settlers.

Reference: Guffroy, J., New research into rock art in Peru (2000-2004), In :G. Bahn, A. Fossati (eds), Rock art studies. News of the world III, 2008, Oxbow: p 239-247

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Adapted from materials provided by Institut de Recherche Pour le Développement, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Gaston Acurio boosts Peru's culinary confidence

By VICTORIA BEKIEMPIS Associated Press Writer
Posted: Aug. 22, 2008

LIMA, Peru — It's a confidence issue, really.

That's why you've probably never tasted aji de gallina, deboned chicken drizzled with creamy chili sauce, or lomo saltado, Peru's classic beef and tomato stir-fry, says Gaston Acurio, the nation's wildly popular leading chef.

"We have a mentality: Nobody will like our food even though it's tasty," he said recently from his breezy culinary workshop in Lima's bohemian Barranco neighborhood. "People think the things Peruvians do are third world."

Acurio, however, lacks neither confidence nor schemes for changing his country's global culinary status.

His name might be mostly unknown in the U.S., but here he enjoys celebrity akin to Bobby Flay, thanks in part to a string of successful restaurants and a popular television program in which he scouts Peru's out-of-the-way gastronomic gems.

He already has expanded his culinary empire with high-end eateries Astrid y Gaston in Spain, Chile and Colombia, and the more casual La Mar in Mexico City and Panama.
And now Acurio is coming to the U.S.

"If you can sell a hamburger in Peru, why can't you sell ceviche in the U.S.?" he says of his nation's classic dish of refreshingly raw fish.

Acurio, 40, is convinced Peruvian food could, and should, be as popular as Japanese or Thai food, and that it belongs on every street corner and built into every strip mall in the U.S.

Next month, he takes the first steps in that direction, launching a branch of his La Mar restaurant in San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf district, with more planned for Las Vegas, New York and Miami.

Then, in a sort of culinary reverse-colonization, Acurio hopes to inundate the U.S. and European markets with his many brands, from a mall-friendly stuffed potato franchise to microwavable Peruvian favorites and seasonings for grocers.

Acurio acknowledges his plans are ambitious but he says investors have been eager to back his projects, and that the La Mar locations slated to open in the U.S. already have financing.

Of course, winning over investors and winning over the American palate are entirely different games.

Success, he thinks, will hinge on finding the elements of Peruvian cuisine Americans already embrace from other cultures. And given the popularity of sushi, Acurio is gambling on ceviche, the main plate of the La Mar franchise.

It's a plan that some in the food world think might just work.

"If you're going to peg Peruvian food's success to one dish, ceviche isn't a bad dish to do it with," says Kate Krader, restaurant editor for Food & Wine magazine. "Americans have already shown themselves to be head-over-heels in love with sushi, tuna tartar and other types of raw fish dishes."

There's also a benefit to being unique, says Tanya Steel, editor-in-chief of Epicurious.com. "There's not a top-notch Peruvian restaurant in America right now, so I think there's room for one," she says.

Acurio's plans for a line of Peruvian sauces, spices and snacks - including a ceviche marinade - however, might be a harder sell among American home cooks unaccustomed to preparing raw fish, says Steel.

But for Acurio, cracking the American market is more than a business challenge. It's also a personal mission to earn what he considers long overdue culinary credibility for Peru.

"Our work is to make the Peruvian gastronomic heritage - that we've always had - become recognized everywhere," he says. "And the only way to do that is by opening restaurants throughout the world."

And that's all part of a dream that began when Acurio was a boy, a dream that didn't mesh with his father's plans.

"He wanted me to be president," Acurio says with a laugh. After two years of law school in Madrid, Spain, Acurio dropped out to enroll at the city's restaurant school. From there he went on to study - and meet his wife, Astrid - in Paris.

Cooking in Europe taught him the power of innovation, how to respect a traditional cuisine while also reinterpreting it. It was a skill that served him well when he returned to Peru to draw inspiration from the foods of his childhood.

The result was Astrid y Gaston, his first restaurant, a contemporary-Andean restaurant Acurio and his wife opened in Lima in 1994.

Many of his dishes are Peruvian classics, including lomo saltado and tacu tacu, a lightly fried, chunky mash of Andean beans and rice.

And, of course, there is the showcase seafood that has propelled Acurio to fame, including tiradito - a sort of Peruvian take on sashimi. One of Acurio's signature tiradito is a plate of chilled, raw sardines splashed with a tangy yellow chili sauce.

Chupe de camarones, another favorite, is a creamy tomato and river crawfish stew accompanied by a poached egg and buttered toast. It's his own take on his family's recipe.

"What we cook is what we lived, what we taste," he said.

And soon, he hopes, Americans will develop a taste for that life.

Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Article in WRAL.com

Trek to awe-inspiring Machu Picchu

Shoshana Robuck BLOG (august 12, 2008)

IT was very sad for me to say goodbye to my new "family" and friends from Urubamba, especially the students, but it was also with a sense of excitement that the 10 of us climbed onto the bus, waving goodbye to the small town that we have called home for all this time.

The reason was that we were heading off to Machu Picchu, which is usually the highlight for most visitors to South America.

The first step on our journey began with the Lares trek -- an alternative route to the more popular Inca Trail.

It was a three-day hike that took us over mountaintops to reach a set of gorgeous hot springs in the mountain town of Lares.

The walk was physically challenging, especially since we hadn't really done any proper exercise in three months and were all very unfit!

Also, because of the extremely high altitude, breathing was difficult, but we took it slowly and tried to enjoy the scenery.

Reaching the top of the highest mountain (when we knew all we had to do now is go down) gave us such a feeling of euphoria.

The view of the snow-capped, towering mountain peaks was picturesque -- that moment seemed to me both the physical and emotional pinnacle of my entire journey so far.

And finally making it to the hot springs was such a high!

Our team of Peruvians who accompanied us on the trek had already set out our tents and were busy cooking our food when we arrived, so we changed into our swimming costumes and hopped right in.

The pools were hot -- I swear you could boil potatoes in that water -- but we stayed in until about midnight.

We hadn't felt such hot water in three months!

The next day we caught a train that would take us to the town of Aguas Calientes, the town situated below Machu Picchu.

We arrived late at night, so we explored the town a bit, but it was very touristy (everything massively overpriced!) and we were anxious for the following morning.

We woke up around 4am and caught one of the first buses up to Machu Picchu.
I'll just say it really was everything it's made out to be -– majestic and breath-taking!

We all stood in awe, watching the sun rise and illuminate Waynu Picchu that stood before us.
The typical image you see of Machu Picchu isn't actually Machu Picchu, in fact it is another mountain, Waynu Picchu.

We took plenty of pictures and then our lovely tour guide took us through the ruins, where we marvelled at the skill of the ancient Incas.

Experiencing and learning about the history of the Inca culture in Peru has been fascinating for me and so the trip to Machu Picchu was very fulfilling.

Article by Shoshana Robuck

Travel blog: Arequipa, Colca Canyon and the Sacred Valley

Monday, 11 Aug 2008 11:16

Rhian Nicholson has swapped the bright lights of London for a three month journey across South America from the Pacific to the Atlantic coast. Here is her ninth blog entry:

Travel into the old Inca heartland of central Peru and it's not long before a combination of altitude and more mummies, ruins and penas (traditional Andean evenings of food, music and dance) than you can throw a very large stick at start to do strange things to your brain.

We're talking Inca children sacrificed on Mount Ampato in a last ditch effort to appease the gods; crumbling Inca settlements set high in the stunning Sacred Valley; and indigenous people dressed in elaborate costumes twisting and twirling to the sounds of twangy guitars and panpipes.

Arequipa, Peru's second largest city nestles in the shadows of the three massive peaks of El Misti, Chacani and Pichu Pichu.

It is home to one of the most well-known Inca figures - Juanita the Ice Princess whose world tours in her frozen coffin make her the Madonna of the archaeological world (admittedly without the singing and dancing).

After 500 years buried in an icy grave she made her debut in the modern world in 1995, her face and body almost perfectly preserved by the ice and cold.

Centuries older and looking like grotesque china dolls with long matted hair atop their creamy skulls, the mummies of the Chaucilla cemetery are the stuff of children's bedtime fears.

Dressed in rags and sitting huddled in the foetal position (apparently to facilitate their rebirth in the afterlife) in pits-come-open graves and surrounded by bones, skulls and ceramic objects, they would certainly make an impressive army of extras in any horror film worth its salt.

If you're going to sacrifice yourself to the gods then whiling away your days in the colonial oasis that is the Santa Catalina monastery in Arequipa is a fate far better than death.

Its cobbled streets and spacious terracotta courtyards are more reminiscent of a four star holiday resort than a place of quasi-religious devotion.

Outside, the shops lining the photogenic Plaza des Armas certainly put temptation in your path with enough alpaca wool goods and silver jewellery to give your bank manager a coronary.

Well, a girl can never have too many scarves - even if you've only got one neck and have to fork out for another bag to carry them in...

You'd think therefore that leaving the bright lights of the city for the barren landscape of the Colca Canyon would give your debit card a well earned breather. How wrong can you be?! Driving through the earthy wilderness - where herds of llamas, alpacas and vicunas (all big fluffy sheep-like things with long legs - it's not that easy to tell them apart) indulge their suicidal impulses by darting in front of the tourist buses - it's nigh on impossible not to cast your eye over the local handicrafts sold by indigenous women on the roadside.

And who can really resist stripey alpaca socks (essential for those cold Andean nights), woolly hats with ear flaps in a rather fetching llama pattern (useful for those cold Andean winter days) and intricately stitched woven bags (they're just pretty...) Souvenir shopping should come with a health warning.

Rather disturbingly the locals dress up their small children in traditional clothes and bring along their pet alpacas adorned with brightly coloured earrings and woolly coats for the tourists to photograph for the princely sum of one sol (20p).

And it all works well until they lose their cuteness factor and are shipped off to the local restaurants where they end their days on the menu turisticas (the alpacas not the children that is).

If you're going to get fully into the Peruvian spirit then mastering the art of squelching coca leaves around your mouth (you don't chew apparently) is a must.

A staple of Andean life the locals seem to have a wad permanently wedged into one cheek, savouring the juices that ward off hunger, tiredness and crucially altitude sickness - rather helpful when you're at 4,900 metres!

Unfortunately they also taste like an old dirt-encrusted slipper - drinking the coca tea or simply floating in the local hot springs watching the sunset over the mountains is far more pleasant and does the job just as well.

And why go to all this effort? Well, Colca Canyon is the world's second deepest with tiny houses perching on its jagged rust-coloured sides and shadows blackening the valley floor.

Although a few Andean people have braved the rather barren conditions to make it their home, it's far more popular with the condors who swoop, glide and torment the tourists with the faint possibility of getting a decent photo.

This is great if you're a bird watching fan, otherwise standing round for two hours in the freezing cold offers little reward for a 05:30 start.

Meanwhile in Cuzco, the old heart of the Inca empire, you're unlikely to be in bed before 05:30 whether you're psyching yourself up for the Inca trail or celebrating having made it to the end.

Nowadays the city centre is a frenetic hive of tourist activity with the shops lining the picturesque Plaza des Armas and its surrounding cobbled streets flogging souvenirs, Machu Picchu daytrips, any piece of outdoor equipment you may possibly need for the Inca trail and more restaurants and bars than the average person has liver cells.

And with all the free drink offers on every night of the week you can safely assume that you'll lose a few over the course of a couple of nights appreciating all the city has to offer.

But its biggest draw is its proximity to the Sacred Valley - a breathtaking mesh of snow-capped mountains, terracotta slopes and pale yellow farmland cut through by the turquoise Rio Urubamba and packed with Inca ruins.

Perched above Cuzco is Saqsaywaman - known to non-Quechua speaking tourists as Sexy Woman - once a huge fort that staged one of the bloodiest battles between the Spanish and Manco Inca.

When the Inca Patachutec originally built Cuzco he intended it to be in the shape of a puma (one of the Inca's most sacred animals along with snakes and condors) with Saqsaywaman as its head. Unfortunately with the urban sprawl over the centuries the shape of the city now more closely resembles a squashed badger.

Snaking down the road past more market stalls selling yet more handicrafts made of yet more alpaca wool, the town of Pisac leaps into view on the valley floor, its central plaza groaning under the weight of souvenir stalls.

The highlight, however, is not just getting that silver pendant for half the asking price. A steep climb up from the town lies a group of ruins that offer a spectacular panoramic over the valley below (and which more than justifies the rasping sound coming from your lungs).

Back in its heyday it used to be the administrative centre for the surrounding villages with a functioning water system, religious buildings made of polished stone and rougher rustic style buildings for everyday use. These were definitely rooms with a view...

Last stop en route through the Sacred Valley is the market town of Ollantaytambo. Its llama shaped ruins cover the steep valley sides with rocks still left where they were abandoned centuries ago when the arrival of the Spanish disrupted construction of the fort.

Nowadays it's swarming with tourists making the most of creature comforts before starting the Inca trail at KM82.

And indeed you'll never fully appreciate just how good that final hot shower actually was until you are two days into the trek...

Rhian Nicholson

Article in travelbite.co.uk

National Geographic to air documentary about Peru’s Chachapoyas culture

Art/Culture/History 11 August, 2008 [ 10:44 ]

A new National Geographic documentary will tell the story of the ancient Chachapoyas people, a lost civilization that flourished in the cloud forests of the Amazonas region of present-day Peru.

The documentary, which will be produced by Far West Films, will show the hidden past of the mysterious Chachapoyas culture and its citadel, the Kuelap fortress.

Far West Films is casting local actors to star in the documentary and identifying the needs of equipment, costumes and props.

The documentary will highlight the discovery of eighty skeletal remains by archaeologist Alfredo Narvaez.

The Chachapoyas' territory was located in the northern regions of Peruvian Andes.

The area is rich in archaeology and has one of the largest ancient stone structures in South America.

The Incas conquered their civilization shortly before the arrival of the Spanish in Peru. When the Spanish arrived in Peru in the 16th century, the Chachapoyas were one of the many nations ruled by the Inca Empire.

Their incorporation into the Inca Empire had not been easy, due to their constant resistance to the Inca troops.

News source: ANDINA

Travel blog: Incas and more Part II

Thursday, 07 Aug 2008 15:07

Rhian Nicholson has swapped the bright lights of London for a three-month journey across South America from the Pacific to the Atlantic coast. Here is her eighth blog as she continues her trek along the Inca Trail:

The final ascent up to Dead Woman's Pass is the real killer: you're staggering like a 12-year-old after four sips of cider and you're prepared to sell your own mother in return for a donkey.

In fact you're so busy concentrating on your next footstep you forget to actually look around at the scenery which is practically criminal as the views down into the valley are nothing short of stunning.

Then suddenly, as if by magic, you find yourself with 20 steps to go before reaching the top and the chance to smugly laugh at all those people still struggling away below. In all, the climb is supposed to take a moderately fit person around four hours: I did it in under two-and-a-half but by god did I pay the price the next day.

The laws of physics dictate that what goes up must come down - but putting a one-and-a-half hour, knee-jarringly steep downhill stretch (which you have to complete to get to the night's campsite) immediately after an uphill slog is nothing short of sadistic.

You'd think downhill would be easier but one wrongly-placed foot and you'd be plunging down enough steps to comfortably break every bone in your body. By this time the sun's blazing and the water in your bottle seems to have all but evaporated so the sight of the night's campsite looming in front of you is more welcome than a winning lottery ticket.

And the scenery is breathtaking with the tree-clad peaks rearing up on all sides and the fluffy white clouds nestling in the turquoise sky.

Camping itself is never the best option for those of us with permanently cold extremities but as fate would have it after lugging god knows how many pairs of socks and warm clothes in preparation for the sub-zero temperatures, it seemed positively tropical - although that may have had something to do with the rather large amount of hot red wine that appeared at dinnertime.

Once again the next day came round all too quickly and after a quick two-minute contemplation of whether the bronzed colour of my skin was actually a fledgling suntan or ingrained dirt (it turned out to be the latter), it was time to brave the cold morning air and another hour's uphill slog via an Inca look-out point.

The third day involves a mere eight hours of trekking along narrow rocky jungle paths with sheer drops on the other side just to keep you on your toes.

Luckily the hard slog is broken up by various Inca ruins, where the chosen pilgrims of old could spiritually cleanse themselves in ritual baths en route to Machu Picchu. But that goal feels like a billon light years away at this point.

Rolling into camp at night there's the prospect of hot showers to magic away the dirt (priceless) and cold beer on hand to celebrate the fact you're still alive - just…

That feeling of jubilation quickly fades, especially when you have to get up at 3.30am and sit outside the final freezing cold check-point in the pitch black for an hour to secure your spot at the front of the herd.

Then suddenly the gates open and the stampede starts as every trekker attempts to make it to the Sun Gate in time to see the sun rise over Machu Picchu.

There's nothing quite like traipsing as fast as your weary legs will carry you in the early morning darkness and trying not to stumble over the rocks littering the trail which would send you headfirst to your death over the cliff edge.

After shuffling along like a lame penguin for 45 minutes with the light gradually starting to filter through, in a final twist there are then just 50 incredibly steep steps between you and the fist glimpse of Machu Picchu.

Originally the Inca trail was a pilgrimage for a handful of people to reach the most sacred city of the Inca empire- and you can quite imagine how they felt when they finally reached their goal.
Standing at the top of the Sun Gate with jelly legs, aching lungs and an overwhelming sense of relief coursing through your veins, you can't help but grin like a maniac.

At 6am the first busloads of tourists who shirked the Inca trail challenge and caught the train from Cuzco have yet to pour in and so the city is remarkably still in its mystical splendour.

Grey stone ruins, temples and grassy terraces are set majestically against the deep green of the surrounding peaks.

To say it is spectacular is not giving it the full credit it deserves: at the risk of sounding melodramatic it's one of those sights that will remain in your memory forever - and if you happen to develop amnesia the sixty billion photos you take will certainly help to remind you.

On the downside it understandably gets packed out with tourists and when they start swarming about like a plague of hungry locusts, it loses something of its sublime charm.

Walking round the city is pretty hard on your knackered legs - so many steps in such a small place - and then there are the llamas with that manic glint in their eyes to sidestep.

Plus being on top of a mountain and being in South America, the terraces end abruptly with dizzying, vertical drops. Surely a good few Incas must have met their maker after one glass of Chicha too many on a cold and misty night…

But still, when you've heaved your weary body to a prime sunbathing position in the middle of Machu Picchu and you're half dozing, half contemplating your surroundings it's hard to imagine many other places which would be worth four days of pushing your body beyond it's natural limits.

Without a doubt it's the highlight of a trip to South America.

Rhian Nicholson

Article in travelbite.co.uk

Travel blog: Incas and more Part I

Friday, 01 Aug 2008 09:18

Rhian Nicholson has swapped the bright lights of London for a three-month journey across South America from the Pacific to the Atlantic coast. Here is her seventh blog:

Following in the footsteps of the Incas is not an easy task. Initially the thought of covering a mere 33 kilometres over four days seems like a rather long walk in the park. However, throw in altitude, seemingly never-ending slopes and early morning starts and the reality is really rather gruelling.

You start bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and blister free at KM82 just down the road from Ollantaytambo, clutching your passport like it's an oil slicked eel - if you lose it your permit for the Inca trail disappears too.

So one strict passport control and a gaggle of women selling painted wooden walking sticks (the best five soles or one pound ever spent) and woven water bottle carriers (tacky but incredibly useful), you finally set a tentative foot on the legendary Inca trail.

To be fair it's a pretty easy start with a rock-strewn, fairly flat path taking you into the heart of the valley past grazing cows, tiny houses complete with roaming chickens and the odd electricity pylon that seems remarkably out of place.

Still, in the blazing sun it's not long until thirst kicks in and the sweat begins to pool on your brow. Then the uphill starts and before you know it you're traipsing along with your tongue hanging out in a rather unattractive manner, the altitude ripping the breath out of your body and a dull ache starting to plague your leg muscles.

At this point, three months preparation in the gym seems like it would have been time well spent. And if you need reminding of your abysmal fitness levels, the porters laden with 20kg packs containing gas stoves, tents and even a camping version of the kitchen sink bound past like energetic puppies.

How they manage to storm up the hills hour after hour is an incredible feat of human endurance - plus when they arrive at the campsite they proceed to put up your tent and guard your bags while you're still a distant speck on the horizon.

And for all their efforts as human donkeys they get paid peanuts - modern day slave labour is very much alive and kicking in South America.

On the plus side, their superhuman efforts leaves you free to concentrate on the essentials; putting one foot in front of the other and moaning about the lack of showers when you arrive into camp hot, sweaty and minging.

But the first day was a rather gentle introduction to what lay ahead. Rocking into camp after a mere five hours walking, desperate for water, covered in dust and with your hair matted with sweat, you're prepared to pay a large amount of money for a hot shower.

Unfortunately there aren't any: in fact the only running water is in the freezing cold stream nearby. And then there's the loos - the stench from them was bad enough to bring lunch back up into your throat even before they were frequented by people with 'stomach problems'.

Still the campsite itself was charmingly rustic with inquisitive donkeys grazing nearby and dirt paths leading to the huts where a handful of locals lived. And just to prove that the Andean people have a sense of humour, they called the tiny little shop selling water and chocolate the shopping centre.
With some much energy going out, you need an awful lot of food going in and the chef certainly didn't disappoint in producing carbohydrate-laden meals in sufficient quantities to feed an Olympic rowing team.

He also proved a dab hand at carving toucans out of aubergines. Being veggie there's only so much white rice, omelettes and pasta you can stomach but the chilli-stuffed potatoes would have had Gordon Ramsay purring like a kitten in front of a fire.

After a cold sleepless night, the 6am wake-up call was less than appreciated - and after a quick wet wipes wash it was time to gingerly climb back into the previous day's grime-encrusted clothes to face the toughest challenge of the whole trail: Dead Woman's Pass.

To say it's an uphill struggle would be a major understatement. At 7am it's freezing cold, your muscles have gone on strike and you have the prospect of a five hour trek up steep rocky paths staring you in the face.

At that point the urge to kidnap a donkey becomes almost irresistible. Still, somehow the basics of how to walk return to your numb legs and with your stick firmly grasped in your hand you start to make slow progress up the mountain, initially along gravely inclines with stunning views over the valley below.

Indeed taking photos every tenth step is a brilliant way to kid yourself that you don't really have the fitness level of a stoned couch potato.

Then just as you're getting into your stride, and your lungs become less likely to make a bid for freedom out of your rib cage, you hit the stone steps. And not just any steps.

These are irregularly shaped, some steep, some slippery and all contributing to the painful lactic acid build up in your legs. And they seem to go on forever. The guides tell you to zig zag across like the porters to save energy, although this just serves to increase the time it takes to reach what you think/hope/pray is the top.

In my expert trekking opinion (hmmmm), it was easier to bolt up the middle and deal with the burn later. Add to this the bitter cold and your body can't make up it's mind whether it's hot, cold or on the verge of collapse.

Indeed, the Inca trail seems to have a rather nasty way of playing with your mind: you think you've reached the top of one section only to turn the corner and find another steep stretch yawning out in front of you.

And the only way is up, meaning the altitude makes it harder and harder to keep the pace, or even to keep upright. All the way the stream of porters is steadily plodding along in front of you.

To be continued…

Article in travelbite.co.uk

PHOTOS: Rare Mummy Found With Strange Artifacts, Tattoo

July 17, 2008—


Seen with metal plates on his eyes—signs of status—this male mummy found in the ancient Peruvian town of Rontoy was unwrapped in June 2008. He had been disemboweled and placed in layers of cotton and woven textiles to aid his preservation. (Read full story.) The metal and red paint on the thirtysomething's face indicate elite status, and the presence of elites in Rontoy suggests the mysterious Chancay held a tighter grip over the Huaura River valley region than previously believed, experts said. The Chancay rose to power around A.D. 1000 and were conquered by the Inca in 1476, though the Chancay elites likely continued to rule as Inca deputies.

More info

VIDEO: Unusual Mummy Found in Peru

July 17, 2008—


His eyes covered with metal plates, a thousand-year-old elite mummy has been found surrounded by unfamiliar artifacts—shedding light on a mysterious culture.

Human Sacrifices Found at Ancient Peru Site

June 4, 2008

This circular plaza holds possible evidence of human sacrifice at the 4,000-year-old Peruvian archaeological site of Bandurria, thought to be one of the oldest urban settlements in the Americas. Human remains have been found at the site before. But only recently have scientists discovered human bones bearing what could be the signs of ritualized violence. (Read full story.) If laboratory analysis confirms that hypothesis, it would upend theories that the so-called Pre-Ceramic period (3000 B.C. to 1800 B.C.) was largely free of ritualized killings. “It is a truly incredible site, regardless of how the recent human remains come to be interpreted,” said Shelia Pozorski, an anthropologist at the University of Texas-Pan American.

This apparently decapitated skeleton, of a man who died in his 20s, was recently found at the Bandurria archaeological site in Peru, scientists announced in May 2008. Alejandro Chu, a Peruvian archaeologist, said the victim's head has not been found. Chu suspects the man was the victim of ritualized violence. A U.S. bone expert is slated to study cut marks on the neck vertebrae. “One needs to prove by cut marks or other physical evidence that a body was dismembered [before death],” said Tulane University anthropologist John Verano, who was not involved in the new discovery.“Even then, theoretically, one could be dealing with sacrifice, execution, murder, or any of a number of human behaviors.”

Two pairs of legs (one of which is shown here) were recently found in Bandurria, Peru, archaeologists announced in May 2008. “The legs probably belonged to a young female in her 20s,” said Alejandro Chu, Bandurria's lead archaeologist. Chu hypothesizes that the women were victims of ritualized killings, and has summoned a U.S. bone expert to study cut marks more closely. If Chu's theory proves correct, the skeletons would be the first documented evidence of ritualistic killing in the Pre-Ceramic era (3000 B.C. to 1800 B.C.)—period thought to be free of such violent practices in the Andes region.Chu said the people belonged to “a pre-ceramic society that had no exact name.”

36 Hours in Lima, Peru

By ETHAN TODRAS-WHITEHILL
Published in New York Times

Correction Appended
LIMA has long been a cosmopolitan city hesitant to embrace its diversity. A capital founded by Spanish conquistadors that subsequently exploded with influxes from Asia and then from Peru’s own Andean highlands, it has remained a city of fairly segregated neighborhoods. But led by Lima’s cuisine — which is rapidly gaining worldwide renown for its freshness and creativity — that is changing. Sushi and ceviche chefs are learning from one another. The most popular street food is “five flavors” a rice and pasta dish with Italian, Chinese, Andean, Japanese and African influences. Restaurants that once hid their existence from all but the “in the know” are now advertising their presence with Web sites and — gasp — signs out front. For the tourist, it means days of exploring neighborhoods and attractions with distinct cultures and histories, interspersed with the spicy, sweet, and subtle gastronomic experience of how it all comes together.

Friday

4 p.m.
1) SINS OF THE SEA
In Lima, food rules. And in the cocina limeña, seafood is king. Just a block or two from the ocean with ceramic tile floors and an open-air foyer, Pescados Capitales (Avenida La Mar 1337; 51-1-421-8808, http://www.pescados-capitales.com/) combines the relaxation of the beach with the European refinement of Lima’s upper caste. “Pecados capitales” refers to the seven deadly sins, all of which can be ordered from the menu. Start off with a little Freudian Lust (lujuria freudiana, grilled baby calamari for 26 soles), and then chow down on some creamy, indulgent greed (avaricia sole Rockefeller, 40 soles) or simple infidelity (infidelidad grilled swordfish, 34 soles) if you fear that your stomach may not forgive so easily.

6 p.m.
2) PARK IT IN THE PARKS
Far from the city center but right up against the beach is the upscale neighborhood of Miraflores, which roughly translates as “look at all the pretty flowers,” Miraflores’s parks of irises, cactuses, and palms make for a good stroll and introduction to Lima. Start off at Parque Kennedy at the heart of the neighborhood, which often holds spoken-word poetry and outdoor art exhibitions. Cross the Diagonal to Café Haiti (Diagonal 160; 51-1-445-0539) an old-school hangout of the Lima literati with bamboo chairs and a sidewalk cafe where you can sample Peru’s signature beverages: a tangy pisco sour for the alcoholically inclined (9 soles, or about $3.20 at 2.8 soles to the dollar), and the lemony-sweet hierba luisa (4 soles) for the abstainers.

9:30 p.m.
3) PYRAMIDS AND PIE
For dessert, take a quick cab (5 soles) to La Bodega de la Trattoria (General Borgoño 784; 51-1-241-6899), the casual wing of La Trattoria, run by the South American television dessert diva Sandra Plevisani. Get a table out on the patio and order a bocanera de chocolate, a fudge-filled chocolate soufflé (22 soles), looking out at Huaca Pucllana, the complex of Incan structures across the street.

Saturday

9 a.m.
4) HEART OF THE CITY
Start the morning with a stroll up Jirón de la Unión, the pedestrian zone that leads to the Plaza Mayor, Lima’s main square. Pass modish shops and colorful 200-year-old colonial facades and emerge into a wide square surrounded by some of Lima’s finest architecture. This is the spot in which Francisco Pizarro founded the city in 1535 and in which Peruvians declared their independence in 1821. Tour the gold-leaf altars and paintings of the Lima Cathedral on the eastern edge, and if you have the time, visit the Church of San Francisco a couple of blocks northeast with its 17th-century convent and extensive network of catacombs (Plaza San Francisco; 51-1-427-1381 ; http://www.museocatacumbas.com/).

Noon
5) CHIFA, CHIFA, EVERYWHERE
From the city center, walk east a few blocks and a full hemisphere to Calle Capón, Lima’s Chinatown. As a product of early-20th-century immigration, Peru has a large Chinese population, a fact observable by the proliferation of chifa (Peruvian-Chinese) restaurants all over the city. Chifa is spicier than traditional Chinese food, relying more on seafood and sauces and less on vegetables. One of the best spots is Salon Capón (Jirón Paruro 819; 51-1-426-9286), where you can try steamed langostino dumplings with tamarind sauce (7 soles) and spicy garlic-fried calamari (calamar chiu jin, 28 soles). Afterward, stroll through the pedestrian zone with the classic Chinatown arch on either end, stopping to have your palm read, the smell of sandalwood incense filling the air.

1 p.m.
6) X-RATED POTTERY
Through December 2008, if you can make it to only one museum in Lima, it should be the Museo Rafael Larco Herrera (Avenida Bolívar 1515; 51-1-461-1312 ; http://www.museolarco.org/) in the Pueblo Libre district, which showcases pre-Columbian artifacts. The Gold Museum (http://www.museoroperu.com.pe/) is another popular choice, but this year the Larco is featuring a collection of gold headdresses, ornaments and jewelry that rival the Gold Museum’s in quality, if not quantity. The Larco’s real appeal, however, is its collection of erotic pottery dating from the first millennium A.D., which begins with the expected giant phalluses and moves on to detailed depictions of sexual acts that are otherwise unviewable outside seedy video stores and corners of the Internet.

3 p.m.
7) DESERT WORSHIP
Peru is known for the Inca, but Lima is a city built by and for the Spanish conquerors. Still, Inca sites remain, so take a cab to Pachacamác (20 to 25 soles from Miraflores; http://www.pachacamac.net/; entry fee 6 soles), an archaeological site that housed an important oracle for more than 1,500 years with a beautifully restored Temple of the Moon. Skip the tour loop unless you pay your cabbie to drive you around, but shell out the extra 20 soles for a guide, since you can’t get into the areas under work (which are many) without one. Bring a hat and sunglasses, because a visit to Pachacamác reminds you that Lima is one of the world’s largest desert cities.

6 p.m.
8) MAKE MINE A MAKI
Not many cities offer both a world-class culinary scene and a currency significantly weaker than the dollar, so take advantage by visiting Matsuei (Manuel Bañon 260; 51-1-422-4323), a restaurant in San Isidro co-founded by Nobuyuki Matsuhisa of Nobu fame and Lima’s best spot for sushi. The Japanese settled in Peru around the same time as the Chinese, even eventually sending one of their own, Alberto Fujimori, to the presidency (and lately, to the jailhouse). Fish as fresh as Lima’s makes ideal ingredients in maki acevichado, a Japanese roll with the classic Peruvian ceviche sauce (30 soles), and pick up sushi (fried calamari with shrimp, salmon, and rice tartar, 24 soles).

10 p.m.
9) DISCOS ON THE OUTSKIRTS
Lima’s great population boom came in the 1950s when the Andean people migrated to the city in large numbers, creating scores of young towns, or pueblos jovenes, on the outskirts. These young towns have grown up and are now sporting some of Lima’s best night life in the form of a strip of clubs in the town of Los Olivos. Join the multigenerational crowds at the Karamba “salsoteca” for salsa music in a two-tiered club with dancing coconuts painted on the walls, or Kokus if you prefer rock, both on Boulevard Los Olivos, (http://www.boulevard-losolivos.com/ for both).

Sunday

10 a.m.
10) BOHEMIAN LIFE
If Miraflores is Lima’s Upper West Side, then Barranco is Greenwich Village. Home to Lima’s bohemian upper crust like Mario Vargas Llosa, this onetime summer resort neighborhood is filled with art galleries, European style parks and pubs. From the marigold-studded Plaza de Armas, walk west down to the Bridge of Sighs, an old wooden bridge over a bougainvillea-lined walkway that when accompanied by guitar players and women selling single roses, manages to be both touristy and romantic. Wind your way over to the Lucia de la Puente gallery (Paso Sáenz Peña 206A; 51-1-477-9740; http://www.gluciadelapuente.com/), in Barranco, which has contemporary art exhibitions like an Incan ruin reconstructed out of old computer keyboards, changing monthly.

1 p.m.
11) GETTING CRAFTY
Rather than shopping the Inca Market’s repetitive stalls of textiles and figurines, walk across the street from Lucia de la Puente to the artisans’ collective Dédalo (Paseo Sáenz Peña 295; 51-1-477-0562), in Barranco. Each room in the labyrinthine century-old mansion houses a different type of craft, from jewelry and picture frames to lamps and leatherwork from more than 1,000 different local artists. A cafe in the back serves coffee, tea and selections from a decent wine list. It’s a nice spot to sit and figure out how to explain to your partner the beautiful but useless blown glass vase you just bought.

THE BASICS

Continental, LAN and American (through LAN) are among airlines that fly from the New York area to Lima at prices starting around $900 for June, according to a recent online search. Peru has no visa or special entry requirements.

Miraflores makes the best base for a visit with a wide range of quality hotels and a beachfront location. The Hotel Señorial (José Gonzáles 567; 51-1-445-0139; http://www.senorial.com/), in Miraflores, is a lovely, relaxed place with a flowery courtyard and hearty breakfast at a nice price (216 soles, or about $77 at 2.8 soles to the dollar, for a double).

For upscale lodging, you can’t do better than the Miraflores Park Hotel (Avenida Malecón de la Reserva 1035; 51-1-610-4000, http://www.mira-park.com/), also in Miraflores, with double rooms starting at $435 (rates are given in dollars). A taxi from Jorge Chávez Airport should be about 35 soles to both these locations.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 8, 2008 The 36 Hours column last Sunday, about Lima, Peru, referred incorrectly to the hours of operation for Pescados Capitales restaurant. It is open only for lunch, closing at 4:30 p.m., and is not open for dinner.

Rain Forest Protection Works In Peru

Source: Carnegie Institution
Date: August 15, 2007

Science Daily — A new regional study shows that land-use policies in Peru have been key to tempering rain forest degradation and destruction in that country. Scientists at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology led an international effort to analyze seven years of high-resolution satellite data covering most (79%) of the Peruvian Amazon for their findings. The work is published in the August 9, 2007, on-line edition of Science Express.

The scientists found that the government's program of designating specific regions for legal logging, combined with protection of other forests, and the establishment of territories for indigenous peoples helped keep large-scale rain forest damage in check between the years 1999 and 2005. However, the research also showed an increase in forest disturbance over the last couple of years of the study, primarily in two areas of the jungle where the forests are accessible by roads.
"We found that only 1 to 2 % of this disturbance in Peru happened in natural protected areas," noted lead author Paulo Oliveira. "However, there was substantial forest disturbance adjacent to areas set aside for legal logging operations. This leakage of human activity outside of logging concessions is a concern."
Peru has about 255,000 square miles of tropical forests--an area a little larger than France. In 2001, the Peruvian government placed 31% of the managed forests into "permanent resource production." By 2005, a region about the size of Honduras (about 40,000 sq. miles)--was put into long-term commercial timber production. In recent years, the rain forests have been experiencing increased human impacts, as they have in neighboring Amazon countries, but the extent of the damage over the region has not been thoroughly assessed using high spatial resolution satellite data until this study.
The scientists used the Carnegie Landsat Analysis System (CLAS) in their work. It was formerly used in Brazil to detect logging activities there. CLAS is a satellite-based forest-damage detection system, which can penetrate the shielding upper layers of forest leaves to see consequences of logging activities below. The CLAS system can uncover forest changes at a resolution of less than 100 by 100 ft. The core process behind CLAS is an advanced signal processing approach developed by study lead Greg Asner.
"Our approach has improved over the past eight years, but relies on a core set of methods that have consistently worked," Asner said. "We spent years developing them in Brazil, then went to Peru and completed this study in only a year. We are now operating over Borneo. Our approach is proving a good way to monitor rain forest disturbance and deforestation anywhere in the world."
The researchers found that, between 1999 and 2005, disturbance and deforestation rates averaged only 244 square miles and 249 square miles per year respectively. About 86% of the damaged Peruvian areas were concentrated in two regions--in the Madre de Dios, east of Cuzco, and in the central eastern part of the country near Pucallpa. Most of the rain forest damage--75%--was found within 12.5 miles (20 km) of the nearest roads. However, even within those limits, forests set aside by the government were more than 4 times better protected than areas not designated for conservation.

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New flycatcher bird species discovered in Peru

mongabay.com
August 13, 2007
Scientists have discovered a previously unknown species of bird in dense bamboo thickets in the Peruvian Amazon.

Writing in the journal The Auk, authors led by Daniel F. Lane of the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science describe the new species of twistwing (Cnipodectes superrufus).

The scientists say the brownish-red colored bird (with colors of various body parts ranging from "mahogany red", "auburn", "burnt sienna", "Sanford's Brown", "chestnut brown", "Argus brown", "Xanthine orange", "Prout's brown", "Vinaceous-Fawn" and "raw umber" among other shades of brown) remained unknown until the present due to its poorly known, and largely inaccessible habitat: thickets of thorny bamboo (Guadua weberbaueri) in southeastern Peru. The researchers not that while the species was only recently discovered, it may prove to be a common species with "immense blocks of Guadua-dominated terra firme forest in southwestern Amazonian Brazil, southeastern Peru, and northwestern-most Bolivia." Further, some of the birds were spotted within the Manu Biosphere Zone, a large protected area.

"Presumably, there is a healthy population within this protected zone," write the authors. Relatively little is known about the species. It apparently eats small arthropods (mostly insects) and has a call similar to that of the Sulfur-bellied Tyrant-Manakin (Neopelma sulphureiventer). While C. superrufus was only just now described, the "type specimen" was first captured on February 22, 1990. The specimen was deposited at the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural de la Universidad San Marcos and remaind unstudied until 2002. Subsequent trips to its native habitat turned up recordings and more specimen. Daniel F. Lane, Grace P. Servat, Thomas Valqui H.A, and Frank R. Lambert (2007). A DISTINCTIVE NEW SPECIES OF TYRANT FLYCATCHER (PASSERIFORMES: TYRANNIDAE: CNIPODECTES) FROM SOUTHEASTERN PERU. THE AUK Volume 124, Issue 3 (July 2007)

Related links :
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Canary expedition in search of the white stone llamas

A team of Canary investigators is currently in remotest Peru to study a startling new archaeological discovery which came to light recently in Choquequirao, an ancient Inca site which is being described in glowing terms as Machu Picchu’s “twin town”.

The find consists of a line of white stone llamas embedded in massive terraced stone walls and which, it is thought, could well form part of the entrance to the sacred valley of the Incas.And make no mistake - the expedition to Choquequirao is no jolly. The three men and two women face a gruelling five days on foot and mule along badly eroded and slippery tracks, in 100% humidity and in full rainy season. But it’s one they have already done just three months ago and now they are hoping to find more of the mysterious llamas.

“After the hardships, mosquitoes and slips along the way what we found was truly worth all the trouble,” said team member Rubén Naveros of La Laguna’s Museum of Science and the Cosmos.So far 33 of the elegant, minimalist llamas have been uncovered, hidden behind and beneath thick vegetation, but the team thinks there could be as many as a hundred, maybe more. The frieze is unique and has caused a considerable ripple of excitement in the archaeological world because nothing remotely like it has been found in Inca architecture before.Another member of the team explained how, on that first visit they had been puzzled by the fact that the mysterious stone complex appeared not to conform to the usual Inca pattern of being constructed in line with the sun. But they had eventually unearthed evidence of aligned white stones set in black earth and buried underneath centuries of dust and undergrowth. It seems this was the place where the Incas ritually sacrificed selected llamas.The far-flung nature of the site can be judged by Gotzon Cañadas’s account of spending 22 hours on a bus from Lima to Cuzco, followed by a 4 hour switchback mountain journey in a cramped minibus to the tiny town of Cachora. “It was like world’s end,” he said. Then came the five day mule ride up the Vilcabamba mountains to Choquequirao, perched at an altitude of 3,300 metres above sea level.At first glance Cachora might well have been far from the madding crowd, but on the return journey and after 65 kilometres in the wilds on the back of a mule it was civilization itself.“As far as we were concerned it was Manhattan,” smiled Cañadas as he prepared to pack his bags and fly off to Peru with the rest of the team, on a quest to bring the white llamas back to life.

Related links :
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In Peru, the discovery of a waterfall draws tourists

BY STEVE HENDRIX
Washington Post Service

Here I am in remotest northern Peru, hard on the trail of the world's third-largest anticlimax.
This is a story of waterfalls and expectations, and you can count me a waterfall skeptic. I know they are picturesque. I know they are soothing, in that stock greeting-card way of rainbows and unicorns. I know they figure largely in the preflight videos they show on planes to take the edge off your airport rage.
But actual waterfalls? They're seldom worth the walk. Somebody always insists on taking the two-mile side trail to see the local waterfall. And so you go. And there's a waterfall, dribbling (picturesquely) down the rocks. And then you hike back.
In my experience, waterfall equals anticlimax.
But the press release that crossed my desk last year was darned near irresistible: ''World's Third Highest Waterfall Discovered in Peru.'' Howzat? Discovered? The Age of Discovery was ages ago. The biggest things they discover these days are new species of beetle and, every now and then, a forgotten cable network. But the major landforms were all mapped out long ago.
A 250-story waterfall that instantly climbs up on the podium with Venezuela's Angel Falls and South Africa's Tugela Falls? How did that avoid the unblinking eye of satellite cartographers?
Who cares? If it was that big and that remote, I just wanted to get there before they bulldozed a road, built the hotels and generally tarted up the place.
And so in September, I set off on the most harrowing waterfall side trip of all: an overnight flight from Washington to Lima, a dawn hop to the northern coastal city of Chiclayo and a 12-hour drive over dicey mountain roads to Peru's impossibly secluded upper Amazon basin.
This high, dry tropical Shangri-La was the domain of the Chachapoyas, a mysterious Andean race that predated the Incas. The new waterfall, dubbed Gocta after an ancient Chachapoyan village, is deep in one of the many blind valleys they inhabited between 800 and 1400 AD. You can still see their carved tombs, some with intact mummies, in the surrounding cliff walls.
According to the press release, the government of Peru was hard on the case, promising safe tourist access and basic accommodations. In the meantime, getting to Gocta requires bone-jarring days on the terrifying roads and hours on steep and dubious valley trails. All to see a waterfall.
This had better be good.
THE `DISCOVERY'
So how do you discover a waterfall? The local people knew about it, of course. It just wasn't a big deal to them.
Luis Chuquimes is an elder in the tiny village of San Pablo, a few hours' hike from the falls. Tourists were unknown in San Pablo before word spread about Gocta last spring. Now Chuquimes' little cantina serves as an unofficial visitors center. According to the wrinkled sign-in book on his bar, more than 70 people had made the trip by the time I got there at the end of the dry season. On the other side of the valley, another village has logged just over 1,000 Gocta tourists.
It's mostly Peruvians coming so far, eager to make the acquaintance of a new national icon. A couple of Israelis and Germans have been. No Americans have signed in yet. (Now that boggles the mind.)
''We knew it was there,'' Chuquimes said as he busily delivered bottles of beer and Inca Kola to a group of Gocta-bound students from Chiclayo, a day's drive away. ``But we didn't know it was one of the tallest in the world.''
It took a German engineer named Stefan Ziemendorff, working on a nearby water project, to realize that the nameless falls might boast world-class specs. He got the Peruvian government to survey it, checked his National Geographic stats and called a press conference. Gocta came in at 2,532 feet, which put it, by Ziemendorff's reckoning, at No. 3 in the world.
Or not. It turns out that waterfall ranking is, well, rancorous. Waterfall people -- who are a lot like train people and lighthouse people -- are burning up the discussion boards, debating Gocta's place on the charts with fierce references to seasonal flow, degree of slope and something called ''freeleap.'' (Partisans of certain Norwegian cascades have bordered on rude.)
All of which makes Peru's bold claim such a brilliant stroke of marketing. Whether or not Gocta deserves the bronze, ''third highest'' gives it instant Seven Wonders cred. That ensures tourist interest in a spectacular but little-known region that really does have a lot to offer anyone lured in. After all, billboard attractions are often not as fun as the areas that surround them. The Hanging Gardens, for example, may have been a wow, but you know the real treat was knocking about the back roads of Babylon.
''I don't know if it's the third-highest waterfall on Earth, but I know it's a very high waterfall,'' said Peter Lerche, a German anthropologist who has lived here since 1980. ``It gives us a diversity of attractions. We have rivers, lakes, archaeology and now this waterfall.''
The Chachapoyas area of northern Peru already attracts two kinds of tourists: birders and a trickle of hard-core archaeology buffs, those who have already seen (or been turned off by) the hugely popular Machu Picchu (so commercial in places you might call it Inca Inc.). That was my toehold in the region.
I found a guide company in the region willing to take me to the waterfall and show me around the archaeological highlights during a six-day flying visit. They paired me with another tourist, a California antiques dealer, who was fishing around for a Gocta visit. Add a photographer from Lima and we would make a threesome.
GOING TO KUELAP
We convened in the tiny airport parking lot in Chiclayo, piled into one of the ubiquitous hired white Corollas that rattle around Peru and began to climb the Andes. The highway from the coast was flat and paved, lined with beige villages and the colorful political graffiti of the recent election.
In the foothills, the road climbed through an arid, Maui tropicality where cacti grew in the shadow of papaya trees. But six hours on, the pavement ended and the rest of the day was spent lurching on a rope ladder of a road that clung to the cliffs above the frisky Utcubamba River.
Unless you regularly holiday in Bangladesh during the monsoon, these will be the worst roads you've ever seen: pitted, shoulderless one-lane threads draped along the lips of bottomless Andean voids. They are not so bad in the daylight, when the splendid scenery is both compensation and diversion. But when you're trying to sleep (our first sightseeing trip started at 3 a.m.), a radically rough road is a kind of torture.
Yet you get used to it. Mostly because the destinations are more wonderful than the roads are awful.
Our base was in the city of Chachapoyas (which is the name of the ancient civilization and the current biggest town). It's a pretty mountaintop berg of about 17,000 people, with numerous Internet cafes, one good steakhouse and a tradition of awful coffee. From there, our first outing was 2 ½ hours to Kuelap, a walled Chachapoyas city perched grandly on a commanding peak.
At almost 20 acres, Kuelap is actually bigger than Machu Picchu. It's a huge stone battlement with two narrow crevices allowing access to the ruins within.
At daybreak, we stood amid the carefully carved stone foundations of ancient Chachapoyas houses -- there were more than 400 of them in Kuelap at one time, before the Incas, invading from the south, conquered the region in the late 1400s.
The view is 360 degrees of forever. A morning moon hung over a distant ridge even as dawn fired the tips of surrounding peaks. Soft morning murmurs and a little tin-pot clatter floated up from the dark, misty villages below.
Flocks of parakeets darted from tree to tree, reminders that this starkly beautiful mountainscape is the upper edge of Amazonia. They were only cackling shadows until they flew through columns of sunlight and flashed a sudden brilliant green.
Except for a crew of local restoration workers and a group of six Austrian students, we had this majestic enormity to ourselves. Kuelap, by far the signature tourist attraction in the region, had just over 10,000 visitors last year. Machu Picchu saw more than 410,000.
We got a deep briefing on Chachapoyas history from Lerche, the anthropologist, that night at his brother-in-law's hotel, a charming colonial-era hacienda near the river. Numbering nearly half a million at their peak, the Chachapoyas were taller and paler than the Incas who eventually overwhelmed them. At least one scholar argues they may have been the lost tribe of Israel.
Like the mystical, mysterious Anasazi of the southwestern United States, the Chachapoyas left a vast and scattered archaeological record in dry mountain cliffs. Most of them are yet undiscovered.
''Personally, I know of more than 350 sites,'' Lerche said.
One of the best, Lerche said, was a massive necropolis discovered by looters, a grave robbery that ended up founding a remarkable local museum.
In 1996, in a high alcove above the nearby Lake of the Condors, a group of workers found a huge cache of ceramics, textiles and almost 220 perfectly preserved human mummies dating back more than 500 years. The looters pilfered some, but infighting among them quickly led someone to spill the beans to the authorities. What was left is now housed in the Leymebamba Museum at the far end of the valley, a little Smithsonian in the heart of nowhere.
It took another three-hour lurch-fest to reach the tiny village of Leymebamba. But all the shaking was forgotten when we entered the stylish, modern museum. The textiles and pots alone are worth the trip.
But it's the glassed-in chamber of mummies that will grab you by the retinas. The scores of desiccated men, women and children are clearly visible, tucked in tight fetal curls and draped in moody white gauze. Hollow eyes peek between bony fingers, giving them expressions both terrible and bashful.
Marcelita Hidalgo, a white-coated technician, took a withered little man from the shelf and showed us tiny threads tied around his fingers and how his ankle tendons, like all the mummies', were cut to make him fold more compactly.
We were the only (living) people there. I was growing to adore this place.
A MISTY WRAITH
Until now, the tourist itinerary around Chachapoyas has been limited to a circuit of ancient relics and ruins: Kuelap, the mummies of Leymebamba, the intact tombs known as Karajia we would visit on our final day. But now, there's a major waterfall to fit in.
''We've never seen this much interest in the area,'' said our expat English guide, Rob Dover, who started his Chachapoyas-based Vilaya Tours eight years ago. ``It's all Gocta, Gocta, Gocta now.''
Like any outing here, the approach to Gocta begins with a bumpy few hours in the van, this time climbing a steep valley up to the village of San Pablo. Gocta is a two-tiered waterfall; it plummets over the ridge and hits a shelf on the cliff, where it pools up for a few hundred feet before falling over the edge to the valley floor. If you want an up-close look at both sections, you have to make two trips.
The gateway to Upper Gocta is San Pablo, an isolated, attractive hamlet of mud-brick buildings and wide Andean views. Tourists have become more common, but not normal enough to prevent a parade of dogs and marveling kids from falling in behind us as we walked up the only street.
At the end of town, a drunk blocked the trail, haranguing our local guide about the increased foot traffic past his house. A local loco, the guide whispered to us.
We moved on, settling into a blissful morning of hiking in a dry, wide vale. After a couple of hours, we passed the limit of usual village activity and a raw forest gloom closed over our heads. The guide pointed us down a newly slashed side trail, a steep scramble down to a small viewpoint. We huffed out of the trees and there, still two miles away at a distant end of the valley, was the world's third-highest waterfall.
This is the moment that I usually stare for a minute, say ''Oooh,'' bounce my knees Chevy Chase-style a couple of times and then turn in search of the hotel bar. But this . . . this was a really, really big waterfall. Even after four days of hard travel, hundreds of miles of chiropractic roads and impossible emotional windup, I was simply awed.
Gocta, at this time of year, is a misty wraith dancing with gravity, a huge, twisting white column of froth chasing itself down the cliff face. It made an immense noise. Even two miles away we could feel its strange clackety vibe, like an infinite train over a bad track. In the rainy season it must shake the world.
We sat for an hour, having lunch and getting our brains around Gocta. It took another hour to reach the upper base of the falls, where I picked my way over soaking rocks to look down at the thundering impact zone 50 yards away. The boulders within the falls were red with some mineral patina, or maybe just raw from centuries of flaying. I was soaked in seconds, looking up to bathe my face in an ecstasy of proximity.
Then, feeling oddly rushed, as if the promised tourist boom was about to appear on the trail, I stripped off my clothes and dove into the freezing pool. (OK, I lowered myself gingerly into the freezing pool.)
THE LOWER FALLS
There are no safe trails connecting the upper and lower sections of Gocta, so we backtracked to the van. By dusk, we had reached the other side of the valley and the tiny village of Cocachimba, gateway to Lower Gocta.
Dover asked around and arranged for us to camp in the yard of an Adventist church. He paid a neighbor woman to stir up her outdoor fire and boil us some fine chicken and rice. We ate, fended off stray dogs and played with our cook's two sweet and baffled children. We turned in, in utter silence under bright stars.
Of the 20 or so Adventist parishioners who showed up for the 5 a.m. singing service, about 15 of them tripped over my tent line.
It took us about three hours to reach the true bottom of the waterfall, a natural rock amphitheater where Gocta releases its final energy in an everlasting explosion of wet.
When the falls are running at their max, the guide said, the entire end of the valley is consumed and unapproachable. But in September, we were able to scramble to the edge of the pool. I even put on my hardiest rain gear, thinking I might get close enough to touch Gocta's very hem. Bad idea. Within 20 yards, the shrieking blow of mist nearly tossed me off my feet.
I slunk away in a soggy crouch, about as happy as I'd ever been.
No doubt they will make this easier in coming years. But they will not make it better. Paved roads, nearby hotels, scenic overlooks will allow more people to see this place, which is good. And they will mean more money for local people, which is great. But I was glad to fight for it a bit, glad to have jumped bare into the thing and elbowed my way into the hurricane heart of its final plunge.
By the end, I didn't visit this waterfall. I had an affair with it. And that was more than I ever expected.
IF YOU GO
• GETTING THERE: Reaching Chachapoyas in northern Peru takes time and, lately, money. In addition to the fare to Lima, the onward flight to the northern coastal city of Chiclayo will cost you $150 to $200 round trip. Lan Peru dominates the route and has ticket and baggage agreements with American. The long overland trip from Chiclayo to the Chachapoyas region will usually be wrapped into your tour, but inexpensive overnight buses are available if you go on your own.
• SEEING GOCTA: You can go in the dry season, traditionally May through September, and have an easier trip but a smaller waterfall. Or you can go with the rains and have a wetter experience all around.
Be aware that the waterfall is in the moderate Andes, 8,000 to 10,000 feet in elevation. Bring light fleece and rainwear at all times of year. The Peruvian government and local tour operators are falling all over themselves to make seeing Gocta easier. But for now you pretty much have to rough it with one of the archaeological tour companies already there.

Peru: Machu Picchu is named one of the New 7 Wonders

BREAKING NEWS! 7 July, 2007 [ 19:00 ]

(LIP-ir) -- The sacred Incan Sanctuary, located in Qosqo, Peru -¨bellybutton of the world¨- , is now one of the New 7 Wonders of the world. Machu Picchu, pride of every Peruvian, was chosen as one of the New 7 Wonders in a spectacular event held at Estadio da Luz in Lisbon, Portugal today.

Machu Picchu was first chosen as one of the 21 finalists for the New 7 Wonders contest, organized by the New Open World Corporation (NOWC). It was among other internationally recognized architectural wonders such as: Mexico with Chichen Itze, Brazil with Christ the Redeemer, Chile with Easter Island Moais and Spain with Alhambra.

Before the New 7 Wonders were presented it was announced that the list was not given in any special order and that the seven were greatly appreciated. The Great Wall of China was the first to be named followed by the Petra ruins in Jordan and Christ the Redeemer in Brazil.

Machu Picchu was the fourth to be announced followed by Chichén-Itzá in México, the Roman Colosseum in Italy and the Taj Mahal in India.

Although contest organizers do not want to release how many votes each monument received it was stated that over 100 million votes were cast through the internet and over the phone.

The huge event, compared by some to the opening of the Olympics, was hosted by British actor Ben Kingsley, American actress Hilary Swank and one of Asia's sexiest women, Indian supermodel/Bollywood actress, Bipasha Basu. The contest was broadcast to over 170 countries and is estimated to have had a viewing audience of 1.6 million.

Earliest-known Evidence Of Peanut, Cotton And Squash Farming Found

Source: Vanderbilt University
Date: June 29, 2007

Science Daily — Anthropologists working on the slopes of the Andes in northern Peru have discovered the earliest-known evidence of peanut, cotton and squash farming dating back 5,000 to 9,000 years. Their findings provide long-sought-after evidence that some of the early development of agriculture in the New World took place at farming settlements in the Andes.

The discovery was published in the June 29 issue of Science.

The research team made their discovery in the Ñanchoc Valley, which is approximately 500 meters above sea level on the lower western slopes of the Andes in northern Peru.

"We believe the development of agriculture by the Ñanchoc people served as a catalyst for cultural and social changes that eventually led to intensified agriculture, institutionalized political power and new towns in the Andean highlands and along the coast 4,000 to 5,500 years ago," Tom D. Dillehay, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University and lead author on the publication, said. "Our new findings indicate that agriculture played a broader role in these sweeping developments than was previously understood."

Dillehay and his colleagues found wild-type peanuts, squash and cotton as well as a quinoa-like grain, manioc and other tubers and fruits in the floors and hearths of buried preceramic sites, garden plots, irrigation canals, storage structures and on hoes. The researchers used a technique called accelerator mass spectrometry to determine the radiocarbon dates of the materials. Data gleaned from botanists, other archaeological findings and a review of the current plant community in the area suggest the specific strains of the discovered plant remains did not naturally grow in the immediate area.

"The plants we found in northern Peru did not typically grow in the wild in that area," Dillehay said. "We believe they must have therefore been domesticated elsewhere first and then brought to this valley by traders or mobile horticulturists.

"The use of these domesticated plants goes along with broader cultural changes we believe existed at that time in this area, such as people staying in one place, developing irrigation and other water management techniques, creating public ceremonials, building mounds and obtaining and saving exotic artifacts."

The researchers dated the squash from approximately 9,200 years ago, the peanut from 7,600 years ago and the cotton from 5,500 years ago.

Dillehay published the findings with fellow researchers Jack Rossen, Ithaca College, Ithaca, N.Y.; Thomas C. Andres, The Curcurbit Network, New York, N.Y.; and David E. Williams, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, D.C.

Dillehay is chair of the Department of Anthropology at Vanderbilt, Professor Extraordinaire at the Universidad Austral de Chile and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007.

The research was supported by the Instituto Nacional de Cultura, Lima; the National Science Foundation; the Heinz Foundation; the University of Kentucky and Vanderbilt University.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Vanderbilt University.

The Possessed

By ARTHUR LUBOW
Published: June 24, 2007

The stones at Machu Picchu seem almost alive.

They may be alive, if you credit the religious beliefs of the ruler Pachacuti Yupanqui, whose subjects in the early 15th century constructed the granite Inca complex, high above a curling river and nestled among jagged green peaks.

To honor the spirits that take form as mountains, the Inca stoneworkers carved rock outcrops to replicate their shapes. Doorways and windows of sublimely precise masonry frame exquisite views. But this extraordinary marriage of setting and architecture only partly explains the fame of Machu Picchu today.

Just as important is the romantic history, both of the people who built it in this remote place and of the explorer who brought it to the attention of the world. The Inca succumbed to Spanish conquest in the 16th century; and the explorer Hiram Bingham III, whose long life lasted almost as many years as the Inca empire, died in 1956. Like the stones of Machu Picchu, however, the voices of the Inca ruler and the American explorer continue to resonate.

Imposingly tall and strong-minded, Bingham was the grandson of a famous missionary who took Christianity to the Hawaiian islanders. In his efforts to locate lost places of legend, the younger Bingham proved to be as resourceful. Bolstered by the fortune of his wife, who was a Tiffany heiress, and a faculty position at Yale University, where he taught South American history, Bingham traveled to Peru in 1911 in hopes of finding Vilcabamba, the redoubt in the Andean highlands where the last Inca resistance forces retreated from the Spanish conquerors.

Instead he stumbled upon Machu Picchu. With the joint support of Yale and the National Geographic Society, Bingham returned twice to conduct archeological digs in Peru. In 1912, he and his team excavated Machu Picchu and shipped nearly 5,000 artifacts back to Yale.

Two years later, he staged a final expedition to explore sites near Machu Picchu in the Sacred Valley.

If you have visited Machu Picchu, you will probably find Bingham's excavated artifacts at the Yale Peabody Museum in New Haven to be a bit of a letdown. Mostly, the pieces are bones, in varying stages of decomposition, or pots, many of them in fragments.

Unsurpassed as stonemasons, engineers and architects, the Incas thought more prosaically when it came to ceramics.

Leaving aside unfair comparisons to the jaw-dropping Machu Picchu site itself, the pottery of the Inca, even when intact, lacks the drama and artistry of the ceramics of earlier civilizations of Peru like the Moche and Nazca.

Everyone agrees that the Machu Picchu artifacts at Yale are modest in appearance. That has not prevented, however, a bare-knuckled disagreement from developing over their rightful ownership.

Peru says the Bingham objects were sent to Yale on loan and their return is long overdue. Yale demurs.

In many ways, the dispute between Yale and Peru is unlike the headline-making investigations that have impelled the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to repatriate ancient artifacts to their countries of origin.
It does not revolve around criminal allegations of surreptitious tomb-raiding and black-market antiquities deals. But if the circumstances are unique, the background sentiments are not.

Other countries as well as Peru are demanding the recovery of cultural treasures removed by more powerful nations many years ago. The Greeks want the Parthenon marbles returned to Athens from the British Museum; the Egyptians want the same museum to surrender the Rosetta Stone and, on top of that, seek to spirit away the bust of Nefertiti from the Egyptian Museum in Berlin.

Where might it all end? One clue comes in a sweeping request from China. As a way of combating plunder of the present as well as the past, the Chinese government has asked the United States to ban the import of all Chinese art objects made before 1911. The State Department has been reviewing the Chinese request for more than two years.

The movement for the repatriation of ''cultural patrimony'' by nations whose ancient past is typically more glorious than their recent history provides the framework for the dispute between Peru and Yale. To the scholars and administrators of Yale, the bones, ceramics and metalwork are best conserved at the university, where ongoing research is gleaning new knowledge of the civilization at Machu Picchu under the Inca.

Outside Yale, most everyone I talked to wants the collection to go back to Peru, but many of them are far from disinterested arbiters. In the end, if the case winds up in the United States courts, its disposition may be determined by narrowly legalistic interpretations of specific Peruvian laws and proclamations.

Yet the passions that ignite it are part of a broad global phenomenon. ''My opinion reflects the opinion of most Peruvians,'' Hilda Vidal, a curator at the National Museum of Archaeology, Anthropology and History of Peru in Lima, told me.

''In general, anything that is patrimony of the cultures of the world, whether in museums in Asia or Europe or the United States, came to be there during the times when our governments were weak and the laws were weak, or during the Roman conquest or our conquest by the Spanish.
Now that the world is more civilized, these countries should reflect on this issue. It saddens us Peruvians to go to museums abroad and see a Paracas textile.
I am hopeful that in the future all the cultural patrimony of the world will return to its country of origin.''

Behind her words, I could imagine a gigantic sucking whoosh, as the display cases in the British Museum, the Smithsonian, the Louvre and the other great universal museums of the world were cleansed of their contents, leaving behind the clattering of a few Wedgwood bowls and SÃ

Recently Excavated Headless Skeleton Expands Understanding Of Ancient Andean Rituals

Science Daily — Images of disembodied heads are widespread in the art of Nasca, a culture based on the southern coast of Peru from AD 1 to AD 750. But despite this evidence and large numbers of trophy heads in the region's archaeological record, only eight headless bodies have been recovered with evidence of decapitation, explains Christina A. Conlee (Texas State University). Conlee's analysis of a newly excavated headless body from the site of La Tiza provides important new data on decapitation and its relationship to ancient ideas of death and regeneration.

As Conlee outlines in the June issue of Current Anthropology, the third vertebrae of the La Tiza skeleton has dark cut marks, rounded edges, and no evidence of flaking or breakage, indicating decapitation occurred at or very soon after the time of death. A ceramic jar decorated with an image of a head was placed next to the body. The head has a tree with eyes growing out of it, the branches encircling the vessel.

"Ritual battles often take place just before plowing for potato planting, and trees and unripened fruit figure in these rituals, in which the shedding of blood is necessary to nourish the earth to produce a good harvest," Conlee writes. "The presence of scalp cuts on Nasca trophy heads suggests the letting of blood was an important part of the ritual that resulted in decapitation."

Conlee also points to damage on the jar that indicates it had already been handled and used before being included in the tomb. This was only the third head jar found with a headless skeleton. Most are found at domestic sites, and prior research has concluded that they were probably used to drink from, most likely in connection with fertility rituals. "If the head jar was used to drink from during fertility rituals, then its inclusion in the burial further strengthens the relationship between decapitation and rebirth," Conlee explains.

Notably, there is also no evidence of habitation in the La Tiza region during the Middle Nasca period (AD 450-550), to which the head jar dates. All of the Nasca domestic sites in the area date to the Early Nasca, indicating that the La Tiza skeleton may have been deliberately buried in an abandoned settlement that was associated with the ancestors.

"Human sacrifice and decapitation were part of powerful rituals that would have allayed fears by invoking the ancestors to ensure fertility and the continuation of Nasca society," Conlee writes. "The decapitation of the La Tiza individual appears to have been part of a ritual associated with ensuring agricultural fertility and the continuation of life and rebirth of the community."

Reference: Christina A. Conlee, "Decapitation and Rebirth: A Headless Burial from Nasca, Peru." Current Anthropology 48:3.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by University of Chicago Press Journals.

Peru: Tomb believed to be older than "Señor de Sipan" found in northern Peru

Art/Culture/History 3 July, 2007 [ 10:45 ]

(LIP-ir) -- A team of archaeologists, led by Walter Alva, have discovered the wooden tomb of another member of the Mochica culture's elite - older than the "Señor de Sipan" (Lord of Sipan).

These findings belong to the Moche civilization, which ruled the northern coast of Peru from the time of Christ to 800 AD, centuries prior to the Incas.

Alva has stated that he and his team are investigating and within the next few days will know the role of this noble in the Mochica society.

"We have found the tomb of a person that belonged to Mochica nobility. Inside the coffin, discoveries of copper and copper-plated decorations - covered in rust, demonstrate that this person was not a Lord but was among the Mochica elite," Alva explained.The archaeologist, who discovered the "Señor de Sipan" (Lord of Sipan) in 1987, has said that this discovery will provide valuable information about the Mochica culture.

The mummy is estimated to be 1,800 years old, whereas it is estimated that the "Señor de Sipan" was buried 1,700 years ago."The tomb is of a person that appears on Mochica artwork, which shows he participated in important rituals. His headdress, which is V-shaped, identifies him as such," explained Alva.

The archaeologist explained the value of this discovery, "This is the tomb of a person we hadn't found, now we have the Mochica elite complete."40 workers and 6 archaeologists are taking part in this work funded by the Ítalo Peruvian Fund and the government. This years budget is 600 thousand soles.

Pharmacy student learns about medicine in Peru

Monday, July 02, 2007

College group also explores foreign culture, canoes down Amazon and climbs Machu Picchu.
By GINA VASSELLI
The Express-Times

Ryan Toth canoed down the Amazon, stood on top of Machu Picchu and got class credit for doing it.

The 23-year-old Phillipsburg man traveled to Peru this summer as part of his studies as a pharmacy student at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania.

The study abroad program was organized through the Global Awareness Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to saving the rainforest, according to its Web site.

Toth and 11 other pharmacy students from across the country returned June 25 from their three-week trip.

Shelli Holt-Macey, director of Wilkes University's Experiential Programs for the pharmacy school, said the students were selected by the institute's founder, Dr. Barbara Brodman.

The students flew June 1 into Lima, Peru.

"That was basically the last city I saw," Toth said. "The rest was more or less all jungle."

Toth said they visited the GAI's Center for Natural Medicine in Iquitos to learn about natural medicine and drug discovery.

While the group was in Iquitos, it was visited by a shaman who talked about the plants used by the different tribes.

Toth said after her speech, the shaman stayed at the center because of a national workers strike in Peru and demonstrations in Iquitos.

"I guess she was scared to go back," Toth said.

He said the strike was unexpected and surreal.

"That was weird. It happened like two days after we got there," Toth said.

The group left the center a few days later and traveled to Cusco, Peru. It arrived there in time to experience the winter solstice at Machu Picchu.

"It's so huge you just wonder how they could build it," Toth said. "They didn't use mortar and the stones fit so perfectly together you can't fit a credit card between them."

But his parents, Brenda and Dale, had other concerns about the Incan city.

"I knew he was going there but I didn't realize how steep it was. So when I saw those pictures it made me a little nervous," Brenda Toth said.

Ryan Toth said the group traveled down the Amazon in canoes for about three days, which was not always easy.

"One time we were rowing as hard as we could with the current and we weren't moving because of the wind coming against us," he said.

Along the river they met three different native tribes: The Bora, Huitoto and Yagua.

Ryan Toth said he became friends with a river guide from the Bora tribe named Wellington.

"He spoke a little English and I speak a little Spanish so we became friendly," he said.

Wellington hand-carved a mask for him and it became one of many tribal souvenirs Toth took home.

Holt-Macey said the program was a great success because "it's directly related to the study of pharmacy and understanding how other cultures work without a system like the U.S.," she said.

Ryan Toth said the trip "was not the kind of thing you can do as a tourist. We got to see places and people that barely anyone ever sees."

Gina Vasselli is a staff writer. She can be reached at 610-258-7171 or by e-mail at gvasselli@express-times.com.