Following in the paw prints of Paddington in Peru

There’s a frame in the film Paddington in Peru that instantly whooshed me back to my trip to the South American country earlier this year. The ursine émigré – inspired, said his creator, Michael Bond, by the Jewish refugee children he had seen at Paddington station during the war – and his adopted family, the Browns, have arrived in the Inca capital of Cusco. As they emerge blinking from a cinematically rickety bus, they are greeted by scores of beaming Peruvian children, dressed in the most vibrant garments.

On my first morning in Cusco, I couldn’t take my eyes off the beautiful children on the streets of the archaeological capital of the Americas. Little girls and boys in brightly coloured, intricately designed ponchos sat on the pavement with their parents selling hard-boiled quail eggs, chopping papaya and melon and grilling chicken hearts, one of Peru’s favourite street foods. Others were en route to school in pristine uniforms and wide-brimmed hats that, I would later learn, the government has mandated for all pupils to protect them from the Andean sun. The very youngest residents of the city were swaddled in woven shawls hoicked across their mothers’ backs, with only their little faces and glossy, bible-black hair on view.

It was so utterly enchanting that I kept stopping and (with permission) pointing my camera at it all. This was my first time in Peru, in South America, noch, and I didn’t want to miss a single vignette.

But there was a trade-off. Every time I paused to snap, I fell further behind my group until at one point I lost my fellow travellers altogether and our endlessly patient group leader and local man Elias (on whom more later) had to look for me. He found me lingering by a stall selling choclo con queso, cobs of Andean corn (the kernels are huge and creamy white) and the South American cheese paria wrapped in the vegetable’s sheath.

Yes, my first visit to Peru was with a group, and I will be honest and say the notion of a “guided tour” had always slightly jarred with my self-image as an adventurous traveller. I can now say I was wrong to think like this.

Unlike Paddington who, in the movie – mild spoiler alert – has endless time to locate his beloved Aunt Lucy in the continent’s third largest country and who crosses its humid rainforests on foot and sails along the mighty Amazon River in search of her, I had only eight days to experience the country that has given the world Machu Picchu, alpacas, pisco sours and the spit-roasted guinea pig, and having tour group G Adventures sort the itinerary of this once-in-a-lifetime trip was the right decision.

The company has trips of varying lengths and itineraries you can top and tail to your taste, even while you’re in the country – on my second day I took an impromptu Peruvian cooking class with a local expert, and other members of the group booked last-minute treks to Rainbow Mountain – but you start off with a basic tour and mine is best described as Peru’s greatest hits in a week: Lima, Cusco, Ollantanytambo, Sacred Valley, Machu Picchu and then back again.

I landed in Lima, where most of the country’s 2,000 or so Jews live, on a sunny July Sunday at midday. The orientation meeting with my group and our first leader, Mónica, was that evening so I had a few hours on my own in which to explore the Peruvian capital that rises dramatically above a long Pacific coastline of ragged, lush cliffs.

It was seven hours since I’d eaten so my first mission was to find a restaurant serving the country’s national dish ceviche: raw fish, marinated in tiger milk (lime juice, salt and chilli), red onion, Andean corn, crunchy corn nuts and potato, usually sweet. Fun fact: there are no fewer than 10,000 varieties of spud in Peru.

After ceviche – so addictive from the first mouthful, that I would order the dish several times during my holiday – I took a stroll through the city’s colonial heart, a lattice of narrow streets lined with highly ornate churches and other baroque buildings. Then, I thought, why not visit the city’s feted Choco Museo, the chocolate museum? After all, the confection is big in South America and I love it as much as Paddington does marmalade.

But I couldn’t find it for at that point in the afternoon I was on two wheels (renting a bike in Lima is easy) and somewhat navigationally challenged. A bit like Paddington at various points in the film, now I think about it.

I did thankfully manage to cycle my way back to our hotel in the seaside neighbourhood of Miraflores. There, I met the 15 people with whom I would be exploring Peru for the next week. A mix of Brits, Australians, Americans and New Zealanders ranging in age from 16 to 66, half the group were teachers, which I liked. This trip is not out of reach for average earners.

We all seemed to click, but bonded properly, I feel it’s fair to say, on our bus ride through the Sacred Valley, the long winding road that begins some ten miles north of Cusco in the foothills of the Andes, and which is dotted with remote villages and Inca sites. The most notable of the latter is the magnificently named Ollyantaytambo, a medieval town of cobbled byways and gurgling irrigation channels, and the gateway citadel to Machu Picchu. We stayed there overnight and ate at a local restaurant where I tried Peru’s signature soft beverage chicha morada, purple corn drink. It looks like Ribena, but tastes far nicer. On the way back to our hotel one of our group fed the remains of her llama burger to a dog. Pooches are free range throughout Peru but in Ollyantaytambo they seem to roam the streets in particularly high numbers. 

Our visit to the Ccaccolloo women’s weaving co-op was particularly special. A diminutive grandmother in her early fifties called Angela – with men averaging five foot four and women typically reaching five foot, Peruvians are among the shortest people in the world – showed us how the wool shorn from the women’s herd of alpacas is dyed. In brief, you add salt to ground-up dried insects for orange, quartz to get pink, sulphate for purple and various plants for greens and yellows. After Angela’s demonstration there was a chance to buy sweaters, shawls and other textiles crafted at the village. I plumped for a beautiful table runner, which I have since hung as a tapestry in my hall.

With Elias patiently translating my questions and her answers, I learned some fascinating things about Peruvian cultural life from Angela. Here are my top three: if the tip of your montera, a wide-brimmed hat shaped like a fruit bowl, points to the sky, you are single. If it points to the ground, you’re married. Anyone who cheats on their spouse is chucked out of the village: here, you mate for life, like the Andean condor. People clean their hair with ground saquta root, which prevents their barnets from going grey. Yes, I am a bit sceptical too, but it is also true that I didn’t see a single silver-haired Peruvian on my trip.

After the weaving co-ops, we had a farm-to-table lunch at the resident-run Parwa community restaurant. The quinoa was especially delicious, as you might expect in the grain’s country of origin.

Next up was a post-prandial visit to the isolated village of Cuyo Chico where several families run a small ceramics business. Using local clay dug with their own hands they mould bowls, plates, figurines and, best of all, chess sets in which Inca rooks, bishops, queens and knights spar with their Spanish counterparts. I paid the 35 soles (£7) asking price for my set and considered I had a got a bargain.

It hardly needs stating that the imposing walls, terraces, ridges and ramps of the 15th-century Inca citadel Machu Picchu, the engineering marvel that stands 2,430 metres above sea level on the eastern slopes of the Andes, was a highlight of the trip. Even Elias, who must have guided hundreds of G Adventurers through the complex architecture of this World Heritage Site, was palpably excited.

Two members of our group were so thrilled by the prospect of experiencing the Lost City of the Incas, which beguiles historians and mystics alike, they actually climbed a goodly chunk of the mountain to get there. I was one not one of them. I reached its dizzying heights on a bus – and unlike the one in the film that delivers Paddington and the Browns to Cusco, it was reassuringly roadworthy.

While it was an enormous privilege to see Machu Picchu, I think my absolute favourite day in Peru was in Cusco on the way back. I went to the Qorikancha, once the most important temple in the Inca empire; I pottered around the market where I bought slabs of dark chocolate and packets of plantain crisps, I had cocoa leaf tea with picarones (ring-shaped fritters) in a coffee house for a pound and I had an hour-long massage for a tenner.

What I didn’t do was to visit Cusco’s Chabad House, run by Rabbi Ofer Kripor and his wife,Yael. I rather stupidly only learned of its existence after my holiday. But it is there and by all accounts a wonderfully warm and welcoming place and should you follow in Paddington’s paw prints to darkest Peru, please pop in for me.

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​Machu Picchu Adventure: 8 days, Lima to Lima

£1,249pp excluding international flights

gadventures.com

Contact PROMPERU for more information about Peru

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