Broken Stones and Ancient Trails

During the 1970s I spent several years living in Peru—first in Cuzco, then in a small village in the Sacred Valley of the Incas, and finally in a centuries-old mill located in a lush canyon overlooking the Valley. At that time Peru was undergoing profound changes, the result of the 1968 coup d’état led by General Velasco Alvarado and his Junta. This was especially the case in the Andean countryside where, after centuries of living under a quasi-feudal economy, the indigenous population saw the Agrarian Reform rapidly transform their rural communities into socialist cooperatives, replacing many of the old customs with a new order based on modernisation and efficiency. 

Living in the countryside allowed me to keep horses, and the following account is the story of some of the journeys I made on horseback through those lands, sometimes alone, others accompanied by a friend. The text chronicles two trips to Paucartambo —with their unexpected and unfortunate consequences— and a 500-kilometre expedition to the mythical Vilcabamba, the last stronghold of the Incas, hidden for centuries behind inaccessible peaks. Anecdotes drawn from travel notes jotted down in old notebooks by firelight and recovered decades later, it is a simple 150-page narrative that is offered below to the reader in pdf format.