A love letter for Peru

In those lands, there is a fruit called the granadilla: orange, globular, with an airy, crispy shell. You hold it upturned in your fist and squeeze, and in an instant the shell crackles and snaps, and within its fragments is a tumble of black seeds encased in translucent jelly. The seeds look like frog eggs, but they taste like sweet rainwater, slightly tangy. You suck the translucence off the seeds and then swallow the rest. It sounds sexual, and it is. For your taste buds, it is a sexual experience. Peru-- Peru is the same. It opens up to you immediately, with a crackle and a snap: suddenly, you're standing outside the airport and everything is red and brown and extraordinarily bright. 11,000 feet in altitude, and the sun is so close!! The air looks newer, shinier. The sun rays don't feel more powerful, yet, but there is the feeling of power. Cusco is fascinating, of course, with its sprawling Plaza de Armas and rivers of dancing, costumed people celebrating the Fiesta del Sol. The ruins of Saqsaywaman are incredible, due equal parts to the precisely-fitted stone walls and the herds of wandering alpacas. Ollantaytambo is a town of never-ending celebration; a band weaved through the streets blasting music until 1am. But let's go first to Machu Picchu. 5am train ride from Ollantaytambo to Aguas Calientes feels like anticipation. Aguas Calientes is a roaring river town caught on all sides by great green slabs of mountain. From there, a bus ride up, past jungle-faced cliffsides, blurred through the window. It is no exaggeration to call it a wonder of the world; actually, it feels like an understatement. Machu Picchu is a city made of grand swollen rocks, pulsing with a heartbeat that's supposed to be long dead-- but really, it isn't. It can't be. When you stand on the edge of that land, looking into the spaces in front of you-- where an Incan once stood, still stands-- it's impossible to imagine anything less. Now we climb. Montaña Machu Picchu angles into the distance, even higher up than Machu Picchu itself. The climb is one sweat-soaked mile of what feels like vertical elevation. But at the top... What I will say is this: If you were a child and wanted to see what heaven was like, you could climb up Montaña Machu Picchu and you wouldn't even have to imagine. And you would plop down, and maybe suck your thumb, and that's how I imagine the Buddha looked like. So I sat at the summit of the mountain, cross-legged, and thought about being there. It wasn't even deep, meaningful thinking. It was the simplest thought: here I am. The view was simultaneously breathtaking and heartbreaking, because I couldn't help thinking of leaving. (It's the curse of the present that we can't stop thinking of the future.) Mountain after mountain after mountain surrounding this mountain, each one immensely dark green and god-like in its mountainous glory. Only mountains can ever hope to achieve such glory. Their faces were sloped and curved, as if God himself had dragged his fingers down the sides. Far down below I can see Machu Picchu, and in the very depths of the valley, the white-blue ribbon of the Urubamba River. The sky is storybook blue and undulating with translucent clouds. This was, if we continue with the metaphor, Peru's orange shell crackling open into a glorious gasp. This was that first tantalizing taste of fruit. As Bjork said, "As far as I was concerned, I was in an orgy with the sky and the ocean, and with nature." There was a whirlwind of things that happened next: the reverie broken by the climb down, visits to the Salineras salt flat and the Moray archaeological terraces, eating lomo saltado and baked guinea pig, shopping for cheap fruit in huge tented markets. But the important part is the van, rattling down rutted, narrow roads into the elfin forest and then the cloudy forest. It's an evergreen world here, at 1000 to 2000 meters of elevation. Outside it is cold and foggy and brimming with birds: a cinnamon flycatcher, a blue-capped tanager, a green-fronted lancebill hummingbird dashing right past my nose, a Collared Inca with its white throat. Lose focus, and it's all just a buzz and a blur. Our guide has the eyes of a sniper. His specialty is bird-watching and he teaches us how to use a spotting scope. His gaze never leaves the trees, not even on as we ride the van-- as we chug along the uneven road, he suddenly cries out for the driver to stop. We pile out, he sets up the spotting scope, and shows us a Tschudi's wooly monkey ON A WHOLE OTHER MOUNTAIN. (Is this even possible??!) As we ride deeper into the jungle, the cold evaporates into a stifling, moist warmth. We see fantastic birds: Andean cock of the rocks, Andean motmots, Peruvian racket-tail hummingbirds, the endemic Peruvian piedtail. My favorite is the russet-backed oropendola, whose water-droplet call is what I imagine rain would sound like if it fell on the moon. We go whitewater rafting, but the best part is jumping in and floating through the waters of the Amazon River. I can't even describe it: the water is cold but I feel warm, and it's like floating through liquid diamond. Our guide brings us on early morning and evening hikes through the jungle. Walking is a whole process: our rubber boots sink and get stuck in mud, vines, and thick tree roots. He dives into burrows to find spiders, shines his flashlight on the undersides of leaves to reveal cicadas and owl butterflies, describes how you can stick your fingers into termite nests and eat protein-rich termites if you were starving and lost. Under a massive kapok (ceiba) tree, we watch as the world dims. We are 200 feet below the ceiba's crown, where frogs, birds, and bromeliads make their home. We ride a motorboat to the clay lick walls to watch blue-and-yellow macaws, chestnut-fronted macaws, blue-headed parrots, and yellow-crowned amazons fly through the dawn sky and lick red clay, lining their stomachs with the material to protect against toxic fruits. We see strangler trees, a parasitic plant which grows out of monkey feces on a treetop, then spreads downwards until it kills the tree it grew on. We track a flock of pale-winged trumpeters rustling through the foliage, and we find a caiman barely visible above the surface of a bog. While floating on a balsa wood raft, we photograph the outrageous figures of hoatzins. On our last day in the jungle-- the last night-- our guide finds a Wucherer's ground snake curled by our lodge. It moves in a way that I can only describe as snake-like: graceful, magnetic, jerking movements that only a limbless creature could make. Under the glow of our headlamps he puts the snake around his neck, where it flutters its tongue, human and snake tangling into one being.

Holding the snake's cold, slender body in my palms is surreal. I still think back to that moment as, if not my enlightenment, then my baptism as a member of the earth. There is one moment when we are all quiet, marveling at the snake, feeling blessed to be in the same space as it, surrounded by the jungle and the Amazon River, wrapped in the Amazonian night. And then we are smiling, talking, going to sleep, waking up, returning to Cusco, then to Canada, then to California. I've traveled to many places for a 16-year-old, 20 countries so far. But this has only happened twice-- this phenomenon, this feeling, of homesickness for a place that isn't home. Two months later I was driving in southern California, where the chaparral hills and their relentless waves reminded me of Peru's paisaje. I cried, just a little. I'm not sure how this relates to the granadilla, except that the fruit eventually ends. You throw the shells into the forest, which is okay because the fruit naturally grows in the ecosystem. And maybe, many years later, if there was a determined little seed clinging to the shell, I'll have very own granadilla plant growing somewhere in the Amazon. And I guess (I hope) it's true. For me, my experience in Peru has grown into something larger than I could have imagined. It has taken my blind love for animals and sharpened it into something solid and real. There are not just a few distant species which need saving; there's an entire ecosystem, and a culture revolving around this ecosystem, that lie at stake.

A few months after my visit, the devastating Amazon fires ravaged the jungle. So it's really not a hypothesis. This stuff is happening in real time, as I write and as you read. Species we don't even know about are going extinct, and now we'll never know about them. And what is it all for? Is it for our convenience, so that we can flip a switch and burn gallons of fossil fuels; or for our greed, expanding into forests and deep ocean in the search for more places to plunge our drills?

As sentient beings, we don't have the excuse of not knowing any better. Ignorance isn't the enemy. Doing nothing in the face of knowledge is.