Emeralds and Ruins

Everywhere throughout the Peruvian Andes, from Machu Picchu's tropical, 6000-foot-high climate to the dry-arid Lago Titicaca at more than 12,000, each town and tiny village boasts emeralds and ruins: A fertile Pachamama's embrace of Pachapapa's naturally destructive hand.

Plumping up for the winter to come

Especially at summer's end during this rainy month of March, Mother Earth's fecundity is in high form in the high plains—the altiplanos—where wildflowers and lavender and chrysanthemums bloom in riotous color. Water overflowing from Lake Titicaca swamps rich, cultivated fields sprouting corn and potatoes, Peru's agricultural gift to the universe. In fact, at least 40 different kinds of potatoes are intrinsic to the cuisine, depending on recipe.

Storm clouds darken the green plains of Chachani volcano above Arequipa

Mountains towering even above these plains are full of green shrubs and cedars and green, green weeds and grasses to plump up llamas and alpacas for the soon-to-come winter.

Way up here, Patchapapa has laid his cracked, brown hands on Inca temples, some of which date back to archeological ruins in Pukara (0-500 A.D.), well before King Pachacutec's high Inca empire and Machu Pichcu, a most well maintained national park. Yet many ruins stand about unattended; a roofless structure here, a low, meandering stone fence that goes nowhere.

Stones cut for the gods are topped with adobe bricks used by mere morals at the preserved Wiracocha temple in Roaqi, Peru

If a town of, say, 200 people can't lay claim to abandoned ruins or at the least a sacrificial altar then almost always it has a colonial church, or indeed, three or four churches. In one otherwise nondescript village, Andahuaylillas, renovation of San Pedro Cathedral is in full swing. Built circa 1575, the excessively Baroque church (can Baroque be excessive?) challenges St. Peter's in Salzburg, Austria. In Peru, though, this church touts 22-carat-gold leafing on statues and crosses, ceiling beams and huge portrait frames, besting even Cuzco's primary basilica, which is five times the size and gilt through and through with, ahem, 18-carat gold.

Unfortunately, some of the country's ruins are contemporary. Cities like Juliaca or the outskirts of Arequipa harbor hundreds of thousands in shanty-town squalor, a lifestyle that jars senses heavily and blurs the memory of stone cut so precisely a knife blade can't pierce foundation joints.

Tom ponders ancient construction at the Santa Catalina Convent in Arequipa

Ollantaytambo and Aquas Calientes are cities steeped in ancient culture, but these days, they are mostly staging towns for Machu Picchu tourism. Full of hustle and bustle and cheap cinder-block hostels, they're reminiscent of Alaska's boom-bust mining towns.

Contemporary Aquas Calientes

Puno, the gateway to Lake Titicaca, exhibits a similar frenzy of coarseness and youthfulness; backpackers and teenage, native Peruvians bundled with babies on backs. Lots of them; uncut emeralds, truly green among the ruins of hunched old ladies, bent in half from decades of hard labor backpacking bundles of wood, potatoes, reeds up impossibly steep roadsides.

Motorized boats amidst Lake Titicaca's floating islands

Even the ancient culture of Uros, where six or seven families currently live on each of the 49 floating-reed islands in Lake Titicaca, embraces the here-and-now as much as the past. Of course, little old ladies still huddle together to admire their fine embroidering, but motorized reed boats a la Kon-Tiki and solar panels on some thatch houses are something to think about.