Hannah Genders takes a break from the garden to visit the Andes.
I have often seen pictures of Machu Picchu and of Peru in general and thought how much I would love to go there. This summer gave my husband Mike and I the opportunity as we joined the group from St Laurence Church in Alvechurch on a working trip to their linked church project in Arequipa.
Arequipa is a large city in the Andean mountains and has a population of about seven million. For the first week of the trip, our team of 11 visited the schools that are part of the church project in Arequipa.
Each day we joined in music, games, patchwork quilt-making and English lessons with the children. We also visited two orphanages where a number of the schoolchildren live.
The children and staff in both places were absolutely gorgeous and we all got massive hugs from the kids as we arrived and a performance of music and dance from the whole school on our last day. They also put on a barbecue as a thank you – complete with fried guinea pig.
From Arequipa we travelled high up into the Andes to a very remote town called Cabanaconde. It is on the edge of the Colca canyon and sits at about 3,600m above sea level.
This is the height at which altitude sickness will kick in if you are unlucky enough to suffer with it, and unfortunately I was – this resulted in two days in bed and medication for the rest of the trip.
The new project being set up in Cabanaconde by Padre Alejandro and his wife Doris is a retreat (pictured above) for the remote villages situated on the other side of the canyon. The villagers will often trek overnight to get to Cabanaconde for food and supplies. The retreat will become a place they can get a meal, a bed for the night and some spiritual support.
The building also needs a garden, so some of my time was spent sketching ideas for a sanctuary garden at the entrance to the building. There are many medicinal plants growing lower down in the canyon and it was my idea to create a monastic-type garden where the plants are used for therapy and healing.
If the garden project gets off the ground it’s also a good excuse to return to this amazing place.
The edge of the canyon is only about five minutes’ walk from the retreat project and while our days were spent in schools working with the children, at 4pm each day we would walk to the canyon edge to see the condors rising on the thermals. These amazing birds of prey have a wing span of up to 12 feet; it really was an unbelievable sight.
The canyon is one of the deepest in the world (deeper than the Grand Canyon), about 1,500m from top to bottom, or to give you an idea of scale, more than the height of Ben Nevis. The size and beauty of the place is stunning.
From the Colca canyon we travelled for our holiday part of the trip to Cuzco, the Inca capital, in another part of the Andean mountains. From Cuzco we had booked ourselves on the four-day trek to Machu Picchu. A limited number of people are allowed into this ancient Inca site each day so it felt a real privilege to be there.
The trek starts at the river valley and for the first two days is a hard climb up to 4,200m through “Dead Woman’s Pass”. The reason for the name was evidently due to the mountains around the pass looking like a naked women reclining. Strange that most of the men could make this out but the women couldn’t…
Once over the pass, the track starts to descend through a high rainforest, known as “cloud forest”. This is an area where the water condenses to form clouds, hence the name – it is incredibly rich in plant life, most noticeably mosses, lichens and bromeliads growing on the trees.
There were also wild begonias, fuchsias and many orchids. The orchids usually flower in abundance from November to February, but we were treated to a few, including the spider orchid and dancing lady.
At the end of each trekking day the porters, who are local farmers, had put up our tents and cooked a fabulous three-course meal. It really was trekking in style; the porters are so fit at this altitude that they literally run ahead of you on the trail to cook the next meal.
Four am on the final morning saw us getting up for breakfast to trek the short distance to the lost Inca city of Machu Picchu, ready for sunrise. I will never forget it – you arrive at the high sun gate just as the sun touches the temple with the whole city of Machu Picchu below you.
We then spent the day exploring the ruins and learning about the Inca way of life.
Returning home and only just getting back to work and over the jet lag, there are a few things that will stay with me: the stunning scenery and the challenges of the poverty we witnessed, but probably above all, the beauty of the people there.