52 Countries in 52 Weeks, Part 6: Puerto Rico, Peru & Chile

In Which I Go From Travelling Alone To Travelling With Many, And Where Latin America’s History Unexpectedly Connects Me To Home

They say you should lead with your best material. So let’s start with Machu Picchu.

There is a reason everyone takes the same photo. You know the one, where the hero (you, the person posting to Instagram) looks down at those ancient Incan ruins scattered throughout the hillside below, with a look of joy or contemplation or just giddy exhaustion.

Actually, I think there’s two reasons for that photo. One is the visual itself: it looks out of this world, invoking awe and mystery, the sense of a departed kingdom living in ways we cannot fathom today, on a plot of land that seems inhabitable, and yet…there it is, somehow.

But I think the second big reason is the sense of accomplishment getting there.

Reaching the famed Peruvian site generally requires a first flight to Lima and then a second one to the mountain city of Cusco, where a day is recommended before going further to adjust to the altitude. Even if you skip the 4-day hike from that point, it’s a multi-hour train ride to Aguas Calientes, the hotel town adjacent to the site. You’ll likely stay overnight so you can start at sunrise with more time and less people, which means a 5am wakeup, waiting in a lineup for a bus, a 30-minute ride up a dozen switchbacks, each section building a new layer of anticipation.

All the while, you don’t see the postcard image. Not even when you pass through the opening gates. For all its grandeur and anticipation, it sort of sneaks up on you visually, until you turns a corner and it hits, as inspiring in real life as all the photos make it out to be.

To experience that iconic sight, conservatively, is a five-day commitment. And yet, thousands of people collectively choose that same wonder every day. Little wonder you want to tell the entire world “I DID IT!”

I won’t forget the moment. At the same time, it’s worth talking about what happens right after.

You get right into those ruins — which are a lot bigger than they appear in those photo backgrounds — and it takes over an hour to see everything in the site that is part village, part emperor estate.

It is, essentially, an open air museum in the mountains of the gods. An estate for an emperor that was only used for a century, and then protected from destruction for a half millennium because of how isolated and unknown it was.

Will it be possible for our civilization to have equivalents in the future? In an odd way, Machu Picchu made me think of the B.C. ghost town of Kitsault.

please let me explain

Plenty of towns were built and abandoned in Canada in the 20th century. Only Kitsault — a centrally-planned company town of 2,000 people in the middle of British Columbia — has fully survived for decades.

Every other ghost town in Canada has been desecrated, destroyed, or taken over by nature. Due to a mix of remoteness and eccentric owners, Kitsault remains.      

For an abandoned settlement to survive 40 years in this era of history is a miracle. For something in the future to last for more than 500 years?

To travel to a new sight is to experience privilege, gratefulness, and luck.

Never more so than at Machu Picchu.

Machu Picchu was just one stop in an interesting fortnight after Colombia: first was a bachelor party in Miami, immediately followed by a wedding for the same person in Puerto Rico, followed by Peru and a few days in Chile.

There was plenty interesting about each place, but what my mind struggled with most was the sudden changes in how I was travelling.

After six weeks of travelling completely solo, Miami and Puerto Rico were essentially a non-stop party with 20 of my closest friends. In Peru, a different friend joined, giving me my first experience of travelling as part of a duo. And finally, in Chile, it was back to solo.

And while that was not without its joy, it also wasn’t without stress either.

One of the questions I get most often about this trip is “aren’t you lonely?”, or some variation therein. Which I suppose is a normal human impulse.

At the same time, three of the ways that my neurodiversity goes hard is a) generally wanting to avoid needless small talk, b) coming up with my own way to get through a day and sticking to that routine, and c) finding interruptions to that routine stressful.

Travelling around the world for a year solo eliminates the small talk and compromises, and creates its own routine and rhythm. It’s not that I don’t miss people (well, some people), but my brain gets to derive joy from so many other aspects of this trip that it’s mostly a minor inconvenience.

Suddenly having to contend with the conflicting desires of 20 different people on what to do during an afternoon off in San Juan, or not being able to go into complete quiet mode at the exact moment of my choosing, was a challenge.

Which admittedly reads as a bit selfish, and given the nature of *all of this*, it’s a small complaint.

But a trip like this will surprise you in all sorts of ways, and one of them came when I got to my hotel in Santiago, the first time I had a hotel room to myself (and was not in a hostel) in 17 days.

Weird as it seems, the sense of quiet and freedom to re-establish routines was a recent emotional highlight.

Okay, the immediate hike to a beautiful viewpoint may have added to that.

A benefits of travelling to so many new places in succession is it creates a constant comparative structure to things. Each new city adds a different layer of understanding to the previous ones, while providing notes to consider for the next community.

That was especially reflected in going from San Juan to Lima, Cusco, and then Santiago — all cities of historic importance, all conquered or founded by the Spanish within a 50 year period.    

You quickly pick up on the the traditional town square, surrounded by a cathedral and government buildings, thin streets radiating from that core, blocks of tightly bunched buildings with different balcony flourishes.

(Sidenote: the most interesting version of this came in Cusco, for a couple of reasons. First, it was already an established Incan capital prior to colonization, so the architecture is a little more varied than other big Hispanic cities. Second, because it’s in a narrow valley in the Andes Mountains, it immediately transitions from a stately village plaza to the windy passages of a mountain town. If you’re planning a Machu Picchu trip, it’s well worth giving yourself an extra day to explore Cusco).

But, if you’re an urbanite familiar with the discourse over public spaces in municipalities (raises hand), you also notice another thing: roads where cars aren’t allowed to go. Lots of them.

There have been pedestrian-only walkways in every city I’ve been to in Latin America, all much larger in size than those I’ve encountered in North America. And while I’m sure there have been no end to local debates over their merits, they were all bustling with people and shops at most hours of the day.

The most impressive of them was in Santiago, where three different streets at the centre of the city are linked together in the shape of a U. They were also connected to a series of open air malls, all of which had a mix of small businesses, corner stores, tourist traps and big chains.

It made me think of Vancouver’s Granville strip — the semi-infamous series of bars and clubs that only becomes a pedestrian walkway when it’s 2am and filled with boorish 20 somethings — and laugh.

It also made me ask, why can’t we do this?

I think there are a few reasons, best exemplified by Vancouver’s attempt at closing a two-block stretch of a street near Kits beach to cars last summer, only to abruptly end the project a month in because it had proven so underwhelming (they’re trying a different project in the Gastown neighbourhood this summer).

For one, a city has to go big with its pedestrian ambitions: while the cities I’ve been travelling through have multiple pedestrian-only streets that extend for 3-10 blocks, Vancouver (and other Canadian cities) have often taken the approach of changing the use of a single street for a few blocks as part of a technocratic, consultation-heavy pilot project, and are somewhat astounded when it doesn’t create the desired effect after a few weeks.

For another, the streets aren’t meant to be car-free for their own sake as destinations to nowhere, but to connect people to key places. Virtually all of the pedestrian streets I used started at a city’s main plaza, a stadium, or a transportation hub. In Santiago, they were also adjacent to commercial plazas, extending the options of how people could use them.

Of course, all these cities built up their central area hundreds of years before Vancouver. At the same time, it’s certainly a new lens that I’ll bring to the discussions when they inevitably come up in my neck of the woods.

Another ways that each of these places showed their age is their approach to history.

Latin American countries have lots of it: centuries of kingdoms prior to European colonization in the 16th century, revolution to regain independence in the 19th century, often another revolution because the first one ended up creating a different form of dictatorship, and then usually a military coup or two in the 20th century, all the while being buffeted by the forces of different countries as they fitfully found a way to govern.

They show it all, in an almost flat tone (with the exception of the many statues for Simón Bolivar), and it can be a little disquieting to go from “here is some beautiful artwork” to “here is a document from the second of our four revolutions” to “here’s a statue of a Spanish conquistador”, but it has the virtue of neutrality, in the sense that all historical eras are complex, and any declarations about the present are provisional.

One example of this in Lima: a statue of Francisco Pizarro, leader of the Spanish conquest of Peru, was moved in 2003 from a prominent plaza to this slightly less prominent park, still on display but with its pedestal literally removed.

It’s a contrast from Canada, where the three basic tropes in displaying the past are a) here was a golden era on the way to our enlightened present, b) here was adversity on our way to our enlightened present, c) here are our recent shameful misdeeds which we will try to atone for, living in tension with tropes A and B.

Of course, mine is a skewed perspective. I’ve spent decades in Canada going to cultural places and critiquing them (or at least ranking all the Heritage Minutes), whereas right now I’m a basic tourist using a QR code to read a plaque and saying “interesting!” afterwards.

There was a place where those two perspectives came together: at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, which is focused on the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and the murders and human rights abuses that came with it.

It’s an unflinching look at their country’s very recent history, but the museum’s first display takes a global perspective. It explains that Chile’s documenting of its most notorious era began with a National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation Report, and explains their purpose.

Then, there’s a wall of a plaques marked with flags, each one denoting a place that had its own Truth and Reconciliation Commission, along with text explaining what they uncovered.

Sandwiched in between a bunch of stripes and stars and three-coloured patterns was a maple leaf. Canada’s own commission on residential schools was there, the plaque explaining that “the report documents 3,200 direct deaths from these schools.”

I went into this trip thinking more about seeing Machu Picchu and less about seeing the world through an interconnected colonial lens.

But in different ways, both sneak up on you.

A clip from the final speech of Chilean president Salvador Allende before he died during the coup that brought Pinochet to power, shown on a screen at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights.