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In the heights (clockwise from top left): Mount Ausangate
is one of the Peruvian Andes’s tallest peaks; a llama
walks along the Chilca River in the Sacred Valley;
guide Armando Tinta explores a frozen cave inside the
Vilcanota mountain range; an elderly shepherdess takes
in a landscape that includes the Quelccaya Ice Cap.
Previous pages: An alpaca herdsman pauses from
his work in the high Andean pastures near Cusco; the
winding Yarapa River eventually flows into the Amazon.WE LEFT CUSCO AT DAWN, heading southeast toward Bolivia.
Breakfast was at a roadside café an hour into the drive, black
coffee and a large bowl of chicken stew—a thigh and a drumstick
in a tangy broth of ginger and lime, with chunks of potatoes and
corn kernels the size of my thumbnail. My glasses fogged as I
ate. Then we bundled back up and drove a few minutes more
to the village of Checacupe, turned off the asphalt onto a dirt
track and began to climb into the Andes.
I had come to Peru for the Amazon, having ditched my initial
plan of traveling its broad waterways in Brazil because I was
drawn to the geographical contrasts on the Peruvian side of the
border. I wanted to see how the great river came together. Trek-
king to the source wasn’t feasible—the location is still somewhat
under dispute and isn’t easy to reach—but I could approximate
the general trajectory of the water, follow the flow of tributaries,
from the high Andes down into the rainforest, in an attempt
to understand the ecosystem of the largest river in the world.
The Amazon hasn’t always dumped its muddy waters into
the Atlantic. It was a network of rivers that flowed west until
roughly 15 million years ago, when the uplift of the Andes along
the Pacific coast formed a barricade, creating an inland sea that
slowly became a massive freshwater lake. Other geologic shifts
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THE ADVENTURE ISSUE