This week’s travel dream: A treasure hunt through Peru

It was my lust for “Andean gold” that drew me back to Peru, said Kim MacQuarrie in National Geographic Traveler. An anthropologist by trade and a collector by nature, I never forgot the woman I met in Cusco some 25 years ago who spoke of a wool, impossible to find then, that Incan emperors once wore. At the time, the vicuña—a long-necked relative of the llama—was gravely endangered. But word reached me recently that this spindle-legged herbivore had made a comeback in the Andes, as had traditional weaving. “It was time to make a return journey.”

My hunt took me first to ancient Cusco, “one of my favorite cities in the world.” Set high in the Andes, the onetime Incan capital is studded with Incan ruins and markets selling armadillo-shell guitars and carved gourds. But even at the Center for Traditional Textiles, I was advised to take my search to a more remote locale, which is why the next day I was sitting in a courtyard in an Incan settlement famed for its textiles. I was enjoying a plate of roasted guinea pig with chuño potatoes when I asked renowned weaver Nilda Callañaupa Álvarez where I might find vicuña wool. “You will have to go where the vicuñas are. You will have to join a chaccu.”

Callañaupa turned out to be wrong. Several days later, I would discover an upscale store in the old colonial city of Arequipa that sold vicuña-wool scarves for $600—about a third of the price they’d fetch outside Peru. The scarves were as soft as feather down, irresistible; I brought one home with me. But my quest had by then produced a different highlight: In a mountain field framed by craggy mountains and distant glaciers, I found myself running as fast as I could one day to close off a group of vicuñas that were heading my way. I was participating in a chaccu; I had become a link in a circle of 300 Andean herders, all of us gently closing in on hundreds of cinnamon-colored vicuñas that would soon be sheared and set free.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

At Arequipa’s Casa Andina (casa-andina.com), doubles start at $71.