As she stepped out of our hotel in Lima, my wife, Tracy, took in the view. I’m blind, so I did not. Some sensations reminded me of our home on Vancouver Island, though. Sea lions barked. The fog from the Pacific Ocean filled my nose with a briny air. As Tracy and I followed the city’s malecón, or boardwalk, gentle waves peeled like a sigh, suggesting the presence of surfers. At cevichería Canta Rana, I scarfed a bowl of chupe, a Peruvian soup made here with sea bass, tomato, sweet potato, and the occasional maize kernel the size of a kidney bean. We washed it all down with tall glasses of chicha morada, Peru’s ubiquitous purple corn juice. Not the view, but these first sounds, smells, and tastes landed me in South America. And I was ready for more.
Peru was a destination that I had never really considered exploring as a blind person. What would be the point in merely listening to people look at legendary mountain views and Incan ruins? But over time, I began to realize this was a ridiculously narrow way of imagining my time in an entire country, let alone one as geographically varied as Peru. So last summer, when I heard about a nine-day itinerary with the tour operator Intrepid Travel—one that takes participants inland to the wilds of the Amazon basin and up to the heights of the Andes—I was intrigued. Surely there would be plenty to feed my other senses.
But now that we were there on the ground in Lima, I was feeling trepidatious. While Tracy and I have traveled the world together—to find enlightenment in Bhutan, on safari in Zimbabwe—this would be our first time participating in a group tour. Eleven of us were to make our way through Peru like a curious platoon. I was used to traveling at my own pace, and I feared my blindness would slow everybody down. Would I distract our guide’s focus or, worse, ruin someone’s moment as I fell off Machu Picchu? Time would tell.
Intrepid Travel has been offering group trips since 1989.
Photo by Ivana Cajina
After lunch, Tracy and I walked back to the hotel to meet Paola Ramos, our Peruvian guide, and our new tour mates in the lobby. As we sat down, I could feel the group’s surprise watching me fumble about for a chair. Things got even quieter as some people tried to square the circle of a blind man joining their sightseeing adventure. No malice. Just honest befuddlement.
Soon we went around the circle and made our introductions. Among us were several couples from Australia and New Zealand. Men named Richard were aplenty; there was also a Rick. Next to me sat Anne, a lone Irish retiree on her first South American tour. I adored her accent. When she asked Paola about the Incan capital of Cuzco, she pronounced it like Costco, conjuring for me the image of massive detergent boxes and family-size Doritos bags decaying among the ruins. To my writerly cheer, there was even a young editor from Sydney. Introducing myself, I said I was from a small fishing village in Canada and that I seemed to be very lost. A few people laughed. A few seemed uncertain if they should.
The next morning, we flew to the city of Puerto Maldonado in southeastern Peru, our gateway to the Amazon. From the airport, we took a car to the water, and helpful hands passed me down a gangway and onto a tippy boat that would take our group up a river called the Madre de Dios, or Mother of God. Such a name seemed fitting as the choppy waters sprayed us like a river baptism. Motoring past caimans and macaws, we snaked deeper into the jungle until our guides to the Amazon, Yuriel and Freddy, ushered us up a trail to the main lodge at the Inkaterra Hacienda Concepción, an ecological reserve that would serve as our home for the next two nights.
The Madre de Dios is a significant tributary of the Amazon River that eventually flows into Bolivia; The Amazon is home to roughly 10 percent of the world’s known species, making it the most biodiverse place on the planet.
Photos by Ivana Cajina
We didn’t have long to rest. An hour after landing, I put on bug spray, boots, and long sleeves and set out for our first trek into the Amazon. After Lima’s overwhelming traffic and crowds, the natural silence was resounding. Things scurried in the bush, whatever they were. Things also scurried in the branches above. We were the only things, perhaps, not scurrying. Carefully, step by step, I listened and trained my eyes down at the ground as if my unseeing gaze could keep me from playing footsie with an unsuspecting viper.
As we hiked deeper into the rainforest, Yuriel identified the towering ficus and walking palms whose roots seek patches of sunlight, walking their trunks slowly, slowly through the jungle. He also had us feeling and tasting our way through the terrain. At one point he placed my hand on a cluster of vines wrapped around a rubber tree. Sticky sap stretched between my fingers like an elastic band. I plucked a few of the vine’s leaves. They felt heart-shaped. Yuriel explained that Indigenous peoples would pick these leaves for a beloved. If the person dreamed of you that night, romance was fated by the intelligence of the jungle. Love, it seems, does grow on trees.
The Amazon rainforest has four layers—forest, understory, canopy, and emergent—each with different levels of light and density.
Photo by Ivana Cajina
One of the Richards and I were growing hungry, so we snacked on the seeds of cottony spore balls scattered about the forest floor. Though dropped by various trees, they tasted like peanuts. For dessert, Yuriel assured me that a protein-rich termite that he placed in my hand would be enjoyably minty. Despite his encouragement, I couldn’t bring myself to pop it into my mouth. Others debated an attempt, but nobody would brave a taste.
Back at the reserve a few hours later, I looked forward to a good night’s sleep. But it never came. With our cabana windows open to the midnight air, the jungle erupted in my ears. Choirs of insects clicked and hummed. Others buzzed and pulsed. Try as I might, I couldn’t count the number of distinct patterns and tones, which I suppose was my failed version of counting sheep. Imagine all those species competing to communicate across the jungle against every other sound. Each creature had to evolve a specific frequency to occupy its small niche in the airwaves of the forest. Radio gold for a blind guy. I was up all night in wonder. Then, like an alarm clock, howler monkeys unleashed their banshee shriek, staking their territory as the sun rose.
Over a breakfast of passion fruit, cacao bread, and eggs, my fellow travelers and I bonded over our lack of sleep; I had never heard so many sighted people regale each other with tales of mysterious noises that went bump in the night. Some of us had at first mistaken the howler monkeys for machinery. Anybody else hear an industrial vacuum around dawn? Or was somebody torching tar shingles on a roof somewhere? Janet and Rick, hoteliers from Melbourne, said they heard animals padding around their cabin during the night. Or maybe Andrew and his wife said that. I couldn’t identify some voices yet. Breakfast was its own cacophony in my ears.
Villages and lodges dot the Amazon River.
Photo by Ivana Cajina
The plan for the morning was to paddle an oxbow lake and see what we could see. To get there we hiked past hundreds of butterflies sunning by the river, or so I was told, and followed a muddy trail inland to a small boat launch. The occasional macaw made its presence heard overhead. We cruised our dugouts around Lake Sandoval, where my tour mates spotted rare giant river otters and cormorants, their wings like wet capes thrown open to the sun. But most exciting was any sudden splash, or a strange, distant cry, or a mysterious rustling in the thick shore brush. What was that? Where did it go? Such noises pulled at people’s curiosity harder than the world in front of their eyes. It makes sense. The density of a jungle teaches you to listen first and foremost, because so much of it, and what it conceals, cannot be seen.
While it offers myriad excursions in the Amazon basin, Inkaterra Hacienda Concepción is perhaps best known for its canopy tour. A series of seven rope bridges, suspended a hundred feet up in the treetops, provides biologists with direct access to the ecosystem overhead; for years, it has given visitors a rare glimpse into the habitat of the Amazon’s endangered three-toed sloth and screaming piha birds. But to walk these bridges, to feel them swing and bend step by step, requires fortitude.
I joked with Rick that maybe it would be easier if you couldn’t see how far down you might fall. But I really didn’t think so. Tracy, who has enough vertigo to power a small city, tapped out as she squinted up at the rope walkways. Each could carry only one person at a time, blind or not. Rick decided he would go first. Although his fear of heights had already drenched him in sweat, he reasoned that if I was going to try to feel my way alone and without my white cane, he’d step out of his comfort zone as well. We would lift each other up, as it were.
The average canopy height in the Amazon is 72 feet, with some treetops exceeding 100 feet.
Photos by Ivana Cajina
Being the first to go up, Rick was also the first to come down. Pale and shaken, he rushed to Tracy and warned her that I probably shouldn’t be up there. It was too late.
“Don’t grab the ropes like a railing,” Paola coached me as I stepped on the first bridge. “They will bend and make it unstable. Just lightly, lightly, touch them for guidance.”
I left her behind and stepped fully on the first bridge. It immediately began to bounce and swing like a hammock. Yuriel’s voice at the other end offered direction like a foghorn and assured me everything was safe. The ropes under my hands, touched lightly, lightly, felt somewhat frayed and old, and the ironwood slats under my feet seemed occasional. Some had gone missing from the weather and natural decay. Still, I shimmied and swayed across the bridge, terrified. It seemed like all the animals of the canopy held their breath. When something suddenly flew past, and far too close, I ducked and jostled the bridge so hard I thought it would never recover. But a few more steps and Yuriel’s hand grabbed mine. I’d somehow made it. Only six more bridges to go.
After I did descend, and not from falling, I found everybody buzzing. I still couldn’t quite believe I’d done it. When was the last time I’d walked anywhere by myself and without a white cane, let alone through treetops? Even the sighted folks had found it disorienting to hike through a soundscape that should be overhead. Rick and I agreed it was time for a drink to truly help us down.
Once back at the lodge, we gorged on fried plantains and drank our fill of pisco sours, a cocktail made with a grape spirit, bitters, lime juice, and egg white. I ordered juane de gallina, a traditional dish of chicken, rice, eggs, and olives steamed together in a bijao leaf, which tasted herby and bright. Others dined on a fried rice dish influenced by the marriage of Chinese and Peruvian cuisines, or chifa. Such fusion dishes reflect the country’s large Chinese population, a migration that began in the 19th century, when Chinese workers came to Peru to build the railroads. As our group sampled each other’s dishes and talked, I learned that Andrew, a New Zealander, once had a job tuning pianos in Canada and was as interested in sound as I am. We discovered that Rick’s wife, Janet, had grown up near my hometown. Night fell and the insects began their choir. We laughed and ate and told stories of home as if home were the real faraway land.
The Sacred Valley is known as Willka Qhichwa in the Indigenous Quechua language
Photo by Ivana Cajina
A couple days later, it was time to begin our trek to Machu Picchu. We set off by bus from Cuzco, with its narrow Incan and Spanish streets and brutally thin air, to the town and archaeological site of Ollantaytambo. From there you can either begin a four-day hike through the Sacred Valley, up and down the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, or you can elect to take the train to the little town of Aguas Calientes, at the foot of the mountain. We boarded our train in a rush, threading through a thick and raucous crowd of tourists. To find our assigned car in the chaos, we had to listen for its letter to be sung by a railroad worker who then danced us, as if in a conga line, to the right spot on the track. We should find more occasions to guide each other by song, I thought. It works.
In the town of Aguas Calientes, residents celebrate the Virgen del Carmen, who is considered a protector against natural disasters.
Photo by Ivana Cajina
Given the heights and drops awaiting us in Machu Picchu—all those mountain vistas, narrow passages, and stone stairways—I had to wonder if anything up there would be worthy of a blind man’s risk. Tracy wasn’t feeling well, ragged with a cold, so Paola and the others would have to guide me one step at a time, slowly, carefully. A few days earlier, one of the many buses taking visitors up the mountain from Aguas Calientes had driven off the road and over the ledge, plummeting its occupants down to the next switchback. There, people held the bus with their hands to keep it from sliding down to the next tier. I couldn’t see any of the road as our bus climbed the mountain, but the riders grew notably quieter with every turn. Occasionally a voice would gasp at the window. Even Paola, seated beside me, admitted she struggled with the view every time. Then she went quiet until we reached the top and got off the bus.
Machu Picchu was built around the mid-1400s and abandoned a century later. In 1911, American archeologist Hiram Bingham helped popularize the site after locating it with the assistance of Indigenous farmers.
Photos by Ivana Cajina
One of the marvels of Incan design is its masonry, encountered frequently in Cuzco and all through Machu Picchu. The most astonishing thing about the stone walls, archways, and passages is the miracle of Incan engineering. No mortar affixes the massive pink granite blocks to one another. Without using calculators, modern tools, or even written numbers, the Incans somehow managed to arrange their towering walls at a constant 13-degree angle. The perfectly jigsawed blocks, stable under their own weight and precision, were hewn using little more than chunks of hematite, an iron-rich stone found miles away. The seams between bricks of any wall, some of the blocks weighing tons, feel as smooth to the touch as a faint scar. I followed one with my finger, unable to find any imperfections.
Meanwhile, Paola vigilantly guided my feet, one here, another there, no, there, before I might hear with alarm, “N-n-n-nooo!” Everybody helped. Andrew and Richard from New Zealand. Anne from Ireland. They took turns guiding me and describing whatever they could around me, from the sunlit colors of the mountains across the valley, to the drama of exhausted families squabbling. It took more than three hours, but I made it safely through the ruins of the citadel and into a room on the eastern side. There Paola steered my hand around two shallow reflecting pools. These stone bowls were believed to have been used by Incan scholars for astronomical observations. As a blind guy, I can appreciate two things demonstrated by these celestial mirrors. First, yes, these scholars knew how to protect their eyes from the sun. But they also understood that things can sometimes be revealed by not looking at them as intended.
Some of the stones at Machu Picchu weigh up to 50 tons, and are so perfectly fit that it is impossible to slide a piece of paper between them.
Photo by Ivana Cajina
As we neared the end of our time at Machu Picchu, I could hear the Instagrammers around us fluffing their hair and fixing their makeup, readying to snap themselves against a last iconic view. A distant part of me felt jealous. How strange, even after 30 years of blindness, to always leave places and people without one photograph. But there are the moments. The minute I made it down the last few stairs to our exit, the long and patient line of travelers behind us erupted in applause. My efforts to keep up had not gone unnoticed.
That evening in Aguas Calientes, Tracy rejoined our group as we gathered for a last meal. A band on the restaurant’s little stage played Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence.” Then they played it again. As we shared a plate of fried guinea pig, I felt a swell of affection for Richard and Rick and Paola and Anne and Janet and Andrew and all the others. Perhaps I had been unjustifiably nervous back in Lima a few days ago. Without seeing any of Peru, I had walked on mountains and through ancient cities, amid jungle treetops and among architectural ruins. There were so many sensations with me now, like burrs stuck to the hide of a passing animal. And it was mostly thanks to these people, who started off as strangers and ended up as something like friends.
Intrepid Tour in the Amazon
Photo by Ivana Cajina
Take This Trip
Contributing writer Ryan Knighton joined Intrepid Travel on its nine-day “Premium Peru” trip, which visits Lima, the Amazon, Cuzco, and Machu Picchu. On the ground, meals, transport, accommodation, and luggage and airport transfers are included. Travel dates for 2025, 2026, and 2027 are available at intrepidtravel.com. From $4,600 per person.
