Peru.  It’s done.  3200km of pavement, dirt, stone, gravel, sand and dust.  I know her intimately now.  I’ve traced her spine with my feet. I’ve sunk into her valleys and lost my breath at her heights.  I’ve seen and felt her moods, how she can be: capricious, warm, complex, varied, voluptuous, mysterious, changeable, humid, verdant, frigid. (no, I didn’t bang her…)  I’ve explored so much of her, and missed so much: the cities of “arequipa”,  and “pisco”, “nazca”and the Lines, “colca canyon”, the southern jungles, ”iquitos” and the Amazon…I’ve known none of them. And yet…And yet…what I have seen. 

I’ve walked along the shores of the largest lake in South America, “titicaca”.  Deep and cold, a giant drop of lifewater in the high desert.  I’ve wandered around Cusco and the Sacred Valley, the “belly button” of the Inca Empire, the center of all things.  I’ve touched and leaned against 100 ton stones that have been carved to fit so perfectly with their neighbors that they seem one…more natural, more organic than naked rock.  I’ve stood in a thick morning mist shrouding Macchupichu.  I’ve watched those gray curtains pull back bit by bit until an entire city, shouting its emptiness, lay out before me.  I’ve worked my way through valley and ridge, over passes in the birthplace and bloody territories of the Shining Path resistence movement, towns and roads that were off limits to travelers until the late 90’s.  I’ve walked through labyrinth-like forests of stone at 4000 meters.  I’ve followed rivers, the “santa”, the “mantaro”, the “chancay”, the “apurimac”, I’ve let them take me where they wanted.  I’ve watched them change from angry to submissive, from supple to twisted, from pristine to destroyed, from wild to tame.  I’ve descended an innocuous valley toward the coast, my eyes always looking to the right, tracing out the remains of an ancient trail that once linked together steep-sloped fields of quinua, maize, potatoes.  I’ve wondered at how many centuries, how many tens of centuries it has lain there, how many millions of footsteps it has bourne.  I’ve watched that trail disappear, swallowed by landslides, by rockfalls.  I’ve watched it reappear sometime later, looking so new that if I saw an Inca emperor himself being carried along it, I wouldn’t have blinked.  I’ve trudged up sections of the Panamerican Highway, through desert so barren that it stuns the eyes.  I’ve walked the “corridor of gold”, a valley in the heart of Peru, flanked on one side by some of the highest peaks in the world outside of the Himalayas.  I’ve passed through hundreds of towns, villages, and cities.  I’ve seen misery and hunger, smiles, pollution, beauty.  I’ve walked in another century, talked to people from an other epoch.  I’ve danced and drunk my fill with Peruvian, Dutch, German, Australian, Isreali, English, Irish, Danish, Colombian,  Argentinean, and Unitedstatesian.  I have hurt and been hurt, helped and been healed here.  I’ve walked with wonderful people who’ve taught me to see my trip with new, fresh eyes. 

 And finally, I’ve leaned, tired and sweaty, against a worn wooden ledge, handed my passport to a disinterested woman and watched as she put an exit stamp in its pages, a stamp on my time here, on everything I’ve seen, met, done and learned. 

A stamp.  All of that time condensed and inked out on my passport…no bigger than my thumb.