When Dick, my dear hiking buddy from my years of living in Washington D.C., came to Lima in February on a post-retirement consultancy, it was inevitable that we would conjure up a return trip to explore a part of Peru yet unknown to us on foot. I introduced Dick to my friend Jim, a seasoned hiker who has been living in Peru even longer than the two decades I can claim. After the three of us considered the highlands of the Huayhuash range on the border of Ancash and Huánuco, and the unspoiled lowlands east of Tarapoto in the Cordillera Azul National Park, we settled on Chachapoyas, as requiring less equipment and being less of a test of our sexagenarian legs. We settled on early June: following the rainy season but not so much so that the lush green countryside would turn brown.
This turned out to be right on the mark: during 8 days in the zone, we suffered only two brief showers, though we learned that the street in front of one of our hotels had been a raging river during a storm the week before our arrival. By coincidence, the first week of June was celebrated as tourism week in Chachapoyas, and on our Friday there, a government road show lead by the Prime Minister and the Minister of Tourism came to town. The rest of the week, we were able to enjoy the wonders of the upper Utcubamba River watershed almost to ourselves.
No wonder! With the ancient airport closed since the 2003 crash of the last commercial flight, getting to Chachapoyas means a grueling 8-12 hour overland trek from the airport at Tarapoto or Chiclayo. We chose the latter, which enabled us en route to take in the world-class Museum of El Señor del Sipán in Lambeyeque and the nearby ruins at Túcume.
We began our exploration of the fantastic cliff-side sarcophagi with a delightful half-hour down-hill walk to view the tombs at Karajía, west of Chachapoyas near the small town of Lamud. These are perhaps the most-recognized Chachapoyas burial sites, guarded by six 2-meter tall anthropomorphic figures standing in impossible-to-reach shallow caves high up on vertical cliffs. We also saw our first waterfall dripping from an overhang here, and an unseen flock of parrots filled the tight valley with a cacophony of jungle sounds.
After hiking back up to the car, we still had daylight left to return to Lamud, where we met a local guide who offered to take us to another, recently discovered series of sarcophagi at Ayachaqui. A promised 10-minute drive turned into a half-hour jaunt along a rocky road that became increasingly narrow and hair-raising as it wound up the mountainside. When the driver could go no further, we continued on foot, but a landslide that had created a slippery and precipitous drop-off into the abyss soon led me to abandon the effort. My more valiant compañeros were rewarded with a rare close-up view of a series of undisturbed burial sites and a long-distance view of Gocta falls, reputed to be the world’s 3rd highest, across the Utcubamba River valley far below.
The mostly unpaved road that parallels the Utcubamba is the principal means for transport in the area. Three hours upriver from Chachapoyas lies Leymebamba, a picturesque village that is home to a fine private museum housing objects – ceramics, textiles, wooden objects and over two hundred mummies – that were found two days distance on foot at the pre-Incan mausoleum above the pristine Laguna de los Condores. A visit to the museum is a must for understanding the Chachapoyas culture, which thrived from the 12th century until the arrival of the Incas two hundred years later. The Chachapoyas never fully accepted Inca rule and in the 16th century, helped the Spanish conquistadores defeat them in this key zone northeast of Cajamarca.
The next day’s visit to the cliff-side burial sites at Revash marked the beginning of our serious hiking; the four kilometers uphill proved to be a good test for what was to come in the days ahead. Rectangular burial structures, called chullpas, where painted with red designs similar to those on the figures at Karajía, and were only slightly more accessible. Our guide told us a chilling story of previous clients, a French couple whose intrepid female member insisted, against her husband’s pleas, on braving the narrow path leading across the otherwise sheer-vertical cliff to a second set of chullpas. She fell to her death, and the $500 paid to organize the rescue of her body below had provided him with the down payment for the station wagon that had brought us from our hotel.
We were staying at the delightful hostel at the Estancia Chillo, upriver from the tiny pueblo of Tingo. The next morning its proprietor, Oscar Arce, offered to join us on a hike up the steep incline of his mountainside back yard, from where we could see the Utcubamba below and, atop a huge mountain across the way, we caught out first glimpse of the mountaintop fortress of Kuelap.
The next morning, we hopped into yet another white Toyota station wagon to take us there. Some two hours later, the precipitous winding road left us in a small open field with two other vehicles that was the starting point of a delightful 20-minute hike along the spine of the ridge up to Kuelap.
Kuelap is a 12th century, rectangular fortress surrounded by a 12-20-meter-high wall. With only 3 narrow entrances, it has the look of being impenetrable, though our guide told us that the Incas starved the Chachapoyas out of Kuelap by surrounding the fortress to prevent the entrance of food and water, and at one point said to involve a Trojan horse-style trick by visiting female Inca subjects.
Several things make Kuelap a remarkable place to visit. First is its mountaintop location that offers the visitor vast 360-degree panoramic views of the surrounding countryside. Second is its lush vegetation: a wide array of flora includes fully mature trees laden with orchids and other colorful epiphytes, ferns, and many, many flowering plants, adorn most of the six-hectares (15 acres) inside Kuelap’s walls. Third, Kuelap has seen a minimum of archeological excavation since it came under the care of the Instituto Nacional de Cultura in 1985. Only one small round house has been re-constructed; this was done poorly, according to our guide, and is now falling down under its own weight. The work of archaeologists has been limited to cleaning plant matter off stones and the conservation of walls through a careful dismantling of the weakest ones, then re-assembling them using a special mortar that resembles that used in its original construction nearly a millennium ago.
Finally, the most remarkable aspect of Kuelap is the feeling of solitude resulting from the vastness of the place coupled with the small number of visitors. We were told that 11,000 persons visited Kuelap in 2006 (when 450,000 went to Machu Picchu); the day we were there, there were more people working on conservation and caring for the site than there were visitors.
Kuelap is not for the faint of heart. Its 3,000-meter (10,000 feet) altitude gave me no problems only because I had nearly a week to acclimatize. On TV a few days later, though, Prime Minister Jorge del Castillo was shown huffing and puffing after hiking up the day following his long journey from Lima. Dick, Jim and I had come to Chachapoyas determined to deflate those tires around our waists that were the product of too many papas rellenas and too much sitting in front of our computer screens. The big test was still in front of us: the 15-kilometer up-and-down hike through fields and forests and streams to the base of the 770-meter (2,500 feet) Gocta Falls, revealed to the world in 2006 by a German adventurer, and instantly converted into the second most popular tourist attraction of Chachapoyas.
Even at the government PromPeru tourist office in nearby Chachapoyas, the information on getting to Gocta was pretty sketchy, even contradictory. We knew that there were two trails in to see the falls: one from the pueblo of Cocachimba that ends at the base of the lower fall, and another from San Pablo Valera that climbs to the mid-level of this two-tiered fall, offering the hiker spectacular views of the mid-level of the falls while approaching it from the side and then again, from behind the base of the upper fall. We chose the former hike in belief that it would be the less strenuous of the two and also in consideration of my vertigo that was more likely to come into play during the hike from San Pablo.
Although Cocachimba is on the Gocta River, the hike to the falls took us high above the river twice before crossing tributaries, meeting the river shortly before rising again to a platform overlooking the base of the lower fall. We finally descended down a slippery path to the pool surrounded by boulders covered with a thick green blanket of algae irrigated by the cold mist that escaped the main vertical flow at the bottom of the falls. The dense cloud forest surrounding us through most of the hike was more like Costa Rica than any scenery I have seen before in Peru.
The immensity of Gocta Falls is hard to convey in words: its total height is equal to the world’s tallest building. For the last hour of our hike, we were only able to see the lower fall (540 vertical meters) and unable to capture its entire height in one view, even with our most wide-angle camera lens. While at the bottom of the fall, the face of the cliff supporting the falls completely filled my vision, making this curved, verdant surface seem endless in scope. It is a vision that will not be easily forgotten.
I was exhausted, but the hike out proved not to be as daunting as I imagined it would be while my face was being washed with the cold spray of Gocta. Perhaps it was the Pepsi at the trail-side, thatched-hut bodega deep in the woods, half-way back to Cocachimba, or perhaps it was just knowing that these tired legs were all I could count on to get me back home again.
I can’t close this travelogue without a mention of the warmth and hospitality of the local population. We were very well attended to in hotels throughout the area (especially at the Casa Vieja in Chachapoyas, which even received a souvenir I had left behind elsewhere, then shipped it to me in Lima), the drivers and guides who accompanied us couldn’t have been nicer, and the people in the streets of Chachapoyas consistently greeted us with a polite buenos tardes.
Hasta la proxima, Chachapoyas! 
