Traveling with Native Tours – Brooke Burroughs

When Native Tours included a visit to the Amaru community on our itinerary to Peru, my husband and I were intrigued but skeptical. Karen, the tour organizer, had told me that we’ll be driving an hour or so out of Cusco to visit an indigenous community who would cook for us, sing and dance, and then we’d stay at their accommodations in the mountains.  I imagined a display of the brightly colored textiles we’d seen throughout Cusco, and someone demonstrating a weaving technique that was purely for show, all with a very touristy flair.

What we experienced was the furthest from what my wary tourist brain had concocted in my imagination

When people say the Amaru are a truly welcoming, open community who great you with “nanay” (sister) or “turay” (brother), it is the furthest thing from a tourist show I’ve seen. The warmth emanating off the Amaru women when we walked into their homestead was not just because it was cold at over 12,000 feet in elevation. Rarely have I met a group of women with such glorious, welcoming smiles, automatic embraces, and an inner joy that can only come from living a life that is truly in tune with nature. 

Yes, there was some fun, as we dressed up in traditional Quechuan clothing, and I finally got to wear one of the super cool hats that I’d seen throughout the Cusco area. But that was just one drop in our visit. Our visit was in a word, wholesome. Once we arrived, we were informed that the women had prepared a corn soup for us, which was both delicious, and warming after the trip up the mountain. Then we proceeded to help them cook an absolute feast, called the panchamanca, which literally translates in Quechua to earth oven. When I say the visit to this remarkable community was so down to earth, it actually was.

The Panchamanca experience

The panchamanca is started by first digging a broad, somewhat shallow hole in the earth. Inside, a feast is layered. Fava beans still in their pods were layered with at least five types of potatoes. If you are a potato lover, Peru is the place for you! Guinea pig and trout and chicken were added, each on its own layer, separated by greenery until it is like a lovely layered vegetable and meat parfait, covered with roasting coals, greenery, and buried in the earth oven built for that day. 

While we waited for the coals and the earth to cook our dinner, the women graciously shared how they take a variety of elements from nature–plants, roots, insects, and even urine to create natural dyes that are used to color the yarn they weave from their pet alpacas. And after visiting an alpaca farm on the way and wanting to throw my arms around the thick fur that warms them during the colder weather, I was ready for one of the gorgeous textiles weaved from one of these cute and lovable creatures. 

Amaru Indigenous Community

The women showed how they washed the wool with natural elements, dyed it in the natural coloring they’d created, and then how they put it on a loom and weaved a scarf. As our guide translated from Quechua to English, I thought I must have misunderstood what she said. “Did you say it takes 3 months to weave a scarf?” I clarified. And the answer was yes. Living in a world of fast fashion and clothes that are made by a machine somewhere in a factory halfway around the world in mere seconds, I looked at these scarves and felt awe. A woman sat at a loom for three months and handcrafted an alpaca scarf. 

It starts with the Alpaca…

It starts with the Alpaca, shaving the wool from them in the summer, but the care for the Alpaca is all year round. Plus, collecting all the creatures and plants needed for the dye, creating the dye, and spending the next three months of their lives weaving stripes and patterns, snakes and birds, horse and alpaca images into the scarf. Each scarf tells multiple stories, not just the story of the animals and history of the scarf, but also of a woman’s life, living off the land at 12,000 feet above sea level. 

The Amaru women had set up tables with their textiles, lit by a few single bulbs in the approaching dusk, and the group of us walked through, hungry for the beautiful things they had made. When Karen, the tour organizer, found out that they hadn’t had any visitors since the pandemic started in 2020, my heart broke. They had spent the past two years weaving and knitting and creating and…waiting. I felt so fortunate that we were able to visit them, and also grateful to Native Tours for arranging such an experience. 

Dinner was ready and the Amaru women unwrapped the dinner from the earth, piling the beans and potatoes and meat into bowls, and brought it inside for us to pass around. The dinner was accompanied by an array of fresh herbs–chamomile, Andean mint, and lemon verbena, for us to pluck out of a bowl and drown in hot water, making a variety of hot, delicious teas. 

Thoughts and lessons we learned

It was a lovely experience, curated by wonderful women, who truly know the truth of what the earth provides us, and in turn, provides the earth with the respect it deserves. If there was one thing I took away from the visit to the Amaru, it was to appreciate the natural world around us, and not forget what it has provided us, and what it continues to provide us. Living in the city, especially an American city where so many of us get from point A to point B in our cars, live off our laptops and cell phones, buy produce wrapped in plastic, and feel so exhausted at the end of the day we can only sit around and watch television, it was refreshing to see how people still live off what nature has given us. How if we take the time, we can farm and harvest, weave our own fabrics from what the earth has provided us, and cook with fire from wood and coal. 

Even if we don’t take those lessons and adopt them as our own, it has made me think differently. I walk past the ten dollar shirts at Target and think about clothing waste. I pick potatoes at the store and wonder at the 4,000 varietals grown in Peru, and how I would love to do a taste test of them all. I light up my gas stove and wonder how the food would taste differently if it was cooked over fire. And maybe most importantly, I look at the scarf I bought from the Amaru women, the one with delicately stitched animals and patterns, and try to unravel the story of the woman who weaved it and what secrets might be inside the patterns and colors that she created with such artistry and grit.

Brooke Burroughs is an award-winning author of fun love stories about women with a heart for adventure. Brooke lives in Austin, Texas with her husband, who she met on one of her own real-life adventures living in India. When she’s not writing, she conducts experiments in vegetarian cooking, performs with a Bollywood dance troupe, travels whenever she can, and is frequently seen at the dog park with her Great Dane which is often mistaken for a horse. For more information visit her website at www.brookeburroughs.com