Adventures in Peru

”It’s very simple,” says Bruce Poon Tip, founder of travel company G Adventures. “If travellers go far, on long-haul journeys, they should go for longer.”
Poon Tip is talking to writer Kevin Rushby in Peru at the start of his 3,000-mile journey down the Amazon. Rushby is on a mission to see “how - or if - tourism can help with the huge challenges of social inequality and the climate crisis”.
Exploring less-known sites and communities - as well as staying longer - is part of the plan, and Rushby decides to trek to Choquequirao, an abandoned Inca site that gets the same number of visitors in a year that touristed Machu Picchu gets in a day.
Though the four-day hike is tough - harder than the well-trodden Inca Trail - Rushby finds that “the advantages of this smaller-scale trek are quickly apparent: local communities get direct financial benefit and the visitors are absorbed into their world, which remains essentially unchanged.”
Despite worrying that the experience would not be as powerful as its better-known alternative, he finds the opposite is true. “I sit on the steps, alone in the 'lost city',” he writes. “There are no voices, no selfies, no one telling me to move along. I lie back and watch a condor soar overhead.” A win-win for the traveller and the Indigenous people he visits.