I´M AT: Hostal Izhcayluma, Vilcabamba. German-run, $8 dorm room including a wonderful breakfast, views over stunning scenery, an incredibly varied and beautiful garden that attracts exotic birdlife, bar, pool table, swimming pool, hammocks - the business.
Vilcabamba seems to have a reputation for attracting the esoteric of mind.
It´s the place where you can supposedly get San Pedro, a hallucinogenic drink made from a local cactus, used by shamans and the like. I didn´t see it on offer or even spoken about, but Vilcabamba did seem to be in the middle of a long trip.
Take the caucasian guy with mocassins who used to traverse the main plaza, veeeeery slowly, bleached dreadlocks tied into a pineapple above his head, sacks for clothes, his mixed-race children and wife walking a few paces behind him. Or Mike, a bloke from Norwich who´d moved here years ago, never to return, who ran a café in town, complete with a display cabinet of mystical ephemera and books on symbolism. Mike was a big drinker and weed smoker, as, it turned out, were most of his mates. His even stranger friend, Gavin, was an emaciated, 50-year-old Kiwi in a cowboy hat, who babbled manically about dark omens in the sky.
Mark and I were once invited back to Mike´s house after a night of drinking in the café, and we passed a carved potato pipe around Mike and his friends, through which we smoked a very baggy spliff. I was told the next day that I´d been listening to Mike eulogise about some guru for hours, nodding my head as best I could, but the memory is not mine. The night ended - as did all four nights in Vilcabamba - walking up the 2km pitch-black slope back to the hostal, fending off the farm dogs.
Another night, on the way down, our German friend Kristine and I bumped into a bunch of drunks who were swigging something from a water bottle. They waved us over for a chat and offered us a drink and, despite thinking this could be San Pedro, we both took a swig from their unmarked bottle. It turned out to be cane liquor, made extremely locally, and was so nice that I bought a bottle to keep me company during the forthcoming nine-hour journey to Peru.
For all that, Vilcabamba is absolutely, outrageously beautiful. Brown, rutted cliffs spill into gentle canyons below, butterflies drift like pollen on the temperate air, birdsong is light and trill, and the nights are warm. One day, before Mark showed up, a group of us borrowed a mountain bike each from the hostal and rode to the start of a three-hour hike to a nearby waterfall, which you had to slide your way through a guy´s near-vertical potato field to get to. I ended up taking the same photograph of the same beautiful view thirty times.
But the place had its teeth into me as well, for not only did I turn down a beer one dinner, I forgot to take up the pool challenge laid by two German girls. Anite, and your silent friend, Vilcabamba has a lot to apologise for.
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