Waking Among the Llamas at Pampa de Maras

At 3,800 metres, the night resembles no other you have spent. There is no traffic in the distance, no refrigerator humming in another room, no aircraft crossing overhead. The silence of the Maras plain is so complete that at first it unsettles, and after half an hour it becomes the reason people return.

You arrive at the end of the afternoon, when the light turns the dry grass gold and the mountains opposite have already gone pink. Dinner is served early and outdoors, with a blanket over your legs, because the temperature drops quickly and because it would be a waste to eat under a roof with that sky beginning to switch on.

The sky, which is the main argument

No humidity, no city light, no cloud in the dry season: the Milky Way reads as a solid band of vapour from horizon to horizon. No telescope is required, and no guide. What is required is a coat, a reclining chair, and staying quiet for a good while.

And at six in the morning, the reason you came

The animals arrive on their own. Llamas and alpacas graze at first light and, if the tent is where it should be, you open the door with coffee in hand and find thirty of them ten metres away, indifferent, chewing. It is not a scheduled encounter or an activity: it is simply what happens there at that hour, and that is precisely why it is worth it.

You return to the valley mid-morning, while the rest of the travellers are only just sitting down to breakfast at the hotel. There is something about having been awake before everyone else that changes the rest of the trip.