Free The Coat Route by Meg Lukens Noonan

been diverted hundreds, maybe thousands, of times into ancient irrigation ditches, feeding the roots of potatoes and maize on high terraces and alpine valleys, then, here at the coast, giving life to acres of cotton.
    The traffic slows as the highway becomes Chincha’s main street. We have joined a slow stream of brightly painted motorized rickshaws. Schoolchildren in uniforms walk in groups past women selling bales of raw white cotton from open-air shops. Beyond the outskirts of Chincha, the sun finally burns through the clouds in an angel-song display of crepuscular rays. The shafts pool light on the sea and illuminate a rocky islet spattered white with bird droppings.
    This is, I remember reading, the Guano Coast, where the combination of millions of seabirds and a rainless climate guarantees that every surface large enough for bird feet will be permanently painted with dung. Early civilizations experimented with bird excrement as fertilizer and found that it coaxed astonishing bounty from the bad soil. Incan societies so prized the guano that the killing of seabirds during breeding season was declared a crime punishable by death. When, in the mid-1800s, European and American farmers discovered what Peruvian bird shit did for their crops, guano mining became a huge business. At the height of the forty-year guano boom, American and British ships crowded the rolling seas off the rock islands waiting—sometimes as long as three months—for their cargo holds to be filled with dung. The Industrial Revolution, the invention of man-made fertilizers, and the fact that the miners were starting to hit rock put an end to the guano rush.
    We continue south through Pisco, a town of about sixty thousand that is famous for the production of the clear grapebrandy that bears its name and is the key ingredient in the pisco sour, a potent cocktail made with lime juice and angostura bitters and topped with frothed egg white and fresh nutmeg. All along the road, locals have set up stands selling bottles of the liquor and advertising vineyard tours. The town was also briefly famous for being the epicenter of an 8.0-magnitude earthquake, which in 2007 shook Pisco for 210 terrifying seconds and nearly flattened it. Five hundred ninety-six people died. Three years later, the streets are still edged with rubble and the town is full of half-collapsed buildings.
    Just past Pisco, we head inland on Los Libertadores, an ancient two-lane highway. The road skirts miles of lowland vineyards, then ascends through yellow foothills, and eventually crests on the broad tablelands of the high Andes. After a few hours of climbing, we turn off the highway in the dark and drive under a lighted stone gate that says BIENVENIDOS A HUAYTARA . The simple stone hotel we check into has a large, brightly lit lobby furnished with blocky laminate tables and modular sofas, giving it the feel, oddly, of a seventies ski-lodge rumpus room. Behind the front desk, three clerks sit close together watching a game show on a tiny TV.
    Along with other members of the CONOPA staff who have arrived before us, we walk down Huaytara’s main street, cross a small park, and head for the restaurant where Andres had called ahead for reservations—a table for nine. The place is dark. Andres knocks, and in a few moments the door opens a crack and a man peers out and says something to him.
    “He says some other people came and he fed them and now he has run out of food,” Jane reports, interpreting the conversation for me.
    Next door is another café with a table big enough for ourgroup—and, it seems, plenty of food. I sense that there is a reason Andres wanted to go to the other restaurant, but it is eight-thirty and we are all hungry and cold. The guys order one bottle of Cristal beer and pass it with a small glass around the table. It’s a charming Peruvian tradition of sharing that goes against my twin American urges to both guzzle my own beer and remain germ-free. Jane, sensing