Buzzards and Bananas Quotes

“This is what travel should be like. Yampara locals heading home from the market dressed in their Sunday best braced against the wooden tie slats or squatted on the truck bed their bundles tucked around them. It was a little microcosm of the market, of real Andean life with laughter, chatter, babies crying, mothers coaxing, people gesturing at passing landmarks in a language we could never understand and us nodding back, gracious locals offering us bit of pastries and other treats and us smiling in recognition of their kindness. A diaspora of Andean life shared under a bracing blue sky and a passing panorama.”
― George L. Ayers, Buzzards and Bananas: Fragments from my Journals Across South America - Peru, the Amazon, Chile and Bolivia 1977-78

“It wasn’t the high thin mountain air that took our breath away. Those stone steps led us up to a place unlike any other on earth. We were overcome by the vision spread out before us; a purely mystical embodiment of space, time, setting, and silence. Up here the noise of our fellow travelers was strangely absent, muffled beneath a mantle of quiet that permeated the mountaintop city. No one was immune. In that first view, in that first moment, every visitor absorbed the essence of Machu Picchu in reverent stillness.”
― George L. Ayers, Buzzards and Bananas: Fragments from my Journals Across South America - Peru, the Amazon, Chile and Bolivia 1977-78