Trip to paradise revives the soul, opens the eyes

The main reason my trip north in March across the Peruvian border and into the southern Ecuadorian Andes was hotly anticipated was because of the heat itself. Piura was Missouri in July without air conditioning. If I'd ever sweat so much, I'd never had to look so good doing it.

By that I mean it matters what I wear to work these days. I'm not powdering my wig or anything, just slacks, a decent button-up and a tie, but without islands of cool to get us through, we all get hot and stay hot longer down here. It's justifiably ironic that I've become the perspiring teacher in short sleeves I would have cut on so lovingly in my youth.

Most everybody wants to ditch their day job at least every now and then for a heaven of their own imagining, don't they? After an all-night bus ride over the rushing Macara River up and up through pockets of cloud forest, I got my wish, finding myself chilly in shorts at dawn in Loja. A nearby village I'd just read about was beckoning.

Vilcabamba is now a mainstay on the backpacking circuit. Along with many other choice locales worldwide, but unique in its eccentricity, it is becoming a prime example of one of travel's most troubling problems. How to see a place, dream on it, perhaps move to it, indeed place our desire on its ideal and manage not to contaminate it in the process. It's a complex dilemma given the fact that humans have a historically strained relationship with paradise.

Nestled like a golden coin on the rumpled bed of the Andean spine running north to south through Ecuador, Vilcabamba is legendary. I was told Timothy Leary's ashes as well as 200 or so expatriates now call it home. The trickle began with a Reader's Digest article circa 1955 touting native longevity. Seems some of the locals had been living to overripe old age. You know the story: the air, the water, the mangoes, the tranquility.

Not long after, an American espouser of fruitarianism calling himself Johnny Lovewisdom founded his International University of Natural Living there, and seekers began finding the hallucinogenic properties of the plentiful San Pedro cactus as well.

Nowadays, along with the 60-year-old woman from Harper's Ferry, Va., I met who had just bought a large parcel of land hoping to turn it into a self-sustaining model community, the village is fancied by a former Apollo astronaut turned eco-warrior named Dr. Brian O'Leary. There's talk of UFOs in the crystalline sky, the healing powers of negative ions and the all-too-terrestrial carping about rising property prices.

At some point in the past decade, the quaint image of supposed 120-year-old men carrying outsize bundles of sugar cane to market mushroomed into shabby chic massage spas and weeklong horseback rides up into Podocarpus National Park, but to their credit, concerned people, however otherworldly their ideas, are trying to shape the area's precarious renown.

The fascinating thing about a place that becomes "the place" is the way it deals with its growth spurts. Vilcabamba seems poised at that tipping point where "out of the way" quite quickly becomes "along the way." For better or worse, the El Dorados of the mind, if not ever actually within reach, have their continually beguiling ways of appearing so.

I left refreshed, no doubt, sitting shotgun on the clear, sunny hour-plus ride back to Loja. We traced crumpled verdant mountains rising straight from the road. It was the sweetest spin I've taken in a while.

Good luck, Valley of Eternal Youth, Buena suerte y vaya con Dios.

Matt Wittmer is a columnist for the Southeast Missourian and an avid traveler and cyclist. He is teaching English at the University of Piura in Piura, Peru. Reach him at matt.wittmer@gmail.com.