Toby and I arrived in Lima, Peru on May 13 for a few days of logistical set-up for this shoot and then flew on to Cusco to meet up with our director of photography Vicente Franco, sound recordist Willy Ilizarbe and our fixer Veronica Perez Orbezo. We spent a couple of days in Cusco which were filled with last minute preparations, good food (after all, we knew we’d be camping for eight days and Peru is known for its cuisine) and all the dull but necessary stuff of pre-production. We even had to rush around tracking down emergency oxygen supplies as we were going to be above 14,000 feet for more than a week. Then we left the city of Cusco in two vans driven by Miguel 1 and Miguel 2 (henceforth known – inexplicably – as Pachín) for several weeks filming with the Q’eros community.

Along the way we stopped for a few shots of the construction of the Transocéanica carreterra. This is the first highway that will bisect South America. With several lanes running in either direction, this highway is bound to rapidly change western Brazil and southern Peru from a cluster of rural towns with slow and ancient Andean-Amazonian trade to a network of expanding modern cities. Theories abound here about why the highway is being pushed through this difficult terrain at an amazing 5 kilometers a day (by Peruvian government estimates), but the amount of timber and minerals coming from the southern state of Madre de Dios bordering Brazil is a clear indication that making travel more convenient for locals and tourists is not the primary reason. Forget Brazilian socialism and Peruvian “progress”, say the people here. The Amazon and the Andes are open for business and the only people seeing the benefits are “los grandes” – a local term like “fat cats”, well-connected businessmen and government officials.

While construction crews stretch and smooth this highway over the devilish turns and passes of the sawtooth Andean chains, local life continues at campesino pace. People who have slung their hay and wood and children onto their backs to walk grassy paths for centuries now find they walk the same route but on the precarious shoulder of the highway. Trucks fly by at reckless speeds, and buses can no longer pull over to let them on. It seems that in the design of the carreterra, the builders did not consider how the majority of people living in the Andes travel: on foot.