Allen Ginsberg visits

Machu Picchu
OMAR PÉREZ SANTIAGO
OPULENS MAGAZINE
On January 20th 1960, Allen Ginsberg flew from New York and landed at the Los Cerrillo's
airfield in Santiago. The poet was bearded and short-sighted, had dark eyes with optical
lenses and carried a backpack. Ginsberg told reporters ‘I’m here to have fun’, but the next
day a newspaper would write, perhaps maliciously: ‘I’m here to fuck one’.

Allen Ginsberg published his book Howl in 1957. Its impact on the literary world was like
that of a cluster bomb. Chilean poet Gonzalo Rojas sent him an invitation to participate in
a meeting organised by the Universidad de Concepción in 1960.

He stayed at the Pan-American hotel on Teatinos Street, next to the presidential palace La
Moneda. He went to Café Il Bosco, the bustling bohemian centre in Alameda. Il Bosco was
full of journalists, writers, night owls, cabaret performers, comedians and nightclubs
dancers.

The following day a skinny man, only 25 years old, appeared at the entrance of the hotel.
It was the poet Jorge Tellier. He did an interview which he published in Ultramar
magazine. Ginsberg travelled in a van to Los Cerrillos where a plane took him to
Concepción. The ‘First meeting of American writers’ was held between January 20th and
25th.

Ginsberg stayed at the City Hotel, famous for its parties, boîte and elegant rooms. On
January 21st he reads Howl in the auditorium of the University. In a letter he sent to his
lover Peter Orlovsky he writes that the central discussion was about the relationship
between art and politics. ‘Everyone expects the revolution.’ He wrote about the poet Luis
Oyarzún, whom he described as a ‘roly-poly philosopher’, member of a semi-secret queer
society. The writer Luis Oyarzún was then 40 years old. In 1954 he had been president of
the Society of Writers. He also meets the Peruvian writer, Sebastián Salazar Bondy,
director of the Institute of Contemporary Art of Lima. He invited him to Lima.

In the early morning of January 26th, Ginsberg and his backpack got on the train that
would take him further south. He wandered the wet streets of the cities of southern Chile;
Temuco and Puerto Montt. Then he returned to Santiago and met the famous poets,
Nicanor Parra, Jorge Teillier and Pablo de Rokha. He spent three months in Chile.

In April he went to La Paz, the capital of Bolivia, writing:

"How real is Bolivia? With its snowy Andes rising above the modern city, now that one is
in La Paz wich means The Peace in spanish."

On April 21st Allen Ginsberg arrived in Cusco. He spent five days in the city. Then he went
to the Machu Picchu area where a guard offered him accommodation in his hut. From
there he wrote to his boyfriend, Peter, describing the cliffs and snow-capped mountains of
the Andes. Ginsberg did not find what he was looking for: the sacred plant of the Incas –
Ayahuasca, the rope of the dead.

On May 5th Ginsberg went to Lima by bus. He stayed at the legendary Hotel Comercio, in
front of the Desamparados Railway Station. The hotel has a famous bar on the ground
floor, the Cordano bar. As in Il Bosco de Santiago, pisco sours were famous in the Cordano
bar. Ginsberg reads Howl in a tiny room of the Institute of Contemporary Art, just steps
away from San Martin Square, on May 12th, 1960.

Ginsberg hiked in the Peruvian Amazon jungle through Huánuco to Pucallpa. Pucallpa
reminded him in some city of Tibet.

There he drank the hallucinogenic ayahuasca.

In a letter send to Burroughs Allen Ginsberg described his experience in these terms:

‘Drank a cup -slightly old stuff, several old and slightly fermented also- lay back and after
an hour (in a bamboo hut outside his shack, where the shaman cooks) began seeing or
feeling what I thought was a Great Being or a lake that approaching my mind like a great
wet vagina was.’

On July 8th 1960, Ginsberg departed from Lima airport back to New York.

Omár Pérez Santiago