When we walked across the border bridge from Ecuador into Peru my daughter Rachel was aged nine years and eight months. For three years, since our return from trekking with a pony through Baltistan, she had been attending the primary school at our little home town of Lismore while I wrote a book about Northern Ireland. She was due soon to start her boarding-school career, which would preclude long journeys, and post-boarding-school she would naturally want to travel with her contemporaries, so I regarded this Andean frolic as our last major journey together. We planned to buy a riding-mule in Cajamarca, one of the main towns of northern Peru. Then I would walk while Rachel rode the 1300 miles (or so) from Cajamarca to Cuzco. We were not intent on following exactly the conquistadores’ route as described by Prescott – the nineteenth-century American historian – in his History of the Conquest of Peru. But inevitably, because there are so few routes through the Andes, we would be covering much the same ground – at much the same season. Francisco Pizarro and his men left Cajamarca on 11 August 1533 and conquered the Inca capital on 15 November.