I grew up visiting Peru often to visit my mother’s side of the family where I fell in love with the history, culture, and became fascinated by the ancient architecture of long forgotten civilizations.
When I was about 10, we took a trip to Machu Picchu. Exploring the site was a lot more relaxed then, and I remember wandering off into some caves where I saw something small gleaming in one of the walls. Investigating further, I scraped out seashells embedded into the wall. At 8,000 feet above sea level! This blew my mind.