About us

A family of guides from Cusco

Wayra Adventures carries the name of Wayra, the guide whose way of seeing Cusco we follow: more than 35 years walking the Inca Trail, the Sacred Valley and the high Andes with travelers from around the world.

Our story

Meet Wayra

Adrián Yábar Luna goes by Wayra, which means “wind” in Quechua. “You can also call me Wind,” he likes to say. Like a gift that lay dormant until his youth, the calling arrived at 28, in 1986.

Until then his life had been a string of adventures. He was in the ninth cycle of anthropology at the Universidad Nacional San Antonio Abad in Cusco, and he had worked as a bartender and DJ in a Cusco nightclub and as a driver for tourists. He loved the bohemian life, and his ease with English opened the door.

That same year, while his wife was expecting their first child, he accepted a job leading a couple from the United States along the Inca Trail. Machu Picchu was the final destination and they would pay him US$500. A friend who had lived in the mountains went with him.

The hike was hard. Even with 30 kilos on his back and rain that never stopped, he kept going. “Halfway along the trail I cried and regretted it. I said I would never go back. My feet were white and raw. I suffered,” he says today with a touch of drama, standing on a hill at Sacsayhuamán. Twenty-five years later he still tells visitors the story.

But the painful memory had a happy ending: “When we reached Machu Picchu and I explained it to the travelers, I felt good. I realized this would be my source of life.”

Years later he guided a group of 60 people along the Inca Trail without a problem. Only the first time had been hard, and now he does not think of doing anything else.

After he started as a guide, Wayra remembered his Chanca ancestry. What had been a minor detail in his biography became a value in his work. “If you have a solid theoretical foundation, you know English and you are a native, the world will admire you,” he says. With that legacy he studied the traditions of Andean communities and learned the rituals that travelers asked about, such as the Pago a la Tierra. He entered mystical tourism, but always careful of the fantasies he heard from colleagues: “Many people talked without any foundation, and that did harm to Cusco.”

The journalist who profiled him wrote that Wayra mixed three ingredients for his work: his anthropological knowledge, the advice he received when he studied tourism at an institute, and his personality. Cheerful and warm, he won the trust of the 30 travelers a day he led on average, and some of them invited him to Brazil, Argentina and Chile to talk about what he knows.

He believes that if you treat a traveler like family, fifteen or twenty more will follow. Guiding is a family trade: there are four tour guides in his family, and he has been preparing his own children to be ambassadors of Andean culture too. Wayra Adventures is how we keep that work going.

Does he think he already knows everything about Cusco? “Oh no, brother. For that I would have to live many more years. I have walked a lot. My knees hurt.”

In the press

Wayra in El Comercio

Wayra’s story was told in El Comercio, one of Peru’s main newspapers, on May 14, 2011. The profile, titled “El embajador de los incas” (“The ambassador of the Incas”), was written by Miguel Ángel Farfán for the newspaper’s Mil oficios series.

Read the article online (in Spanish)

El Comercio, Lima, May 14, 2011. Click the image to read the full article.