It’s 5 a.m. on December 31, and Puno, a lakeside town in southeast Peru, is stirring. Coral pinks and tropical aquamarines creep into the sky. I gaze up at the rafters, tied with strips of llama skin. Closely following the dawn chorus of birds come the cries of children playing an impromptu soccer game by the railroad tracks. I watch them through the window. The game includes children of all ages, and the small children are swooped out of the action zone when the game moves their way. The one-room dwellings where many of these families live aren’t big enough for playing inside, so the kids are outside as soon as it is light.

The chullpas of Sillustani (pre-Incan funeral towers) sit high above Lake Umayo.

The traders, too, are already arriving and setting up their stalls on the sidewalk, first laying down the cerise and blue woven cloths that serve women as baby slings, backpacks and, now, a cloth on which to arrange trinkets.

We bartered with the vendors yesterday to buy yellow underwear, which we plan to wear at midnight tonight — a Peruvian tradition said to bring good luck for the New Year.

Before we start on the day’s adventures, we enter the dining room to find a table spread with red and orange cloths. The smiling staff of our hotel has prepared a cornucopia of breakfast foods: quinoa, oatmeal, maca, or wheat porridge, fresh mangoes, papaya juice, bananas, oranges, crusty white rolls, strawberry jam and strawberry yogurt. Tea in hand, I gaze through the picture window at the distant mountains across the lake.

We leave the hotel in a private combi, a tour bus, to go up the mountain and visit the chullpas of Sillustani, pre-Incan funeral towers high above Lake Umayo. The chullpas were made of immense granite blocks, shaped into cylindrical forms that rise as high as 39 feet (12 m). It’s astonishing to see these jigsaw-puzzle structures in which massive stones were fitted together without the benefit of modern lifting equipment.

The scenery is akin to that of my native Pennine Mountains in Britain, albeit on a much larger scale. Purple heather blooms, and tufts of moorland grass, bleached at the tips, wave in the slight breeze. Alpacas graze alongside sheep, and are accompanied by shepherds holding large crooks.

It’s easy to indulge the fantasy of being lost in time and space, of being back in a purely agricultural society. When we give an eight-year-old shepherdess some fresh fruit, she tells us her name is Vanessa. To me, the highlands seem like a great place for meditation, but I can’t imagine any children I know being content to be so alone with the sky, the mountain spirits and the beasts. I wonder what Vanessa thinks of all day long as she watches the herd.