OUT OF A CLEAR GREY SKY

One day in 2007, a meteorite landed in a Peruvian hamlet. And it wasn’t just any meteorite. Hugh Thomson visits the locals and tracks the fall-out…

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, November/December 2012

ON A WINTER’S morning, the sun is rising over Lake Titicaca and steam is coming off the frosted water as it melts. The light at 13,000 feet is so thin that the Andean mountains around the lake have an eerie, insubstantial quality: cardboard cut-outs in a puppet play.

At Puno, the largest town in this region of south-eastern Peru, passengers are being piped aboard the Orient Express, with its leather armchairs and complimentary pisco sours, to take the high pass to Cusco and Machu Picchu. In lakeside boutique hotels like the $1,000-a-night Titilaka, foreigners and now a few well-heeled Peruvians are sipping muña tea as they contemplate a trip…