I am writing from Lake Titicaca, the largest lake in South America and highest navigable lake in the world, on the Peru/Bolivia border. It's my idea of vacation: a heavy dose of discovery and exploration even though I usually need a few days to recover when I get home.

The tiny island we've been staying on is remote --it has no roads or permanent electricity, and yet it is the eye of the Inca origin myth: the two peaks on the island are called Pachatata and Pachamama, Father and Mother Earth respectively, the hills of the sun and the moon.

Even though Inca religion is not my own, as sunset drew near my husband Javier and I found ourselves climbing up toward the peak of Pachatata, almost by instinct. It had the feel of pilgrimage.

At 14,000 feet, even putting on a sweater could leave me hard of breath, so a thousand-foot climb exacts a price. But nothing short of reaching the peak would do for us, no matter how many rests we had to take along the way. And if a man with a mule had offered us a ride I think we would have still chosen to walk. The journey was part of the experience of arriving at the top. Struggle is part if the satisfaction of arrival.

After the sun set, the pull of Pachamama across the valley became too strong to resist so we trudged our way to that peak as well, sitting with the dark expanse of the vast lake below us and grey band of the Milky Way rolling out across unfamiliar constellations shining brighter than I've ever seen them. It was hard to believe New York skyscrapers even existed. We sat there feeling very small but very connected.

I can't live in the luminous and thin air of Lake Titicaca, and I'll be home among the skyscrapers in a week, but as I write this on the freight boat idling its way back to the mainland, eating potatoes for lunch off of a pile that the laborers have invited us to join them in sharing, I feel that same sense of connection from the top of the mountain, something I can't put words to but still feel in my bones.

I guess that's one of the challenges of this vacation/journey/pilgrimage/life: to keep connecting the dots to make sense of how climbing the mountain of the gods and eating spuds with strangers (on a Sunday morning as it happened) feels like the same moment of Communion.