Special Guests - Paperback

Special Guests: Wacky and Wild Wellness Stories in Peru's Sacred Valley

When Terry Cumes left his career in educational travel to take over his mother's legendary wellness retreat center in Peru's Sacred Valley, he thought he knew what he was getting into. He was wrong.

Willka T'ika - "Sacred Flower" in Quechua - had been built from the ground up by his mother Carol, a South African expat who turned a rocky plot of Andean land into one of the most spectacular healing centers in the world. Surrounded by Seven Chakra Gardens, ancient Incan ruins, and a 1,000-year-old lucuma tree, it was a place where yoga teachers, shamans, executives, and spiritual seekers came to heal, transform, and occasionally lose their minds.

Special Guests is the hilarious, moving, and deeply human story of what happens when a Stanford MBA tries to run a wellness retreat in one of the world's most mystical destinations. Terry navigates ayahuasca ceremonies gone wrong, naked Russians in the Water Garden, Booking.com guests who are allergic to everything, French photographers who never deliver their photos, and a dog who can detect plant medicine energy from fifty meters. Along the way he wrestles with questions that matter: What does it mean to heal? Who gets to call themselves a shaman? And how do you protect sacred space in a world that wants to Instagram it?

Woven through these comic misadventures is a deeper story - of a man shaped by two remarkable parents, a surgeon-turned-sangoma father and a visionary mother who built a garden paradise in the Andes, finding his own path between Western ambition and ancient wisdom.

Funny, warm, and unexpectedly profound, Special Guests is the story of a man who went to Peru to run a business and ended up learning - from his guests, his staff, his dogs, and the mountains themselves - what it means to heal.