The music of the Andes Mountains, however, is especially intoxicating. Played mostly on pan pipes and reed flutes, the ancient melodies lilt in the air like fog on the mountain.

I was in Otavalo, a Quechua village a few hours north of Quito, Ecuador, and had the chance to hear this music up close from the people whose ancestors taught it to them.

On my first day there, I met some musicians who invited me to a peña (folk club) at someone's private home. The club was inside, surrounded by a tall adobe wall. We entered through a low doorway in the wall and walked down a corridor into the middle of an open patio.

It had a stone floor and tables with chrome and vinyl chairs, and a small stage in the corner.

The hosts served guayusa from behind a bar. Guayusa is a home-distilled drink made from a local herb that has almost no taste. Small pitchers showed up at our table.

I sat with the musicians. They were from many different countries in South America, traveling around with their instruments. After a few rounds of the warm drink over lively conversations, they rose to take the stage.

They were dressed in regular street clothes with beads and macramé bracelets, and long, black pony tails down their backs.

They played traditional and modern music on guitars, charangos (armadillo-backed mandolin), quenas (bamboo flute), pan pipes and bombo (drum). Pan pipes peppered the sound, but the quena took over the melody, floating on top like a bird.

My friends played la nueva canci—n (new song), the political music of South America, songs by musicians-activists Victor Jara and Violeta Parra. Jara's hands and wrists were broken in a public display of punishment for his anti-government songs. He was eventually executed in a stadium with several hundred others during the 1973 CIA-backed coup that put dictator Augusto Pinochet into office in Chile.

When they finished their set, we wandered to another peña inside another residence, this one filled with locals dressed in traditional clothing - 5-foot-tall men in white pants and embroidered wool ponchos, borsalino hats and long black braids. The women dressed in black hand-woven woolen skirts with shawls folded on their heads and layers of beads around their necks and hands.

Their music was traditional, with families getting up on the stage to perform in front of one microphone that hung from the ceiling on a string.

They played only traditional instruments.

One family took the stage without much fanfare and remained virtually motionless throughout their performance. For their last number, they performed a melody I recognized. It had been recorded by Simon and Garfunkel: "El Condor Pasa."

I asked someone where the song came from and it was told it was very old, very traditional.

I wonder if Paul Simon first heard the tune in a peña, before recording it with Los Indios Tabajaras? Regardless, the Otavalans have the better version, simple and honest, as rural people usually do.