Who doesn’t want to see Machu Picchu? When we first began to discuss this trip to South America, the only thing I knew for sure is that we would go to Machu Picchu. We’ve all seen the pictures — it looks so grand, so mysterious… And indeed, it was. We will tell this story a little backwards because in this case, the destination was not the journey, it was the destination (actually).
Machu Picchu is a marvel. Unlike so many match.com dates, she looks just like her pictures, and she’s gorgeous. This well cared for world heritage site has something very special going for it, especially when compared to many of the other ruins in and around Cusco — it’s very intact. This is the real reason it’s so famous. The spanish and their catholic armies had no idea it existed, high in isolation on a mountains top, so unlike the vast majority of the other Incan ruins, it wasn’t destroyed of defaced in order to loosen the indigenous grip on their culture and religion. Good thing that.
They do a good job with the place. I had read that more than 30% of it was reconstructed, and I initially thought that they simply threw up some walls according to how they thought it looked. Not so, one only needs to look at the mortarless Incan stonework to see – each stone is carved to speck for an airtight fit, and each stone is shaped perfectly to the job, they simply picked up the stones and put them back as they had been.
Access is relatively unrestricted, and visitors can meander as they wish through the labyrinth of stonework, across grassy lawns (llama manicured!) and stepped terraces, just as we had in our many hours there. Sure, we spent the first hour, like everyone else there, trying to take decent pictures of ourselves there: IT’S MACHU PICCHU, not even the most cynical of you can blame us! But we got there at sunrise, and had the whole day to take it all in with all of our senses and all of our presence.
Sure, there’s a lot of people there. The gubment allows 2500 permits a day for tourists to wander its terraces, but it’s big enough that, now and then, you find yourself alone with one of the truly great places in the world. The jewel of Incan ruins, and the most marveled over destinations in all of South America.
Getting to Machu Picchu is no minor task. “Traditionally”, one does a supported hike of the Inca Trail, though I don’t really know where this tradition sprang from. Nowadays there are more and more options to get there “by car” as the tour agencies had advertised, and at good prices. There’s kind of a bandit option that we’ve heard more and more about involving a mix of hitching, walking, busing and cabbing between the small towns in the sacred valley, a trip that some friends of ours made. We took the “standard” route and booked the train from Cusco to Aguas Calientes (recently renamed Machu Picchu pueblo). We love trains, and splurged on the upgraded service that added panoramic windows and a a wonderful breakfast service to the comfortable trip up the Sacred Valley.
Aguas Calientes was not as bad as I thought it would be. It exists for access to Machu Picchu, so clearly it’s going to be full of hostels, restaurants and gift shops, but it’s a fish in a barrel situation here, so the pressure is low, and people seem to enjoy a relatively high quality of life. The little pueblo climbs the walls of its narrow valley, spilling out from either sides of a river, crisscrossed by footbridges. The tightness of the place doesn’t allow for motor vehicles, and it’s particularly fun to marvel at the constant pushing of soft drink laden wheelbarrows up these steep paths, restocking the inventory of every shop on town using good old fashioned sweat.
We had a few hours to kill before boarding the train for the 3 hour ride back to Cusco, so we took the opportunity to take a long slow walk through the cloud forest and along the roads and tracks heading out of town. We spent the rest of our afternoon wandering among the ferns and orchids of a family owned botanical garden, really talking in the humid warmth and treasuring the oxygen rich air we had been away from for so long.
