Sorry no pics today. Check my Facebook for the best and I’ll fix this when I get home.
We arrived yesterday (Tuesday– although I honestly have no idea what day it most of the time) afternoon in Agua Calientes (sometimes calling itself Machu Picchu City). Formerly a one horse town, it lies at the base of the mountain ridge upon which Machu Picchu was built. We handed our bags off to hotel porters and continued by bus twenty minutes up the winding road to the ruins.
There are a couple of things to note here. First, there are no roads to Machu Picchu, no airports, no nothing. Everything in this town comes by rail or by mule on the Inca trail, including humans. I didn’t elect to do that 4-day trek after I read about the 4000 ft assent on Day 2. According to several of my companions’ fitbits, we are averaging 200 flights of stairs a day as it is. That’s more than enough for me. Second, the government now runs the rail and bus service as well as the management of the ruins itself. So that means that we have scores of pieces of paper (each) for the bus up, another paper for the ride down, and another paper for the daily entrance. You know how they love to give you pieces of onionskin paper and receipts in the developing word to make everything feel official. And our assistant guide, Carlos, bless his heart, has the horrendous job of doling those out on a daily basis. I’m sure REI has learned from experience that we really can’t be trusted with too many of these important passes at one time. Oh, did I mention you also have to show your passport at every time you get on the bus or enter the ruins?
To be fair, it does run pretty smoothly but several of us have some efficiency improvement ideas we’d like to submit to the authorities — multi-day passes, an app telling where you are and what you are looking at amongst the ruins, etc. I’m sure we aren’t the first with these ideas.
Machu Picchu absolutely delivers on the hype and looks even more stunning in person than in photographs. Seriously. The size of the city, the dramatic terraces circling this ridge, the height and steepness of the mountains that ring the site, and the sheer remoteness leaves me searching for superlatives. It is stunningly beautiful, cleverly built, and ridiculously unsustainable. All combined, we learned that the terraced mountainsides would grow enough food to support 85 people while the city could house 600+. That means the rest of the food had to be brought in from wherever. I’m exhausted just thinking about it.
Our trip includes three days here — the first starting about 11 when we arrived by train, then all day today and tomorrow morning. That way, we can take it in bit by bit. So on the first day we got a solid 2 hour tour of the highlights (some rain), and then we climbed to the guard house late in the day to get the million dollar view of the ruins and the big courtyard, with Huaynu Picchu mountain rising sharply in the background. Group shots are from this day and they turned out pretty well.
As we all know, the victor writes the history so sadly much information about how and why the Incas did what they did has been lost. The Spaniards were more interested in plundering gold and silver for God and for King than in understanding, let alone preserving, information about the Incas knowledge of the stars, mathematics, language, etc. For example, we were told that although the Incas had no written launguage, they had very elaborate knotted strings systems like hanging tapestries, almost like an abacus for their history. But in a fit of rage for their unwillingness to convert to Christianity or some similar reason, the Cardinal of Toledo ordered them burned just a few years after the conquest. Now, both the elaborate weaving and anyone who could understand it are long gone. But on a karma-is-a-real-bitch note, both Pizarro and his number two where dead within 10 years of the conquest of the Incas which made them wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. Apparently, they had some disagreements about how to split the loot so the lieutenant killed Pizzaro and one of Pizzaro’s sons killed him. Hope it was a good ten years.
That is a long way of saying no one knows why Machu Picchu was built where it was or what it’s true purpose was. The only thing folks agree on is that it was not the Lost City of the Incas, which was discovered later but without the expected gold.
This next set of pictures is from our hike today to the Sun Gate about an hour’s hike higher than Machu Picchu and the entrance to Machu Picchu from the Inca trail.
I’m having some problems loading a pictures and they may need to be resized stateside so these pages will load easily, so thank you for sticking with me on this journey.
Let me just say this is really worth seeing.
Boonedoggler 