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| Machu Picchu - morning sun |
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| Machu Picchu - afternoon rain |
We just spent a wonderful week with our lovely friend Fiona, who met us in Cusco and traveled up the Sacred Valley of the Incas with us to Urubamba and Machu Picchu. I was especially happy to have her as a travel companion in the city because Luc had developed an aversion to Cusco after three circuits through the narrow cobbled streets on the big motorbike trying to find our campsite with faulty GPS coordinates (at one point he radioed me to tell me that he was giving up and getting a hotel in town).
While Luc was becoming increasingly frustrated in Cusco, I was getting the van more and more stuck in the muddy ground of the campsite. Two other camping couples, Christian and Veronika (mehrzeitfueruns.com) and Russ and Julie, were helping wedge me out when Luc finally arrived. There is nothing like a campground crisis to bring people together. Russ winched us out and we enjoyed all of their company for the next several days.
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| Christian and Veronika |
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| Above Cusco with Russ and Julie |
Cusco was the political capital of the Incas (AD 1100 - 1600), with their empire spreading in 4 directions, north to Ecuador, east to Bolivia, west to the Pacific and south into Chile. Standing on the shoulders of giants, the remains they left (however looted by the Europeans) are still awe-inspiring.
Above Cusco, and just up the road from our campsite, is the site of Sacsaywaman (sometimes mockingly pronounced Sex-y Wo-man by tour guides to help tourists remember the name). This incredible site above the city has the most remarkable of all the impressive stonework we've seen (including Machu Picchu). Much of the stone, especially the smaller pieces, was removed from the site by the Spanish and taken into Cusco to be incorporated into the cathedral and many catholic churches there. To get the original stones to Sacsaywaman - some over 120 tons - over 100 Inca subjects were apparently required to drag the larger stones from a quarry 3k away. (The Incas did not use wheels for building, though Charles Mann,
1491, cites evidence they knew of them because childrens' toys with wheels have been discovered). On one side of the site, there is a hill made out of the same volcanic rock in the shape of a rainbow, which was sacred to the Incas. This rock formation was not quarried, but sculpted with stairs and platforms that incorporated into the site.
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| Stonework at Sacsaywaman - curved corners |
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| A big, multi-cornered stone |
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| Luc among the ruins |
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| The rainbow shaped hill |
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| With Russ and Julie |
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| The round shape in the background was once the base of a tower |
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| Three rows of lightening shaped walls |
In Cusco, Fiona and I spent several days doing chores, drinking coffee and seeing the sites while Luc enjoyed the solitude of the campground with his sax and new quena (an andean flute). Much of the city was superimposed by the Europeans onto the original Incan city. The church of Santo Domingo was built right over the Qoricancha, the temple of the sun. An earthquake in 1950 revealed a lot more of the Incan masonry than the curved walls that had been incorporated into the church foundation. Now it is impossible to say after a visit if it felt more like a church or an Incan temple.
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| Fiona at the Plaza des Armas |
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| Plaza from the top of a church |
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| Stonework on the outer walls of the church/temple |
The Catholics, like the Incas, were really good at co-opting and incorporating the festivals, rituals and beliefs of the cultures they were subsuming. Churches here have blinking Christmas lights around silvery alters and many of the familiar saints look suspiciously like the local Quechua people. In the Cathedral (built over the palace of the Inca emperor Wiracocha) there is a painting from an artist of the Cuzco School complete with a Quechua-colored Judas, chicha beer, local fruits, and a big platter of wild guinea pig upstaging the dinner guests.
Another wonderful discovery for me in Cusco (thanks to Fiona, whose father is himself a photographer) were the paintings of Martin Chambi (1891 - 1973), a photographer from Lake Titicaca whose photographs of Peru remind me of Ansel Adams.
From Cusco, we traveled up the valley to Urubamba, where we were welcomed by Daniel and Beatriz, friends of friends. With nothing more than an email self-introduction, they welcomed us into their family. We were lucky enough to arrived when Daniel wasn't working - he is a circus artist who directs and performs a circus dinner theater 4 nights a week in a local hotel. We parked in their beautiful garden and enjoyed lovely meals with them and their two children and were even driven to the train station by Beatriz at 5:30 in the morning!
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| Daniel and Beatriz |
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| Fiona with another solo woman biker we met on the square in Urubamba |
We visited Machu Picchu on April 21, the autumnal equinox here. Like most visitors, we tried to manage our expectations, as there is so much hype (and expense!) around the visit. We chose to take an early morning train from Urubamba, arriving to a misty morning. We found a guide as we got off the train (or rather, she found us) and she whisked us by the souvenir stalls and coffee lines and onto a bus in Aguas Calientes for the twisty climb up the hill to Machu Picchu.
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| Our guide at Machu Picchu - 5 years of school in training for this job |
What is so astounding for me about Machu Picchu, looking down into it from a hill was we first arrived, is the sheer majesty of it. It is set in an incredible location (as are so many of the ruins we've visited) and the city seems to rise up as a human extension of the natural beauty of the place.
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| First view of the city |
Unlike many other Incan sites, Machu Picchu's existence was not widely known to western culture until the early 1900s. The forest overgrowth had both kept it hidden and uprooted much of the stonework. It has been extensively renovated, and it is now visited by 2500 tourists every day. Somehow it is still possible to be awed by its vast beauty in the company of 2499 other people.
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| Natural rock integrated into the stonework |
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| The only rounded structures here were temples |
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| The rain comes in |
There are many theories about the original purpose of the place. The most widely accepted is that it seems to have been a summer retreat for an Incan Emperor, which was later abandoned when the new Inca built his own retreat. Apparently each Inca Emperor left his holdings (and his mummy) to the safekeeping of his household. The mummies continued to live in their palaces, came out for feast days and participated (through their oracles) in important decision making. The new Inca was expected to build his own palaces, fend off pretenders, and create his own legacy, which may account for the incredible pace at which the Inca empire expanded.
(Aside: I wonder if the current tradition of a newly married couple building their own home rather than taking over an existing building may be related to this tradition - at least it explains why there are so many abandoned and empty houses in the mountains of Peru.)
Our friends Brent and Maya had told us that Machu Picchu was either intensely sunny (though always with misty clouds floating between the tops of the surrounding mountains) or rainy. Our day was a rainy one. Luckily, the morning was fairly clear, so we were able to take a few pictures. Once the rain came we were able to experience the incredible water engineering of the Incas. The water systems, both for irrigation and drainage, are still working, and kept the steps free of puddles (though not my clothes).
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| Stones carved into the natural rock |
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| Drainage |
Machu Picchu is divided into two main areas, agricultural and residential. The residential area includes apartments, a school for future leaders, and a number of temples. Our guide did a lovely job of explaining it all.
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| Temple in residential section |
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| School section |
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| Temple with organic rock in center |
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| One of the many vendor stalls by the train station (for Janique) |
I recommend
The White Rock by Hugh Thomson if you are interested in learning more about the area. He is a great writer, has an interesting story of his own, and effortlessly weaves history and his own observations. I have also heard good things about
Turn Right at Machu Picchu by Mark Adams, but have not read it.
We left Urubumba and our friends the next day, dropping Fiona off with her bicycle on the road to Cusco from where she was heading off to Bolivia. We miss her!
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| Fiona back on the road |
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| Luana selling bread at our fork in the road |
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| Her bread |
We drove down a beautiful valley through Abancay and back onto the PanAmerican. Once again, we drove through Lima very early on a Sunday morning, sleeping in a guarded truck stop just south of the city the night before. Ten hours after a 5:30 am departure, we climbed up to Huaraz in the Cordillera Blanca. it is great to be back in the mountains again!
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| Canyon terracing (lettuce in foreground) |
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| Lima Truckstop |
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| Back in Paracas |
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| Abancay campsite |
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| Road to Abancay |
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| Cordillera Blanca |
Fiona Sheil's blog: https://pigasusonwheels.wordpress.com
You can check out some of her father's work here: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/europe-landscape-still-scarred-world-war-i-180951430/?no-ist
