I am sitting in an internet cafe in Lima, the leaden sky pressing down on the busy streets of jostling cars. I have had a cold for the last five days after being infected by Seb and my stay in the mountainous town of Huaraz, famous for being framed by the Cordillera Blanca where "Touching the Void" is set, was therefore curtailed. Im my boredom, Ive worked out how far I´ve travelled in South America.
As you remember, I started my trip in Buenos Aires and headed south across the arid, flat pampas, unsure of what the future would hold. Puerto Madryn and fishing escapades later, I found myself in the "land of mist and snow", Patagonia, gawping at glaciers and climbing mountain crags. The cold, bleak immmensity of the landscape got to me in the end and I yearned to head back to civilisation. It came in the form of the street vendors and sooth-sayers of Santiago, in the "cafe con piernas" and deep seats of Starbucks. My love for Argentina meant that I would cross back into the country of the gauchos twice on my way up Chile, visiting Santiago and the beautiful Salta. Mystery lay in the "magnetic" valley of Cochiguaz, near the Elqui valley and exquisite beauty in the star strewn mantle thrown above me. San Pedro was the tourist nexus of the north, drawing me in and spitting me out again within two days, my jeans a little more ripped from sand boarding and the valle de la luna. Trains have been a continual disappointment in South America, and Calama was no exception. It wasn´t a lurching steam engine that awaited me, but prostitutes on street corners and an Italian with a beard who went by the name of Alberto.
"Dawn in russet mantle clad" walked not "oer dawn of yon high eastern hill", but over the rosy, rotund faces of the Bolivian women in their top hats, my most enduring memory of Bolivia. The mountains of salt led on to Tupiza and Tarija, nearly falling off a horse and sampling some foul Bolivian wine. Refreshed, I travelled on to Potosi and the bowels of hell, only to emerge suffocated and humbled. The white walls of Sucre provided the perfect setting for independence celebrations and prepared me for the din of La Paz`s streets, "the shanghai of the Americas". The cross into Peru was imperceptible, both of the Andean peoples of Lake Titicaca descending from the Tiahuanaco tribe. Enjoying David´s company, I gained an interesting insight of how people live on the islands of Uros, Amantani and Taquile, so different from Puno where people entice you into their hostels in the hope of foisting a sub-standard tour upon you.
Arequipa was a pleasure, Cusco a chore. The first was as elegant and relaxing as the second was vulgar and stressful. It was made up for though, by the first sight of Machu Picchu as the sun rose over the surrounding mountains that had lain inviolate for so many centuries before the arrival of Bingham. Much of the area did not even appear on the map of the famous Italian cartographer, Raimondi. I have travelled progressively more slowly as time has passed, and by the end I was content to just keep on keeping on.
Argentina was my favourite country, but does not compare to Bolivia in terms of difference and "culture shock". The people of Madagascar seemed more akin to Europeans than the Quechuan speaking locals of Uyuni or La Paz. In all, I have travelled 13,000KM across dry pampa, silken grass land, barren mountains and icy precipices. The sand dunes of the Chilean and Peruvian coast would seem to stretch on forever and then suddenly give way to snow-capped peaks and green foliage. The pampas north of La Paz was an even greater contrast, home to flitting kingfishers, parrots, dolphins and caimans.
I´ll certainly miss the four sol dinners (though Ive eaten too few and am surely running low on funds), the staggeringly high, six thousand metre mountains, meeting new people at every destination and the feeling of freedom you experience when you pack up you meagre belongings and get back on the road. In terms of culinary highlights, the steak of Argentina stands out, as does the ice-cream of Bariloche, the humitas of Bolivia, Israeli food in La Paz and above all, Cappricio cafe in Arequipa where oozing slabs of artery blocking chocolate cake would be served up with nonchalance.A place to be remembered and its not even in the Lonely Planet.
The smelly socks will not be missed, though, nor the swiss-cheese trainers and jeans that haven´t bear the scars of chimichurri sauce and ceviche juice. I believe some bugs may have found a willing home there. The bread here in South America is nothing short of crap; a sort of sweet, crumbly dough that doesn´t bear up well to the rigours of jam spreading. God knows why they have a word for homemeal bread, pan integral, because nobody eats any. To be added to this growing list are holes in the ground where you are expected to urinate, toilets without seats, carrying toilet paper around in your bag wherever you go, supermarkets that don´t cater to the individual, pharmacies that refuse to sell plasters, illegal driving, continual strikes, contempt for the Gringo, poor water pressure in the showers, hair in the plugholes, marauding Israelis, laundries that shrink your clothes and people who have no sense of civic pride. It made me yearn at times for some sort of benign dictatorship that would make the buses run on time. There are no trains left to run on time.
As Orwell said, everything feels heavier in England and people with knobbled faces apologise for being pushed or jostled (apart from London, of course, the least English part of England. Will people be protesting in the streets about Britain´s complicity in the torture of terrorist suspects. I doubt it...the Ashes are a far bigger concern. It may rain, but its still home. TAKE ME BACK TO DEAR OLD BLIGHTY....
Thursday, 9 July 2009
Wednesday, 1 July 2009
Machu Picchu or Picchu? Cusco or Qosco?
Peru would be alright if it weren’t for the people, the women on every street corner with leering smiles who entice you into their “massage parlour” with calls of “mister, mister, massache”, the taxi drivers and tour operators who brazenly lie to you, the bus drivers who let their country go to the shit in order to protect their own narrow interest. The people who jeer at you and call you “gringo” with a contempt that you would reserve for the lowliest of beings, while relying on your money to survive, the greasy haired libertines who grab at you as you walk down the street and whisper “You want weed man, coke?”. Of course, these people comprise only a small proportion of the population, but they do enough to take the shine off a city that should overwhelm a tourist with its culture, elegance and heritage.
“Cusco”, a perversion of the Quechuan word “Qosco” was literally the heart or navel of the Tihuantinsuyo (Popularly known as the Inca empire), the four districts of which stretched to the north into modern day Columbia, to the south into Chile and Argentina, to the East into the Amazon and to the West to the coast. The word “Inca” only refers to the head of the tribe, a descendant of the sun God Inti. Under the reign of the Inca, Pachacutec, Incan lands were transformed from a tiny collection of small villages and hamlets into a vast, sweeping empire containing tens of thousands of people who owed homage to the Inca and worshipped the sun God in the ceremony, Inti Raymi. The creative force of this empire was concentrated on Qosco. Pachacutec remodeled the city, building upon the stonework of earlier inhabitants and turning the modest Temple of the Sun into Koricancha, or temple of gold. Much of this spectacular work can still be seen today in walls and fortifications that have borne the winds and rain of half a millennium and today support a modern city. I stayed in the artsy district of San Blas and every day, when walking to the Plaza de Armas, I would pass an exquisite Inca wall built in the expansionist style; hulking, irregular shaped masses of rock fit together seamlessly without the help of mortar and polished to create a shiny finish. This contrasts with an earlier style of rough hewn rock glued together with mortar and a later style of shiny, regular blocks fitted together seamlessly in uniform lines. The expansionist style seems to me to be the most ingenious and intricate. Without the help of the wheel, the Incas fitted strange shaped stones together so perfectly that not a blade of grass can fit between the seams, built the walls to withstand earthquakes and would lay the foundations for a modern city that pays little attention to its own roots.
Koricancha is a fantastic example of Inca masonry. When the Spanish arrived, much of the Sun Temple was dismantled, but the foundations and fortifications were retained in order to built a Franciscan monastery above it. The smooth, curving outer wall looks like a breaking wave and contrasts favourably with the clumsy Spanish structure it supports. Inside, two perfect chambers that are mirror images of each other hold niches where the Inca would have sat during the winter solstice, the sun shining on him alone. All the walls lean inwards and the two hunks of rock that form the door run horizontally from a trapezoidal lintel in order to spread the weight in a world that had no conception of the arch. Because weight could not be distributed more efficiently, all the Inca buildings I have seen are squat and made of monoliths of rock, suggesting that the city itself was made of low-rise buildings. Despite all the Inca remains that litter the city, it is difficult to visualise exactly how the city would have been, like seeing a stumps of wood where once a forest stood. The old centre of the city is reputed to be shaped like a puma, the head being the ceremonial site of Sacsayhuaman where the Festival of the Sun, Inti Raymi, would be held. Outside the city walls, fields and terraces would have stretched off into the distance, feeding Qosco and the rest of the empire. Probably because they lived in temporary dwellings, the ordinary farmers and citizens of Qosco have left few visible signs of how they lived.
Yet within Qosco, it is easy to forget that you are living in one of the most historically important cities in the world. Locals prostitute their centuries-old culture by posing for photos with as many goats and llamas as they can muster, young children of nine and ten are forced to make a living by making up information about the Incas and feeding it to gullible tourists and one man dresses up as the founder of the Inca dynasty, Manco Capac, complete with all his regalia: colourful tunic, gold headdress, sandals and golden axe topped off with a husk of corn. There is a street branching off from the Plaza de Armas where you are sure to be offered drugs and at the end of the street lies homogeneously Israeli area, complete with Israeli signs and budget restaurants. Party hostels like The Point and Loki cater to the needs of the gap year English who want to get slashed and humiliate themselves without even leaving the comfort of their hostel and the staff refuse to speak to you in Spanish. In the centre of the city, you see nearly as many tourists as locals. There is little living in Qosco that is authentic, not even the name. Only some old walls supporting modern decadence. This is such a shame in a city as beautiful as Qosco, where two beautiful Mestizo churches grace the central square against an azure sky invariably spotted with billowing cumulous clouds.
Are modern Peruvians any more developed than the Incans? They may talk on mobile phones and use computers, drive cars and look into space, but their running water is polluted and many children don’t go to school or are forced to work at an early age in order to earn a living. Some are abandoned by their parents and stuck in orphanages where they are helped by willing tourists. On my Machu Picchu trek, I met a girl called Lydia who had volunteered in an orphanage in one of the riches cities in Peru, Arequipa. One day, someone proposed raising money to give the children new clothes to wear at school. The money was raised, the clothes were bought and given, but the next day they had disappeared. They had been sold for drinking money. The people are fired on by their own government and so demand their rights in transport strikes that paralyse and impoverish the country. Yet despite all their ostentatious catholic piety, many Peruvians have yet to learn to treat each other with respect. This became glaringly obvious when we went to watch Inti Raymi in the head of the puma, Sacsayhuaman. We arrived at 9 in the morning in order to secure seats for a ceremony that would begin at 2 in the afternoon and were soon heckled by a woman behind us who whined throughout the day about us being too tall and obscuring her view (Nobody can whine like a Peruvian). For the first hour of the ceremony, we were given an uninterrupted view of the parade ground where the Inca was being carried on a litter to a central platform where he would perform a libation with chicha (a fermented drink made from corn) and make a symbolic sacrifice of a llama. As the hill overlooking Sacsayhuaman became more crowded, you could feel the tension in the air and some people stood up to get a better view to a chorus of “Bajate, Bajanse”. When they refused, the people above threw bags of rubbish and stones at them, despite the fact that there were tens of young children in the crowd. Plastic bags rained down, one of them hitting me on the back. The people below retaliated and in the tumult, hundreds of innocent onlookers decided to leave, standing up and angering those above yet more. From then on, we saw nothing. An old man struggled up a slope and then collapsed onto his knees before fainting. He was quickly helped up by a woman who hauled at his limp body, pressing his face into the folds of her blouse and restricting her airway. He was laid on his back and people jumped down from the terraces above with their own home brewed remedy. One woman proposed putting alcohol in the man’s nostrils, while a young adolescent offered to perform CPR. Luckily, a young American medical student was on hand to save the day. Meanwhile, wave upon wave of Peruvians tried to push their way through the throng while an old man lay on the floor, perhaps about to die. Crazy.
My four day jungle tour to Machu Picchu was fantastic, despite a conceited, unfit guide who would lag behind the group and abandoned us the day before we went up to The Lost City of the Incas. Our tour included Rachel and Scott, sun brazed Californians who live in San Francisco and work as an artist and teacher respectively, the two Johns, funny, gay Canadians on a short tour to Peru and Lydia, a bubbly English girl who has been surviving on five soles a day since her credit card was stolen. The tour started with mountain biking on a road bordering the Urubamaba valley, the Sacred valley of the Incas. We sped round tight corners as we descended from a high mountain pass to humid jungle, at times leaving the road for a dirt track whose bumps unseated both of the two johns who tumbled over the handlebars. Yohan consoled us by boasting that he could jump 10 metres on a bike. The second day included a steep hike through jungle to an Inca trail, past a group of ailing Irish who often stopped to catch their breath and later collapsed into hammocks or vomited into toilets. The Inca trail was one of the most spectacular sections of the treck, with perilously narrow steps and nothing separating you from a two hundred metre precipice. Yohan performed an Andean ceremony to the surrounding Apus, or mountain Gods, which involved addressing each mountain in turn and stripping three coca leaves to the stalks. With this, we were granted safe passage all the way to Machu Picchu. Salcantay loomed ahead of us, laden with snow, but it didn’t compare to our first view of Machu Picchu the following day as we stood on a rickety metal bridge riddled with holes. A vertical cliff face rose up hundreds of metres to an Inca trail that somehow traversed the impossible gradient. On top of the mountain, the three windows of the sun temple were silhouetted against the sky. The boring slog along the railway tracks finished in Aguas Calientes, a bizarrely modern tourist town crouching below towering mountains covered with trees and tropical vegetation. That same day we braved the vertiginous climb up Putucusi mountain to the side of Machu Picchu. We clambered up a series of almost vertical ladders, struggled up the rocky slopes with quads burning and gained the summit for our first view of Machu Picchu. We saw it from ninety degrees, as if in cross-section, the mountain of Machu Picchu descending into a hollow where the ruins stand. A ridge takes up on the right where the ruins end and bumble along to the foot of Huayna Picchu where some ruins still cling. To climb this mountain, you have to be one of the first four hundred people to enter Machu Picchu, and so the following morning, we crawled out of bed at 3:30 and began to walk at 4.
The torch beams swung around crazily in the darkness as we walked towards the bridge in the pitch black. For the first ten minutes we met nobody, but soon picked up the trail at the start of the steps. Despite the hour, the air was hot and humid and we were all bathed in sweat after the first flight of steps. Unusually for Seb, he hung behind, nursing his blisters and a brewing cold. In the darkness, the steps seemed to go on forever and I had to grope around to find the next step. After an hour of hard climbing, we began to smell bacon wafting from the 900 dollar-a-night hotel next to the entrance to Machu Picchu. We were among the first people to sit down on the steps and easily gained admission to Huaynu Picchu. The city looked spectacular as the sun rose slowly over the surrounding mountains. Llamas munched lazily at the grass covering the terraces and we were surrounded on all sides by tumbling terraces, constructions that looked like rustic cottages and the smooth stonework of sacred buildings. Next to the steep steps, irrigation channels carry water down the hillside. The water is supposed to come from an underground lake and the flow is constant throughout the year. We were given a tour by a man called Percy that was less than illuminating. All we were left with was uncertainty; uncertainty about what Machu Picchu was, how it was constructed and who was truly the first person to discover it. Some archaeologists have claimed that the site served as a haven for the Virgins of the Sun because only female skeletons were found in the cemetery. Others claimed that it was a prison, but the consensus today is that it was a get-away for the Inca Pachacutec and was one of the last safe havens for Incas fleeing the Spanish invasion. The trails leading to Machu Picchu were blocked and the lost city was not officially found until 1911 (of the 1880s depending on whom you believe), although the local people had known of its existence for centuries. The problem lies with the Spanish who seeked to destroy rather than to understand. Contrary to popular belief, Machu Picchu does not mean Old Mountain, but is a meaningless name coined by the Spanish. Furthermore, no Spaniard ever deciphered the complex Incan cords where the key to understanding the Tihuantinsuyo may lie. They are multi-coloured strands of fibre with knots of various types and colours. The size of the knots, their colours, the space between them and the direction of twist may all carry meaning. That said, they may merely have acted like the rosary in the Catholic Church, reminding the Incas of important facts and dates in a primarily oral culture. Quien sabe?
The late afternoon was magical as the slanting rays of Inti picked out the strict contours of the terraces and the rising hulk of Huayna Picchu. Exhausted, we took the tourist bus back down to Aguas Calientes, a rip off of Starbucks and some extortionate Mexican food. Quite a day!
“Cusco”, a perversion of the Quechuan word “Qosco” was literally the heart or navel of the Tihuantinsuyo (Popularly known as the Inca empire), the four districts of which stretched to the north into modern day Columbia, to the south into Chile and Argentina, to the East into the Amazon and to the West to the coast. The word “Inca” only refers to the head of the tribe, a descendant of the sun God Inti. Under the reign of the Inca, Pachacutec, Incan lands were transformed from a tiny collection of small villages and hamlets into a vast, sweeping empire containing tens of thousands of people who owed homage to the Inca and worshipped the sun God in the ceremony, Inti Raymi. The creative force of this empire was concentrated on Qosco. Pachacutec remodeled the city, building upon the stonework of earlier inhabitants and turning the modest Temple of the Sun into Koricancha, or temple of gold. Much of this spectacular work can still be seen today in walls and fortifications that have borne the winds and rain of half a millennium and today support a modern city. I stayed in the artsy district of San Blas and every day, when walking to the Plaza de Armas, I would pass an exquisite Inca wall built in the expansionist style; hulking, irregular shaped masses of rock fit together seamlessly without the help of mortar and polished to create a shiny finish. This contrasts with an earlier style of rough hewn rock glued together with mortar and a later style of shiny, regular blocks fitted together seamlessly in uniform lines. The expansionist style seems to me to be the most ingenious and intricate. Without the help of the wheel, the Incas fitted strange shaped stones together so perfectly that not a blade of grass can fit between the seams, built the walls to withstand earthquakes and would lay the foundations for a modern city that pays little attention to its own roots.
Koricancha is a fantastic example of Inca masonry. When the Spanish arrived, much of the Sun Temple was dismantled, but the foundations and fortifications were retained in order to built a Franciscan monastery above it. The smooth, curving outer wall looks like a breaking wave and contrasts favourably with the clumsy Spanish structure it supports. Inside, two perfect chambers that are mirror images of each other hold niches where the Inca would have sat during the winter solstice, the sun shining on him alone. All the walls lean inwards and the two hunks of rock that form the door run horizontally from a trapezoidal lintel in order to spread the weight in a world that had no conception of the arch. Because weight could not be distributed more efficiently, all the Inca buildings I have seen are squat and made of monoliths of rock, suggesting that the city itself was made of low-rise buildings. Despite all the Inca remains that litter the city, it is difficult to visualise exactly how the city would have been, like seeing a stumps of wood where once a forest stood. The old centre of the city is reputed to be shaped like a puma, the head being the ceremonial site of Sacsayhuaman where the Festival of the Sun, Inti Raymi, would be held. Outside the city walls, fields and terraces would have stretched off into the distance, feeding Qosco and the rest of the empire. Probably because they lived in temporary dwellings, the ordinary farmers and citizens of Qosco have left few visible signs of how they lived.
Yet within Qosco, it is easy to forget that you are living in one of the most historically important cities in the world. Locals prostitute their centuries-old culture by posing for photos with as many goats and llamas as they can muster, young children of nine and ten are forced to make a living by making up information about the Incas and feeding it to gullible tourists and one man dresses up as the founder of the Inca dynasty, Manco Capac, complete with all his regalia: colourful tunic, gold headdress, sandals and golden axe topped off with a husk of corn. There is a street branching off from the Plaza de Armas where you are sure to be offered drugs and at the end of the street lies homogeneously Israeli area, complete with Israeli signs and budget restaurants. Party hostels like The Point and Loki cater to the needs of the gap year English who want to get slashed and humiliate themselves without even leaving the comfort of their hostel and the staff refuse to speak to you in Spanish. In the centre of the city, you see nearly as many tourists as locals. There is little living in Qosco that is authentic, not even the name. Only some old walls supporting modern decadence. This is such a shame in a city as beautiful as Qosco, where two beautiful Mestizo churches grace the central square against an azure sky invariably spotted with billowing cumulous clouds.
Are modern Peruvians any more developed than the Incans? They may talk on mobile phones and use computers, drive cars and look into space, but their running water is polluted and many children don’t go to school or are forced to work at an early age in order to earn a living. Some are abandoned by their parents and stuck in orphanages where they are helped by willing tourists. On my Machu Picchu trek, I met a girl called Lydia who had volunteered in an orphanage in one of the riches cities in Peru, Arequipa. One day, someone proposed raising money to give the children new clothes to wear at school. The money was raised, the clothes were bought and given, but the next day they had disappeared. They had been sold for drinking money. The people are fired on by their own government and so demand their rights in transport strikes that paralyse and impoverish the country. Yet despite all their ostentatious catholic piety, many Peruvians have yet to learn to treat each other with respect. This became glaringly obvious when we went to watch Inti Raymi in the head of the puma, Sacsayhuaman. We arrived at 9 in the morning in order to secure seats for a ceremony that would begin at 2 in the afternoon and were soon heckled by a woman behind us who whined throughout the day about us being too tall and obscuring her view (Nobody can whine like a Peruvian). For the first hour of the ceremony, we were given an uninterrupted view of the parade ground where the Inca was being carried on a litter to a central platform where he would perform a libation with chicha (a fermented drink made from corn) and make a symbolic sacrifice of a llama. As the hill overlooking Sacsayhuaman became more crowded, you could feel the tension in the air and some people stood up to get a better view to a chorus of “Bajate, Bajanse”. When they refused, the people above threw bags of rubbish and stones at them, despite the fact that there were tens of young children in the crowd. Plastic bags rained down, one of them hitting me on the back. The people below retaliated and in the tumult, hundreds of innocent onlookers decided to leave, standing up and angering those above yet more. From then on, we saw nothing. An old man struggled up a slope and then collapsed onto his knees before fainting. He was quickly helped up by a woman who hauled at his limp body, pressing his face into the folds of her blouse and restricting her airway. He was laid on his back and people jumped down from the terraces above with their own home brewed remedy. One woman proposed putting alcohol in the man’s nostrils, while a young adolescent offered to perform CPR. Luckily, a young American medical student was on hand to save the day. Meanwhile, wave upon wave of Peruvians tried to push their way through the throng while an old man lay on the floor, perhaps about to die. Crazy.
My four day jungle tour to Machu Picchu was fantastic, despite a conceited, unfit guide who would lag behind the group and abandoned us the day before we went up to The Lost City of the Incas. Our tour included Rachel and Scott, sun brazed Californians who live in San Francisco and work as an artist and teacher respectively, the two Johns, funny, gay Canadians on a short tour to Peru and Lydia, a bubbly English girl who has been surviving on five soles a day since her credit card was stolen. The tour started with mountain biking on a road bordering the Urubamaba valley, the Sacred valley of the Incas. We sped round tight corners as we descended from a high mountain pass to humid jungle, at times leaving the road for a dirt track whose bumps unseated both of the two johns who tumbled over the handlebars. Yohan consoled us by boasting that he could jump 10 metres on a bike. The second day included a steep hike through jungle to an Inca trail, past a group of ailing Irish who often stopped to catch their breath and later collapsed into hammocks or vomited into toilets. The Inca trail was one of the most spectacular sections of the treck, with perilously narrow steps and nothing separating you from a two hundred metre precipice. Yohan performed an Andean ceremony to the surrounding Apus, or mountain Gods, which involved addressing each mountain in turn and stripping three coca leaves to the stalks. With this, we were granted safe passage all the way to Machu Picchu. Salcantay loomed ahead of us, laden with snow, but it didn’t compare to our first view of Machu Picchu the following day as we stood on a rickety metal bridge riddled with holes. A vertical cliff face rose up hundreds of metres to an Inca trail that somehow traversed the impossible gradient. On top of the mountain, the three windows of the sun temple were silhouetted against the sky. The boring slog along the railway tracks finished in Aguas Calientes, a bizarrely modern tourist town crouching below towering mountains covered with trees and tropical vegetation. That same day we braved the vertiginous climb up Putucusi mountain to the side of Machu Picchu. We clambered up a series of almost vertical ladders, struggled up the rocky slopes with quads burning and gained the summit for our first view of Machu Picchu. We saw it from ninety degrees, as if in cross-section, the mountain of Machu Picchu descending into a hollow where the ruins stand. A ridge takes up on the right where the ruins end and bumble along to the foot of Huayna Picchu where some ruins still cling. To climb this mountain, you have to be one of the first four hundred people to enter Machu Picchu, and so the following morning, we crawled out of bed at 3:30 and began to walk at 4.
The torch beams swung around crazily in the darkness as we walked towards the bridge in the pitch black. For the first ten minutes we met nobody, but soon picked up the trail at the start of the steps. Despite the hour, the air was hot and humid and we were all bathed in sweat after the first flight of steps. Unusually for Seb, he hung behind, nursing his blisters and a brewing cold. In the darkness, the steps seemed to go on forever and I had to grope around to find the next step. After an hour of hard climbing, we began to smell bacon wafting from the 900 dollar-a-night hotel next to the entrance to Machu Picchu. We were among the first people to sit down on the steps and easily gained admission to Huaynu Picchu. The city looked spectacular as the sun rose slowly over the surrounding mountains. Llamas munched lazily at the grass covering the terraces and we were surrounded on all sides by tumbling terraces, constructions that looked like rustic cottages and the smooth stonework of sacred buildings. Next to the steep steps, irrigation channels carry water down the hillside. The water is supposed to come from an underground lake and the flow is constant throughout the year. We were given a tour by a man called Percy that was less than illuminating. All we were left with was uncertainty; uncertainty about what Machu Picchu was, how it was constructed and who was truly the first person to discover it. Some archaeologists have claimed that the site served as a haven for the Virgins of the Sun because only female skeletons were found in the cemetery. Others claimed that it was a prison, but the consensus today is that it was a get-away for the Inca Pachacutec and was one of the last safe havens for Incas fleeing the Spanish invasion. The trails leading to Machu Picchu were blocked and the lost city was not officially found until 1911 (of the 1880s depending on whom you believe), although the local people had known of its existence for centuries. The problem lies with the Spanish who seeked to destroy rather than to understand. Contrary to popular belief, Machu Picchu does not mean Old Mountain, but is a meaningless name coined by the Spanish. Furthermore, no Spaniard ever deciphered the complex Incan cords where the key to understanding the Tihuantinsuyo may lie. They are multi-coloured strands of fibre with knots of various types and colours. The size of the knots, their colours, the space between them and the direction of twist may all carry meaning. That said, they may merely have acted like the rosary in the Catholic Church, reminding the Incas of important facts and dates in a primarily oral culture. Quien sabe?
The late afternoon was magical as the slanting rays of Inti picked out the strict contours of the terraces and the rising hulk of Huayna Picchu. Exhausted, we took the tourist bus back down to Aguas Calientes, a rip off of Starbucks and some extortionate Mexican food. Quite a day!
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