7th Wonder

Cuzco :: Peru

The other Lost City of the Incas.

Places: Machu Picchu & Cuzco.

Coolest thing I did: Watched the clouds and mist slowly clear to reveal Machu Picchu, as a reward for walking for 3 days to get there.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The avocado was originally from Peru. How they failed to invent guacamole is beyond me.

Sometimes when you travel around for long enough you get a bit jaded about things having become too touristy, and being forced to say "no gracias" about once every 60 seconds or so walking around the streets of Cuzco to offers of massages, paintings and food doesn't put you in the mood for a proper adventure. However, you often forget in your cynicism that some things really do live up to the hype.

Walking for 4 days to Machu Picchu along the Inca Trail is one of those things.

Now let's be clear, since the government limited the numbers of people who walk the Inca Trail from infinity to somewhere around 120 a day the prices have risen, but so has the service. This is probably the poshest camping I've ever done in my life. Not only are you basically carrying your personal effects for the day, but an army of porters from the local area carry your tents, tents to cook and eat in, and everything else that goes in it. There's a chef that comes along, so you get fed about 5000 calories a day of really good food and the guides all speak several languages and are ridiculously knowledgeable about all things Inca. After the grunt work of carrying all our stuff in and out of Huaraz it was much, much easier.

The trek itself takes in many lesser Inca sites along the way, many cleared and reconstructed so you turn a corner and find terraces dropping down the hillsides right in front of you, or roofless fortresses sticking out of shelves carved into the cliff faces. I'll say this for the Incas: they had a flair for the dramatic in the placement of their buildings.

The second day of the trek is the only one that you would consider a serious challenge to someone of average fitness, with a 1,200m climb to 4,200m to a point called Dead Woman pass, which inevitably leads to a whole bunch of jokes directed to every woman that climbs it. However, the name comes from that fact that at a distance it looks like there is the upper half of a woman in profile sitting at the base of the pass, complete with what the guide liked to refer to as a "titty". This was also the day that one of the Brazilians in our group got hit hard to by the lack of oxygen and basically dragged himself up the hill in bits. Even with a serious hit of oxygen from the emergency supply he never really recovered enough and by the last day he was almost being carried. I'm glad even with my altitude problems at their worst I was never hit that bad.

The third day is a long one, but it involve many stops at Inca sites along the way and a very spectacular stretch through the cloud forest on the far side of the ranges as you drop down toward MP. The terrain over 4 days goes quickly from forest, to dry exposed hillside down to jungle on the other side. You've constantly reminded about how seriously the Andes divides the country and creates these micro climates, and why the Andes may well have been the only place outside Mesopotamia in modern day Iraq where man started agriculture independently.

The 4th day starts at 4am, with a climb up to the Sun Gate, the traditional first glimpse of MP that you get from the end of the Inca Trail. When we got there (basically last) pretty much everyone of all the various groups we'd seen over the previous 3 days were sitting at there, waiting for said glimpse. What we got instead was a cliff dropping into a perfect sheet of white. The sun came over the hill, shined it's rays down in the direction of MP and we were still waiting to see the damn thing. By 8am the guide decided it was unlikely to clear in the next couple of hours so we kept down the path towards our goal. It was probably almost 2/3rds of the way down before we got our first sighting of one of the New Wonders of the World.

Having seen many Inca sites on the lead up you think you're ready, but nothing really prepares you to see the huge numbers of terraces zigzagging down the hillside, overlooked by temples and living quarters and all watched over with rocky vigilance by the peak of Huayna Picchu. At first we were only getting either the citadel or the mountain not covered by cloud, so were frustrated in the goal of getting that photo that's appeared on a thousand postcards (and that you're probably already familiar with) but by mid-morning the cloud had lifted and we could see the whole thing.

And the couple of thousands of day trippers up from Cuzco or nearby Aguas Calientes. You get so used to sharing the trail with a select group who you've been meeting all along the way you get almost offended at your first site of someone else. It's amusing to see people who caught the bus up traipsing around in perfectly clean, brand new hiking gear for half a day while you smell like you've slept in your clothes for 4 days, mostly because you've been sleeping in your clothes for 4 days. By lunch time it gets almost out of control, so that you can't walk 5 metres without your way being blocked by a tour group who got there on a bus while they sit there and have facts bounce of them in about 9 different languages. I know it's something that everyone should be able to see, but at the time I strictly thought if you walked that long to get there the least they could do is limit the tour groups to an hour in the late afternoon, once I was done with the place. You get some funny thoughts.

As I was the only one in our group who had been warned, I was the only one who had bought the extra ticket to climb Huayna Picchu to get a view back over MP and all the way we'd just come since the morning. By the time I started at 11am the sun was blazing down on the side of the peak, and to be honest some of the steps came up to my waist. The whole thing would be made a little more manageable if you didn't have to stop behind really fat people who hadn't been warned that climbing hundreds of really steep steps would actually be hard, but I still managed to get up in a reasonable time for a 360 degree view over the valley below. What's even nuttier is the Incas built structures all the way up there, including terraces that I  assume were agricultural (because they all seemed to be agricultural, or retaining walls). That would have been a pain in the arse to get up there to water them.

No such problem in MP itself. There's a massive system of aqueducts that were used to irrigate the hundreds of terraces you see, and about a third of them are still working after 500 years of neglect, despite all the earthquakes and landslides since. This has led to some theories that the place was a large scale lab for cross breeding different plants to grow at altitude, as there isn't enough flat land there to feed a population the size the place probably had at it's peak. This is one of many, many facts that bounced off the front of my head that day.

So who built the place, and why? There's endless theories, but it's known that it was one of the later Inca sites, and it must have been fairly important, because when the last Inca emperor to resist Spanish rule led them on a wild goose chase out into the jungle he made damn sure to skirt MP and leave it undiscovered for centuries. They instead led them to the city of Vilacamba, some 100km away from Cuzco and had their last bloody stand there. So when the Spanish looted Vilacamba and burnt the place to the ground, MP survived nearly intact. With the notable exceptions of grave robbers, both local and foreign, they remained as such until a local farmer led the Yale professor Hiram Bingham up the hill and the first scientific discovery of the site in 1912. He had been on an expedition to find Vilacamba, the Lost City of the Incas, and assumed that with it's sheer size that Machu Picchu must have been it. He also carted off a whole crapload of Inca stuff to Yale and they remain in a museum there, much to the chagrin of the Peruvian people. In the last few years the demands for their return have rivalled those of the Greeks petitioning for the return of the Elgin Marbles from the British Museum.

The Andean people in general were crazy about lining things up for the cardinal points and having the light hit certain things during equinoxes, and that has of course led to a whole lot of mystic mumbo jumbo being speculated about the place. If I never hear another ageing American hippie talking at high volume about ley lines or the healing power of the earth it will be too soon.

Due to the high cost of the Inca Trail (due to the laws of supply and demand brought on by limiting the numbers) many people choose to do other hikes to get to MP, but I'm glad I did it the old school way. Besides MP itself, I think the highlight for me was the stretch leading up into the cloud forest, where the trail seems to disappear into the clouds themselves, with the wind occasionally clearing it long enough for you to see way down into the green valleys below. There's something otherworldly about walking through clouds that has to be experienced to be believed.

Jesus and the guinea pig

Cuzco :: Peru

A town that's more of a life support system for Machu Picchu than anything else.

Places: Cuzco.

Coolest thing I did: Took in the many buildings the Spaniards built by tearing down all the existing Inca buildings and using them as pseudo-quarries.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The pre-Colombian people of South America weren't literate like we understand, so they used big bunches of strings with knots tied in them, called quipus to record stuff. They had histories, maps and accounting information all encoded in the knots. Computer geeks dig that kind of stuff.

Even if you've never planned a trip to Peru, one of the only things you've almost certainly heard of is the jewel in the crown of pre-Colombian archaeological sites in South America; Machu Picchu. The closest town to MP is the old Inca imperial capital of Cuzco, so if you're planning a visit to MP, either on a day trip or at the end of the famous Inca Trail, you're going to spend at least a bit of time here. If you're like me, for the first time in all of Peru you're also going to get the feeling you've found somewhere spoiled by mass tourism. It's a stunningly beautiful town marred by not being able to walk the streets as a gringo without being constantly harassed by someone selling handicrafts, offering massages or trying to wedge you into their restaurant.

As I mentioned last time, I've had to spend a few idle days here acclimatising before starting the Inca Trail, so of course the first thing I did is spend Friday drinking practically no water, eating massive meals (you should have seen the mountain of fries that came with my half roast chook) and going out till the wee hours of Saturday morning. In order to prepare for altitude you should stay well hydrated, eat light meals and avoid alcohol, but man, how boring would that be?

A word of warning to anyone planning a big night out at 3600 metres above sea level - you get drunk really quick and the hangover is magnified by about 10.

I'm not sure if the indio influence is really stronger here than in the rest of the country, or whether it's just hammed up for the package tourists, but the streets here are thronged with women in traditional dress trying to sell you stuff made of alpaca wool that's usually woven into a design that contains llamas on it. For the first time in all of Peru I'm being confronted with dirty children begging and old people sitting in the gutter looking miserable. Again, I'm not sure if this is just because of the proximity of so much gringo cash but I do find it strange that you didn't encounter this kind of stuff in the north so much.

Most of the sites you visit in Cuzco are colonial structures sitting on the original Inca stonework (which was pretty sturdy), with the stones used mostly coming from the remains of Sacsayhuaman, the fortress that used to watch over Cuzco during the Inca days. The most famous of these was Qoricancha, which used to be the original Sun Temple, the holiest place in all of the Inca empire. When Pizarro was conquering Peru he once captured the Inca (emperor) and ransomed him off for a whole room full of gold and silver. Most of that was stripped off the Sun Temple and melted down by the Spaniards. When Pizarro took control of Cuzco for good he left his brother in charge, who donated the temple and grounds to the Dominicans, who pretty much tore it down and built a church and monastery on the foundations. Some of the original temple has recently been rebuilt inside, using descriptions provided by the early Spanish conquistadors (they wrote quite a few books on the Incas) but most of the stone is now being used elsewhere.

The main cathedral is a object study in how the native religions were co-opted into Catholicism. There is a famous painting of the last supper next to the main alter which shows Jesus and his boys chowing down on some cuy (guinea pig) and most of the pictures of Mary are basically a white woman's head superimposed on the body of Pachamama, the earth goddess. It was through this process that the Spanish managed to convert the natives to Catholicism. The patron of the city is also housed in the cathedral, Senor de los Temblores (lord of the earthquakes), a large wooden statue of a crucified Jesus that gets paraded around the town at Easter. The name alone should tell you the locals are fairly pre-occupied with the fact their city is knocked over and needs to be rebuilt every 50 years or so. The cathedral is full of holy iconography, a lot of it far more spectacular than the stuff in Lima, and in another nod to pre-Colombian traditions the Peruvians like their Jesus bloody. You get used to seeing the clean, sanitised European art of the Passion of Christ back on the old continent, but the indios were ever going to believe a man with nails driven through his hands  and feet was going to end up with a couple of neat blood spots on each wrist. These people used to sacrifice humans, after all. Much like Qoricancha, the cathedral was built on the site of the Inca's palace and used up all the stone that said palace used to consist of. All of this stuff shows just how brutal the Spanish conquest was and how the large percentage of the population who pretty much still look like they did in Inca times is able to retain a grudge against the white people who rule them from Lima.

So I've had my briefing and been given a lovely yellow t-shirt stating I survived the Inca Trail (I wonder if I have to give it back if I don't survive?) and tomorrow morning I'm finally getting started.