Machu Picchu

Here we are at Machu Picchu. It's April 22nd, my birthday! What a wonderful birthday present. Rain had been predicted for the entire week and we got blue skies every day. We felt incredibly lucky. We caught an early bus from the little town of Aguas Calientes and I held my breath as we went barrelling up the winding narrow gravelly road to Machu Picchu. It seemed like we took hairpin turns on two wheels and when we met a bus coming down the mountain we quickly pulled over to the steep side so it could squeeze by. I kept telling myself that hundreds of buses do this every day; that they're like the mules in the Grand Canyon that instinctively know where the edge is and that I've never read of a bus plummeting down the mountainside. Please let us not be the headlines tomorrow.

I loved everything about Machu Picchu. To get into the site we first had to make our way over a narrow rocky path with a steep drop on one side and I just had to close my eyes and hug the hill. But once we got into the ruins it was fascinating. We got there early before most of the tourists while the air was cool and it was still and hushed. The mountains around us were shrouded in mist. It felt mysterious and hallowed.

Llamas roam the ruins and we're warned to give them their space. They spit. Mostly they ignore you but if you annoy them you may get a nasty spray of foul-smelling cud in your face.

These ruins seems to have been homes. Thank goodness that the Spanish never discovered this city. They would have carted off the stones for their own buildings as they did everywhere else. You can see how pitched the roofs were. No one is really sure just what Macchu Pichu was used for. Maybe a religious retreat, or a palace get-away for the Incan king. Of the 135 skeletons found buried there, 109 of them were young women.

This is typical construction of the rooms. Behind Dad and our cute little LDS guide you can see the beautiful fit of the stones in the lower levels and the rough stacking that restorers did later. All the doorways are perfectly tapered and narrowed at the top and every room has those niches (for storage or religious icons) that you see spaced along the walls. All the walls slant inward.

I am amazed at the intricate and complicated pattern in the stones. The angles are cut perfectly and joined without mortar. You really can't slip a piece of paper between the cracks.

See how the walls slant.

What a view from your bedroom window.

This is a bathroom with running water under the hole near the back wall.

Look how the builders formed this wall around the existing natural rock. Pretty ingenious.

This stairway cut in hard stone seems to lead nowhere. There must have been a pretty good reason to work so hard to carve this.

Those Incans must have been half mountain goat. I've never climbed so much in my life. Everything was either up or down steep narrow steps that were sometimes as high as your calf and often with no railings to cling to. Our thigh muscles were quivering by the end of the day and for a week afterwards our legs hurt. But oh, it was worth it.

At the end of a great day we braved the bus ride down the mountain to colorful Aguas Caliente where we caught a train for the four hour ride back to Cusco. We sat across from a young Austrailian man and his English girlfriend who were traveling throughout South American. They had just walked the four day Incan trail from Cusco to Macchu Picchu and were going to catch a boat to float them down the Amazon river for a few days into the wilds of the rainforest. Oh, to be young and have strong leg muscles.

The Sacred Valley and Train Ride to Aquas Caliente

These are two views of the beautiful Sacred Valley in Peru, probably not much changed from Incan days.

We stopped at a little roadside market where we found this tiny little man with his llamas.

Ollantaytambo is a living Incan city on the outer edge of the Sacred Valley, the only Incan town where "time took a rest." Our guide grew up here and her family still lives in humble homes built atop Incan foundations. Entire mountainsides are faced with steep and narrow terraces used for growing crops. I can not even imagine the effort made by the Incans to create them. We were told that they had had a sophisticated and scientific system of testing over 3000 types of potatoes and 1500 species of corn on the different levels to find at which elevation they grew best.

These little boys were playing among the stones in the cold and wind. When they caught me snapping their picture they excitedly ran over with their hands out and posed some more, for coins. These children are street smart. Tourist + camera = Money, with a capital M.

From Ollantaytambo we boarded a train for a 4 hour ride to the tiny town of Aquas Calientes, the jumping off point for Macchu Pichu. We followed the rushing Urubamba river, gazed at beautiful rugged views, and spotted ruins everywhere along the mountains.

Whenever the train slowed down children would appear from out of nowhere in the cold rain to run along side, smiling with hands outstretched hoping that we would throw them money. I tried but couldn't get my window open. Despite their smiles it left me feeling sad for them.

Late that night we got to Aquas Calientes and found our tiny bare hotel room. We ordered pizza at a small restaurant that looked clean enough and afterwards wandered down the one main street. As we passed a brightly lit open restaurant the maitre de excitedly motioned for us to enter. Unknown to him, (maybe) two large, healthy looking rats were playing a game of tag around his feet. It's probably a good thing we'd already eaten because I wasn't hunger anymore.

We got back to our small dimly lit room and got ready to call it a day. It was obvious that the sheets hadn't been washed and there were little critters in the room with us so I decided that I would sit in the lone chair all night, rather than wonder what was in bed with me. That resolve didn't last too long and finally I turned all the linen inside out, lay down fully clothed, including coat and slept fitfully with one eye open. But it was worth it for the great sites we were about to see. More tomorrow.