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Published: December 30th 2008
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Inca wall in Cuzco
The Spanish built overtop of Inca foundations. Sensible in terms of efficiency. Senseless from today's perspective of preserving cultural heritage. The heart of the former Inca empire, Cuzco sits in a valley and you could call it the terra-cotta town. Seen from the hills, it's all red tile roofs and red adobe walls. At night the lights spread up on the hills like electric amber. The main square, Plaza de Armas, is large with a cathedral and a church. The former is massive, of yellowish stone - a real colonial construction. The streets in the historic San Blas district are very narrow with lumpy cobblestones that are round, not flat, so they're uneven and difficult to walk on. As Cuzco is built on slopes, these must be treacherous in the rain.
This is very much a tourist town so there are hundreds of hawkers and street vendors selling paintings, woven crafts, beads, jewellery, cigarettes, dope, or offering tours, massages, restaurants. Women in colourful Andean dress with llamas want you to take their picture for a few coins. On every corner someone has a blanket spread out selling crafts. Trains leave daily for Machu Picchu, blowing their whistles as they climb out of the valley.
You also find the remains of Incan architecture here. The Spaniards built on top of
Rich colour...
...at the open-air market just off the main square in Cuzco. it and it stands in contrast. Buildings whose foundations are of big, reddish stone blocks so carefully carved that in most spots there is no mortar. They fit together like a jigsaw puzzle but not in perfect lines like you see with contemporary breeze-block or brick construction. The stones are square or rectangular and are sculpted to adapt to each other's shape and size. On top of these foundations stand stuccoed and whitewashed walls, or walls of boulders cemented together that imitate Incan construction but without the care and finishing that the Incas employed.
Cuzco sits at 3 400 metres and for the entire time I was here I was short of breath, gasping like an emphysema victim. The reason I'd come here, however, was to see nearby Machu Picchu (pronounced Mah-choo Peek-coo), a place that really takes your breath away. Built on top of an incredibly steep mountain and abandoned before it was completed, it was discovered by American archaeologist Hiram Bingham in 1911. It has become the premier tourist site in South America.
On 24 December I took the train up to Aguas Calientes, the access point for Machu Picchu. The rail line follows the Inca
Trail, which many people trek for the adventure. It was the beginning of rainy season in the Andes, so I chose not to do the trek. The train chugged slowly through increasingly spectacular scenery with mountains and cliffs rising high above, walls closing in as light faded from the day, short tunnels and occasional stops on sidings to let past trains coming in the opposite direction. I arrived early in the evening at the village of Aguas Calientes, which is also known as Machu Picchu Pueblo.
On Christmas Day at 05h30 I caught the first bus up to Machu Picchu. Narrow dirt road of hairpin turns climbing an incredibly steep slope for about 20 minutes through Scotch mist: not just fog but not really rain either. Call it drizzly cloud.
From the entrance you climb. Anything you do in Machu Picchu involves climbing. What Hiram Bingham encountered must have been thoroughly overgrown but still exciting for him What we see today is a really well-maintained historic site that, thankfully, has very few markers to interfere with viewing and photography. Here and there you find discrete signs with arrows pointing you the way through the ruins. That's it. No
Anthropology student Carolina Cusi
Selling her macrame bracelets and necklaces in the open-air market, you could describe her as "friendly to the power five, sweet to the power ten." plaques or anything else to tell you what you're looking at. But with your entrance ticket they give you a map that explains things clearly enough and if you want detail you hire a guide.
As I walked through the site the ruins emerged slowly in the mist. Instead of being disappointing, this added a mystical dimension. At first I couldn't get the whole picture in one viewing and instead experienced the ruins one by one. But as the morning wore on the drizzle stopped and the sky lifted enough to provide complete views and some sunshine.
It's hard to describe the place and even harder to convey it with pictures. You have to experience Machu Picchu. The first impression is amazement at the geography itself. I'm used to mountains with distance from peak to peak and valleys between as you find in the Alps or the Rockies. Here, something other has taken place during erosion, so that what you see is a group of giant green thimbles standing tightly together. Because it's so unusual, it's no surprise that the Incas must have thought of it as a spiritual place. Just getting up here would be difficult for
Like a green thimble
This is the view from Machu Picchu of the facing mountains on the village side. people in sandals, although no real challenge to today's mountain climbers.
I began to think about how the people began to carve the place to create the site. I wondered about the first few months of work. No stone shelters, no flat land, no food available. Until some things had been built it must have been excruciatingly difficult on these precipitous slopes. Carving is really what they did. They didn't bring materials up the mountain to build with. They reshaped the mountaintop itself, cutting the rocks into blocks and fitting them together with that amazing precision to create their buildings, shaving layer after layer of the slope into terraces. Over the years they built terraces for farming, temples, dwellings and an observatory (solar, not stellar).
The summit of Machu Picchu is the observatory, known as The Hitching Post of the Sun. This is not a rock set on top of the mountain; it's solid stone, the peak of the mountain itself shaped into a tetrahedron that's lying flat, one edge for sacrificial llama's hearts, one corner for solar readings of the summer and winter solstices. I overhead a guide explaining that it's reputed to be an exceptional place
Machu Picchu Main Plaza
Grass, tree, mist and mountains. for energy and those who perform a simple ritual of rubbing their hands together in front of the apex and making a wish will see that wish come true. I've seen places similar to this elsewhere in my travels and am sceptical. But there's also no harm in trying. The guide said he'd done it and began to see the results of his wish coming true within two days.
Machu Picchu was never a city because there isn't enough room to support more than a few hundred people. I wondered if it was a place to live or a place to worship, meaning was it a typical community or one mostly of priests, acolytes and other support staff? Archaeologists say it was abandoned unfinished and that it wasn't much used because digs reveal very little of the artefacts they'd expect to find, such as coins, textiles or seeds and grains.
For a couple of hours I just sat on a rock and let Machu Picchu's energy flow into me, spent time meditating about the place and simply experiencing it. There is something about it that leads you to want to use words that are suspect in a world
Triangular shapes
Triangular shapes were important to Incas as they represented the three realms of sky (condor), middle (puma) and ground (snake). dominated by science and technology: magical, mystical, supernatural, spiritual. Call it that, or call it just the combination of extraordinary geography and amazing location to find such work and such structures.
I won't tell you the wish I made at the observatory, but I'll let you know if it comes true.
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