CUSCO, Peru — Everyone envisions taking a dream vacation, but what if the destination itself seems like a dream?
That’s the sort of experience that awaits tourists in the Peruvian Andes, where the so-called “lost city of the Incas” has been entrancing visitors since its “discovery” by Yale University’s Hiram Bingham in 1911.
Buses inch up the mountainside, navigating a series of semi-paved roadways by way of hairpin turns, until the first sight of it comes into view: Machu Picchu, the city clinging to the mountaintop, as mind-boggling as any photograph you’ve ever seen.
It was so cool — just so cool — my cousin and I agreed enthusiastically, craning our necks to peer out the bus windows and falling back on the same descriptors we’d been repeating at cathedrals and ruins and town squares packed with festival-goers throughout our week in Peru.
As our bus turned one more precipitous curve, offering a new view of the careful geometry of terraces and temples, my cousin momentarily paused. “I just have one question,” she said, turning to me, bearer of the guide book. “Why …?”
It’s an obvious question for anyone who approaches the seemingly gravity-defying city, which sits amid a cradle of peaks in the Andes, making one wonder if nearly 8,000 feet isn’t a modest estimate for its altitude. While I’m told the effect is enhanced for those who come upon it after four days on the Inca Trail, whose mountain-clinging terrain is similarly illogical, it wasn’t lost on us in our comparable comfort that the Incas, apparently, weren’t going for convenience.
My cousin, Adrienne, and I found ourselves in Machu Picchu in June following the World Potato Congress in Cusco, Peru. (Yes, there really is such a thing.) Adrienne, a doctoral candidate in plant pathology at Cornell University, was presenting research on root-knot nematodes affecting potatoes. I was tagging along.
We knew well before we met at Alejandro Velasco Astete International Airport that the day-trip we’d arranged to Machu Picchu would be the highlight of our week. So we booked our approximately $350 tickets well in advance, conscious of the steps that Peru, at the urging of UNESCO, has taken in recent years to curb the number of tennis shoes tromping through its “city in the clouds.”
While general admissions are capped at 2,500 people daily, it’s estimated other types of tickets can double this number on a given day. Our guide book estimates we were two of more than 1 million who will visit this year.
To even get to Machu Picchu from Cusco was a nearly 5 1/2-hour affair, covering a shuttle, a bus, a train, and another bus, even though the two are only separated by less than 50 miles. Once there, we spent an efficient two or so hours exploring the ruins, starting on one side of the city, where the mountainside is sliced into neat rows of agricultural terraces, then following our guide into the citadel, where stone walls box off geometric rooms, temples, and plazas that tourists, for the most part, are free to explore. Machu Picchu isn’t a “no touching” sort of place.
Viajes Pacífico, our tour agency, hadn’t asked us about our athletic abilities before picking us up at our hotel at 4:10 a.m., and we saw enough young children and gray-haired tourists to assure us that most anyone, once somewhat acclimated to the altitude, can work his or her way through the site. But visitors are advised to be sure-footed: We spent a significant chunk of our tour balancing a strong desire to stop mid-path and photograph everything with an even stronger desire to not slip off a terrace and, as Adrienne imagined, “just keep falling.”
Archaeologists and historians generally agree that the Machu Picchu was constructed under the Inca leader Pachacutec in the 15th century. As we followed our guide on a highlight tour — past the alpacas grazing on the Central Plaza, under the shadow of the hulking Sacred Rock, and through the mysterious contours of the Temple of the Condor — we learned, frustratingly, that there’s really no good answer as to “why.”
Incan architects left no written record, so any answers as to what motivated the maze of walls on the mountain are speculative. It could have been spiritual ties to the geography and the cosmos. Or it could have been natural protection from enemies. Or it could have been both.
Our guide, Ruben, was frank: “This place is a mystery.”
The walls are a mystery in themselves: Their often non-rectangular stones are fitted together without mortar, shaped one to another so perfectly that they’ve withstood earthquakes and centuries in the elements with their trapezoidal windows and doors remaining precise. The stones are also massive, in some cases, prompting more questions about how they wound up there at all.
We’d come to appreciate the same sort of stonework earlier in the week along some of the streets in Cusco, which, although several hours journey from Machu Picchu by bus and train, was a similarly important part of the Incan Empire. It’s here that the Incas built and worshiped at their most important temple, Qoricancha, honoring the sun deity. We’d visited days earlier.
It’s hard to imagine — and at the same time constantly in the back of your mind — that the corridors that multilingual tourists swarm all day are the same ones that Incan residents would have used on the most mundane trips around Machu Picchu some six centuries ago, that the sweeping mountain views we saw framed in the three parallel windows off the Sacred Plaza would have been perhaps as ordinary a backdrop as the tree outside my apartment in Toledo.
Machu Picchu more than surpassed my expectations, which, after years of looking at photographs of its stone walls in Spanish textbooks, were already quite high. It would have been easy to continue marveling for hours. But for us, early afternoon meant it was time to board a bus that would take us back down the mountain to Machu Picchu Pueblo, a backpacker pass-through more commonly known as Aguas Calientes, where we burned a few hours shopping, eating, and exploring as we waited for the scenic PeruRail back to Cusco — the first leg of another lengthy and worthwhile journey.
We wouldn’t be boarding with answers. But we would be leaving satisfied.
For more information on Machu Picchu, go to visitperu.com.
Contact Nicki Gorny at ngorny@theblade.com or 419-724-6133.
First Published July 28, 2018, 8:23 p.m.
