Today dawned absurdly early as it was a heavy travel day involving a 7:05 train from the hotel to Aguas Calientes, the town at the base of Machu Picchu, then a bus trip up to the top of the mountain itself. I had a funny little experience when the train pulled up (and by that I mean when the train literally stopped outside our hotel for Gilmar, the Lady, TBJ and myself to get on) as we were expected a “real sized” train, but the one that arrived was only 2 cars long. Our return trip will be on the famous Hiram Bingham train, but I had understood that the trip to Machu Picchu was on a normal Peru Rail train. This thing, however, was tiny, and I briefly thought that we were to have our own private train to Aguas Calientes. Thankfully (sort of), this was not the case and it was just a short train that had come up in the rotation . We got lucky on seats (which is its own story involving one of the people across from us who could have been the central casting version of “spoiled ugly American”, but luckily we scored) and TBJ absolutely loved the Thomas- and Chuggington-like experience of actually riding a real train, so the journey was quite pleasant. We also saw the character of the Urubamba change completely as the bottom dropped out of the river and it went from “swift but flat” to some of the most insane Class V stuff that I’ve seen. It looked ridiculous even from the train, though it did make me long for my kayak even if I would have been taking the “far right” line on most of the rapids.
Upon arrival in Aquas Callientes we had a short walk to the busses to Machu Picchu. This is a hell of an efficient operation, with busses running constantly, so we didn’t have much of a wait. It was, however, enough time to see that Aguas Callientes is exactly the same as every backpacker/hippy travel stop town anywhere in the world. It’s amazing how universal these towns are, and how similar the “local” crap that people sell is regardless of the continent or country. Nothing wrong with that, and I would have enjoyed the scene 15 years ago, but it’s just kind of funny at this stage of life.
After a 30 minute or so bus ride we arrived at Machu Picchu, dumped our stuff in our hotel room at Sanctuary Lodge (the only hotel on the mountain, and really the only place to stay if you have the opportunity), strapped TBJ in, and started hiking around the Lost City of the Incas. Gilmar really shined as a guide here, as he knew all of the touristy stuff as well as the kinds of TMZ-style history about the site and Hiram Bingham, the “discoverer” of Machu Picchu, that really makes a trip memorable.
A good example of this was a story Gilmar told that apparently Hiram Bingham, when first arriving at Machu Picchu, wrote in his journal that the trip was a waste of time and money as the only things there were a group of poor farmers. He was apparently ready to turn around until a little 10 year old boy led him down a stone path to what turned out to be the Sun Temple, at which point he realized that he was onto something important. Ironically, the four families of farmers still lived on the site farming the Incan terraces until Bingham brought in his full archaeological team, at which point they got irritated and decided to move somewhere even MORE remote. I would like to think that their descendants are farming some Incan terraces at some even more dramatic and beautiful “undiscovered” site somewhere in Peru. My guess, though, is that they’re selling Cusquena t-shirts in Cusco.
Another thing that Gilmar passed along that really blew my mind, but that we would not have learned otherwise, is that when the Incas decided to build Machu Picchu the site had just about everything you could ask for – fantastic stone, the right geography and even a reliable water source. What it lacked was fertile soil, so the Incas brought in dirt from the Sacred Valley floor to fill up each terrace. It’s impossible to articulate how absolutely insanely ambitious this project must have been. Whoever dreamed it up must have been a mad genius with unbelievable powers of persuasion (and an endless supply of slave labor), as carrying TBJ around on my back was thoroughly exhausting and he’s only 27 or 28 pounds; I could not imagine someone trekking up and down 4000 or 5000 feet several times a day carrying 50-100 pounds of dirt on their back. The effort and patience involved must have been absolutely monumental.
One of the enduring questions about Machu Picchu is “what was this place for”? According to Gilmar, shortly after it was excavated some European anthropologist apparently collected all the skulls he could find at the site, lined them up by size, and based on size along declared that 80% of the population were women. This spawned dozens of theories about the purpose of the site, ranging from a school for girls and women all the way to some sort of imperial brothel. Recently, however, someone more familiar with Andean people studied these same remains and determined that the original work was simply wrong, the site has a much more typical gender mix, and all hell broke loose in archaeological circles as people had to revise their interpretations of the site. I can’t tell you how much this cracks me up, given the hair brained theses that one sees on the historical purposes of just about anything people find.
Awesome as our visit was, after a couple of hours TBJ fell asleep in his backpack, which precipitated a speedy return to our room, a long nape, and a little work for your Blogger. One major difference between blogs from earlier trips versus more recent ones is that your Blogger and the Lady are now an old married couple with a kid. This means that our evenings have been pretty tame and we’re not having adventures anymore like being in the middle of fights between the Dakar branch of the Lebanese mob and a group of local soccer players. Tonight, however, we finally got a good story. We went down for an early dinner around 6:30 and around 7:00 the restaurant started filling up with a large Japanese tour group and quite a few other people. Shortly thereafter we were finishing up and an Inca band started setting up. Despite expectations and past experience, these guys were awesome, so we stuck around for a while and ordered desert. Suddenly the lights went out, a candle was lit, and the band and restaurant staff started our way singing “Happy Birthday”. This, of course, sent the Japanese into hysterics and we were assaulted by flashes in a way that I haven’t experiences since the paparazzi stopped stalking me. Since the next day was our 10th anniversary we sort of expected something to happen, but we went into our own hysterics when a cake was placed in front of the Lady with the inscription “Happy Birthday, Connie”! Halfway through the song the manager realized his mistake, but we all just rolled with it until the end and had a good time. In short order, Connie’s cake was switched for ours, and all was right in the world, but I am going to be laughing about this for quite some time and enjoying the fact that a little video study of your Blogger, The Lady and TBJ cracking up will live on in some Japanese living room for decades to come.
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