Machu Picchu (continued)

Okay, so when I left off yesterday, Amy, Katie and I had just arrived at the gates of Machu Picchu. These gates are actually fairly depressing...someone paid someone else a shit ton of money to build the Machu Picchu Sanctuary Lodge, this terrible, large building right at the gates of Machu Picchu. The disturbingly rich can stay in this hotel for $1,000 (US) per night so that they can get dressed in their finest Gucci hiking gear and take the ten strenuous steps into Machu Picchu. Then there are bathrooms (for which you pay a sol for toilet paper), a snack stand (where a bottle of water costs 8 soles and a sandwich costs 25), and a few gates that the tourists are channeled through (you get stamps...Dawn, I got a PERU stamp!!!). Once you´re on the other side, you go around a corner and suddenly you are surrounded by ten foot Incan walls. You wind through a narrow passage and then the stone walls give way to an open hillside of terraces. Each terrace consists of a 7 foot stretch of grass that drops into a 3 foot stone wall, and together they cascade (well, as well as anything rectangular can cascade) down the hillside. According to the Peruvian guide we hired outside the gate, these terraces served as agricultural planters/bathrooms...when the Incans had to go they would go out to the terraces and fertilize them...interesting the things we remember about tours, eh? Anyhoo, behind these terraces stood stone walls, buildings, and stairways of various shapes and sizes, interspersed with green lawns and an occasional llama. We wandered to the Temple of the Sun, a cylindrical tower with an altar inside...I´m not exactly sure what purpose it served because our guide had a really thick accent, and after asking her to repeat herself 3 times, I finally felt bad and gave up, haha. I did hear though that the temples were made out of special stones called Inca Imperial Stones...each one was a perfect rectangle and they were reserved especially for the temples...all the other stones were kind of bumpy and...well, stone-like. It´s amazing though how the Incas were able to sculpt/move soooo much stone with very limited resources...I´m a dork and i get excited about things like that. :)

Sooo, other points of interest at which I could understand our guide...one was the living quarters where important guests got to stay...these were the only quarters in the city with bathrooms because the Incas thought it was impolite to make their important guests hike out to the terraces and shit out in the crops, haha. Anyway, these bathrooms consisted of a room with a hole in the floor that connected to the city´s system of water channels...hopefully not to the drinking water. This system of water channels was actually pretty advanced...I guess the Incas had two water systems, one that went through the city and one secret well underground that the Incas could drink from if they ever suspected that an enemy had poisoned their water supply. Cool, huh?

Other things that are noteworthy...the Temple of the Condor was really cool. This was a building in which a flat slab of stone in the ground represented a condor (it didn´t look like a condor to me, but I´m willing to give the Incas the benefit of the doubt since they were mighty and brilliant and whatnot). This is where the Incas brought their dead to mumify them/sacrifice llamas. Once a llama had been sacrificed, the spirit of the condor would carry the spirits of the deceased up into the sky. Then the mummies were places into rectangular crevaces in the wall until the Incas could bring them up into the hills to be properly buried. Once again, cool, huh? We also saw these circular reflecting pools that the Incas used to study the stars...apparently it was sacriligious for them to look directly at the stars, so they studied the stars through their reflections in these pools. We also went to the Temple of the Moon, the rock quarry from which the Incas got all of their rocks to build with, and a giant sundial the Incas used to study the sun. It was cool to hear about all these places, but mostly it just felt kind of magical to wander through the ruins and stare out at the mountains surrounding them and think about the people who used to live there and what their lives were like and what they would think if they knew this city they had worked so hard to build was now one of the biggest tourist attractions in the world and 2,500 people come to see what was normal to them every day. I wonder if our cities will ever be cherished and studied and picked apart the way Machu Picchu is today.

Sooooo, now that I´ve gone on a philosophical rant, once again I must stop for the day. Even more (I know, right?) to come.

written by

kfox on June 17, 2010 from Cusco, Peru

from the travel blog: Peru Adventure!

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Machu Picchu seems to be a wonderful place! haven't been there but will try

written by El Cid Vacation on June 17, 2010

A PERU stamp?! You have completely trumped the three stamps I just hiked into a very deep canyon to obtain, and as much as it pains me, I'm going to overlook it, because it's Machu Picchu. I expect tons of pictures and popcorn upon your return! And you're right...the Andes are newish, and still on their way up! :)

written by Dawn on June 19, 2010

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