Empire of the Sun
We have been moving north throughout the andes, and from LaPaz upwards we knew there were archeological treasures to be seen. In Bolivia, we took a day trip out to Tiwinaku which is a site from a culture which predated the Incas. The main complex is divided into three temples/observatories. The first was a newly excavated seven tiered ziggarut with space on top for a double row of standing stones and a shallow pool of water for reflecting the starlight. The second was a dugout square with a monolith in the centre and carved faces around the walls, built for tracking the movements of the moon. The third was a walled plaza with bolivia's most famous idol, so packed with imagerary and meaningful symbolism I don't even have the patience to list. The Spanish Missionaries added their own flavor to the huge, sacred stone by taking a sledgehammer to it's face, carving a cross on it's shoulder and baptising it. It was the least they could do after ripping up parts of the temple for stones to make a nearby church, with which to further indoctrinate and destroy the local culture.
The day after we went to Copacabana, with many a Barry Manilow-related joke. Our timing was excelent as there was a fiesta on the next few days, ostensibly to celebrate some obscure Christian holiday but mostly to let off fireworks and drunkenly stumble around the town from mid-morning onwards. The town has regular automobile blessings with monks and holy water, I saw one drunk woman who must have been about 80 and in full ceremonial dress steal the 1.25 litre bottle of Holy Water (formerly Coca-Cola) and spray it all over the waiting supplicants and their vehicles with wild abandon.
Copacabana sits on the shore of the great Lago Titicaca, which looks like an ocean and would have me fooled but for the fact I was 4,000meters above sea level, in the andes, and inside a landlocked country. It's very beautiful and quite calm in a way my brain tells me that volume of water simply should not be. We crossed by boat the the Isle del Sol, a site of incan ruins and is, so ledgend says, also the birthplace of the sun. Huffing and puffing up to see this prodigious rock, we also found a few sacrificial stones upon which people and Llamas were/are ritually killed as offerings. From the north point, we walked over the back of the island's volcanic ridges to a settlement to the south which had amazing 270 degree views of the ancient stone terraces and lush hills sharply rising out of the anomolious turquise lake.
Leaving Bolivia sweet Bolivia for Peru took us all day. We arrived in a town called Cusco where we are still staying. The city was the Inca capital for most of it's empire, the layout itself being shaped like a Puma with an ancient stone fortress whose name is homophoniously 'Sexy Woman' being the jagged teeth. One thing I've learned about the Inca kings is that they put a lot more though into what they were building that we do. The most sacred temple, the temple of the sun, is still standing in the downtown area despite further spanish debasements - The christian cloisters they built over the top of them came crumbling down in an earthquake, leaving the Precolumbian stone Vatacan unburdened, having smugly shook off the far inferior architecture. Now it's a museum. We toured the sacred Valley, which was a span of land so rich and fertile it gives 3 harvest seasons per year and produces (to this day) a reddish grain unpronouncable to me which has 6 times the protein of meat pound for pound. We eneded the day catching a train to a small settlement called Aquas Caliente, which is at the very base of the most famous inca site, Machu Pichu. At 4:30 in the morning we woke and lurched out of bed to catch the pre-sunrise bus up the mountain to the entrance gate. It was foggy and cold, and also a little crowded with people of a similar notion. Going in (whilst everyone else inexplicably went straight to croud in a line at a different gate which opened an hour later, just so they could get a ticket to climb a different mountain, made lucrative by the absurd offer "first 400 free!") we hauled our fat asses up the Hut of the caretaker of the funerary rock to watch the light increase, the fog drift apart and the morning birds glide and spin and cartwheel as eventually it came into view: the glorious lost city, Machu Pichu.
My expectations were quite high as I had previously predicted it the most beautiful vista on Earth, but even with those kinds of standards I must admit I was pretty overwhelmed by it. Every new angle lent it a new charm, endowed by the scale and depth of both contruction and setting the endlessly repeated postcard images simply fail to capture. After about 2 hours oohinh and ahing at the still slightly foggy ruins/mountain, we took a guyide who showed us all the important places and provided us with the fun facts. That was interesting, but as soon as we were free from him we ducked and weaved our way through the academy district, and found a path leading down into an area it seemed noone but the gardeners ever go. Down some terraces and past a quarry, I found an old disused trail which led, through overgrown jungle, to a section of machu pichu which had not yet been reclaimed and was still just as ruined as they day it was found. Through the plantlife and up a staircase which was more a slightly angled wall with ridges than a set of stairs as I normally understand them let us under and then back up to the main ruins. We found a wild (as in, pre-domesticated) passionfruit plant growing out from one of the larger unkept rocks and had ourselves a tasty Inca snack!
Back up to the tidy grassed plazas and tourists, we came upon a group of Alpacas grazing on on of the World Heritage Site lawns. Seeing as everyone needs to show their passports to get in the single, well guarded entrance suddenly the dromedary bumbags of earlier travels in Bolivia seems to make perfect sense.
From the mountaintop we walked the old steps back downto the river which, upstream, leads to town, the trainstation and a good 40 mins at some nearby hotsprings and which downstream merges with several others and becomes the mighty Amazon, every single drop destined for a journey of several weeks until being let out into the Atlantic. We are back in cusco, well sated from our archelogical expeditions and now with only one though in our minds: the Incas left Machu Pichu and sought out greener pastures in the dense jungle of the Amazon basin, and we're going to follow in their footsteps.
The day after we went to Copacabana, with many a Barry Manilow-related joke. Our timing was excelent as there was a fiesta on the next few days, ostensibly to celebrate some obscure Christian holiday but mostly to let off fireworks and drunkenly stumble around the town from mid-morning onwards. The town has regular automobile blessings with monks and holy water, I saw one drunk woman who must have been about 80 and in full ceremonial dress steal the 1.25 litre bottle of Holy Water (formerly Coca-Cola) and spray it all over the waiting supplicants and their vehicles with wild abandon.
Copacabana sits on the shore of the great Lago Titicaca, which looks like an ocean and would have me fooled but for the fact I was 4,000meters above sea level, in the andes, and inside a landlocked country. It's very beautiful and quite calm in a way my brain tells me that volume of water simply should not be. We crossed by boat the the Isle del Sol, a site of incan ruins and is, so ledgend says, also the birthplace of the sun. Huffing and puffing up to see this prodigious rock, we also found a few sacrificial stones upon which people and Llamas were/are ritually killed as offerings. From the north point, we walked over the back of the island's volcanic ridges to a settlement to the south which had amazing 270 degree views of the ancient stone terraces and lush hills sharply rising out of the anomolious turquise lake.
Leaving Bolivia sweet Bolivia for Peru took us all day. We arrived in a town called Cusco where we are still staying. The city was the Inca capital for most of it's empire, the layout itself being shaped like a Puma with an ancient stone fortress whose name is homophoniously 'Sexy Woman' being the jagged teeth. One thing I've learned about the Inca kings is that they put a lot more though into what they were building that we do. The most sacred temple, the temple of the sun, is still standing in the downtown area despite further spanish debasements - The christian cloisters they built over the top of them came crumbling down in an earthquake, leaving the Precolumbian stone Vatacan unburdened, having smugly shook off the far inferior architecture. Now it's a museum. We toured the sacred Valley, which was a span of land so rich and fertile it gives 3 harvest seasons per year and produces (to this day) a reddish grain unpronouncable to me which has 6 times the protein of meat pound for pound. We eneded the day catching a train to a small settlement called Aquas Caliente, which is at the very base of the most famous inca site, Machu Pichu. At 4:30 in the morning we woke and lurched out of bed to catch the pre-sunrise bus up the mountain to the entrance gate. It was foggy and cold, and also a little crowded with people of a similar notion. Going in (whilst everyone else inexplicably went straight to croud in a line at a different gate which opened an hour later, just so they could get a ticket to climb a different mountain, made lucrative by the absurd offer "first 400 free!") we hauled our fat asses up the Hut of the caretaker of the funerary rock to watch the light increase, the fog drift apart and the morning birds glide and spin and cartwheel as eventually it came into view: the glorious lost city, Machu Pichu.
My expectations were quite high as I had previously predicted it the most beautiful vista on Earth, but even with those kinds of standards I must admit I was pretty overwhelmed by it. Every new angle lent it a new charm, endowed by the scale and depth of both contruction and setting the endlessly repeated postcard images simply fail to capture. After about 2 hours oohinh and ahing at the still slightly foggy ruins/mountain, we took a guyide who showed us all the important places and provided us with the fun facts. That was interesting, but as soon as we were free from him we ducked and weaved our way through the academy district, and found a path leading down into an area it seemed noone but the gardeners ever go. Down some terraces and past a quarry, I found an old disused trail which led, through overgrown jungle, to a section of machu pichu which had not yet been reclaimed and was still just as ruined as they day it was found. Through the plantlife and up a staircase which was more a slightly angled wall with ridges than a set of stairs as I normally understand them let us under and then back up to the main ruins. We found a wild (as in, pre-domesticated) passionfruit plant growing out from one of the larger unkept rocks and had ourselves a tasty Inca snack!
Back up to the tidy grassed plazas and tourists, we came upon a group of Alpacas grazing on on of the World Heritage Site lawns. Seeing as everyone needs to show their passports to get in the single, well guarded entrance suddenly the dromedary bumbags of earlier travels in Bolivia seems to make perfect sense.
From the mountaintop we walked the old steps back downto the river which, upstream, leads to town, the trainstation and a good 40 mins at some nearby hotsprings and which downstream merges with several others and becomes the mighty Amazon, every single drop destined for a journey of several weeks until being let out into the Atlantic. We are back in cusco, well sated from our archelogical expeditions and now with only one though in our minds: the Incas left Machu Pichu and sought out greener pastures in the dense jungle of the Amazon basin, and we're going to follow in their footsteps.