Peru - Machu Picchu (day 5, part 1)
Originally published at BlackTabi Blog. You can comment here or there.
It’s taken me a long time to get around to writing this blog post, partly because I’ve been busy, but also partly because it was difficult to decide what exactly I wanted to say. In the end, I decided that the photos speak rather well for themselves, so I could get away with more photos and less dialog. Still, it was tricky to try to capture the majesty of Machu Picchu without feeling like I ought to post every single one of the hundreds of photos we took, so then there was time spent deliberating over which photos best showed our time in the ruins.
We took so many photos at Machu Picchu that I decided to split day 5 into two entries. Even at that, there are still going to be a lot of photos in this post - some of them are even super-sized for full effect. Aside from the photos, there’s even a cliff-hanging plot twist!
We had to board our train to Aguas Calientes pretty early in the morning, so we were on our way to breakfast before 6 am. Since the sun was up, I snapped a few more photos of the scenic Sol y Luna resort on the way to breakfast. This was the view from our cabin up towards the restaurant.
We made sure to eat a hearty breakfast, because we knew that we had a lot of hiking ahead of us before lunch!
Here we have scrambled eggs, french toast, fruit salad, a decorative bread, and the ever present coca tea. We didn’t realize before taking it that the bread was decorative - and hard as a rock! Oops.
After our quick breakfast, a driver from the hotel whisked us to the train station in one of the hotel SUVs. No mere cars for this terrain! The hotel looks cushy, but we were already edging our way up into the mountains.
At the station, we boarded our VistaDome train, complete with window panels in the ceiling so that we wouldn’t miss the great views. Our assigned seats were at the very back of the car, so we actually had the best views looking behind us at where we’d just been.
Our car had tour guides giving lectures in several different languages, but none of them seemed to be English. All the same, views like these didn’t really need translation and passengers rushed from window to window trying to take it all in. As the tracks stretched out behind us, we saw all sorts of different things.
Pastures that turned into terraces as they edged up into the mountains.
This river ran along one side or the other of the train tracks as we rode.
Small communities and farm buildings, houses and stores.
We kept an eye on the mountains, growing ever-larger in our dome view.
And we noticed that as we edged closer to the cloud forests, our view became increasingly lush and verdant. Gone were the dusty browns from Ollantaytambo!
A couple hours later, we pulled into the train station at Aguas Calientes, and a series of events set in motion so quickly that I didn’t have a moment to pull out a camera! Our guide met us at the train, and sent our luggage ahead to the hotel. We kept only the things we wished to take with us to the ruins. Then we walked briskly across town, over some precarious looking bridges above the street, produced our bus tickets, and found ourselves seated on a crowded tour bus on the way to the summit.
I could probably have found a moment on the long bus ride to pull out the camera, but I wasn’t near a window and the bus ride was full of sort of scary hairpin turns, so I concentrated more on not looking out the window whenever there were steep drops. The roads were so narrow that only one bus could go around each corner at a time, so when a bus traveling up the mountain met a bus traveling down, one of them had to pull over to let the other pass!
Eventually we did make it to the top without any of the incidents I imagined for most of the ride. After several hours of train riding and another on the bus, the first stop was the bathrooms, which were an adventure. Each use cost one Peruvian sole, and the line was enormous. Even in the women’s room, all of the toilets lacked seats, and some lacked doors. I instantly regretted commenting to Matt earlier in the week that I was disappointed that we hadn’t had any “international bathroom” excitement, meaning that we hadn’t encountered any facilities that were terribly different from those we’d had at home. These were a bit too different!
That finished, we met back up with our guide and prepared ourselves for the highlight of our trip.
As we approached the first entrance to the ruin, between a wall and a guard house, our guide told us about the rediscovery of Machu Picchu by Hiram Bingham in 1911. The ruin was not completely unknown, but had been mostly forgotten by all except a few people living in the area. Although his archeological background is somewhat in question, locals that we talked to all spoke of him with a touch of reverence, possibly because it was his rediscovery of Machu Picchu that helped to make Machu Picchu and the surrounding areas into the thriving tourist destination that it is today. In fact, the aforementioned winding bus route to the ruins is called the Hiram Bingham Highway!
We stepped between the buildings framing the entry path to the ruin:
and were almost instantly transported into a scene every bit as beautiful and breathtaking as photos would have you believe.
Seriously, wasn’t that worth the large image size?
To our left, up the terraces, we could see a guard house topping the steep incline. These terraces, like the ones we saw at Ollantaytambo, were used as the agriculture sector of Machu Picchu. Crops were grown on each layer, and inside the stones you’d find carefully layered dirt and rocks that create prime growing conditions.
From there, we could also see over to the residential and sacred districts. One area was full of small houses, while another had larger buildings that housed temples and workshops.
Most of the buildings are roofless and doorless today, but a few have been thatched the way that they would have been back when people lived here so that you can get a better idea of what the city might have looked like.
Sectors used as temples or housing for those with high status were built using the same techniques we’d seen in other temples earlier in the week. Carefully cut stones fit closely together to build a structure that was near indestructible. Lesser houses and parts of the city were built with rocks that were left uncut, but still fit closely together. In one area we walked through, the wall on one side was carefully squared while the wall on our other side was not.
The well-crafted stone and architecture helped to protect the ruin from earthquakes, which is part of why it is in such good condition even today. We saw some areas with damage like this one, but everything is in remarkably good shape.
The roofs were carefully slanted so that runoff fell between buildings, into these carefully constructed ditches. From there, runoff traveled down to the edge of each terrace, through the drainage hole left at the end, and poured out of the way into water collection areas or down the side of the mountain.
We also had the opportunity to see how the rigidly pieces rocks had been cut. Small holes were bored into the rock with specialized tools, spaced along the lane on which the rock was to be cut. Then, hot and cold water was poured into these holes repeatedly to stress the stone until it cracked along the convenient perforations, leaving a smooth break through the rock.
There are many sacred sites throughout the ruin, leftovers from a people who were religious, but also deeply scientific. We saw reflecting basins that are rumored to have been used to watch eclipses without needing to look directly at the sun.
We also felt the heat coming off of the sun warmed Intihuatana stone. At midday on each of the equinoxes, the sun stands directly above this stone, and the point casts no shadow. It’s believed to have been used as a clock or calendar, but perhaps also a sacred object that held the sun to its path in the sky.
The sacred district also houses the Room of the Three Windows (of which this is one), as well as the famed Sun Temple.
This grassy area was probably meant as a community gathering area. It’s built to help amplify sound when large groups are gathered here, and was used for large celebrations. Now it’s off-limits to visitors, and the llamas seem to know that they’re safe from being bothered here!
Speaking of those llamas, we also saw a fair amount of wildlife on our hikes. This little butterfly followed us around for awhile:
We also saw several of these little striped-head birds running around looking for snacks.
Many of these lizards darted in and out of the rocks, sunning themselves on the edges of precipices. I wondered if any of them ever stubbed their toes or tripped and went sailing off into oblivion.
The llamas were anything but shy, and seemed well-acquainted with the area.
Late in the morning, our guide left us at the restaurant on the peak so that we could have lunch and continue exploring on our own. The sun had come out by the time we finished lunch, so all of the bright green photos in this post are from our solo explorations. I was a little worried about getting lost in the maze-like ruins, but there were signs everywhere directing us to the safest paths.
For awhile, we just sat on one of the terraces and admired the scenery. I wondered what it must have been like to live here and have this view out your window all the time. Would it grow old and mundane, hardly noticeable as you went about your business?
While everything in Machu Picchu easily made up a neat, self contained city, it was hard to escape the glimpses of other things all around us. The mountains surrounded us, particularly the dominating Huayna Picchu (Young Peak), which was visible from pretty much everywhere.
We could also see far below, down to the river beneath us.
From one edge of the ruin we saw the winding Hiram Bingham Highway that we’d traveled up earlier.
We even saw another train go by, carrying more tourists. Little had we known earlier that we had passed directly below the ruins!
Some of the stairways looked like they led to terribly frightening dropoffs, but I was surprised to see that high up as we were, the terracing made everything look steep, but you never really had far to fall if you did lose your footing.
I’m not usually much of one for hiking, but even at altitude I didn’t have too much trouble in the ruins. The heights gave me pause a few times, like walking down this steep staircase where I made the mistake of looking over the edge before I started walking down.
Matt was in his element, hiking and climbing on anything that presented itself:
Meanwhile, I spent the day taking photo after photo, so most of the pictures of me look something like these:
We even managed to get a great “make your friends jealous” tourist shot with both of us!
After awhile, we decided that there was only so much grandeur we could possibly stand in one day (and that my face and scalp were turning an exciting shade of red as my sunscreen wore off), so we thought we’d beat the end-of-day rush down the mountain and head back towards our hotel. After all, we planned to return in the morning for the sunrise in the sun temple, right? We bid the ruins a last goodbye for the evening, and set off down the mountain to try locating our hotel without a guide.
As usual, I have far more photos than I can imagine fitting in a single blog post, but you can see all of the photos I’ve uploaded from day 5 in my flickr set for this day. Lots of photos of general scenery at Machu Picchu, but well worth a look if I do say so myself! Day 5 - Machu Picchu