Machu Picchu

It was so sunny and beautiful yesterday when we arrived in Aguas Calientes. We went straight to our hotel and couldn't check in for an hour or so, so we sat at a little cafe and got the ever-present limonade (made of whole limons, whirred in a blender with water and sugar, skins and all. It's incredibly refreshing and delicious). We decided to head up to the mountain around 2pm, when it is supposed to clear out, as organized tours leave to catch the 3:30 train to their next stop.

It was very confusing. We had to buy bus tickets in one place, and a ticket onto the site at another place. We got conflicting information about when the bus left for Machu Picchu, and when the last bus left to come back to town. The ticket to Machu Picchu was almost twice the amount we thought, which meant $80. OK, you only do this once. You don't come here, you don't come this far, to let the ticket price stop you. It was just surprising.

Our weary nerves and all the confusion frayed us and we had to reorient ourselves to each other again. We'd had very little sleep the night before, and had gotten up at 4:45am, so I think we were just a little bit cranky.

We barely caught a bus; Marc whistled and shouted just as one was pulling away, and we got on. There were just two seats, and not together, but who cares for the 25-minute trip up the mountain. Then the man sitting next to me smiled and got up to sit in the other empty seat so Marc and I could sit together. This is characteristic of the people we've encountered -- they're friendly and engaging.

The ride up the mountain was by turns breathtaking and a little scary, as the road seemed wide enough for one bus quite easily, but not so much for two buses. And of course there were nonstop buses coming back down the mountain, so we were often squeezing past each other. This wasn't so scary when we were on the inside lane, but when we were outside and seemingly hanging on the edge of the road, on the edge of a mountain, it was a little pulse-increasing. When we got near enough to start seeing the site, and the other site much higher on a facing mountain, it felt like my mind just stopped in awe. We were at Machu Picchu.

First, the video:

When we walked into the site, we stopped on a terrace and sat in the shade of the terrace above, to just look. I think we both could've just done that for hours. The clouds on the facing mountain tops were constantly shifting, as was the light. The whole site was much greener than we expected. And the site itself was much more amazing than we expected. You know how you think about these iconic places for decades, building them up a little, and then they're not quite as awesome as all that? Machu Picchu is not like that at all. It exceeded my imagination, by far.

The stonework was really amazing -- sometimes square, sometimes here and there, sometimes straight courses, other times just cut to fit:

The Temple of the Condor was really interesting -- on the floor of that space was a sculpted representation of the condor's head, and the wall behind the head had two enormous rock faces going upward as wings.

head

wings

As amazing as the buildings and rooms and temples and terraces are -- and they really are -- for me, anyway, it was the vista that made it so breathtaking. Marc and I picked our way through the site, stopping everywhere just to look at the views.


There's this amazing massive rock that was carved to echo the mountaintops it faced. It is a near-perfect imitation. Those Incas were truly brilliant; one thing I meant to post earlier, from our Colca Valley trip, was that when they built a site, they first carved a stone model -- an exact model -- of their building site, so they could see how the water would flow downward, etc. Really brilliant.

It was sunny and a little cool, with a breeze that just kept the temperature perfect. The air was sweet and clear, the skies were blue but the mountaintops were shrouded in clouds, and it simply could not have been better, in any way. We soaked ourselves in it and stayed until the last buses were leaving. As we sat on a terrace, taking our final looks at the view, an enormous flock of green parrots took off from our right, wheeling and squawking as they flew past us. They were brilliant in the sun, and it seemed like some kind of dream.

And one final thing that happened, that you wouldn't believe unless you know and trust me: while we sat watching the mountains and clouds, a heart-shaped hole opened up in the clouds directly in front of us. It wasn't almost heart-shaped, or kind of heart-shaped. It was an exact, perfect heart:

I just don't have the words to describe this experience. Awesome, magnificent, amazing, incredible, breathtaking, puny little pale words.

blogging in the Andes

OK, this is surreal. I'm sitting in an internet cafe in Aguas Calientes, Peru, looking out the enormous window at the Andes and a huge statue of an Incan, listening to house music.

The particular mountain I'm facing has these beautiful yellow-green plants hanging on the mountain's face, with dusky red leaves or maybe flowers, I can't tell from here. The sky is blue, and the tops of the mountains disappear into clouds. It boggles my weary little mind.

Yesterday morning we boarded the 6am train from Cusco to Aguas Calientes, which is the little village you spend the night in if you are seeing Machu Picchu. Leaving Cusco:

We took the Vista Dome train, which meant we not only saw the landscape through the windows at our sides, we could look up and see the mountains above our heads. It was magnificent. We thought the Vista Dome would be cool, but I don't think we could really appreciate what it would be like.

Train ride: The movie!

As with everything else on this trip, it was better than we hoped. We wound our way through the higher ground of the Cusco area, then dropped down into the valley that leads to Machu Picchu.

Peru Rail did this really cool thing, very smart as far as we can tell. You know how you go up a mountain by zig zagging, hairpin turns, so the incline isn't so steep? Well, the switchbacks in the Andes end in straight track, then the train backs up and goes to the next path. I can visualize it if I blur my mental eyes a little. We weren't even out of Cusco when we hit the first one, so when the train started going in reverse, Marc and I were a little nervous. But no one else seemed to notice, and then we figured it out.

So Cusco is kind of dusty, but when we dropped down into the valley, the landscape changed so dramatically. It kind of looked like Louisiana, lush and with what I think are cypress trees. The homes were no longer adobe, but really did look like houses you'd see in the rural areas of Louisiana. There were tropical plants and it just couldn't have looked more different.

There were these large areas of paradise, it seemed to me. Acres and acres (well, here it would be hectares and hectares) of farmed land, crops planted in neat rows. Cattle and sheep grazing. Little creeks and rivers flowing past beautiful adobe homes. And of course gorgeous mountains all around. Gorgeous Andean mountains, some with snow on the tops, some with clouds hovering around the tops, some just jagged rock. It was truly breathtaking.

Rio Urubamba

fertile, beautiful farmland

snow- and glacier-topped mountains

random Incan ruins scattered everywhere

more snowy cloudy mountains

Aguas Calientes exists solely for the purpose of housing and feeding tourists, and selling them crappy tchotchkes. The hotels would be considered backpacker hostels anywhere else; the nicest ones are still pretty sad. But you don't come here for the hotel, obviously. The food is kind of uniformly ok too, and totally geared to tourists. Pizza. Hamburguesas. Mexican food. The odd guinea pig here and there. Free drinks pushed on you everywhere: the ubiquitous pisco sours, hard liquor, beer.
Somehow 2,000 people live in this little town. It just consists of little alley-sized streets lined with people hawking their menus, little shops with too-bright serapes hanging out front and lots of little dolls and gourds and bags and t-shirts, and hotels and hostels. This internet cafe overlooks the town square, which is the most uninteresting square ever. There is a church, of course, and in the center of the square is this huge statue of an Incan with outstretched arms and holding some kind of staff. A couple of little patches of green, with benches. And surrounding the square, restaurants. Like everywhere else we've been in Peru, everything, nearly every building, is under construction. It's been quite notable, the frequency of homes and buildings with rebar sticking out of the roof, as if they're just adding it, or building another floor.

Our hotel was really pretty bad -- we didn't expect anything great, given what we'd read in our guidebooks and on various travel boards....and they were right. What we hadn't really expected was the rooster outside our window that started crowing at 3am. He crowed, and he crowed, and he crowed, for hours. The view out our bedroom window:

Looking up

Looking down -- roosters and chickens and rabbits running wild

And general paradise vegetation

We had to check out this morning at 9:30, and our train doesn't leave until 3:30, and there's nothing else to do here. We decided not to go back to Machu Picchu this morning, so here we are.

miscellaneous catching up in Cusco

This morning we found our way to the train station to buy our train tickets for tomorrow morning's trip to Machu Picchu, which leaves Cusco at 6am. Just as with everything else, it went perfectly, no glitches. It's really kind of remarkable, like we've wandered into some paradisaical Twilight Zone (with the exception of our techno problems, of course). On every trip there are things that go wrong, plans that go awry, places that are much worse than we expected, hotels that are bad, something goes wrong. Instead, on this trip -- so far -- nothing has gone awry. In fact, we were watching the weather and it always said that it would be raining the whole time we're in Cusco, but it's been nothing but perfectly sunny clear weather. Cloudy in the morning, then sunny blue by 10am. Weird and wonderful. And the flights have been uneventful, too. No real delays, easy flights, very nice airplanes. Since most flights are 30 minutes long, there is no service; we climb, level off, then begin our descent. Quick quick. Presto. This is what it looked like as we started our descent into Cusco -- incredible geography:


So this is the first time on our vacation that Marc and I have gone separate ways for a bit. He's gone to the bank in the main square, which is an easy 10-minute walk downhill but a less easy walk uphill coming back. The street is a very narrow alley, with sidewalks on either side that are wide enough for one person only. And in places, it even disappears. Buses and taxis come hurtling down that alley, so it's always an "exciting" experience. While he's gone down to the square, I'm in the lobby catching up a bit.

Let's see. Last night we ate dinner at this little tiny restaurant on a tiny street. The name was Relic, or something like that (note to self-look it up later). It was one small square room with a blue wall, a yellow wall, a black wall, and a huge video camera in the corner. And the tv was blaring, I mean really blaring Spanish tv, which means cacophanic. It was hot, they had strong incense burning, and we were the only people in the restaurant. Still, it was Sunday night and the big meal here is lunch, so finding a good place for dinner was a bit uncertain. Marc ordered stuffed trout, and I ordered a vegetable tortilla, which is like a frittata. There were two young women working there, so when we placed our order, one went in the back room and started chopping vegetables. The other went to the store to get the main ingredients. And like most every other restaurant in Peru, they brought our meals out separately -- often 10 or 15 minutes' difference. In this case it made sense, since the woman was cooking our dinners individually.

WELL. The dinner was out of this world. Marc is always wary about ordering fish in restaurants because it's usually overcooked, but even he was blown away. The flavors were so subtle, with such depth, and the fish was very fresh and cooked just perfectly. Even his rice, which is often kind of dry and an afterthought, was moist and lightly buttered. There was a shredded beet and carrot salad on the side. My tortilla was every bit as wonderful. A family of 3 came in after we ordered, so once we had our food the cook started on those meals. And, as before, the other woman ran out the front door to go buy the ingredients. They did this for every meal we observed. It may be the very best meal we've had so far.

Our hotel is incredible. Our bedroom opens onto a lovely terrace, and you walk up a flight of stairs into our bedroom. There's an elevated platform by the huge window overlooking the city, with a small table and chairs and a little fridge. So we lie in bed and watch the sun come up and go down over the mountains, and the city lights rise and fall. They're beautiful, too, yellow and blue.

Cusco out our bedroom window

at night

how perfect, that sliver of moon

Of course, once we've walked up the hill from the plaza, then up the stairs to our terrace, then up the stairs to our bedroom, we're hot and panting and have to lie down.

hotel front door

our terrace

more of the view from our bedroom

The hotel lobby is really charming. I sit here to write these posts and listen to Peruvian music (which isn't only pan pipes, of course). They have complimentary coffee and hot water for tea, which primarily means coca tea. And of course, there's the ubiquitous large bowl of coca leaves. On every table in our hotels, there is always a large bowl of coca leaves. When you check in to hotels, they bring you a cup of hot coca tea. I drank it a few times and it tasted like chamomile tea, and I felt no effect at all.

The hotel is this little boutique hotel that used to be someone's home, and it's up the hill from the main plaza, in the artisans' section of town called San Blas. It's been the artisan quarter for centuries, apparently. A block away from the hotel is the San Blas Plaza, surrounded by little alleyways of shops. I'd been thinking I wouldn't buy anything here, because they're so focused on the tourists that all we've seen are garish tchotchkes. Bright red and pink and sky blue serapes, even more garish prints of Machu Picchu, etc. But in this artisan's quarter the shops carry handmade beautiful things. Onyx and silver earrings, lovely scarves, handmade suede purses. Presents to come for our three girls.

Cusco: The Movie!


The Cusco square is like all the others -- named Plaza des Armes, and flanked by churches. Other buildings have balconies on the 2nd floor, overlooking the plaza, made for people watching and coffee drinking.

the Cusco Cathedral

ancient Incan stone walls

those blue balconies are often in coffeeshops; we had a favorite
coffee place, for espresso, cappucino, and pitchers of limonade

I don't think this looks like me, but I really
like it -- I look as happy as I was

and I love this photo of Marc

old Cusco women and their llamas

OK -- adios muchachas!