Machu Picchu ... just in time?

Hi everyone,

This has been one of the best weeks we´ve had, capped off yesterday by probably the most amazing thing either of us has ever seen. On Tuesday, our last day in Arequipa, we went to the Colca Canyon, one of the deepest in the world. Our bus left at 2:00 am. It was a four hour ride on "el camino mas estupido del mundo." It seemed like the dips in the road were purposely designed to make people, especially those in the back row of a bus, bounce as high as possible. Needless to say we didn´t get much sleep, but we got breakfast and coffee as soon as we got to Chivay at 6:00 so we were okay. We left from here with a tourgroup on a 2 hour vanride to the canyon, stopping at a few places along the way. The canyon itself wasn´t as spectacular as we expected, but the main reason people come here is to see the condors, and that part was not dissapointing. We saw several condors, birds of prey with a wingspan of up to 4 metres, flying at eye-level, just 10 metres away from us. A couple times, two of them sat together on a ledge, posing for the 100-odd tourists. Question: Has anyone besides my brothers and I seen the movie Condorman?

We got back to Arequipa that evening and took the bus to Cusco where we arrived Wednesday morning. We played bingo on the bus and the winner won a free trip. Cusco is nice, and there´s good reason for its popularity. Besides being close to Machu Picchu, the city has remnants of Inca walls, nice churches, and some good museums. One of the museums we visited was the Temple of the Sun, which is a Dominican abbey built over an old Inca temple. The old Inca walls remain. They are built of huge carved stones perfectly shaped to fit together without mortar. Another wall in the city has stones of all imaginable shapes and sizes, yet they still fit together perfectly. The Spaniards used these existing walls and built them higher for their own buildings. Cusquenians like to say that the bottom walls were built buy the Incas and the top walls by the `incapables´. We also visited the Cathedral. It is actually the centre church of three churches attached to each other, the centre one being the biggest. Everything inside is covered in either gold or silver. The main altar is actually covered with a layer of silver overtop of a layer of gold, because the bishop decided he liked silver more. One of the weird things about the Catholic church in Cusco is that Rome turns a blind eye to local traditions that wouldn´t be accepted in any other part of the world. There are mirrors hanging up which represent the vanity of the Catholic church, there is an altar with a black Jesus, and a painting of the Last Supper with a roasted guinea pig, a local delicacy, on a platter in the middle of the table. Something we decided we had to try.

We left for Auguascalientes, the town at the base of Machu Picchu, on Thursday evening, taking two busses and a train. (The town is only accesible by train.) During the first busride, the driver all of a sudden slammed on his brakes, and the people standing in the isles went flying to the front. It sounded like we hit something, and when we got off we saw a huge dent in the front. Probably a llama. In Auguascalientes we stepped off the train and got bombarded by hostel workers trying to get us to stay with them, shouting prices and things like "hot water", and "private bathroom." We always enjoy the position of power that puts us in, and drag it out as long as we can. Then we usually just choose the first one. So we had to try guinea pig, or cuy, for supper. I thought it was pretty good. And yes, it does taste like chicken. The problem is that it looks like a rat, a dead rat on your plate. I think Clay was convinced it really was a rat so he didn´t eat too much of it.

Friday morning we started hiking up the Inca stairs to Machu Picchu at 5:30. We got there, sweating and breathing hard, in time to see the clouds rolling over the ruins. There is no way to describe what we saw. It looks completely different than the pictures or movies. We took some more stairs to the top of Waynapicchu, that steep mountain in the background which also has ruins at the top, and realized the magnitude of what we were looking at. First of all, the setting itself is amazing, a lush green valley rising almost straight out of the Urubamba river, whose white water rapids are visible below. Parts of the valley are vertical, bare cliffs. And then, on top of a hill is a city, complete with a main square, walking streets, houses, temples, and surrounded by farming terraces which are built down the edge of the steep mountain. We had an unforgettable breakfast at the top. The rest of the day was spent walking around the ruins, which are just as amazing from close up as from a distance. Machu Picchu is huge, and it is impossible to see all of it in one day. The Inca stonework was similar to that in Cusco, but for some houses it looked like huge stones at the bottom were just carved straight out of the original boulders that were already there, the tops of which were shaped to fit more stones. There was alot more cool stuff, but it´s impossible to describe so I´m not even going to try. We both decided Machu Picchu is something no one can afford to miss. Unfortunately, one of Saturday´s newspaper headlines was that Machu Picchu was put on UNESCO´s list of world heritage sites most at risk of being damaged, so who knows how long people will have the chance to visit it. Do it before it´s too late.
Pieter