Machu Picchu
Monday, February 26 was a very long, tiring day. Miguel came for me just after 4 a.m. and drove me to the bus station on Avenida El Sol from where I took a two-hour bus ride operated by Inka Rail to its train station at Ollantaytambo.
From there it was one hour and forty minutes riding along the raging Umubamba River.
At Aguas Calientes, there was another bus ride for half an hour to reach the entrance to Machu Picchu.
Because I had left the hotel before the breakfast hour, I was given a sack containing two white-bread sandwiches, a slice of sweet bread, a container of peach juice, an orange, and a couple of hard candies. I ate the sandwiches and drank the juice in the dark on the first bus and ate the sweet bread with a cup of coffee purchased on the train.
All the transportation was highly organized; I was given a stapled bunch of tickets. The train ticket had my name and my car and seat numbers. Every seat on the train was taken except the one next to me, which was nice.
At Aguas Calientes, I was met by my guide Mariela, holding a sign with my name. She recognized me immediately and took charge of getting me on the bus and into Machu Picchu, itself. She was short and attractive with a pretty smile. She might have been 30 or a bit younger. She had graduated from university with degrees in tourism and anthropology. As I would learn in the course of the morning, she was a local woman whose first language is Quechua, not unusual in Peru where there are many speakers of that language. Quechua was spoken by the Incas.
A thing about Machu Picchu is that it may be the most visited site in the world. It seems that every day of the year the allotted number of spots are taken. Because of this demand, the entrance is highly organized.
We spent more than two hours on site at Machu Picchu. Unfortunately, the heavy fog on arrival was accompanied by rain to the point that we had to don our plastic rain ponchos.
At first, we waited with others on a grassy plateau overlooking the ruins of the city. A large number of visitors stood for a long time at the edge of the plateau in hopes that the fog would suddenly disperse revealing the spectacular views Machu Picchu is famous for.
We waited awhile, too, but further back where I sat against a wall in my rain poncho.
Mariela was an experienced guide with a large store of information about the remote site and Inca lives and social organization. It was begun in the 14th century by Pachuteg, the tenth Inca king. Mariela said it was where trade was carried out between those who lived in Cuzco and tribes in the Amazon.
Finally, we gave up waiting and descended to the ruins and explored them as well as possible. The rain gave Mariela the opportunity to point out how the Incas carved water channels in the rocks to move water to different parts of the city. A large channel brought water from a nearby mountain.
Exploring the ruins required a lot of climbing and descending. Mariela had been forewarned by Miguel that because of my age and the altitude I might have had problems navigating the stairs. She walked at my side and occasionally supported me with her arm. I was very careful not to slip and fall. The steps cut out of granite rock were very steep with some high risers. I used the stones of the walls next to me for balance. Moving around was complicated by the numbers of people using the same steps and passageways. However, it all worked out in the end.
Like at Saqsaywamán the day before, some of the stones were huge. In what are said to be the rooms of the religious sector, the stones were carefully shaped and fitted together without mortar.
The Incas seemed to have eaten a great deal of corn and potatoes. Peru grows an unbelievable 3,000 varieties of the latter. Machu Picchu’s agriculture made use of terraces of the kind I saw earlier in the Sacred Valley.
Machu Picchu was kept secret from the Spaniards. Western treasure hunters discovered it overgrown with brush, found no riches and ignored it. It was Hiram Bingham, an explorer and Yale archeologist, who realized its value to history.
There were shops, restaurants, and a hotel outside the entrance. In one, named Toto’s House, Mariela and I had lunch. We helped ourselves to pumpkin soup with cheese, and I followed mine with pasta and purple Peruvian potatoes. Dessert was milk cake and a couple of caramel cookies.
Saying goodbye to Mariela, I returned to Cuzco, backtracking the way I had come. On the train, I sat next to a young Mexican from Tijuana who had just begun a dental practice. He spoke English like a native from having spent a lot of time in the States. He admired my trip and hoped to do the same one day.
I invited Miguel to have dinner with me at Yuraq, the delicious restaurant next to my hotel. He ate only soup and a coke, and I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. He was a lovely man who didn’t seem to have much of a life.
I was leaving for the city of Puno and Lake Titicaca the next day, thinking I would travel by bus. Miguel offered to have Mariela drive me in a small car and show me sites along the way. I agreed to that plan and, exhausted, went to bed directly after dinner.
The 27th was a better day. A language problem maybe, but I had misunderstood what Miguel had said about Mariela driving me to Puno in a small car. What, in fact, happened is that Mariela showed up with a fellow named Richard driving a taxi. Mariela doesn’t drive at all. It worked out for the best, though. Richard was an excellent driver who moved us along quickly in spite of bridge work in several spots and our own stops that were part of the day’s long road trip.
Saying goodbye to Miguel was an emotional moment; he had been very good to me and seemed to enjoy our brief relationship.
We had good weather most of the way except for a brief period of rain and hail.
Mariela sat next me in the rear seat and talked about things pertaining to what we passed.
Our route, known as the Barraco Andino, led us to the small town of Andahuylillas and a church that amazed me. Nothing about its ordinary exterior prepared me for the extravagance within. Its walls and coffered ceiling were covered with golden murals whose Christian symbols were mixed with indigenous ones, rich with native plants, fruit, and animals. A hole in the wall, representing the holy spirit, let the sunshine through, symbolically allowing the sun god of the Inca ancestors to enter the church. (I was not allowed to photograph that interior, but you can go online and see photos made by others.)
Mariela told me that what I saw had been a means of overcoming a language barrier. The colonizers and the population they colonized could not understand each other through language, but they did communicate through shared iconography.
We stopped at another San Pedro, a town that is a center for pottery making. There, Mariela spoke about some of the pre-Inca peoples that lived in this part of Peru. The Andean god was Wiracocha, and I wish I could remember how Mariela said it was worshiped.
Another stop at Raqchi allowed me to look at more Inca ruins, including a tall adobe wall that must have been part of a large settlement.
We stopped for a buffet lunch at a place named Felipon. I helped myself to string beans, carrots, and a couple of other vegetables that I dressed with a lovely sauce made with passion fruit. Then, there was rice made a subtle green by the addition of a local herb. I can’t exactly describe the taste of a vegetable named lisas; it looked a bit like sliced mushroom and was served in a kind of stew. All three of us drank large glasses of chica morada, a non-alcoholic drink made from purple corn.
As we drove, Mariela spoke about the region’s agriculture, much of which is corn or maize. As with the country’s great varieties of potatoes, so are there varieties of corn in different colors. She showed me pictures of some in the book she always carries to illustrate her remarks.
Our last stop before Puno was Pucara, which contains a large church and a small museum containing a few pot shards and some very interesting pre-Inca statuary, some in quite good condition. There was a belief in a figure named Pistaku or the Destroyer. It is represented holding a human head.
I enjoyed this museum with its small galleries and bright, shiny red floors.
Pucara is a town noted for Toritos, small bulls with two large horns. There were representations everywhere around town. It seemed like a happy symbol.
During the whole day, I was taken with the landscapes we passed through. We were in a wide valley with mostly low mountains on either side. At times, I could see taller peaks behind these. Once, we passed one covered with snow. The sky was unusual, too. There were clouds whose formations looked as though they might have been painted.
The sun was down by the time we reached the Jose Antonio Hotel on the far edge of Lake Titicaca across from the city proper. Puno felt like driving through a large, undistinguished city whose best claim to fame was its proximity to the remarkable lake.
Saying goodbye to Mariela and Richard, I checked in and went to the restaurant for a plate of pork chops accompanied by a thick potato cake and a large portion of flavored rice, more than I could eat. In Peru, combining rice and potatoes on the same plate is common. I really wanted to drink some wine, but I kept my vow not to drink alcohol at high altitudes, and at 3,812 meters (12,507 feet), Lake Titicaca was very high indeed.
It was in my room after dinner that I realized how cold it was. There didn’t seem to be any way to heat it. Finally, I slept under thick covers, wore socks on my feet, and put on my fleece over my pajama top.
I was annoyed by the phone ringing as I was almost asleep. It was a woman at reception who wanted to verify the number of my passport.
I’m impressed at how well the execution of my tour packages had been. Each step happened as planned and expected. The following morning, I was ready in the lobby at 7:10 as instructed. A driver showed up on time and drove me to the Puno’s port where I was met by someone who took me to a tour boat with comfortable seats and a group of others. I didn’t know what to expect from the day, but a man named Fausto began speaking to us, saying he would be our guide. He did a very good job of communicating facts and instructions.
Before leaving port, we were entertained by three performers in costume who came aboard and danced in the aisle. Two were masked and the third was a beautifully made-up woman. One appeared to be costumed as a bear. We passengers were encouraged to dance with the performers, and I did so briefly. It was good that I stopped when I did because I was out of breath.
Underway, Fausto told us that Lake Titicaca sits on the border between Peru (60%) and Bolivia (40%). He joked that Peru got the tits and Bolivia, the caca. He pointed to an old steamboat on the distant shore, saying that it had been brought from Liverpool in pieces and reassembled in the 1860s.
Titicaca is the highest navigable lake in the world. It is more than 190 kilometers long and 80 wide. It attracts many immigrant birds, flamingoes from Chile among them.
We visited two islands that day, the first one that floats called Uros, the home of twenty-five people belonging to five families. The surface of the island is made of reeds and is soft and a bit spongy to walk on (a bit like the surface of the late Christo’s floating piers installation in Italy). As we sat on reed-made benches in a semicircle, Fausto spoke and demonstrated how the island floated on thick blocks of material made from the roots of reed plants. He said that the roots contained carbon dioxide, making them buoyant.
Reeds are the basic material for everything on the island. They are even used to make large and seaworthy boats, one of which we boarded for a short while.
The island has access to a plant that looks like a larger and longer green onion. It is a basic food source for the inhabitants. A man, probably the headman, peeled one and gave us a taste. He said it was nutritious.
The women of Uros knit and embroider. Their work was lovely, and I bought a small piece of fabric, sorry that I couldn’t carry a larger one.
Fausto told us a great deal more about the life of these people that I can’t remember. The island is small and where we were at its center, we were surrounded by the inhabitants’ thatched and reed-built dwellings. We were invited to visit those, which were quite small but had electricity from solar panels and contained all a family’s belongings.
It took us more than an hour to reach our second destination. Taquile Island is much larger. It measures about 5.5 kilometers in length by 1.6 in width. Its highest point is more than 4,000 meters above sea level. After lunch on the island, we climbed it but not to the very top.
Its population of farmers and fishermen are also proficient knitters. As Fausto talked to us about the island, an elderly man, who owned the house and property where we sat, knitted a small piece while standing next to him.
The two thousand inhabitants of Taquile are descended from the Incas and speak Quechua. They live by an ancient code, one of whose practices is reciprocity. They take turns helping each other perform large tasks like home building. Each family is also required to donate a certain amount of labor to the community.
Their marriage practices are remarkable, too. When two young people declare they plan to marry, they are allowed to live together, but not have sex, for six months. At the end of that period, they can choose to marry for life. By custom, divorce is not allowed, and if, in a rare case, a couple were to divorce, they would be shunned.
We ate lunch in the knitting man’s house, sitting at long tables. I ate a delicious bowl of quinoa soup but passed on a plate of grilled lake trout and rice. During the meal, I talked with an attractive American couple from Atlanta. Jack works for Merrill Lynch in wealth management while Juliette works for a start-up that grows hydroponic vegetables. Both seemed happy in their jobs and their lives. They were not married but were thinking about it.
After lunch, we walked along a paved path to a point on the shore opposite to where we had landed. It was more than two kilometers and some of it was uphill. The group didn’t walk together, and at times I walked alone. I walked slowly and stopped to rest when needed. At that altitude no one was rushing. The walk on the sunny afternoon was very pretty with glimpses of the lake far below. The last steeply downhill part of the walk was the most taxing, it included some steep natural steps.
I was happy to find my seat on the boat and settle in for the ride back to the port where I found a driver bearing a sign with my name.
Back at the hotel, I went to the dining room and ordered a lamb shank that came with a large portion of mashed potatoes molded into a kind of cake. The food was bland, and I ate little of it. The staff wanted to know what was wrong, and I explained that I like what I eat to have a pronounced flavor. I asked for ice cream for dessert and was given a large discount on my main course.
Next to me, a lone Englishman had ordered the same thing and was equally unhappy. He was blunter than I had been, criticizing the meal to the waiter and a manager who came over. We commiserated with each other over our dinner and laughed about it.
February 29th. It was a leap year, so the month of February got an extra day. I finally returned to the Jose Antonio Hotel in Lima, reunited with my belongings and glad to have left the cold hotel in Puno.
I took a lovely nap before going out for pizza and beer, a meal I had been dreaming of. I hadn’t drunk any alcohol since leaving Lima days before and was surprised at how easy it felt to walk at sea level after those days of walking and climbing at high altitudes. The following day I would decide where to go next.