Glorious Machu Pichu

I earned my visit to Machu Pichu.  All in all 107 km (66 miles)  on foot over 8 days with high altitude mountain passes.  At first, I was worried that I would not be able to handle it, and felt reassured that our expedition was equipped with two mules to help those too sick or tired to walk.  It turned out that not only I had no altitude sickness, but that I led the expedition to the highest passes such as Yanama at 4,500 meters (a little less than 15,000 feet) and overall was complemented by my fellow trekkers about my "excellent shape."  It's nice to discover new aptitudes in one's 30's though I think that my swimming experience must have helped with breathing in low oxygen air.

The hike itself wad incredibly beautiful, much better than the Colca which I had done the week before, and had I known, I would have skipped Colca and spent more time in the Sacred Valley instead.  We kept alternating between 3 climate zones sometimes in the same day: humid hot and insect ridden river valleys, cool dense lush cloud forest, and cold dry high land where only grass and shrubs grow.

There were ruins of two main Inka cities on the hike: Choquequirau and Machu Pichu.  Choquequirau is the largest of the two but has only been excavated about 20% and so one can only see a couple of the structures and the main plaza along with a number of agricutural terraces.  Since the only way to reach Choquequirau is by 2 day hike on mule trail, we pretty much has the place to ourselves which felt like a priviledge.  We encountered Peruvian workers doing restoration work very slowly (For wooden wedges, there was a dude sitting with a tree branch and chopping little bits by hand).  We were told the excavation was going to take about 50 years and at the rate I witnessed, it was totally believable.

Machu Pichu on the other hand was magestic and awe inspiring.  It totally lives up to the expectation.  I admired the beauty of the stonework, the ingenuity of the aquaducts and the Inka roads (I don't like ot call them trails because even though they are narrow, they are fully paved and better engineered than current Peruvian roads), and losing myself in the miriad of streets.  I pretended that I was a guest in the still vibrant city and tried to imagine how its people lived.  I thought that there would be so many tourists that the site would be hard to enjoy, but that was not the case.  The site is large enough that people disperse and you can still have quite an intimate experience with it especially if you veer off the main attractions and go down the residential streets.

More photos on Picasa

http://picasaweb.google.com/chertar/MachuPichu#

Back in Cusco I found that I kept getting angry at how the Spanish Conquistadores destroyed much of the city's Inka temples and palaces to replace them with exceedingly inferior colonial houses which keep falling down after each earthquake while Inka walls widthstand without a trace of damage.  I could not get myself to walk into any of the churches built from rocks harvested from Inka sites.  For all I know, the Inka's could have been equally brutal to their contemporaries, but still I could not shake out the anger.  One of the guys I trekked with adequately said that the conquest was like the Spanish going back in the time and destroying the Roman Empire.

Enough ranting.  I am now leaving the sacred valley for the very remote high plateaus of the Central Andes through the town of Ayacucho.  The guidebook describes this road as only for "the most hard core and time rich back packers" which I suspect is an exageration.  There are no comfy tourist busses, so it will be bumpy local busses on unpaved roads but I think the experience will be worth it.  I am not sure how to connect the dots to my next and last destination: the northern Amazon, but I shall inquire locally once I get closer.  Tomorrow, I am shipping about half of the contents of my back pack (including this computer) back to the States in order to have an unincumbered last few weeks which will require casi-constant moving.  So this may be the last posting of pictures until I get back to the States in a few weeks already!

:-)

Tarik