American Perkinses from Beyond Machu Picchu...

We found a casita (little house) for rent in Cusco, Perú, on Craigslist. Cusco is the nearest major city to the ruins at Machu Picchu, and is an interesting place in its own right because of its former status as the southern capital of the Inca empire. The casita we rented is in a neighbourhood called San Sebastián, which is much more interesting and real than downtown Cusco, although it lacks the perfect Inca stonework. The property is walled in, has a main house containing an American expat family, a big garden with blooming flowers of all kinds, and many resident hummingbirds and accompanying flummoxed cats.

We were met at the bus station by Angela, the 17-year-old daughter of the family, who took us back to the pad in a taxi, where we met Gabriel, 14 year-old son, and Michael, father of indeterminate age. We were met warmly in the kitchen/band hall, and had a nice time getting to know each other while making dinner. They are a great bunch of people; extremely laid back, totally open, and very interesting. They lead a very high-texture life in Cusco; they have many friends and live life one day at a time.

The kitchen is the main hang out in the house. It is very well lived in. There are stacks of MP3s on CD everywhere with ambiguous titles; you never know what you’re going to get, and when you get it (say, Stones), then there’s no guarantee that what you’ll get next will be at all similar (Bach organ fugues). We love hanging out at the house because of its warm feel, and all of the nice people coming and going.

Michael is a really interesting dude. He wears his grey hair long under an abused leather hat. He uses the expression “out of sight” in all the right ways. He’s a great guy to talk to about how crazy the USA is/was/will be, but he’s not bitter about it particularly. As I said, he knows how to take it one day at a time. A true prince of a man, and a guy we will keep in touch with.

The living situation has been kind of Perkinsian, for those of you who know of, or know personally, the famous Salt Spring Perkinses… but different; more fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pantsing. Life is lived on the edge… of what, I’m not exactly sure, but we’re happy to be involved.

Machu Picchu was discovered by Jen and Neil in 2007. Well… pretty much. It was discovered by Hiram Bingham, an American Yale graduate who is famous for not realizing how incredibly lucky he was, in 1911. Well, there were farmers up there tending their flocks and hanging out, but they didn’t qualify as “Western Scientists”. At first Bingham thought that this was a famous undiscovered last holdout of the Incans that had been written about by the Spanish, but which had been lost some time between the mid sixteenth century and the early twentieth. He found it, but wasn’t totally convinced that it was an important place, and pretty much left it to be thoroughly explored some years later.

When Bingham first came across the site it was buried in jungly forest. Machu Picchu is located on the “eyebrow of the jungle”, or junga, according to local experts, and was a ceremonial city and getaway for royalty during the height of the Incan empire… maybe. Experts still aren’t really sure. The fact that it was buried in jungle cover, and hence could not be appreciated in a single overall view, probably had a lot to do with Bingham’s underestimation of the importance of the site.

To get to Machu Picchu we took a train with a glass roof from Ollantaytambo, another very interesting Inca city with expansive ruins, to the town nearest the ruins called Aguas Calientes. It is named for the stinky swill that spews out of the ground nearby that the locals put in baths and charge tourists to decompose in. We didn’t go to the baths. There are better ones in Canada… in my bathroom. There were some really nice bathing suits for rent in town though. We were tempted to rent them just to cruise around town in… flattering floral numbers with integrated frilly skirts.

The town is another hastily constructed tourist pit, but it has a really nice, dirty, crazy feel to it. The streets are narrow and there is basically no car traffic. One is constantly being assaulted by restaurateurs and bathing suit rental artists. The streets are steep, and the competition for tourist bucks is fierce, so strolling through town is not exactly the peak of relaxation, but we found it pretty amusing.

We had a cheap dinner, went to bed, and woke up the next morning at about 5AM - we wanted to Machu as much Picchu as possible. We jumped on the bus and were at the gates by about 6:30AM. We paid the very high admission price and slipped through the zigzagging tunnel into the ruins. Stepping out from behind the last wall and seeing the ruins stretched out in the morning light was something I’ll always remember. Photos don’t really do it justice; they all end up looking fake. Believe you me, that place is real.

When one sees Machu Picchu today, there is absolultely no doubt about how important to its people and how grand it must have been during its peak of inhabitation. It is a beautifully conceived and constructed city sitting between two serene peaks, surrounded by sheer valleys and snow-capped ranges in the distance. It is the most incredible place that I have ever been.

We watched the sunrise (with the other 600 people who wanted to maximize their Picchu), and began a long day of exploring the ins and outs of the site. One of the highlights was climbing the very pointy peak at the far end of the ruins called Wayna Picchu. Stairs trace the side of the mountain up to buildings on its very peak. A band of bare-chested 21-year-old male tourists had assembled on the tippy tip top - they were busy comparing nipples and stupidity when we showed up, so we didn’t get a chance to meditate there. We looked around for a minute and went on our way.


From there we walked down the back of the peak to the erroneously named Temple of the Moon. Wooooo. It was named by some gatekeeper in the ‘70s, and is actually a horrible place to observe the moon, but it was an interesting anyway; a cave with integrated Incan stonework and many niches. Niches are all over Incan structures, and were used for keeping sacred artifacts, bad people, virgins, food, soft drinks, and electric razors.

We spent a total of 4 hours on Wayna Picchu, from about 8AM to 12PM, so we still had a full half-day ahead of us in the main ruins. We spent the rest of the time reviewing the nooks and crannies, and at about 4:30PM we began the walk back to Aguas Calientes which took about an hour and a half total. I think that was probably the most walking mileage I’ve ever put on in a day.

We woke up the next morning and got back on the train (where we were assaulted through dance by a terrifying steward in a white woolen mask - we still don´t know what the hell happened there, but we were scared), then a combi, then a bus, saw more ruins at Pisac, then another combi, then we were back home. This was the end of a major event for us. We had been looking forward to Machuing a bit of Picchu since before leaving Canada, so it was an incredible relief to have it done with, and it was especially satisfying because it more than lived up to the almost impossible hype.

The next week in Cusco was spent mostly being homebodies, enjoying our pad and getting work done. The next weekend we set out on another mission to see Inca ruins, but the main purpose of this hike, from Cusco to the Sacred Valley over the highlands in between, was to see more of the incredible land around Cusco. The ruins were an added bonus.

We started at a site called Sacsaywaman, conveniently similar in sound to “Sexy Woman”. The stones there at Saucymama are the largest available; the biggest are about 8m tall, and still have the exquisitely perfect joints that walls with smaller stones have.

After finishing with the ruins, we used a guidebook, topo map and GPS to find the trailhead. That took about 2 hours. There are many trails around there - it’s hard to know which ones are Incan. But we found the right path eventually, and set out to conquer the first of the three mountain passes of the day at 4300 meters. But everything up there is pretty high. It was like walking from 4300m to 4000m to 4350m to 4100m. Up and down, but not very down. But we were still panting like pant salesmen from the lack of oxygen at those elevations.

We camped in what we thought may have been some pre-Incan ruins at the top of a valley, and were visited by and entire family of 8 while eating dinner. They said they were looking for their sheep, and asked if we had seen any. We hadn’t. Then the children asked for money, and we gave them buns and butter, and they wandered off into the night. We couldn’t decide whether they were truly looking for their sheep, or whether handouts from traveling gringos were common enough that it was actually worth their while to drag the whole brood out to visit camping tourists.

We have found this type of meeting with locals a bit challenging; we love talking to campesinos in our horrible Spanish, but so often, after the initial exchange of pleasantries, the little request for money or sweets comes out and sours what was shaping up to be a perfectly good conversation. If you answer them “no”, then they typically lose interest and drift away. I still think that this type of interaction is better than no interaction at all, but I do not think that the solution is to give them money and sweets. That would only serve to reinforce this flawed relationship between tourist and campesino. I agree with Peter Frost, who wrote our excellent Cusco guidebook, who thinks that giving a lump sum (of money, not sweets) to a reputable charity is the way to go.

The stars that night were beautiful, and the full moon came up right outside our tent door, so we sat and ate fig and apple crumble and watched the moon. It was bitterly cold that night, but we survived and awoke the next morning to a beautiful blue sky full of puffy whispy clouds.

We ran across many herds of sheep and llamas on the high plateau that day before descending through a lush narrow gorge leading down from the plateau into the Sacred Valley. The gorge was replete with interesting bird life - bright yellow finches, flycatchers, and swallows. At one point I thought I saw the green back of a parakeet as well. We skirted the valley wall on a very narrow path and found the ruins, but by this time we were basically ruined out, so we made a cup of coffee with our trusty sock filter, and then made our way down to the town of Lamay.

On our way back to Cusco we stopped off at the busy market in Pisac, and Jen got some little things (adult llamas) for some very special people (Stanley, Walter, Connor, Grace, and Quinton). I sat, had a beer, watched our bags, and read Roughing It by Mark Twain. If you like this blog, read that book. That dude is a comic genius, ahem… and his tale of traveling to Nevada from St. Louis before the Pacific Railroad was laid is the best travel writing I’ve ever come across.

Now we’re back in Cusco, mopping up the last days in our home away from home. The jungle beckons. We took our first anti-malarial today, and we feel great! The next two weeks will be spent counting macaws at Las Piedras Biodiversity Station, so we’ve been practicing our counting feverishly. I can make it to 8 now, thanks mostly to my science degree. Jen has vaulted past me and can now count to 14, but she’s using her witchy feminine voodoo which I consider cheating.