Early next morning, before the crowing of the rooster, we set out on foot from Aguas Calientes to Machu Picchu through a high jungle, chewing coca leaves for that extra boost of energy to see us up the trail to our destination. Two hours later, we found ourselves standing in front of Machu Picchu—the famed lost city of the Incas—nestled on a saddle with Mount Huayna Picchu looming in the background. In 1630, when a certain group of Puritans set sail for the New World on board the Arbella determined to ‘be as a city upon a hill’, little did they know that the Incas had bettered them two centuries earlier!
And what a treat Machu Picchu turned out to be: an icing on the cake as the American couple on the train had put it, a pre-Columbian Inca ‘city upon a hill’ believed to have been founded during the reign of the ninth Inca Emperor, Pachacuti (aka Pachacutec) (1438-71), and one of the most recognisable symbols of the Incan civilisation. Built mostly of stone blocks cut to fit tightly together without mortar, using stone tools and without the aid of the wheel to move the building materials, some weighing tonnes, around, the city is generally hailed as the culmination of the Incas’ remarkable achievements in wide-ranging fields such as stone masonry, water management, astronomy, agriculture, and bio-engineering. A fine example of integrated mountain development of its time.
Words failed us as we wandered wide-eyed through the maze-like city crawling with tourists, visually savouring its many archaeological treasures such as the Three-Window Room, the Intihuanata (‘the hitching post of the sun’), the Condor Temple, the Royal House, and the Temple of the Sun, each with competing theories as to what purpose(s) it served in the lives of the resident Incas of yore.
Leaning against the Sacred Rock in the northern end of Machu Picchu, I wondered half-incredulously, Ah, so this is where Che Guevara had an epiphany. How such a thing of beauty as Machu Picchu could have been a turning point in his transformation as a future revolutionary, as alluded to in the film The Motorcycle Diaries, was beyond me. But then again, by the time he reached Machu Picchu, Che probably already knew about Tupac Amaru, who had been executed by the Spaniards for organising an indigenous uprising against the Spanish occupation of Peru in 1780.
After repeated failed attempts at photo ops with a flock of llamas on the east-facing agricultural terraces, we decided to head up to the Watchman’s Hut, a vantage point, for a more panoramic view of Machu Picchu and its surroundings. After photo opps from all conceivable angles against choiciest backdrops, we continued along a southward-trending trail, which, half an hour later, brought us onto a ledge, overlooking an Inca bridge: two logs placed over the U-shaped stone wall built into the vertical face of a cliff over a 2,000 foot drop to the Urubamba valley floor. Just the sight of it filled me with trepidation, with a sense of déjà vu, for I had once crossed a similar bridge over a collapsed section of the trail between Sotikhola and Lapu Besi on the Manaslu circuit. Thinking of Nepal, it amused me a hell lot to recall reading somewhere that the Royal Nepal Airlines had once used an image of Machu Picchu—probably mistaking it for Machha Puchchhare—in its poster to promote tourism in Nepal!
Our next destination IntiPunku—‘the Gate of the Sun’—turned out to be a more pleasant, albeit a more-crowded, affair. A 45-minute walk from the Watchman’s Hut, Intipunku is a gateway to Machu Picchu for hikers approaching it along the classic Inca trail. The view from here of Machu Picchu and the Hiram Bingham Highway hurrying up to meet it—like some love-struck Romeo—from the deep river gorges below was heart-stopping, to say the least!
After another leisurely circumambulation of Machu Picchu, we began hiking down the hill to Aguas Calientes to prepare for our journey back to Cusco the same evening. Machu Picchu disappeared from our sight as we descended further, but not before impressing itself oh-so-indelibly on our impressionable minds.
A masterpiece of the Inca Civilization,
Machu Picchu today attracts at least 600,000 visitors annually.
Written by 2Machupicchu
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