When a bed was produced for me, I fell on it and slept soundly for several hours. My room was tiny, the bedside cupboard was painted tin and the bathroom had a lethal hot water system that required a great deal of cursing to get satisfaction from it. But it was sufficient, as they say, unto my needs. Rested and cleaned I went out to walk the narrow cobblestone streets that wind up and down the hillsides of the town – a dangerous occupation if you are as clumsy as I am. The ancient stones had been worn slippery smooth by many feet, and I nearly broke a leg. But I got warm walking around in the sun and had a delicious llama roll for lunch, washing it down with divine-tasting fresh juice made from local fat, yellow passionfruit.
I had a wonderful time in the huge market. Row after row of stalls lined the streets surrounding the main building and inside I browsed among piles of buttons, hair ornaments, frilly children’s dresses, flowers, fruit and open bags of seeds, dried herbs and medicinal goodies. There were frogs, live, skinned or dried, desiccated corpses of alpaca foetuses, olives in great casks and sugarcane sellers who whirled their great wheels to extract the juice for you to drink on the spot. I bought an alpaca jumper and woollen long-johns for more insulation against the cold.
The next day I joined a tour of the town and surrounding ruins. The bilingual explainer spoke in Spanish then English. The Spanish bits were pretty boring but the English ones were interesting enough.
We visited the three churches in the plaza. Cuzco is crammed with fine baroque churches that have centuries-old, hand-carved pulpits, valuable paintings and dazzling, jewelinlaid ornaments. The Incas were skilful gold and silver-smiths but unfortunately the Spanish melted down most of the finest examples of these artifacts to decorate their churches. I was staggered at the unbelievable wealth that had been squandered in the churches I saw. The guide told us that Phillip of Spain took so much gold from Peru to Europe in the 1600s that the price crashed, so he told his minions to bung the gold in the churches. They certainly did. Some altars had entire walls encrusted with gold. One altar was solid silver. Another, also solid silver, was mounted on tractor wheels so that it could be paraded around the town and displayed to the populace. Bigger than life-sized dolls, overdressed in crappy taste and covered in gems and glitter, represented the various saints. Some whacking big paintings hung on the walls, one of them a copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s
Last Supper
. This had been painted by an Indian who jazzed it up by depicting a guinea pig and local bread as the food on the table. The inquisition rewarded these pious efforts by executing him for sacrilege.
The guide also said, with more than a hint of asperity, that the Spanish had pillaged the wonderful stone of the Inca buildings to erect their houses and churches.
We drove out from Cuzco to the Inca ruins of Sacsay-huaman, a fortress constructed from huge boulders, some of which were three hundred tonnes in weight. Then we travelled further on to the sacred valley of the Urubamba river to visit the remains of Incan country estates. Everywhere the tour went, sales vultures, waving their tourist wares, were lying in wait ready to ambush us, but they were not really tenacious. Not surprisingly we were taken to a large souvenir shop, where we were expected to leave large sums of cash. I failed to oblige but gave the proprietors a gold star for their toilets, which were almost normal except for their lack of paper and water. I did rather blot my copybook, though, by using the men’s. The male and female toilets were divided by a wall, on top of which a doll dressed as a woman, which I failed to see until later, identified the one for the use of ladies.
Near my hotel I found a shifa, a Chinese restaurant, where I had a reasonable dinner. Early the next morning I caught the train to Aqua Caliente, the village nearest to Machu Picchu. Maria, the tourist tout who had now fully adopted me, had arranged a room at a hotel there for me. The elderly local train had leather seats but no heating and was very cold. It chugged out of the station a short way then backed up, doing this several times before I realised that we were on a switchback and ascending ever higher with each shunt. This was the only way a train could have climbed out of the valley and over the high mountains. Higher and higher we went, passing hovels, broom bushes, eucalyptus trees and an unbelievable amount of rubbish that cascaded down from the hillside houses and was strewn into all the ravines. Dogs galore of every mixture imaginable chased the train or dug among the piles of garbage. On the roofs of houses we passed at eye level I saw small clay figurines of pigs.
Finally the town was far below and we reached the top of the ring of mountains that encircle Cuzco. Way down, about sixteen hundred metres below, I saw the town, a cluster of brown buildings with curved tiled roofs, nestled in the valley. I could see the train track up which we had come snaking out.
Then hawkers began climbing onto the train, mostly women of local dress and odour who bore all sorts of edible goodies. I bought bananas, boiled eggs and bread rolls. Their boarding methods were alarming. They jumped on the moving train’s steps and banged on the locked carriage doors until someone opened them. Then they proceeded from carriage to carriage via this outside route. Watching the carriage in front of me rocking wildly, and considering the large baskets and bundles that the vendors carried, this game looked extremely dicey. I was told that this railway had only recently been restored and re-opened after it had fallen down the mountains last year. I was exceedingly glad to hear this.
The railway track had been cut along the edges of the mountains and as we spiralled up and down to pass through them the views down the valleys were superb. And when the train reached the broad fertile Andean plateau, the scenery was breathtaking – gorges and foliaged mountains on all sides. Broad meadows swept over the plateau, interspersed with small patches of wheat and onion crops. I saw different animals grazing – donkeys, goats, cows and pigs. All untended animals were tethered. At one stop a woman milked her cow into a wooden pail beside the railway line.
A small, clear stream bubbled far below in a rocky bed. This stream came closer and closer and grew larger and larger as we descended onto the plateau until it was running alongside the train track. Then it became a river that, by the time we reached Aqua Caliente, was a broad, seething, mass of white water that went falling and tearing along.
Now the train was running on almost flat ground and really rocking on. Slowly the vegetation increased until it became forest, and the mountains that rose steeply around us were fully clothed in tangles of green dotted with splashes of red, pink and yellow flowers. The train stopped at the eightkilometre peg to let off groups of hikers who intended to walk the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu from there.
At Aqua Caliente – meaning hot water – named for the springs that were almost in the main street, it was bedlam at the station. I was caught in a crush of tourists and touts who tried to shove me into nearby restaurants and hotels. Then I had to run a gauntlet of souvenir stalls that lined either side of the narrow pathway. The hotel owner – the one who had been organised by Maria to meet the train – rescued me, shepherded me to his establishment, threw my bag into a room and shoved me off to catch the bus up to Machu Picchu.
For eight kilometres the road looped around an incredibly steep mountain to reach a dizzying height. Looking down I saw a breathtaking view of the valley – the densely covered green slopes of the lofty mountains that rose from it, the tiny train that stood in the village like a toy on a model railway and, alongside it, the mighty green and white river now reduced to a mere thread.
The bus ejected its load of tourists and, giving the expensive restaurant near the entrance to the ruins a miss, I started the long climb to the top. At first there was a guard rail and a path, then there were only steep steps cut in rough rock, some of them worn smooth and slippery. At the summit, when I had stopped panting for long enough to admire the view, I found that I could look down on the whole of Machu Picchu. Thought to have been the last hideaway of the Incas, this site was never discovered by the Spaniards. Hiram Bingham, an American explorer, is said to have found it in 1911, but it was never really ‘lost’ – most local Indians knew about it.
Set among a complex of still-used Andean terraces, some of which are 2500 years old and are estimated to have taken ten thousand workers forty years to build, Machu Picchu is a flourishing ceremonial and agricultural site and the gateway to the jungle marches of the empire. It is not of monumental proportions but is rather a beautiful jewel in a perfect setting, completely in harmony with the contours of the mountain on top of which it sits. The buildings are no more than three storeys high and some builders took advantage of the slope of the land to construct them in tiers. One huge rock at the base of a temple has thirty-two angles cut on it in order to fit the stones. Many buildings have bases of natural rock into which other rocks have been perfectly fitted. The architectural work is wonderful.
Most of the structures are tiny houses. There didn’t seem to be any bathrooms and I wondered where the lavatories had been. Looking across to the adjacent mountain I saw workmen the size of ants at the very top of the steep point. They were excavating more Inca terraces. Some of the mountains that surrounded me had large patches of exposed rock and others had razor-sharp edges on their tops and slopes that looked as though they had been cut with a knife. Way below me were plots, houses and temples. Only a couple of the buildings had restored thatched roofs, the rest were open to the sky.
The stones for the buildings had been cut on the spot. The Incas did not have the wheel, so possibly they rolled the stones on logs. They also had few tools. The stones were polished by hand with shards of haematite, an iron-oxide ore.
I came down more steps to the level of the buildings and visited a round temple where the sun strikes a golden ray through the windows to illuminate a certain stone at particular times of the year. And at the temple dedicated to the condor, native to the Andes, the heaviest bird of prey in the world with a wing span of over three metres, I discovered a slab on which sacrifices were performed and from which ran a gutter to convey the blood of the slain down to the carved condor’s beak. There were also a stone Southern Cross constellation sign and several sundials.
When I arrived at Machu Picchu the tops of the mountains had been tipped with clouds. Now the clouds slowly descended to wreath everything in fine rain, so I took the bus, which left every half hour, down to the village again. A small boy clad in an Incan tunic and sandals raced the bus to the bottom of the mountain by leaping down the Inca trail from loop to loop of the road. He would wait by the roadside and shout, ‘Hola,’ at the bus as it passed each loop. This had become a feature and tourists were told to look for him. However, I now know the trick that got him to the bottom first. He was plural. When I walked the trail the next day I encountered five of him.
Back at the hotel I sat by the pizza oven to get warm. The oven was situated on a balcony that served as the dining room and which had a roof, but was open on all sides except one. Very ordinary food was provided here, for large sums of money, on long, communal wooden tables. I shared a table with Klaus and Claire, an interesting middle-aged German couple. I tried a Pisco Sour, a local specialty rather like a marguerita, that was made from Seven Up and singani, a spirit distilled from grapes and lemon juice.
My hotel room didn’t cost much but, although it had a surfeit of beds, it had no refinements whatsoever. There were no cupboards or shelves, not even a hook to hang your clothes on. In the bathroom you had to be a contortionist to get at the toilet paper, which was secured to the wall behind the toilet. The hot water was provided by another of those inventions of the devil, a plug-in instant electric element. The element is like those in electric kettles and is inserted in the shower head to heat the water as it flows past. It is connected to the electricity supply by a plug in the shower wall over which water flows. It gave me electric shocks in between cutting in and out with alternate blasts of cold, then boiling water.
The Aqua Caliente train returned to Cuzco at six in the evening and pandemonium ruled at that time. After this the hotel was utterly quiet and I slept well. It was still raining when I went to sleep but I woke to a decent morning. The sun was shining and the sky was as blue as it gets. It was very cold at first but I soon warmed up after a good breakfast of great coffee, fresh papaya juice and bread rolls sliced and toasted on the end of a fork on the oven fire.
After breakfast I took the bus up to Machu Picchu again. The ruins looked even better in the bright early sunshine and there were few tourists before the train arrived to disgorge its hordes. Wandering around virtually alone, when it was peaceful and quiet, I was able to absorb the atmosphere. Lizards sunning themselves on rocks darted into crevices among the stones and a couple of llamas cropped the grass in the largest flat spot between the buildings where one small tree grew. I passed flowers here and there, orchids, begonias and a bush with a purplish honey-scented blossom. I met the German couple from dinner the night before – or, more precisely I met Claire, who was sitting on a flat rock that overhung a sheer drop, and Klaus’s boots, which sat alongside her. I reckoned that she’d just pushed him overboard. It would be very easy to do – the drop was breathtaking – but she insisted that he had gone for a walk. We watched as a swallowlike bird with a blue breast dived from the edge to swoop out over the depths of the valley. Standing there, I felt as though I was on top of the world and yet secluded from it. But the edge occurs so abruptly it made me uneasy to look down. Looking out was okay, but not down.
Watching the clouds rise up and out from the humid canyons below, I felt the permanence of this place. It will always be here, suspended in the mist, a shrouded apparition out of the past. They say that on nights of the full moon the shimmering light falling down on Machu Picchu is a majestic sight.