Luckily I got there in the end. But the round trip took from 6am to 11pm and I only got to spend about an hour at the place itself before having to leave because it was closing. Most of the day was taken up with rickety bus rides, stop-start train rides, and lots of waiting around. I wish I’d had more time there – I could easily have spent several hours just sitting there and staring at it. But I got there, and I saw it, and the photos are below. (Apologies for the repetitive angles but the light was fading and so I couldn't get decent shots facing the other way!)
This blog can be pretty cynical at times, so I think it’s only fair to drop all the irony for a moment and record that Machu Picchu absolutely does live up to the hype. It’s like nothing else I’ve ever seen on this earth. That said, the natural setting itself would be a marvel to behold even if nothing had ever been built on it. But there is something peculiarly cohesive about the way the stones blend into the landscape. It’s almost as if the place had grown up organically out of the soil. The visit is definitely worth the time and the effort and the expense. (And the expense is rather more than you might expect, overall, but I don’t mind. Fair play to the Peruvian people: it belongs to them and it’s theirs to sell.)
As well as causing train-delaying landslides, the heavy rain had caused the Urubamba river to swell up to a quite terrifying extent. A video snippet of the rapids, taken from the train, is below. As is a picture of Aguas Calientes (ie Machu Picchu town) looking like it’s about to be swept away whole. Bit scary really, but the locals seemed unperturbed and I guess this kind of thing is routine for them.
Inevitably, Aguas Calientes is ludicrously over-commercialised. As soon as you get off the train, you’re confronted with an absolute barrage of merchandise, most of which has only the most tenuous link to any kind of ‘authentic’ Andean culture. But it’s what people come here to buy, and you can’t blame the locals for meeting the demand. I just wish they didn’t have to hammer it home so much all the time – like with the cheesy Pan Pipe Moods elevator muzak playing constantly on every bus and train within a thousand-mile radius of Machu Picchu. In Huancayo, there was a busker playing a pan-pipe version of ‘My Heart Will Go On’ by Celine Dion, complete with karaoke-style backing track. Cheese knows no borders.
As for Cuzco, it’s a lovely place, but again it’s just that little bit too manufactured. Too much merchandise. Too many hawkers and hucksters. Too many gringo travellers - not ‘tourists’, oh no, heaven forbid - all wearing exactly the same ‘alternative lifestyle’ uniform: sculpted beards, sunglasses, dreadlocks, hessian, beads, etc. (Actually it’s strange how many of the girls have dreadlocks, or braids or whatever, but I think that may be something to do with dreads requiring less day-to-day maintenance than normal hair. Perhaps some of my female friends can enlighten me on this point.) You just know that in a few months all these people will go back to Connecticut or Surrey; they’ll ditch the outlandish hairstyle, put on a smart suit and go and work for a legal firm or a hedge fund. Why pretend to be something you’re not?
I also think there is something profoundly hypocritical about the patronising attitudes with which most visitors view the locals. European and American people, intent on living scrupulously ‘ethical’ lifestyles, who wouldn’t be seen dead buying a T-shirt if it was made in a Chinese sweatshop, practically squirm with delight when confronted with the sight of an octogenarian Andean woman who’s been sitting on a pavement all day, through sun and rain alike, trying to flog a few pieces of needlework to get enough money to eat. Because it’s all so ‘authentic’, don’t you know? And when they’ve finished haggling the poor woman down for the sake of an extra 50p, they take pictures of her and the other locals, without asking permission, as if they were animals in a zoo.
Oops, I’m getting all cynical again. I think the point I’m trying to make is that trying to capture an ‘authentic’ experience is a self-defeating exercise, because you can’t capture real life and put it in a bottle and sell it off bit by bit. Real travelling is about experiencing life as it’s actually lived in the places you visit, with all its pros and cons, however mundane - real life, and not some grotesque stylised Beamish-esque parody of it.
(Lecture over.)
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| Sunset in Cuzco |
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| Downhill into Aguas Calientes |
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| Machu Picchu |
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| Machu Picchu |
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| Machu Picchu |
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| Machu Picchu |
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| Machu Picchu |
