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March 11, 2004
Machupicchu. The name conjures visions of the lost city of the
incas, high in the mountains, green, misty, remote. It is perhaps
the number one tourist destination in all of Latin America, and certainly
the number one cultural attraction. The expectations for the
visitor are, shall we say, rather high. I am pleased to announce
that the article easily measures. Machupicchu is an awesome,
spiritual experience, an astonishing feat of engineering, and a testament
to the ability of mankind to accomplish the unthinkable, especially given
such basic capabilities. It is only somewhat tarnished by the
extraordinary pains being taken to commercialize the hell out of it.
Several years ago the 10-year concession for m
But let nothing of that color your first moment rounding the bend,
stepping through the gates, and passing through the wall of the city-- or
passing the watchtower a bit further up the hill if you're coming via the
Inca trail--and catching your magical first glimpse of the well-manicured
splendor of this incredible treasure. It will catch you a bit off
guard, if you're like me, and a gasp or unconscious exclamation is likely
to pass your lips. It is big. This town easily once housed
and fed a thousand or more.
I got up early, before 5 in the morning, and walked the trail from Aguas Calientes, in order to beat the first 6:30am tourist bus. As i arrived, the sun was just breaking over the mountains across the valley. It was an unusually crystal clear day for machupicchu. I realized at that moment, why they called themselves the children of the sun--and what drove so many of their design decisions. These people were not just mere sun-worshippers--the sun was at the very focus of their beings.. The whole layout of the city is like a giant amphitheater for the morning sunrise, with the kings throne at the top of the city, where the first light strikes. And i'll put money on his perfect attendance, barring sickness and circumstance, for every single one of those incredible shows.
Climbing the nearby peak, Huanaypicchu, which affords a bird's eye view
of the whole affair, takes nearly an hour. As i sat on the top and
watched the sun climb higher in the sky, and the angles of the shadows
change on the face of the massive stone walls, i couldn't help but think
what a shame it was that this had been turned into a tourist attraction.
It would have been much better off to have been completely restored and
inhabited by the local quechuan descendants of the Incas.... to have
What is even more a shame though is how little time and effort we spend on anything anymore. Our buildings and homes are snap-together crackerboxes, our attentions are only as long as the space between commercial breaks, and very few of us are engaged in projects longer than months or weeks at a time. If the supersize lawsuits (what, blame the fast-food chains? i've heard everything now...) are any indication, the vast majority of us seem to value quantity over quality, and we nearly always take more than we need--a consumerism, it is becoming more evident to me, perhaps enabled by our considerable technological prowess, but certainly powered by the excess fossil energy we have managed to unleash from mother earth. Standing in front of machupicchu, I have no doubt that the end of the fossil fuel supply is a damned good thing for us, though i shudder at the short term consequences. So perhaps you had better get down here and visit--before the dinosaur's tit runs dry, and the airplanes fall back to the ground.
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achupicchu,
along with the railway Perurail, the Machupicchu Inn, and a posh hotel
called Monestario in Cusco were auctioned off to a private company for
some unheard of sum of money. Since then, prices for access to the
ruins and for staying at the closest hotel, the Machupicchu Inn,
have skyrocketed. A single night in the off season at the Inn now
fetches $625, the matrimonial suite is nearly $2000. Needless
to say, i opted for more modest $4 a night accomodations in Aguas
Calientes, about an hour and half hike away.
And the setting, the presentation of
this wonderous jewel to the gods, is nothing short of tolkein-esque--
almost a caricature of itself in its incredible steepness, loftiness, and
exquisiteness. 
been
blessed and honored by being restored to functioning fashion, instead of
being pawed and ogled over by mounds of ski-pole sporting tourists.
I couldn't help but think how disappointed the incas would be to see this
creation, which easily took 100 years to build, reduced to such base
purposes... perhaps one of the other cities, recently uncovered but
not yet commercialized, can be saved from this unfortunate end.