The Lost City of the Incas

"In the most inaccessible corner of the most inaccessible section of the southern Andes there is a stupendous canyon whose rock is granite and whose precipices are frequently a thousand feet sheer." - Hiram Bingham, The Lost City Of The Incas

A ten minute taxi ride takes us out of Cuzco centre. The paved squares, wooden balconies and white plaster and dry-stone buildings fade away, the cobbles under the wheels become rougher and the pavements gather dirt and mud and water. The day outside is overcast, cool with altitude and heavy with the promise of rain, but Ellen and I stare out of the windows with optimism un-dented. 

After a hasty switch in a backstreet of an outskirt and a brief haggling over price we squeeze onto a two and a half hour local collective bus that almost immediately makes up its quota of passengers and sets off at a suicidal pace. It takes us winding through mountain passes and dusty villages and we slowly drop in altitude; down into forested foothills and wide river valleys. Ten of us bend into the van, rucksacks on our laps, and stare quietly out at farming terraces and Incan step. (Unlike Mongolian step the Incan steps actually look like steps, broad agricultural terraces carved into the hillside that have been in constant use for over a thousand years.) As we get lower the temperature in the van slowly increases until we are all extremely grateful when the driver opens a window.

We board a twin carriage train at the small town of Ollaytambo. The single track curves away down a narrow river valley where jungled mountains rise sudden and steep on both sides. There is no road along the valley to Aguas Callientes, and no path except between the wooden sleepers. Even the closest hiking trail winds for 4 days through the mountains far to the north of here. As a result the two train companies that operate this route have almost a complete monopoly on access to Machu Picchu and the prices are set accordingly. Ellen and I have to pay the equivalent of £100 each for our 1 and a half hour return journey. The train rocks along as if in a heavy swell and the trees on one side start to crowd against the window. The track curves under the mountains through tunnels and right up against the riverside where shallow white water rips its way past boulders and fallen trunks. Despite the swaying the train porter insists on serving drinks. They are complimentary with our ticket and we get a choice from a variety of local teas and juices, but the cups slide alarmingly across the table the moment they are put down and everybody quickly grabs their beverage of choice before they end up on the floor. Over the next hour the landscape slowly gets more dramatic but it is not until we finally pull in to the town that we can step out into the now humid, jungle air and fully appreciate our surroundings.

Aguas Callientes translates to "hot waters", named for the natural springs upriver fed from deep underground. The town itself is a little more than three streets in the crook of two valleys, crowded with restaurants and hostels and street stalls. The scenery is spectacular in every direction. From the white of the river to the soaring green of the near vertical forests, as the sun sets there is the definite sense that you are stepping somewhere special. We won't start our hike until early in the morning tomorrow when we will be racing the sun to the top.

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At 3AM the night is still dark but the line to catch the bus up the mountain is already long, even though the first bus doesn't leave until 5:30. Ellen and I, day bags hastily packed with cameras, water, torches and a packed lunch prepared for us by our hostel, (really good service, all hotels should offer this) walk straight past the bus line because we have decided to trek up the mountain instead. We have done no research more than asking our hostel owner which way the path is but, confident that it can't be that difficult, we set off past the limits of the towns street lighting and into the night. The moment the town is behind us we are alone, and much more so than we expected. Our head-torches make little impact on the night around us and we focus on the road as it winds around the base of the mountain, gravel mixed with mud. We can hear if not see the river below us on our left hand side and above us the forested hills are all but invisible against the sky, you can just make out the deeper shade of black where there are no stars. We pass tracks that slope down to the riverside and boarded up, corrugated iron storehouses buried into the base of the cliff. Dogs bark at us from out of the darkness and our hearts give a leap when we see one standing at the edge of the light, but it doesn't do anything but growl and stand its ground.

(Ellen: I am far more comfortable and confident around dogs than George is, even the strays all over Latin America. But even I felt a sudden jolt of fear when a dog trotted out of the dark, barking in warning. I tried to channel inner calm and control and stand my ground and all the things I know you are meant to do with dogs. "Keep walking slowly" I tell George. "OK" I tell the dog in the firmest voice I can muster, putting my hands out in a calming, placating gesture. "Good dog. It's OK." And slowly, purposefully we walk past and the dog stays away. "You have to be assertive but not aggressive" I tell George as we continue, trying to bluster my way through the adrenaline that is coursing through my body. "That's why you should never run - they see you as something to chase. They can sense your fear". I'm pretty sure the dog could still sense my fear, no matter how much I tried to channel the dog whisperer.)

15 minutes later we can see lights on the road ahead and hear the quiet murmur of voices. If we had done our research we might have learnt that we have to cross the river before we start the climb. And if we had done our research we would have known that the guards on the bridge need to check out tickets. And if we had done our research we would have known that the bridge is gated and doesn't open until 5AM. But we didn't. And so we have to wait for an hour and a half under the one street lamp, surrounded by flies and stray dogs, as a steady stream of tourists build around us in the early morning twilight. Making the top of Machu Picchu for sunrise is not easy when you start from the bottom. 

The gate opens with the sky a lighter shade of grey and the dogs immediately bound ahead of us down the road. We file through in an orderly procession and then we are across the river and climbing. From bottom to top there are 1789 steps up to the entrance gate of Machu Picchu. They are steep, muddy and uneven and the path is rarely wide enough for more than one person at a time. It only takes 150 before I have to stop and hold my sides, it is already swelteringly humid and I can feel the sweat on my back. From that point on Ellen and I take the climb in 100 step bursts as we wind our way slowly at first, then agonisingly up the hillside.  Having been very near the front of the queue when crossing the bridge we find ourselves regularly having to step off the path and being overtaken until there is almost no-one left behind us. Our route is crisscrossed by the road which is forced to take a much longer sweeping route, but soon enough we are having to wait as the first buses overtake us as well, tourists looking sleepily out of the windows. Our packed lunches disappear well before breakfast time as we try to stretch our water and mini-cartons of peach juice out to last us all day. The sun is visible above through the trees and now it is just a battle to reach the top. 

When the American explorer Hiram Bingham first discovered the lost city of the Incas it was by following a local boy through thick jungle and mountain terrain, and after weeks of searching. His first sight of the city was of a huge stone wall, overgrown and half buried under 1000 years of growth. In contrast to that, our first sight is of a roadside car-park full of buses and a line of people queuing at the ticket gate, and it could not have been a more welcome sight if it had been covered in gold. Both of us take a few minutes to catch our breath while Ellen fishes our tickets out of her bag. One of the peculiarities with Machu Picchu is that it is impossible to buy tickets on the gate, you can only buy them in advance in Cuzco or in Aguas Callientes because there is a limit set by the government for the maximum number of visitors per day. Luckily for us we had done just enough research to discover this beforehand and so, armed with tickets, we queued up, and we were in.

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When you build a city on top of a mountain, steps and ramps are an unavoidable fact of life. And so with the quad-busting hike up from the valley behind us, we are immediately climbing again through jungle. This time we are following signs for the watchtower which used to guard the entrance to the city from above. It is another hot and humid climb, and tough on the legs even if it is only a short distance, but the reward is easily worth the effort. Finally we see the city itself laid out in-front of us and for the second time on our trip we are both rendered speechless (the first being at Iguazu). In the early morning half light, with only a handful of other tourists around us, there can be few places on Earth that match Machu Picchu in terms of drama. As the clouds of mist are burnt away by an increasingly ferocious sun we can still hear the cicadas in the jungle, feel the wind gently soothing the humidity and drying the sweat from our shirts, and see a vast network of stone walls and terraces, temples and alleyways and workhouses and statues, stepped streets and wide open pastures. It all sits together in an impossible location, and one that I'm afraid even our best pictures can do little justice. 

I remembered from somewhere that the highest point of Machu Picchu is the sun gate. (That is excluding the small temple of Waynapicchu on top of the mountain which you have to purchase a special ticket for - and they were sold out on the day we visited even if we could have managed the climb, not likely given the near vertical staircases you have to negotiate). So with the idea that it would probably be best to do all the climbing in one go, and that we had already climbed most of the way, we decided to go to the top and then work our way back down. We follow the signposts and set off, but as it turns out, the sun gate is over a kilometre away from the main site and all of it is uphill. During the course of this final and unexpected climb I got acute kidney failure, broke both legs, suffered from respiratory arrest and died at least twice. By the time we both reached the gate I was a wreck and had to collapse in a heap against one of the stone pillars. For some reason, now that we were not at high altitude Ellen seemed to find the climb much easier and as I pulled myself up to standing against the pillar she was already climbing a little further up the hill to look at the gate from above. The sun gate is the point from which many visitors first see Machu Picchu as it marks one end of the Inca Trail. Trekkers at the beginning of their fourth day of solid hiking come through the gate as the sun is rising, and even coming from the other direction we can appreciate what an effect that must have. As we both sit on our different vantage points and look back the way we have come I find it hard to imagine the people who could have built this place. I find it easier to imagine the explorers who would have discovered it thousands of years later and I spend several minutes imagining I am one of them. It is remarkably easy, and even the presence of other tourists can't break me from the reverie. 

On the way back down Ellen says she needs the toilet and so she scrambles down the steps ahead of me towards some thatched rooftops lower down the mountainside. I stop to take a few pictures and when I turn around she is gone, lost amongst I the throngs of tourists. Somewhat aware that finding each other might be quite difficult in such a crowd I hurry down the steps after her and instantly get caught up in Machu Picchu's rigorously enforced one-way system. At every junction there are uniformed men who whistle and shout at you if you step away from the main flow of tourists. You are not allowed to go back on yourself, you are not allowed to go the wrong way through gates and you are not allowed to move from one track to the adjacent one going in the other direction. If you try to do any of these things the man nearest to you will shout at you and speak rapidly into his walkie talkie as if calling security instantly to the site of your infraction. I am swept along with the crowd, looking in every direction to see if I can spot Ellen and eventually finding her... on the other side of a gate. Unfortunately there is only so much officious rule following that I can take (don't tell my students). I asked the man politely, twice. I made it very clear that I had been separated from my fiancé and only wanted to come back to speak to her. I was all smiles. And when the guard still waved his finger and shouted at me I ignored him and climbed under the barriers. This caused much consternation and whistling and talking in a walkie talkie that only served to make me more annoyed, but we did our best to ignore it as we worked out what to do next. Ellen had somehow managed to circumnavigate the one way system but was yet to find a toilet. Embarrassingly this meant that we both had to go straight back through the gate I had just misused. The guard looks at us both with a severe frown and a shake of the head that says "tourists are evil" in every crinkle of his forehead. It turns out that the only toilet is outside of the park and you have to go out and back in again if you want to use it, your ticket accommodates for this by letting you in three times in the same day. It's a bit of an irritating system, but when you get as many visitors as Machu Picchu does I guess that some control is necessary. Ellen and I decide to have lunch in one of two restaurants just outside the park entrance to make the most of our time outside. 

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Written at the time:

The early afternoon light hides behind cotton wool clouds that rest neatly on the jungles mountain tops. Trees cling to distant sheer white rocks that rise precipitously from the valley, covered in earth coloured lichen and scarred by deep cracks.

I am lying on grass and stone, back resting against a fallen foundation on one of the high agricultural terraces that surround Machu Picchu. From here I can see the entire city draped over the mountain below me, and the high temple on waynapichu that perches impossibly high on the peak above. Dust whips across with the wind, grit with a welcome moment of cool in the sweltering, sticky heat of the day.

Around me is a constant quiet murmuring conversation as tourists take pictures of themselves at the viewpoint. Families, backpackers, hikers. This place is for everyone, though not everyone has hiked their way to the top. Behind them birds twitter and flit, cicadas shriek in the jungle and the distant clatter of the train echoes up from the riverside far below. 

The second time we did the climb to get to this point it wasn't any easier, but at least we had lunch to power us through. Ellen has unzipped the bottom of her hiking trousers and turned them into shorts, mine do not have that function available so I am slowly cooking instead.

A short walk in the opposite direction to the sun gate takes you on a less traveled path towards the Incan bridge. The trail winds closer and closer to the sheer cliff face until in a couple of places you are almost edging along with your back to the rock. This route probably gives the best view over the valley from any part of the site with a steep drop off and clear view down to the river in the valley bottom. This was the ancient route into the city, easily defended with a drawbridge and impassable terrain on both sides. When we see the bridge it looks more like a scene from a movie than a construction in real life. A vast smooth single rock face stretches from the sky to the ground with overgrown steps just visible on the far side. The castle drawbridges in the UK have nothing on this, it's narrow and flimsy and just wide enough for one person at a time. Tourists are no longer allowed to climb over the bridge after a British man tragically fell over the edge and died a few years ago, so after looking a bit longer, and feeling sorry and a little horrified for the man, we turn around and finally head into the main part of the city.

I flick through the little book I bought near the entrance and try to make sense of the walls I'm seeing. There are no readily available maps of Machu Picchu, no leaflets handed out at the entrance or even information boards around the site. This has had the triple threat effect of maintaining the spectacle of the structure at all times, causing an explosion in tour guides with whom the vast majority of people seem to be walking around, and leaving everyone else confused by the one way system. Having experienced this once and with no desire to be shouted at again I spent a little and bought a book which has a very crude map printed on the back page. From the points of interest I can see marked it appears that Machu Picchu is mainly comprised of temples. Or at the very least these make up the majority of remaining recognisable structures. There is also a small quarry with stone working marks still visible, a sundial that actually isn't a sundial but a sort of astronomical calendar used for working out when crops should be planted, a sacred stone in the vague shape of the mountain behind it and a series of agricultural terraces with stone carved irrigation systems. I think it is fair to say that the structures themselves are not as interesting as what they can tell you about the civilisation that made them, and so I found myself pouring over my book trying to extract as much information as I could and thinking that this is where the tour guides earn their money. While we did the best we could, there was a definite sense that the day had already been a long one and by the time we had made it around to the final few buildings we were both ready to head back to the town. By the end, even Ellen will admit that she was getting a little distracted.

The climb down was far easier for me than for Ellen. I race down the steps barely pausing to take breath, but Ellen found the going much tougher and less than a quarter of the way down her legs were already shaking underneath her. Every stop to catch breath saw more little red dots appearing on the back of Ellen's legs as the sand flies buzzed around us and so we soldiered on as fast as we could, keeping a count of the steps between us and occasionally disagreeing over what exactly constitutes a step. When we reach the bottom we both look up and can just see the very edge of one of the terraces peaking out from the jungle high above. 

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1 day later - Cuzco

Ellen:

Sand fly bites do not itch immediately. They are, at first, seemingly harmless tiny red dots that you only notice when you look and do not hurt or irritate at all. You don't even feel them happening, or see the bugs at work. There is a reason they are called "no see-ums". And it is for those reasons, that I did not worry about my bare legs for the whole day we were at Machu Picchu. In the middle of that night back in Aguas Callientes, however I learnt how grievous my error had been. I woke, feeling like my calves were being eaten from the inside by tiny irritating, barbed creatures. I don't know how I managed to get back to sleep, other than due to extreme exhaustion. The morning light revealed that each pin prick was now an angry, raised red lump and itched about ten times more than a bad mosquito bite. Unlike mosquito bites, sand fly bites do not stop itching if you ignore them.

The journey back to Cusco was just as beautiful as the one there and thank god, it involved very little movement. Aside from the cramping of my leg muscles after the hiking, any movement of fabric over the bites scratched them so excruciatingly lightly that it physically made me twitch with the effort and self control of not going into a frenzy of scratching. The next day in Cusco was pretty much a wipe out, because I couldn't walk. I am not exaggerating. I have never experienced anything like the itchiness of one single sand fly bite. I had 49. Just on the backs of my legs. Some right on top of each other. One particular cluster right on the soft at the back of your knees, making bending or flexing the leg a torment. I lay in bed whimpering while George googles solutions. In doing so he also managed to discover that the bites can itch for up to 5 days and for some people, it can even go in for multiple months. Not something I wanted to hear. In the end George kindly went shopping around various pharmacies and brought back possible remedies to an increasingly frantic Ellen. In the end the thing that worked was rubbing alcohol. They finally stopped itching after just short of a week, but the marks remained for more than twice that. Every person we have met since then who has said they are headed that way, I have given serious advice that no matter what the temperature, wear long sleeves and trousers, not shorts.