It was almost seven when I finally got through customs, so even though I figured nothing ran on time in Peru, it being a third-world country and all, I was fairly certain that I had missed my six-thirty connection. The only question in my mind was, could I make the other Faucett flight, whose departure time I had neglected to note. But the girl behind the Faucett counter dashed my hopes; it had left at seven. Right on time. She informed me that I would have to wait for tomorrow to catch the next flight to Cuzco. Damn, this was not good. My first day, and already my schedule was being shot to hell.
By now I was sweating profusely from dragging my three heavy bags across the steamy terminal, and was still a bit queasy from the red-eye I had just endured. In no mood to spend an extra day in Lima, I inquired from her in broken Spanish if there might be another airline that could get me to Cuzco today. The look on her face told me that she seemed a bit reluctant to lose my fare, but suggested I try Americana, another Peruvian domestic airline.
So I shlepped my bags through the crowd to the other side of the terminal to the Americana counter. Sure, the girl said, they could get me there, but there seemed to be some sort of formality I had to take care of over at Faucett, which I couldn’t quite understand. So she scribbled a note and indicated I should head back to Faucett again. I gathered from the note that Faucett needed to endorse my ticket over to Americana, so I grabbed my bags and shoved my way back through the crowd. God, didn’t this airport have any luggage carts? The only ones I saw seemed to be the property of the few porters milling about, and I was too cheap to spring for their services. I’d rather get drenched in sweat and risk a dislocated shoulder, it seemed.
Back at Faucett, a man behind the counter disappeared behind a door with my ticket for what seemed like five minutes, but when he returned, my ticket was stamped and endorsed. Now back to Americana with my bags, which seemed to get heavier each time I dragged them through the crowded terminal. My clothes were sopping wet now, and I was starting to feel a little sick, but I managed to get back to Americana, and to my infinite relief, got a ticket on board their next flight. I was so relieved, I didn’t even think to ask when it left. The big departure board was no help either. It was in such a state of disrepair that it looked like the board on Wheel of Fortune, with half the letters missing. Finally I asked one of the guys milling around the Americana counter if he knew when the next Americana flight to Cuzco was, and he told me it was to leave at nine thirty. So now I had an hour and a half to kill.
The prospects for killing time inside the terminal were uninviting, so I wandered out past the machine-gun-toting guards at the main entrance, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Lima skyline, but the smog and the fetid smell of decay drove me back inside. There didn’t seem to be any place to sit down, so I headed toward the domestic gates, hoping to find a place to crash until my flight left.
The gates were strung out on either side of a long, glass-lined corridor, with hard plastic seats the only place to sit. I tried them, but they seemed designed to ensure permanent spinal injury, so I got back up and looked out the glass windows onto the dusty tarmac. All of the planes parked there looked like vintage craft which apparently hadn’t been washed or painted since the sixties. Many were obviously in no condition to fly, with missing engines and control surfaces. I began to remember all the news stories I had read over the years of planes crashing in the Andes. Boy, I really know how to entertain myself.
Now and again some unintelligible—to me, anyway—Spanish message blared out over the loud-speakers, but since I had yet to see an Americana plane anywhere, I didn’t panic. I figured that if I camped near the windows, eventually an Americana plane would show up, and all I would have to do is wait for people to start boarding it.
At last, an Americana 727 did show up, and sure enough, after inquiring at the counter, I was told that it was indeed the flight to Cuzco. Amazingly, we boarded on time, and I plopped down into my window seat with great relief. Three hours late, but my schedule was still somewhat intact.
We took off to the south, and from the air Lima looked even worse than I had imagined. Even the slums outside of Cairo had been cleaner and better laid out. What a miserable place it must be. As we turned inland I was surprised to see how fast the Andes rose up to meet us. They looked like gigantic slag heaps, riven with gullies, and totally devoid of life. Off to the east I could see snow-covered peaks tearing at the cloud cover. As the mountains continued to rise, some vegetation began to appear, and a scattering of tin-roofed settlements bordered with terraced fields dotted the landscape.
Soon we were enveloped in the clouds, and I began to entertain visions of us slamming headlong into some unnamed Andean peak. But as we began our descent, the clouds parted enough so that I could see the green fields around Cuzco and soon, the terra-cotta tiles of the city’s roofs. It reminded me very much of Tuscany, only much higher. We circled around before landing, and I got to see the whole city, nestled in a wide valley. It was much prettier than I expected.
I was a little worried about going from sea level to 11,000 feet, but when I stepped out of the plane, I noticed that I felt no ill effects from the altitude. The terminal was small, but in the corner I spied a booth with the name of my hotel, so after collecting my bags from the carousel, I strolled over and introduced myself, and was ushered to a waiting VW bus for the ride to town.
The formalities at the hotel took little time, and the porter showed me to my room, a quaint but clean little colonial-style room overlooking the main drag in Cuzco, the Avenida del Sol. The street out front was noisy, but I had taken the precaution of packing ear plugs, so I figured I’d be OK.
Immediately after tipping the porter, I stripped out of my clothes and hopped into the shower, and the grime and tension of the last 24 hours washed away. I had little more than an hour before I was to meet my bus for the half-day city tour that was included in my package, so I went downstairs to the restaurant to grab a bite to eat. I had a great fish soup and some sort of Peruvian stir-fry called Lomo Saltado—evidently something of a national dish—and a bottle of the excellent local brew, Cusquena. Finishing just in time, I was escorted back to the VW bus for my tour. My guide was an old gentleman named Milton, and he chatted with me as we rattled through the narrow, cobblestone streets of the town, stopping at some other hotels to pick up five other people, three of whom turned out to be from California as well.
It has been my experience that whenever a group of Americans gets together in foreign land, at least one of them usually turns out to be an asshole, and that role was ably filled by a man named Bill from southern California, who during the course of the tour kept interrupting Milton’s interesting discourses to ask inane questions about human sacrifices, and bizarre theories he had picked up about Inca construction methods. Straight out of Chariots of the Gods, or perhaps the National Enquirer. More than once I had to bite my tongue to stop myself from telling him to shut up.
But in spite of Bill, the tour was fascinating. We visited two of the main cathedrals in town, and Milton filled us in on many of the interesting facts about them, some of which I had already gleaned from the research I had done before the trip, but most of which were new to me. He showed us many Inca remains in town, including the foundations of Inca palaces, upon which the Spaniards had built their churches and government buildings. Being a native Quechua Indian, he seemed to take great pride in pointing out how the Inca foundations, built without mortar, had survived the great quake in 1950, when most of the colonial buildings tumbled to the ground. After visiting the churches, we drove up into the hills above town and were shown four of the nearby Inca ruins, which I plan to visit again tomorrow on my own.
By the time the tour was over, I was beginning to feel the effects of the altitude, and I was glad to get back to the hotel and pop an Ibuprofen. I put in my ear plugs and settled in for a two hour nap, which greatly refreshed me for dinner. I considered wandering around town in search of a good restaurant, but the sound of native musicians in the hotel restaurant lured me back there, and I had another excellent meal accompanied by Quechua music. All in all, not a bad day
Alone in Cuzco
This day didn’t start out very well. I was awakened at six by the maid knocking on my door to clean the room. It took me a about ten seconds to realize where I was, and then I shouted at her to come back later. I stumbled into the bathroom to pee, and was startled to see the puffy-eyed stranger in the mirror looking back at me. Jesus, I looked ugly. I decided I needed a hell of lot more beauty sleep, so I fell back to bed and managed to get a couple more hours slumber.
When I awoke again, I felt somewhat better, and I showered and went downstairs for breakfast. There were just a couple of other people in the dining room, and I got the idea that there weren’t a lot of people staying in the hotel. Breakfast was your typical continental breakfast; toast, jam and tea, but it filled me up.
This day I was to be on my own, and all that I had scheduled for myself was to revisit the sights I had seen the day before. But first I wanted to try to call Vilma. I went back up to the room after breakfast to reread the passage in my Lonely Planet guidebook about placing an international call from Peru, and armed with my notes I left the hotel for the telephone exchange, which happened to be almost directly across the street. Since it was still very early back home, I decided to stroll down the Avenida del Sol, just to waste some time. I went down the street for about a mile on one side, and then back up the other. Not much to see there, mostly small stores and offices, except for one thing. On a large wall on the same side of the street as my hotel, someone had painted a huge mural, which depicted the history of the Incas. It was beautifully done, and told the story in vivid detail, making the Spaniards appear just as they must have been, brutal invaders. Gigantic conquistadors slaughtered Inca women and children, and priests with bloodshot eyes enslaved Indians in dark silver mines. It was stunning, especially considering the fact that the country is still ruled by the elite, white descendants of these Spaniards.
The Avenida del Sol
It was still about 6:45 am back home, but I figured it would take some time to get an international connection, so I wandered into the telephone exchange and stood in line at the counter. When it was my turn, I explained to the lady in my broken Spanish what I wanted to do, and was surprised that I actually understood her instructions. It seemed what Lonely Planet said was true, I could simply go to a phone booth, punch in a few numbers, and get connected to an AT&T operator. So before I knew it, I was talking to Vilma. Boy, it was good to talk to her, and she seemed equally pleased to hear from me. I told her of my adventures so far, and she filled me in on what had been going on at home. All too soon we we’re saying our good-byes and I love yous. I wondered again just what the hell I was doing here without her.
Then I went back to the hotel and loaded up my bag for the day. My original plan had been to hike back up to Sacsayhuaman, the Inca fortress just above the town, but by the time I hit the street again, it had started to rain, so I spent a few hours around the main plaza, ducking in and out of the colonnades, basically just wasting time. I went back to the churches I had visited the day before, but only the Convent of Santo Domingo seemed to be open. The guard at the door was kind enough to let me in without a ticket, and I spent some time there shooting video. I was practically the only one there, so one of the guards sort of took me around and pointed out a couple of interesting architectural features in the Inca walls. But between my Spanish and his English, I’m afraid I didn’t get a whole lot out of his explanations. Still, I thanked him profusely for his time. Nothing but friendly people so far.
By the time I left, the sun had come back out, so I wandered back up to the plaza and sat on one of the benches and let the street vendors pitch me for about an hour. An older man sat down on the bench and tried to strike up a conversation, but my limited Spanish put a quick end to that. A drunk in a soccer uniform sailed by, taking inebriated kicks at passing cars, and offering anyone in his line of sight a drink from his bottle. Luckily, his bloodshot eyes never focused on me, but he did provide a couple of minutes’ amusement. Then it was time for lunch—Lomo Saltado again—at one of the restaurants on the square.
I felt good after lunch, but not good enough to try the steep hill up to Sacsayhuaman, so I hired a taxi to drive me up there. The taxi driver tried to converse with me too, but it was just too hard to string more than a couple of sentences together. Damn, these people were so friendly, I wished I had spent more time on my Spanish.
The ruins were almost deserted when I got there, and I enjoyed strolling around them, shooting video, taking pictures, and looking down onto the town. It is truly an impressive monument, even after the Spaniards got done tearing down most of it for their buildings down in the valley below. The Incas constructed this massive fort, and aqueducts, and roads, not to mention their impressive knowledge of astronomy, medicine and agriculture, even though they hadn’t known of the wheel or the arch, and apparently had no written language.
After I had shot all the pictures I wanted to, I climbed up a small hill across from the main battlements and just stared at the place. It was sunny and a little breeze blew, and I was lost in contemplation for a long time. Suddenly I heard the sound of a flute nearby, echoing off the massive stones. I peered around one of the boulders nearby and saw a guy playing a quena, a traditional Inca flute. Eerie is not a strong enough word to describe the sound. I was mesmerized.
By now the sun was starting to set, and I began to walk down the Inca trail back to town, stopping only to be amused by the sight of a small dog which waited in ambush for the tourist buses. He’d crouch by the curb near a hairpin curve, and each time one passed up the road, he’d leap out and chase it for a few yards, barking and snapping at the rear bumper. Quite a hoot, but I don’t think that dog is going to have a long life.
I managed to get one hell of a sunburned face, sitting in the sun for as long as I did, so after I kicked myself, I pulled the sunscreen out of my big pack for the trip to Machu Picchu tomorrow. We leave at 5:40 in the morning, so I think I’ll end this entry for today.
Taking the Train to Machu Picchu
I hardly slept last night. For some reason I kept tossing and turning, with thoughts of calamities and troubles riling up my brain. The noise from the street seemed amplified by my ear plugs, and I decided against taking a sleeping pill only because I had to get up at 4:40. The night went on forever.
At exactly 4:40, the reception clerk called with my wake up call, and even though I hadn’t slept, I didn’t feel all that wasted. Strange. I got up, showered, and got my bags packed for the trip to Machu Picchu.
At 5:40, Ivonne from the travel agency showed up in the lobby and handed me the ticket booklet I was to use for all the various buses and trains and entrance fees. Then the minibus drove up and another, older American couple and I were whisked to the bus station. The American gentleman was winded, and panted in a wheezy sort of way that convinced me that he was having a major bout with altitude sickness. No doubt they were on some package tour like mine which had them fly overnight from the States, get whisked around Cuzco on a half-day tour, and then get rousted up at five in the morning for their “trip of a lifetime” to Machu Picchu. She seemed to be OK, but he really looked like he was about to have a stroke. I was glad that I had spent an extra day allowing myself to acclimate to the altitude.
At the bus station we were herded onto a bigger bus and briefly introduced to the man who was to be our guide, Darwin. (As in Charles, Ivonne informed us.) The rest of the passengers were a noisy bunch of Brazilians, who spent the entire bus trip to the train station in Ollantaytambo singing along with the piped-in music on the bus’s loudspeakers. It was cute at first, but after an hour and a half of it, I could barely keep myself from yelling at them to shut up. To make matters worse, the music they were singing to was old Carpenters and Neil Diamond tunes from the seventies. I cursed American culture and what it had wrought upon the world.
The bus wound its way over the mountains behind Cuzco, through picturesque farm land, dotted with tiny villages, and then made a sudden, steep descent into the Urubamba river valley. At the town of Ollantaytambo, we left the buses and boarded the small diesel train for the trip down the valley. The tracks followed the banks of the river, which began to get ever wilder, and the walls of the valley became ever steeper, until we were racing along the bottom of a deep canyon, next to a raging torrent.
The Brazilians, meanwhile, had continued their singing, unaccompanied now. I prayed for them to lose their voices.
At the Km 88 train station, where the Inca trail starts, the train stopped, and three people got out in hiking gear. I had read enough about the Inca trail to know that it was much harder than its 33 km length led one to expect, and I admired and pitied these guys.
About this time I began to notice a change in vegetation. We were moving from the high Andes down into a subtropical zone, and the trees, which heretofore had been scrubby bushes, now began to tower densely over the tracks. The canyon, meanwhile, was getting even steeper, and the river looked lethal. The train passed through several short tunnels, and finally came to a stop at Puentas Ruinas, its last stop.
As we exited the train, I looked up at the sheer walls on either side of the river. Somewhere up above us in the clouds was Machu Picchu, but I couldn’t see any road, or any way for us to get up there. We stood in line to get onto the minibuses parked next to the station, and as luck would have it, I managed to get on the bus with the singing Brazilians. I began to hope that the bus would crash through a guardrail and send us all plummeting to our deaths.
It turned out that the steep, windy road to the top of the canyon had no guardrails, and the bus wound up the switchbacks, sometimes coming within a foot of the edge. One wrong twitch of the steering wheel, and there would have been nothing to stop us until we hit the river below. I figured that they ought to charge admission for just the bus ride alone.
At the top, perched on a wide ledge, sat the Machu Picchu Hotel, a modern little inn with a bar and an open air restaurant under a wooden roof. I checked in and dropped off my bag, put on my rain coat—it had started to drizzle—and walked back out to join Darwin and the other English-speaking tourists. Away from the Brazilians at last!
Darwin gave us a brief introductory lecture, and then we went through the gates and caught our first glimpse of the ruins. My experience with this sort of site, one which I’ve seen countless pictures of, usually is disappointing. I always expect it to be bigger, or more impressive. But Machu Picchu didn’t disappoint. The first sight I saw after passing through the gates was the classic image of Machu Picchu, with the ruins slanting down the steep hillside before me, and the massive peak of Huayna Picchu towering in the mist behind them. I was awestruck. I could have left then and felt I had received my money’s worth.
Machu Picchu and Huayna Picchu
But of course I didn’t. Darwin, who we later found out is a professor of archeology at Cuzco University, took us on a three hour tour of the ruins, explaining in amazing detail its history, geology, and spiritual meaning. He even whipped out an Inca flute at one point to demonstrate the acoustics of one part of the temple grounds.
He also exploded a number of myths that had been perpetrated on the unknowing public over the years. Like the one about how Hiram Bingham, the purported discoverer of the ruins, had hacked his way through the jungle and found this “lost city,” covered with thick vegetation. The truth, which Bingham’s son gleaned from his father’s unpublished diaries, is more mundane. It turns out that old Hiram was wandering down the Urubamba river, following the railroad tracks which had been built years before, and was told by the local Indians that an interesting Inca ruin was situated on the mountain above. So he hiked up the well-worn trail to the top to find a family of Indians farming the same terraces that the Incas had used centuries before. It is true that he led the first modern scientific expedition to study the site, but the only people to have “lost” this city were outsiders. The locals knew all about it.
At about one o’clock the tour was over, and we went back to the hotel for lunch. I shared a table with an elderly woman named Carmen, from Venezuela. It turned out that she had studied at the University of Florida in her youth, so her English was much better than my Spanish. We had a pleasant conversation—the truth is that I was aching for some company—after which I retired to my room for a nap.
I figured I’d go back out once all of the tourists had left, but after I got up from the nap, I decided to give my sunburn a break and stayed in my room to keep reading the book I’d been struggling with since the beginning of the trip. It’s Conversation in the Cathedral by Peru’s most famous author—and one-time presidential candidate—Mario Vargas Llosa. I’ve been struggling with it because the story jumps around chronologically at almost every other paragraph, and as in a Russian novel, the characters all seem to have several names. The protagonist, for instance, has been called Santiago, Zavalita, and Skinny so far. I’m not sure, but there might even be some other names in there that I’ve missed, and I’m having a little trouble keeping track of what’s going on. But I guess I won’t quit just yet.
I didn’t go to dinner tonight, and not just because I’m not very hungry. I’m already getting tired of eating alone on this trip, and the thought of another meal by myself in a room full of groups talking and enjoying themselves is causing me to get a little depressed. Naturally, not eating just causes my depression to grow, but I just can’t face wandering into the dinning room, wolfing down a meal at a table by myself, and then scurrying back to my room to be alone again. Not for the first time I wish Vilma were here. I know it’s selfish of me, this kind of travel is not Vilma’s cup of tea, but it would be very good for my disposition.
Since I don’t have to get up early tomorrow—the ruins don’t open until seven—I’m going to take a sleeping pill tonight. The walls of my room are literally paper-thin, and I have heard the Brazilian guys next door to me as if they were sitting across from me. God, I hope they don’t feel like singing tonight.
Machu Picchu
I slept very well last night. Between the sleeping pill and the ear plugs, I didn’t stir once, and if the Brazilians next door sang at all, I didn’t hear them.
When I awoke and peeked out the window, I saw that a thick fog had formed during the night, so there was no point getting up in a hurry, I was going to have to wait for the fog to lift before I went back to the ruins.
The breakfast buffet was quite a spread; cereal, yogurt, cheese, ham, breads of various sorts, and platters of fruit. I have been avoiding all fruits except bananas, even though this is a tourist hotel, and the fruits are probably quite safe. But with the climb coming up in a few days, I didn’t want to take any chances at all with catching some intestinal disorder. Bananas, however, I can peel, and so they are certainly safe. It’s the old rule of traveling in third-world countries: if you can’t cook it or peel it, forget it.
After breakfast, the fog was just beginning to lift, so I bought my ticket to the ruins and walked in. I had planned on climbing the massive rock to the north of the ruins, Huayna Picchu, before the sun rose too high and it turned hot, but the ruins were practically deserted, so I wandered around by myself and took in the strange feeling of the place. After some time, I climbed up the agricultural terraces to what is called the caretaker’s hut, and took in the sights from above. I sat there, staring at the ruins for a long time, completely transfixed by the swirling mists and the solitude.
At length, some backpackers happened by, entering the ruins from the Inca trail above. They interrupted my reverie, but I had been there alone for so long that I really didn’t mind. We sat there and stared at the place together.
At about ten I heard the train whistle up the Urubamba valley, and I knew that the hordes of tourists were on their way, so I decided to walk over to the trail to Huayna Picchu and scope it out. At the entrance to the trail is a little hut where the guard signs you in before you make the climb. Darwin had explained to us that some woman had fallen to her death last year, so they instituted this sign-in policy to keep track of everyone who decides to try the climb to the top. After you complete the climb and exit the trail, you are supposed to sign out, so that they know you didn’t tumble off the trail to your death. This seemed kind of ominous.
The trail to the top is a series of steep zigzags, with parts of it lined with ropes to allow you to clamber up the wet and slippery rocks. It is very steep, and I became winded almost immediately. I hadn’t thought to bring any water or food with me, and I regretted it right away. Several times I stopped to catch my breath, and was rewarded with alarming views down the almost sheer cliff to the Urubamba below.
After about 45 minutes of hard climbing I clambered over the last few boulders and stood at the top. The view was absolutely stunning. The tourists in the ruins below were little more than colorful dots, and the mists swirled around the peaks to all sides of me. There were butterflies flitting by from all directions, and a slight breeze evaporated the sweat from my skin. I thought nothing could have topped my silent reverie this morning, but my senses were filled to bursting. I only wish Vilma were there to share that moment with me.
On Top of Huayna Picchu
I stayed on top for about a half an hour and then began the journey back down. Whereas the climb up had been arduous, the descent was less strenuous but tricky. Like climbing down a ladder facing away from it, I had to be very careful where I placed my feet on the slippery rocks. Of course, about a third of the way down I did slip, but it was in a place where I could just reach out in time to catch myself. In doing so, however, I cut the palm of my hand slightly. It wasn’t a bad cut, but in the tropics a slight cut can become badly infected, and I cursed myself for leaving my first aid kit back in Cuzco. Fortunately, I had a small bottle of alcohol in my shaving kit back at the hotel, so I figured that I’d be OK.
The rest of the descent passed without incident, and when I got back to the hut and signed out, I could see that there were many more tourists at the ruins than there had been the day before. So I decided to end my visit. I had seen Machu Picchu at its best, and I didn’t see the need to stay any longer.
I wandered back to the hotel, bought a Coke and some postcards, and spent what was left of my time before lunch writing to the folks back home. I felt in a great mood, and all the depression from the night before had vanished.
After lunch, the buses drove up to take us back to the train station, and I boarded one of the little red and yellow train cars for the three hour journey back to Ollantaytambo, and then to Cuzco. The Brazilians, I noted with relief, were nowhere to be seen
I read more of Conversation in the Cathedral on the train, and I think I’m finally getting the hang of Vargas Llosa’s style. At Ollantaytambo we left the train and got back on the buses which had carried us there the day before. As we climbed out of the Urubamba valley, and reached the farm lands above, I could see that a dusting of snow had fallen during the night. I turned and asked the girl sitting next to me in my fractured Spanish if this was unusual, but her reply came so fast that I couldn’t understand a single bit of her explanation. I just shrugged and smiled, shaking my head, and for the rest of the ride back to Cuzco we didn’t exchange any more conversation.
Darkness had already fallen when we got back to my hotel, and I decided to forgo dinner again, but I munched on some bread and a banana that I had snagged from the breakfast buffet in the morning, and this filled me up. It has been a great day, but I have to get up early to catch my flight back to Lima in the morning, so I’m going to turn in early and try to get a good night’s sleep.