Lima is a bit of a hole to be honest. Apart from Miraflores, which has a long strip of beaches and a heavy swell that rolls 1000s of kms across the Pacific Ocean, uninterrupted by a landmass. It hosts some cracking surf breaks.
It also has very impressive tsunami walls - looks like they’re anticipating a big one.
Cusco, the capital of the Incan empire and former capital of Peru, is a lot more interesting.
In the old centre, the Spanish replaced Incan temples and palaces with churches and mansions. The Inca begged them to spare one particular building because it housed all of their important cultural and historical records. Which, of course, sealed its doom.
The conquerors, as conquerors do, erased the identity of the conquered to deprive uprisings of a unifying cultural and national impetus.| xxx | xxx |
Consequently, all of our knowledge of the Inca today has come via the descriptions of Spanish settlers.
Whatever the criminality of that period, what you see in Cusco today is striking and otherworldly. Spanish colonial architecture is tightly integrated within the ruins of old Incan structures. Gothic, renaissance and Andalusian elements - columns, pointed arches, ribbed vaults, ornate wooden balconies - sit atop and are incorporated within indigenous irregularly shaped and sized, meticulously fitted, drystone walls of granite and andesite. If you arrive by plane, note that Cusco is ~3,400m high so don’t plan anything particularly strenuous until you’ve had a good night’s sleep.| xxx | xxx |
In the surrounding hills, there are a number of Incan archeological sites that should be visited. The best of them, Sacsayhuamán or Saqsaywaman, sounds like “sexy woman” when the locals pronounce it.
A 3 hour drive from Cusco, Rainbow Mountain, so called because of its bands of colour - pink due to clay, mud, and sand, white (or whiteish) due to quartze, red due to iron, green due to manganese, and a mustard yellow due to sulphur - stands at 5036m.
It is a tough but thoroughly rewarding hike, my second 5000m+ in 2 months.
Tourism only arrived here after 2010 when climate change saw the end of its permanent snow cover.
Mining companies have drooled, manoeuvred and manipulated over the mineralogy of Rainbow Mountain. Fortunately, however, it has been officially protected since 2019.
While you can get there by train (to Aguas Calientes) and then bus, one’s first sight of Machu Picchu ought to be from the Sun Gate on the Inca Trail.
If you’re fit, at the very least get off your arse, get off the train at junction 106 and do the last day of the Trail (about 11km)!
If you’re not fit, get fit …and at the very least get off your arse, get off the train at junction 106 and do the last day of the Trail!!
You’ll be grateful to escape the train anyway, with its interminable panpipe muzak and the American ‘History Channel’ voiceover that reduces an Incan legend of ill-fated love to cloying, maukish, Walt Disney schmalz stripped of all beauty and nuance.
Along the way you’ll see the stunning Winaywayna site and views over the Urubamba river 400m below.
The terraces at Winaywayna gave me the idea to pitch a Netflix series called Extreme Farming.
Or perhaps Extreme Gardening as a challenge to the TV networks’ bland gardening programs that seem to always cast people that look and dress like hobbits.
Machu Picchu from the Sun Gate, after a hard slog, took my breath away. I sat, took it in, thought “I can’t believe I’m here”, and wiped a tear away.
I once heard someone say they weren’t overly impressed by Machu Picchu. They most certainly arrived by train and bus and most likely are of the idiot-dilettantes class of tourist.
Abandoned due to economics when the Inca made their last stand against the Spanish in 1572 at the remote stronghold of Vilcabamba, forgotten and reclaimed by the jungle, Machu Picchu was never conquered by the Spanish.
Much later, the repositioning of an important monolith in the main complex to accommodate a Spanish royal arriving by helicopter lead to the stone’s destruction. Thus, belatedly and symbolically, completing the colonial project here.
Consequently, Machu Picchu - largely intact and untouched - reveals the genius and mastery of the Incas. Spring waters are canalised and delivered throughout the city. Excess runoff is carefully diverted. Despite appearing precariously perched at 2430m, no landslides have destroyed the city because a) 60% of construction is organic (uses and anchors to the mountain itself), b) retaining walls are expertly underpinned by drainage systems, and c) its drystone walls are perfectly fitted, use a tongue and groove interlocking system between courses, and doorways and windows have a slight inward tilt with heavy lintels.
The entire city is oriented by design to be a sundial clock, a compass identifying the cardinal points, a calendar and an observatory. The rising of the sun in particular troughs between peaks in the surrounding mountains signals solstices and equinoxes.
Machu Picchu was rediscovered in 1902, designated a protected sanctuary by Peru in 1981 and a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1983. By 2012, Yale had returned all of the exhibits it had pilfered in the meantime.
Aguas Calientes is the obvious place to overnight here. While it is a bit of tourist trap it lies in beautiful surroundings, including cascades and a vertical cliff wall of bromeliads hundreds of metres tall.