Hello Everyone,
Machu Picchu was built high in the mountains, but at a lower elevation (8,000 ft) than the other cities we visited. To get there we took a train to a small town, Aguas Calientes, where we boarded a bus that zig-zagged back and forth up a mountain side 1500 feet above us. They now limit the number of people that can visit each day, so we had to buy our tickets online, in advance, back in Seattle. Once there we hired a guide, Nohemi, who had been showing people around for more than 30 years. In addition to relating the history of the place to us, she also took excellent photos of us when we needed her to. Though we had seen many pictures of it before, when we saw it in person the first time, it did not disappoint. Being there in person felt “almost” something like a spiritual experience. The Incas built this wonderful place out of precisely cut granite rock, without any work animals, no written language and not even use of the wheel. It was all done by human labor without iron tools, only using soft metal tools. Machu Picchu means “old mountain.” It was never finished and didn’t even last 100 years before its civilization fell, at the hands of the Spanish invaders sometime in the 15th century. The Amazon jungle quickly took over the sight and it was not rediscovered until the 19th century by an American anthropologist. Now, it’s one of the Seven Wonders of the New World (six of which Carol and I now have seen).
Interestingly, many people know at least a little history about the Incas of South America. However, their civilization only lasted a few hundred years, if that. There is much more evidence of civilizations that inhabited this land thousands of years before the Inca. We visited the Larco Museum, in Lima, that houses tens of thousands of relics from the pre-Inca periods. The lower walls of their buildings are still in tact all over Cusco, after several thousand years and an unknown number of earthquakes. They use an interesting way of interlocking their stone blocks by custom cutting them with many more than four sides. This makes the walls highly resistant to movement. See the photos for some examples.
Before the Spaniards arrived, the only domesticated animals here were the Llama, Alpaca and Guinea Pig. None of them were work animals. The Spaniards brought many kinds of work and food animals, as well as iron tools, sophisticated weapons and many diseases for which there was no natural immunity in the Inca gene pool. Their civilization came to a quick end, but lots of indigenous people survived to the modern day.
A couple of strange but pleasant “small world” coincidences happened while we were in Cusco. Shortly before we arrived, we found out that two couples, friends of ours from Seattle, were going to be there at the same time we were. On our first night we had dinner with John Saul and Kathy Treisch, Friends from The Seattle Times. On the second day we had lunch with Lionel Ng and his wife Chi-Chwen, who I know from my work at Physio-Control. Seeing familiar faces while traveling in a foreign land is always a treat. We had lots of fun dining with them in Cusco. The next morning at breakfast, in our hotel, we bumped into a couple from Bellingham, WA and another from Tachoma, WA at the same time. These “small world” coincidences were starting to be unexplainably strange. 😉
Later…… your favorite travelers, Tom and Carol
Machu Picchu Photos
Click to Enlarge and Read Caption
Cusco Photos
