Tripped

Looks Like We Chose the Right Year to Go

Devastating floods have struck many of the places we visited when we were in Peru, almost exactly a year ago at this time.

How Sacred Is the Sacred Valley?

Is staggering beauty sacred? Then this place is one of the most sacred you'll ever visit. But it's not clear to me after we've spent the last few days travelling around the Valle Sagrado and its environs that there's anything distinctly transcendent about it. I'm inclined to agree with the author, filmmaker, and all-around skeptic Hugh Thomson that the sheer physical attractiveness of the place inspired the Incas to be aesthetes as much, if not more, than they were devotees of spiritual enlightmentment, despite modern claims to the contrary. Thomson, who spent an extended time here in the 80s as an explorer and returned again a few years ago before writing the book The White Rock, is particularly vicious toward the New Age worshippers drawn by the presence of Machu Picchu who have invaded the valley in recent years; he makes particular fun of one traveller he encountered who told him he had dropped an acid tab upon entering MP and promptly "discovered" that the site was merely a portal to the crystal city below Machu Picchu. "No one has yet taken ley-line directions from Glastonbury to Machu Picchu, but it's only because the string isn't long enough," writes Thomson.

The biggest person to blame for this, of course, is Hiram Bingham, the American explorer who "discovered" Machu Picchu in 1911. Reading the various contemporary histories of the Incas and the Conquest, you learn that Bingham, for all the good he did in bringing Incan culture to the attention of the world, was a serial exaggerator whose greatest skill wasn't exploration or archaeology but self-publicity. (No wonder he made it all the way to the U.S. Senate.) One way Bingham sold his tale to American audiences was to sex it up with fanciful stories of the "Sacred Virgins" who assisted the Inca in his religious role and who were supposedly the main inhabitants of Machu Picchu. Totally untrue, it turns out. Much of Bingham's claptrap been thoroughly debunked by the scientic research, but that word hasn't filtered down to many of the people in the tourist industry here. Or if it has, they've recognized there's a big buck to be made off gullible gringo spirit hunters, and have forthrightly ignored it.

The Incas' version of "Art for Art's Sake" would be "Rock for Rock's Sake." You can't fully appreciate the culture's wizardry at masonry until you see firsthand, in site after site as we have over the last couple days, how much effort they put into making their buildings as beautiful as the rocks in the landscape they mined for their construction materials. It's not just the way their mortarless joints fit together so tightly; it's the way each rock in their best walls is lovingly shaped to meet the rock next to it, including the natural rocks left in place in many locations to be built around. Just look at the way these stones, particularly the lower ones fit together, for example, in a randomly selected photo from the ruins at Chinchero we visited yesterday:

Surrounded by staggering physical beauty, its as if they believed their landscape demanded that they strive to match that beauty. Now you could argue that the source of that demand was spiritual - that their gods asked for them to match the world the gods had blessed them with. But the sheer skill of the work betrays a pride of artistry. And is there anything more decadent than hauling a 10-ton rock to the perfect spot for it high on a hillside, just because you can? The image below is from the Temple Hill portion of Ollantaytambo:

Pan Flute Muzak's Ten Worst Songs

These have all played in the lobby of Casa Andina-Private Collection Valle Sagrado Hotel the last three days:

What Is A Youth (Love Theme from Zeffirelli's Romeo & Juliet)
My Heart Will Go On (Theme from Titanic)
Angel of Music (Phantom of the Opera)
Don't Cry for Me Argentina [There's a particular affection for Lloyd-Weber songs]
Yesterday
Hotel California
Ob La Di, Ob La Da
El Condor Pasa (of course!)
The Boxer [we probably have Paul Simon to blame for most of this, thanks to the previous song]
Hey Jude

The New New Thing

View from our hotel. Somewhere south of that crest between the hills you see in the middle of the frame is Machu Picchu.

Was it the smog, the street noise, or the fact that the diarrhea made the first two that much more noticeable? Whatever the catalyst, it was the right time to leave Lima. And the contrast between where we were, and where we are, couldn't be more dramatic. Safely ensconced in our "high end" hotel (discounted nearly 50% off its rack rate) we now wake to the sounds of bird song in the pre-dawn hour and have replaced the honking of horns with the braying of burros as the soundtrack filtering through our windows at midday. If only we could get rid of the pan flute Muzak versions of Andrew Lloyd Weber songs piped into the hotel lobby and restaurant and bar when we're not in our room, this place would be perfect.

Or maybe not. The tourist economy here in the Sacred Valley between the old Inca capital of Cusco and the old Inca playground of Machu Picchu has created some jarring dichotomies if you're a tourist from the First World dropping into this rural part of the developing world. As we discussed over dinner tonight, you don't see the kind of abject poverty you do in Lima,into which huge swaths of the rural population from all over the country have decamped in the past thirty years. But it's still a bit disconcerting to be staying in a gated complex with uniformed and Kevlar-clad armed Seguridad cops guarding the hotel entrance, while just outside that gate women in traditional Peruvian dress - and their kids in Adidas track pants - are using a switch to guide their flock of sheep down the rutted dirt road.

Most of the motivation for that security apparatus, no doubt, is a legacy of the recent past of terrorist fears, the same reason the electric fences and glass shard-topped walls arose in Lima - indeed, even a few of the peasant walls here in the Valle Sagrado have gone the broken bottle route. I don't think anyone at this point is expecting the rump criminal element of the Sendero Luminoso to come charging into Urumbamba, though. Which only reinforces the notion that the men with guns are here to protect you more from the local residents than from any politically-motivated attack. From a more familiar Western tourist perspective, it feels much more like what you encounter on a visit to large chunks of the Carribbean, where poverty and the tourist economy share an often uneasy co-existence.

After a full day of rest, acclimating, and Inca's Revenge recovery yesterday, we set off today for our first taste of Incan history, hiring a driver recommended by the hotel to ferry us to several of the nearby sites. And it couldn't have been better. The sheer physical beauty of the place is staggering, in a way quite unlike any of the other high-altitude environments we've visited, including the Sierra Nevada, the Rockies, and the Alps. None of those other mountain ranges, of course offer you the prospect of soaring heights so near the equator, so that even when you're at close to 13 thousand feet, as we were at the end of our journey today, you're still in a fairly temperate climate. I'll try to post some pictures tomorrow to try to explain how that changes what you see - and what else we saw on our day trip.