It was an old regret erased. It was the chance within a short lifetime to do what I’d once set out to do, to finally go where I once vowed to travel. It was highly personal and hugely satisfying.
Had I gone in 1976 as planned I’m sure the trip would have been much different. I certainly wouldn’t have flown to Cusco, the Ancient capital of the Incan empire at 12,000 feet. I might have gotten there some way but not on a plane. It is now a bustling modern city of 300,000, built on top of an obscure but visible Indian past. We stayed there two nights. I was travelling as part of a large group of more than twenty complete with large group behavior: way early to the airports, riding big busses with luggage in the lobby at an appointed hour. Nice hotels. Sightseeing arranged. Had I seen me two weeks ago: gray haired, overweight, wheeling my suitcase, wheezing in the altitude, as I was in 1976: a solitary and fit twenty five year old backpacker travelling light, I would have scoffed at myself. Laughed even.
Cusco was hard to manage. The change in altitude and temperature (sea level and eighties to 12,000 and nights in the forties) hit many of us hard. I started chewing coco leaves in the airport, drank coca tea, and took it easy. It hit me anyway. I breathed oxygen for five minutes in the hotel lobby. Don’t know that it helped. I moseyed around the streets of Cusco with my friends, not venturing far, trying my best to rest. People offered me pills for the altitude. I took them all.
We made our way down the mountain through the Sacred Valley, following the fast flowing Urubamba River. The Sacred Valley is full of ancient Incan ruins. It was and it one of the more fertile and prosperous areas of Peru. Where there is water in Peru there is life. Much of the country is arid altiplano. It was fall and the corn was just beginning to be picked. It looked good.
The Incans knew what they were doing. Terraces like giant staircases on the mountains still stood thousands of years after their construction. Granaries built high into the mountainsides with thin window openings to catch the wind and sun, drying the corn, quinoa, and other grains looked ready for the next crop. The bus made planned stops. We visited an animal rescue, saw Andean condors, sacred to the Incas, in flight. We petted llamas and alpacas. I did my best to repel the trinket vendors and be kind at the same time. They gave up fairly easily. Spanish helps.
Mid afternoon we reached the small town of Ollantaytambo and boarded the narrow gauge railroad, with comfortable seats in glass topped cars, which would take us to Aguas Calientes, the town at the foot of Machu Picchu. There is no road to Aguas Calientes. Travel is limited to the train following the narrow gorge cut by the Urubamba River. I joked that the Incans probably rafted down. When I saw the rock strewn riverbed and the churning water I doubted it. Even modern rubber rafts would find it a challenge. As the mountains grew higher the water rolled and tumbled more violently. We passed through tunnels and narrow passes in relative luxury.
Friends of mine, Bill and Sue, visited Machu Picchu in 1979 on their honeymoon. At that time Aguas Calientes was dirt streets and a few concrete buildings. 36 years later comfortable hotels and nice restaurants fill the small town. It’s an important part of Peru’s tourist industry. We checked into a small hotel en masse and made our way into the small town and a nice Italian restaurant with an open fire pit and wine sold by the bottle. As a twenty five year old backpacker I could have lived three weeks on the amount of money I spent on that one meal.
I hadn’t done my homework despite all good intentions. I was a small part of the planning the eye care mission, I’d been writing a lot, busy with church, all excuses. I didn’t set aside even five hours to research and read about the significance of Machu Picchu. I kicked myself and then forgave myself for my sloth. It was getting there that mattered most. I was on the cusp of atoning for an old decision. I was about to both have my cake and eat it too. I felt extremely lucky.
All my planning took place on the fly, during the trip, talking with others who knew more than I. The serious and ambitious, also young, members of our group were taking the first bus. Breakfast at the hotel began at 4:45 a.m., the first bus up the mountain left at 5:30.
“Why so early? What makes that so important?” I was asking Nick, young three year optometry student from St. Louis via South Dakota.
“You can catch the sunrise if you’re lucky. We may not get that tomorrow because they are predicting rain. But it’s usually clearer earlier. Clouds can sock you in up there and obscure the view. Either way, earlier is better.” Nick had done his homework.
I responded blearily to my I Phone alarm the next morning at 4:45. I think I hit snooze. I hardly knew where I was. But I made it down to breakfast in time to join the four young docs, my old friend Dave Eldridge, eye doc from Beverly Hills who has gone on so many trips. Dave might have slept in, I guessed, but he was with his thirty-something son Dan who was on his first I Care trip and had done so well in the clinic’s dispensary. Dan was clearly there for the adventure. Kids can keep you young.
We left town in total darkness, packed on a Mercedes bus. Soon we were climbing the mountain on tight switchbacks. In the dark scattered and tiny lights bobbed and blinked, together making a straight line up the mountain while the bus turned back and forth. Gradually it brightened. Through the bus windows were magnificent views. Such a steep climb among such beautiful mountains. Far below us we saw, at times, the river. Fog (clouds?) swept past us intermittently.
My previously honeymooning friends, who declined to make the trip back to Machu Picchu fearing it had been overrun and ruined, asked when I returned if it was true there is a now a hotel at the top. As we leveled off into a parking lot at the top of the mountain there was a one story hotel with a glass front restaurant above us. Tasteful. No doubt very expensive. But there all the same. We learned later that the hotel was to blame for the greatly reduced flow of the natural spring on the ancient site. Such is progress.
As we waited at the gate young muscular hikers emerged, bathed in sweat, faces flushed, taking off layers of clothing, their bodies steaming in the cold. Some of them still wore their headlamps. Those were the lights we saw bobbing up the old trails, the lights of those who eschewed the busses and hiked up the mountain. That could have been me long ago. The very thought of it made my knees ache.
As if it were another country they lined us up and asked us to show our ticket and our passport. It was a large crowd. We made it inside the gate. I was close to Nick and the baby docs.
“Which way we going Nick?” Nick had a map.
“Left. Up.”
From inside the gate you could walk right into the fairly level ground of the main urban area of Machu Picchu or go left up a steep route through the trees. I looked wistfully at the direct path to the stone structures and followed Nick and the young people. I quickly fell behind.
The right knee, the left ankle, the extra weight, the years- all combined to slow me down. I quickly decided not to be a hero. I stopped, stood aside, and let others pass me. I breathed hard. I kept going. Along the way I encountered Dave Eldridge. Even though he’s more fit than me he was breathing fairly hard himself.
“Take my picture will you Dave?”
“I’d be glad to.”
We both appreciated the pause.
After climbing who knows how many uneven and ancient stone steps the ground began to level off. We came to a clearing. We were at the top of the mountain. A turn right and there it was. Machu Picchu from above.
I found a little place to sit away from the crowd of hikers taking selfies, posing and preening at the edge of the cliff. I just sat, caught my breath and took it in. I said a little prayer of thanks.
I still don’t know why it means so much. It was like a loop closed. I found my way back. Such a different man now, with such a different perspective, so many changes in my life. But the place, Machu Picchu, despite the crowds and the changes that have taken place around it, despite earthquakes, weather, the ravages of aging, remains timeless. Unchanged for 1500 years. A llama grazed freely on the grounds. As I sat there I thought not of Hiram Bingham, the archeologist who searched for and found the lost Incan city in 1911. I thought not of the Incans who finally abandoned the site, no doubt crushed in spirit by the conquest of their brothers in Cusco by the Spanish conquistadors.
I thought of the person who first sat on that ledge. The Inca person who imagined a city there. We can quarry the rock there, on the left he may have thought. We will build terraces to grow our food there, in the all day sun on the right. There is water from a spring. We can route it to the people and the terraces by building channels through the city. We can be self sufficient. It has everything we need. We’ll build a city here.
Here of all places. On top of the world, their world as they knew it. They didn’t over reach. Machu Picchu is a small city, no more than five hundred structures, an estimated population of no more than a thousand. They used the finest, purest, and most rectangular stones for their temples. No mortar in the joints. They built a temple to the sun that accurately predicted both the winter and summer solstices, with small windows which at dawn on those days threw light directly on special markings on interior walls.
They built an amazingly accurate sun dial near the city’s center. The tip of the sun dial was broken off when a giant boom, carrying a camera, fell on it recently during the making of a beer commercial. God help us as we try to care for our world’s ancient irreplaceable gifts. A beer commercial.
The next finest structures, stones fitting together so tightly they again needed no mortar, were the living quarters of the rulers and upper class. The more common men and women lived in the houses with the rougher, less uniform stones that required mortar made of mud and limestone. But they lived together, there on the mountain top, dependent on one another in community. Bodies in caves from Machu Picchu reveal life spans which may have averaged over 50 years, some fifteen years longer than Europeans of that time. They lived well it would seem. Good diets. People of the Americas, long before the Europeans came, living large, oblivious to the fate that awaited them.
So smart, those ancient people, and so advanced. Yet we dismissed them, and continue to dismiss them, as primitive cultures. Since I turned around in Ecuador short of Peru in 1976 I’ve visited, all in connection with I Care tips, numerous Mayan ruins: Chichen Itza, Palenque, and Tulum in Mexico, Tikal in Guatemala, Copan in Honduras, . All those ancient people working, living, studying the world, discovering the wonder of human life. But never have I seen such a complete view of entire ancient site, one that gave me such an immediate sense of community, as Machu Picchu. Some ancient person imagined a city there, and found both the will and the means to build it. 1,500 years later I was able to share his vision. Sometimes life amazes me.
As the morning wore on clouds moved in as predicted, blocking the view of the city from above. It began to rain. Ponchos of many colors came out on the tourists. People clung to their fancy rubber tipped walking sticks as they made their way down the slick old stone stairs. I left the site and bought a terrifically over priced turkey sandwich (pavo in Spanish) at the outside food stand run by the aforementioned evil hotel. It was delicious. I rode the bus back down the mountain. Machu Picchu, behind me, never to be seen by these eyes again. Or might I be wrong?
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