So, after that rather arduous approach, a very nice hot shower, and a reasonable meal, I went to bed in what was, for my trip, a quite "up-market" hotel room and got quite a good nights sleep :)
Next morning we had to get up early again, but not quite as early as before...
Options from the town are that you can take the "Inca Stairs" and climb the mountain by foot or you can go the modern way and take "The Inca Bus"!
Given the unplanned amount of hiking Id done the evening before, and the fact that I had slightly ill fitting rented boots (The big bike boots are good but not meant for full on hiking!) I was not feeling positive about the "Inca Stairs"... I asked about the "Inca Elevator" but apparently the floods had put it out of service or some such :)... So, it was the "Inca Bus" for me :)))
We had to get bus tickets as soon as the ticket office opened and get up to the entry gate early so that we could get our entry tickets stamped with permission to climb a subsidiary peak for which there are only a limited number of passes given per day.
So, it was up early and waiting in line for a bus ticket with hundreds of other tourists in the drizzle at the base of the mountain. Then after about a half hour bus ride, it was waiting in line again with hundreds of other tourists to get tickets stamped in the mist/drizzle at the entry gate of the park.
And then it was waiting around again for the rest of the group and the guide to show up (They wont let you in the park unless you have a guide!... Another reason to not "go it alone" as an individual for this attraction!)... But, the fog made things quite pretty and though there was not much light for the camera, I had a good time while I waited :)
And then we dutifully followed our guide around (like everyone else) for about an hour and a half and he had quite good English... And I learned some stuff about the place that I wouldnt have bothered reading about, so it was quite good :)
In short, Machu Picchu was an Inca city that was never finished... Apparently it took about 85 years to build it, and it was right at the end of the Inca era when the Spanish had just arrived and were starting to systematically destroy the native culture... They (the Conquitadores) would deliberately locate the Inca towns and cities and set about levelling the place and destroying all evidence of the town (Where they then generally built their own town on the ruins of the Inca town) as well as all the religious objects that they could find...
The Incas saw this happening and apparently they wanted to protect Machu Picchu and other such remote places as best they could... So, all the access bridges into the mountains and jungles were ordered destroyed, and the city was ordered abandoned and all the statuary and religious objects etc were removed and hidden else where (no gold was ever found by archaeologists at this site!)... Awaiting a time when the Spanish had left... So, there is still the local legend that the Inca will rise again and the old empire will be renewed etc...
And true enough, some two hundred years after the first conquest of the Spanish over the Incas there was another Inca king and there was an up-rising... but the Spanish crushed that too... But there were sons of the king and not all heirs are accounted for, and no one has ever found the lost treasures of the Inca, and there are regular discoveries of new "lost cities" of the Incas in the Eastern Andes of Peru and Bolivia etc....
... The legend lives on :)
But, back to Machu Picchu...
The thing that I am really here to see is the stone work...
Its only about 400 years old so its antiquity is easily surpassed by many famous structures like the pyramids and the coliseum etc. As well as the more local Mayan cities etc.
But, unlike most of those ancient structures (certainly the Mayan ones), this site was about 75% intact when it was re-discovered by Hiram Bingham in 1911 (It was discovered by several modern westerners before him but he put the effort in to investigating the place with archaeology etc) So, unlike many of the Mayan ruins which have largely been exhumed from the jungle, and "rebuilt" by archaeologists ... And you are never sure what it really originaly looked like...
This place is mostly as it was built.
But also, the stone here is Granite (very dense and very hard... lots of work to carve), and a great deal of it is stone fitted and stacked precisely on stone, with no mortar in between...
This has made the structures very durable in that the stone is VERY slow to degrade, and there are no gaps in the work for plants roots to get into and slowly destroy the buildings. It also means that the structures survive earthquakes very well... Along with the fact that the Incas knew how to build pretty good foundations and that all the walls of all buildings were slanted 10-15 degrees inwards so that when an earth-quake does happen the buildings want to fall inwards (rather than outwards) and thus self-support and dont collapse.
A side effect of this design is that they have made all the windows and doors etc. aesthetically match the shapes of their buildings and they are all nicely trapezoidal :)
So, its the amazing stone work that Im really here to see... Carving this sort of accuracy in stone this hard, and on individual stones this large (some more than three metres on a side), and on so much of the buildings (most of the stonework in the centre and religious sites of the city)... What can I say... It is a very good example of the "finesse" that I value so highly! :)))
... oh yeah, and now that you are picturing in your mind some primitive guy chiseling away slowly at massive granit stones... Think again... They didnt have iron tools either... They were just banging away at the big stones with small stones... All the more impressive No?
So... following are a great many pictures...
enjoy :)
