Just Back From

Just Back From… Peru

Go ahead—pick a bucket list, anyone's bucket list. Dump that list over and scattered among the Great Walls, Great Pyramids and Great Barrier Reefs is almost sure to be a certain South American wonder: Machu Picchu.

Before my recent trip, that was exactly the thing—okay, one of the things—that scared me. Everyone wants to go, and more and more are getting there; the visitor count is now approaching 2 million annually, a remarkable figure for a place you can only reach, on the next-to-last leg, by train. Even though the demand is great for our business, and Indagare sends dozens of families a year, I also worried that after seeing it in photos since childhood—the very image of a world wonder, an impossibly built fortress that was improbably "lost" for centuries—the real thing would be a let-down. Maybe the scale would be disappointing, like finally seeing the original of a masterpiece and finding out it's only 6 x 9 inches. Or maybe the structures that look so miraculously precise and ordered would turn out to be too tumbledown—too ruined—in reality.

Most of all, I thought the experience might be too packaged, as well. At its best travel is often about following your own path to create your own adventures. I say this as one among many planners at Indagare who, when needed, take complicated destinations and package them into do-able itineraries; even then, however, we still want our members to have unscripted experiences, within reason, believing that travel, if the trip is about discovery, benefits from the unexpected.

Related: Spotlight: Urubamba

But because of geographic and transportation logistics, almost everyone who goes to Machu Picchu follows the same well-trod path. Whether you're staying in $2000 a night hotel suites or $20 a night hostels, most visitors from outside the country fly to Lima (staying one or two nights), then fly to Cusco and immediately drive to the Urubamba Valley (to explore for one to three nights), then get on a train to the small way station town of Aguas Calientes (a day trip or for one night) and then finally cover the last four miles up to the site by bus. The stages and pacing of the visit are so standardized that you might even see the same people from the lobby of your hotel in Lima...at the airport...and then—look, there they are again!—on the train. Hiram Bingham, the Yale professor who put Machu Picchu on the map in 1911 after locals led him to the complex, might have partly inspired the character Indiana Jones, but it's been a long time since a trip here offered much real adventure. Even those who get there under their own power in part by walking sections of the "Inca Trail" can sometimes find themselves advancing step by step in what is essentially a long, single-file line of visitors.

But, finally, there was Machu Picchu before us, and on the day I looked from an upper vantage point down on the main part of the complex, the sky was so bright and clear that every rock, roofline and wall looked freshly chiseled and perfectly set into place, and the whole thing so unearthly that you wouldn't have been surprised if it dissolved in front of your eyes, or flew off into space. Not even the distraction of people on the verge of committing selfie destruction—standing on the edges of terraces with sheer drops and then jumping up once, twice, three times—ruined the moment. You knew you were immensely privileged to lay eyes on it. For me the Taj Mahal will probably trump all manmade wonders, with the Pyramids, Versailles and the Angkor temple complex close behind. But for a combination of structure and setting, Machu Picchu—built without the benefit of horses, wheels, cement or metal, in a jungle close to the clouds, in the 1400s—surely beats them all. Taking in the ring of Andes peaks around us, it was easy to understand why the Incas worshipped nature.

Related: Indagare Matchmaker: The Chilean and Argentine Patagonias 

We saw Machu Picchu on Day Four of a seven-day trip, and afterward, with the pressure off, it was easier to relax. Which was a big relief, because the first three days had been a slog. I knew going in that the trip was going to be neither relaxing nor luxurious, no matter the fancy (and wonderful!) meals and excellent hotels. But I was not prepared for how uncomfortable a lot of it would be. The days were long, hot and busy, and in part because of that and in part because of the altitude.

By day four, my stormy mind cleared, and after we made it over the last hurdles of visiting Machu Picchu—waiting in lines of at least 500 people to catch a bus up the mountain at 7 am and back down again at 2 pm—it was easier to appreciate and absorb some of the rest of Peru. Before the trip my knowledge of the country was pretty much limited to what might politely be called basics, at best: Pizarro, quinoa, pipe music and pisco sours (and not even in that order). Over the next couple of days I improved my "Drunk History"-type understanding of the country. Did you know that Cusco is the gayest city on earth? Well, it's not, but that's what I thought when we arrived and saw enough rainbow flags on the fronts of buildings to rival Pride weekend in NYC. Turns out the city adopted a rainbow flag as its banner in the 1970s. Did you know that Nobu came from Peru? Actually, he didn't, but after becoming a chef in his native Japan he moved to Lima and opened a sushi bar, incorporating Peruvian ingredients and techniques into his cooking and thereby creating his signature style. Did you know that the potato is from the Peruvian Andes? Okay, maybe that's common knowledge, but did you also know that the Incas built terraces at their complexes in part to grow potatoes at lower and hotter elevations, so they could feed more people? Staring down into the lake-sized bowl of green terraces in concentric circles going deeper and deeper into the earth at the Moray ruins, I was impressed yet again with another example of Incan ingenuity, even as I pictured this massive agricultural laboratory filled with mashed potatoes (okay, perhaps my mind was still not entirely clear).

Related: Just Back From… Cruising the Amazon on the Aria

Most amazing to me—beyond the beauty of Andean high plateau, where ochre and green fields resemble a patchwork Cezanne landscape come to staggering life—beyond that exceptional beauty I had never grasped the size of the native civilizations prior to the Spanish arrival, or the crazy imbalance of their colonization. The Incas, for instance, numbered 16 million people, in an empire that stretched from Ecuador to Chile, when the Spanish arrived in 1531. And yet it took a force of only 190 soldiers to capture Cusco, their capital, a few years later. The history of domination is built into the city today; many buildings have foundations and ground floors that consist of huge stone walls erected by the Incas, atop which are the Spanish-built higher floors with Colonial-style windows and balconies. With every step you take in the historic core's narrow streets and wide plazas, the native loss is on display. Repeatedly we toggled back and forth between past and present, native and new, third world and first. In Lima the prettiest buildings were the churches of the poor and the mansions of the rich. In the Urubamba Valley, the lives of many farmers looked to be extremely hard; there were not the numbing numbers of people that you see in parts of Asia or Africa, but I was still surprised that so many rural families seem to be living in the dirt or close to it. At the same time, even the shepherd-shaman who demonstrated a ritual offering at our catered and tented picnic lunch had a cell phone, and our guide was wearing Ray-Bans and an LL Bean fleece.

Some trips will deliver or even surpass expectations, and others will disappoint. Before my trip, Peru pretty much meant one place and two words to me: Machu Picchu. And the goal was to get there. Now that I'd gone, it meant many more places and words, and tastes and sensations. If ticking it off my bucket list, and finding that it did not disappoint, was sweet, it also reminded me that sometimes traveling even the beaten path will have its own unexpected rewards. And it might make you add a few more places back into to your bucket, as well.

Read More: Profound Peru

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