The craziest 72 hours of my life: Machu Picchu

The bus ride probably took around 30 minutes.  When we got off the bus, we were admonished.  No food in Machu Picchu. No drinks except water.  No bathrooms. Once you're in, you're in; if you leave you stay out, no re-entry.  Everyone took a few minutes to use the restroom, and then we filed through the gates.

"The first stop," Felix told us, "is the overlook.  We will have to climb this hill to get to it."

"How much of a climb?" someone asked.

"Well, that depends," Felix responded. "Inca style or Peruvian style?"

The crowd laughed. "Inca style," the man responded.

"5 minutes," Felix told him.

"And Peruvian style?" someone else asked.

"Oh, 25 minutes probably," Felix said, and we all laughed again.

We started to climb.  It didn't take me 25 minutes, but it certainly took me more than five.  As I made each turn, I grew more and more excited.  What would Machu Picchu look like?

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OVER THE YEARS, THE BIGGEST ROADBLOCK to writing about this day, June 28, 2007, has been and continues to be my utter inability to write about Machu Picchu.  "What would Machu Picchu look like?" is a TERRIBLE introduction; there's thousands upon thousands of pictures online with photos of Machu Picchu.  The sight line isn't the point. The adjectives tossed about are worthless: mystical, beautiful, pristine, haunting.  I don't think a prose writer--any prose writer--could do it justice; perhaps a poet, a better one than me, might make progress.  A musician, maybe. Perhaps the closest seen I've seen is when Ernesto and Alberto explore the ruins in the movie The Motorcycle Diaries.

Perhaps it's for that reason that my memories--my specific memories--of my three or so hours in the ruins tend towards the quotidian.  The llamas grazing on the abundant open grass. A remark from Felix about how Incan babies are born with birthmarks on their backs (my son has one).  Cody, our official photographer coming up with ingenious poses for Adam and I.  Sneaking some crackers because none of us had eaten since the Snickers bar.  And bumping into Roy, and trying to avoid Roy, and every time we saw Roy, Adam quoting Roy from the bus ride from Cusco.  This must have happened five times before I finally said:

"How much of our conversation did you hear?" I asked.

"Pretty much the whole thing."

"Really? He must have been pretty loud."

"Louder than fuck," Cody interjected. "No one could sleep because of that dipshit.

"He's lucky he found that woman," Adam said. "Everyone else was standing him up."

We laughed and continued exploring.  Our time was beginning to run out, and Adam decided to split a bit early to engage in battle with his digestive system.  Cody followed, but I walked down to the edge of the ancient town.  I didn't dare cross the final fence, but I sat on it and looked:

To look down from Machu Picchu is to realize just how isolated you are, how precariously you are situated.  The ancient Incan engineers had designed the town to be self-sustaining: land to grow crops, enough water to irrigate them and drink.  Some people claim to have it figured it out, but all we really know is that some people, probably some of them very important, spent time here in the 15th and 16th centuries, then split. For violence? Disease? Famine? No one knows.

But it is a place, in a geographical miracle, where a construction miracle also took place.  Natural wonder and man-made wonder rolled up into one.  The stones that construct Machu Picchu are still in place after 500 years of existence--and three centuries of utter neglect.  And the stone itself doesn't come from that part of the mountain--it had to be brought up there and placed, without using wheels. Without fucking using wheels! All this, in place so remote, so isolated, that the very Incas whose ancestors constructed it couldn't find it in the centuries to come.

I looked down and verdant green, but unforgiving slopes.  I gazed into the blue skies, becoming thick with the afternoon clouds. I heard no one; the crowd was growing scarce as the Park Service began quietly pushing people to leave.  I took a sip of water.  A feeling of peacefulness, a strange powerful peacefulness, washed over me.  And in that moment, I felt God pulse between my veins, consume my skin.  In that moment I didn't doubt God anymore than I doubted the llama chewing on the grass a few yards away from me. I said a silent prayer to whoever or whatever God was:

Thank you.

To be continued....