Once upon a time, in a country far far away, a long long time ago, there lived this proud tribe called the incas. They were great warriors, using their sling-shots and spears with great ease and accuracy. They wanted to prove to the world, well their world from far far away that they were the greatest… Far far away is South America by the way. And a long long time ago is 500 years. They started fighting for land, and tried to expand their territory. At the beginning and for a long time it was really tough and they could only dominate a small region around Cusco. They developed a whole new organization where the great Inca (their emperor) ruled as a god. They were very religious and took the sun and the moon as deities and gave them 30% of all their crop and most of their luxuries. The irrigation canals, terrace cultures are of the most impressive and allowed them to grow crop even in high mountains. The way they built their monuments, temples, towns, houses still remain a mystery… how build these walls with no cement, just polishing the surface of each stone for ages so that it could fit perfectly, and how on earth did they carry these stones especially without using the basic but unknown invention of the wheel (remember they were far far away, nobody taught them !). Compared to many of the tribes around, human sacrifices were rare and happened only for big events… to calm down the gods for example if the great Inca died or was sick, two of his concubines and one soldier would be sacrificed. When a volcano eruption happened close to Arequipa, a nobleman decided to sacrifice his daughter to calm down the earths’ fury and they all went in a big procession to give this 15 year old girl to the volcano where we found her intact a long long time later. The volcano is still active though. I was crunching a piece of chocolate. Chocolate only tastes good at home, but right now I needed chocolate. I had lost my credit card, I had to wait a week to get a new one, not to mention my camera was stolen not long ago, and this town was full of tourists. I was in no mood to visit all these ruins, these sites, Inca sites. What were these people anyway, a bunch of warriors who finally succeeded to rule on a big territory on their last century of existence, and they mostly dominated through force. They were ruthless imperialists who massacred enemy troops after they’d surrendered and slaughtered inhabitants of captured cities. They sometime flayed captives alive, stuffed their skins and put them in public displays using their stomach to make drums. Ok, they created one of the largest empires in history, with a vast road network, feeding it’s population, building great temples for a religion taken from all the previous or dominated tribes, and they built walls like no one else, but having watched the thousands of tourists standing amazed in front of the “twelve angled stone” in Cusco (stone guarded 24 hours a day in case you had the idea of making a graffiti on it… and hell yeah I would have done it), all this made me feel… uninterested. I was on the Internet reading all about these famous Incas, and wondering if I should try to wipe my table of all the chocolate crumbles that fell or continue reading, I was finding incas really everything but interesting. All the interesting parts seemed to result in a mix of cultures, ideas and techniques from ancient or neighboring tribes, and I hated all their violence. Anyway we didn’t really know anything for sure about them, they had no writing nor ideograms, very little art left (all the goldcrafts had been joyfully melted by these stupid Conquistadores) or statues, had no currency system… being rich was having human force (meaning a big family), and all we found was some khipus, strings with knots supposedly counting the years’ crop and main events of the year, but even that isn’t really sure.
I hated being stuck here, Cusco was probably the place where all the tourists in South America reunited and created a Gringo heaven (meaning traveler’s hell for me) and whenever you met a Peruvian not whining to sell you something, he was definitely working in the tourist industry. First question: “have you seen the Machu Pichu ?” their second would be : “Have you voted for Machu Pichu as a new 7 wonder of the world on www.nw7.blablablabla.whatever.com ?”. My question would be “have you been to all the proposed new 7 wonders… so how could you decently vote ?”
“you have to go see Machu Pichu !”, but whenever I had to, I didn’t want to. And what an industry in the first place ! A tourist train costing 100 US$ round trip to do 140 kms (I’d paid 10 to do 50 hours of train in India… and I’m quite sure we traveled more than 140 kms). You could go trekking there,… for 200 US$. Or you could take several different buses, and end up walking there for 3 hours after some really dangerous and rough rides. But let me put it that way, I had heard about the incas, this great tribe since a long time… I had heard about the Mayas, and Aztecs. I had seen the impressive displays left by the Angkorian Empire in Cambodia, sites in Indonesia, in India, the great wall of China, the buried Terra-Cotta army. So just looking at these webpages describing this culture, I was actually disappointed. What is this gonna be… looking at how they build walls… sort of impressive the first minute but then where’s the genius… where’s the intelligence, where’s the mystery of the Nazca Lines for example, where’s the mystery behind the ruins in Ecuador showing that tribes before the Incas had actually discovered and measured the exact location of where the equator is, and the inclination of earth in the heliocentric system, the mystery behind statues of the temples in Angkor, the writing of the Mayas, the Egyptians ? The Spaniard met the incas for the first time when the empire was at his biggest, from northern Chili to south of Columbia, from the Pacific coast to parts of Paraguay and Argentina. So when they saw these weird white bearded guys on their horse, they weren’t afraid, on the contrary they actually invited them to stay. And the Spaniard were quite impressed… and interested to see how much gold they saw. At that time the indigenous population of South America was estimated of 100 million people, almost half the population on Earth at the time especially after the black death unpopulated old Europe. But this visit and a second one even though purely pacific had dreadful consequences… they brought illness unknown to the new world. I wasn’t a tourist anymore, I was some ghost randomly walking this touristy place waiting for a credit card to arrive, I couldn’t act as a tourist anymore… a tourist is there by choice, I was forced to be there, so why force me to go see this Machu Pichu ruin ? Well, let’s cut the suspense… Tomorrow, after having spent a couple of hours studying the incas, their habits and how they got destroyed by a bunch of 170 spaniards… I will go to the Machu Pichu. Why is that ?
For the challenge ! This route taking several rough bus rides and ending up walking to the site looked challenging, and whenever I feel challenge I have quite some problems from preventing me to go. Information was hard to get in the first place… so I changed some travelers cheques (the Machu Pichu for one day (and most people only need half a day to finish the visit) is the same price as three days of visiting temples in Angkor a 40 square km site which is still definitely not enough even going really on a high speed visit mode). The Spaniards came back in 1532, leaded by Pizarro and fully equipped. But what was 170 soldiers with muskets (one shot every minute maximum) against an empire that could raise thousands of warriors in just a second. But when they were back, the situation of the incas was catastrophic. They had been hit by illness, smallpox, measles, bubonic plague, whooping cough, influenza, yellow fever. In 30 years almost 90% of the population of South America died from disease. In this context, the Inca emperor and his heir had died of illness in 1527 and two of his sons Atahualpa who held Quito and Huascar supported by Cusco were fighting for power : civil war was roaring. So I got on a bus to Santa Maria. Well, I sort of got late, and there weren’t any rooms left so I waited in front of the bus station, and what always happens in these cases is that someone comes discretely towards you and tells you there’s a minivan going exactly where you want to go. It’s magic. South American magic. The explanation is simple, some guy seeing that there was no more room in the buses, but a lot of people still wanting to go, since he owns a van… he might as well earn a few bucks, and this is how I got to Santa Maria in a minibus through a delightful, full-moony scenery at 2 am in the morning. Next stop, Santa Teresa. Only bus of the day… 4 am. I actually found the bus, broke into it and tried to sleep. I’m not the only tourist adventuring this route, a couple of Argentineans, an argentine girl with whom I was stuck a few weeks earlier in La Paz by violent blockades and bus strikes (at that time I hardly was welcoming and went back to sleep), and a Brazilian guy. The bus charged the tourists more (I still can’t really not consider this habit as robbing), and we arrived at 7 am in Santa Teresa. Next stop for Hydroelectrico (a dam as you would have maybe guessed) and from there with only the Brazilian and Argentinean girl left, who decided to take the train (for locals 2 soles, for tourists 26 soles for 8 kms), I decided to go by foot. It was 8 am. I ran on the railway tracks, passed some bridges and tunnels in my now quite rundown thongs. Not the best way to save your feet from injuries, and finally made it at 10h15 at the base town of the Machu Pichu (Aguas Calientes). Then I bought my expensive 40$ ticket and went to the Machu Pichu walking and climbing up stairs for an hour and a half. I caught up with the Argentinean girl and finally arrived at the gates of the Machu Pichu with her at 11h30. Let’s say Pizarro arrived at quite a good moment. When arriving with such a small force, Atahualpa having an army of more than 80 000 couldn’t possibly feel threatened and sent an envoy to invite them. This is how with a brilliant ambush the Conquistadores managed to take Atahualpa as a hostage. This is where Pizarro illustrated himself the best. For the release of his hostage he asked the incas to entirely fill up the room where Atahualpa was held of gold, and two similar rooms of silver. What was gold and silver for the incas compared to releasing their god-emperor ? They obeyed, Pizarro took the gold and silver and killed Atahualpa. Not having slept much of the night, having being walking through some quite rough railway tracks and climbing steep stairs, I was ready to experience magic… I was ready for these moments of awe, these moments where you forget for one second that you are just one out of billions, that you are just a small dot and you start thinking as a god, as a ruler, as a creator admiring his own creation, his own world, his own civilization… this is the moment where your mind rests for a moment and only feelings flow gently through your head. Time had no more barriers for me, no more endless tic-tacs, I was an Inca, I was the emperor, I was the llama, I was the young girl about to be sacrificed, I was the stone carver, I was the farmer, I was the fisherman… I was all of them, I could see them moving, I could see them living and I would live with them for this entire second… Machu Pichu in Quechua, means old mountain. Since we mainly found women buried (out of only 170 skeletons), the town or fortress of Machu Pichu is believed to have been the main retreat (for religious or holiday reasons) of the emperor Inca. He would follow the Inca trail from Cusco where each night he had a place to stay for 4 days. The buildings and temples aren’t all as impressive. In fact it’s actually hard to believe it’s Inca built in some parts since there is so many dirt and dust between the stones, but the temples and other parts used by the emperor were good old fashioned Inca style ( not the slightest gap between each stone ). Opposite, you’ve got the Wayna Pichu, young mountain in Quechua. Even now a days, mountains are considered as gods in Peru, called Apu. They have a spirit, and asking Quechuan children to draw them, they would draw mountains with human faces inside. Climbing the Wayna Pichu is definitely the highlight of the visit, this is where (if you have a camera that is) everyone takes his classic picture of the Machu Pichu. To tell you the truth it’s quite a rough climb, but once up there I could feel it, I was standing on the face of a god looking at another old god smiling at me. I ended up hanging around the site until it was almost dark.
Pizarro was received in Cusco as a hero, he had killed the enemy of Huascar. And this is how a bunch of Conquistadores conquered an entire empire with an army of 300 000. But their domination was of the stupid kind, introducing cultures and animals that couldn’t live or grow easily in these lands, forgetting about terrace cultures and irrigation canals, melting down any piece of gold they could possibly find and as the pope just said in Brazil the evangelization of the indigenous people was one of a peaceful kind (or was it ?). Why is it that on most sacred Inca temple today we find a Church or a Cathedral ?
I went to bed and dreamt of Apu. Tomorrow same story the other way round. This time 5 hours walk until Santa Teresa. 2 hours bus to Santa Maria. 8 hours bus standing up until Cusco. All this with my crazy Argentinean and my cool Brazilian friends. I was back and ready to receive my credit card that will actually never work. But whatever, I experienced magic. So who cares about credit cards, stolen digital cameras, money, traveler cheques, injured feet… I can still touch magic. |
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