April Adventures: Machu Picchu

When I tried to write this entry chronologically, it just didn’t work or make much sense because Machu Picchu big and complicated!  We spent 6 hours there and took 150 pictures, so it is hard to condense it down into a logical story.  Instead, I think it is easier to just give you the highlights.

1.  Machu Picchu is huge!  See the photo below:  This is the view from one side of the complex which gives you a pretty good sense of the scope of the place.  I had seen this picture a bunch of times—it is a popular poster here, but I hadn’t really worked out the scope of the place.

2.  Machu Picchu was only “discovered” in 1911, which is not that long ago.  Hiram Bingham, an American explorer, was searching for lost Inca ruins in the area when he met some farmers in the area.  They said they thought they knew of some ruins, but probably not the ones he was looking for, and they let him stay with them for the night.  The next morning the weather was bad so they didn’t want to make the trip, so they sent a boy named Pablito Alvarez to guide Hiram to the site.  When he arrived the place was badly overgrown but he could see the stone walls and the size of the place, and was very excited about his “discovery.”  Here is a picture of how it looked in 1911.

 

source

 The farmers were using the Inca terracing in a part of the site to grow their crops.  When I hear this story, it makes me think that people have known where the site was since it was built in the 1400s, they just conveniently didn’t mention it once the Spanish showed up, and it was lost to the outside world until Hiram came along and the farmers decided it was okay to tell him.  Here is the agricultural terracing today:

3.  Machu Picchu is still a mystery.  Since we didn’t take the guided tour with our group, we sat at a few of the more prominent sites and eavesdropped on the guides with their groups in both English and Spanish. We heard different stories for several of the sites, reinforcing for JP that tour guides in Peru make stuff up to make tourists happy, and reinforcing for me that there isn’t a clear consensus on what Machu Picchu was for.  It also looked very mysterious as it was clouded in fog when we first arrived:

Some people say it was primarily a religious site, and there are several sites that supposedly reinforce this.  Here is the Hitching Post of the Sun, a carved rock at the highest point of the main complex, that has its corners pointing to each of the cardinal directions and a pillar protruding from the top:

It is oriented so that there is no shadow from the pillar on the equinoxes, and they had religious ceremonies on the solstices as well.  According to one of the guides, the Incas would get worried in the winter when it got cold and the sun was getting weaker, thinking that the sun was going to leave them for good.  But this stone could be used as an early calendar to show that the sun would start to return after the winter solstice. 

A short walk below the hitching post is this, the Temple of the Three Windows.  Supposedly the three windows represent the three parts of Incan cosmology: the heavens, the earth and the underworld.  Because the stonework is so polished and uniform, the experts say this helps support the idea that this was a temple. 

Other people say it was an estate for the Inca and the royalty.  It also could have been a military base, with the housing for the soldiers and the agricultural terracing to grow food to support the population there.  There are some features, like a removable bridge and a moat, that support the idea that it was a military site.  It may have been some combination of the three.

4.  The stone work is really amazing. First of all, they quarried the rocks from the site, which makes sense since it would be quite a climb with rocks of any size.  Second, the stability of the walls and the precision of the construction are impressive, given that they didn’t use mortar or anything and were doing all this work as a pre-literate culture.  Here is an example: there are three rooms as part of this large structure and the windows in each one line up exactly.  In the photo, you can see JP in the far room and you can see how the windows line up from my viewpoint in the close room.

They also apparently carved some of the stairwells out of the stone that was there:

One of the most impressive places is the Temple of the Sun(the lighter area with the curved wall):

This is the only curved wall in the complex and the stonework is very uniform.  It is also lighter colored than the rest of the stones, and we overheard one of the guides saying that they had this portion cleaned to show what the stones looked like in the time of the Incas, before all the weathering that has happened since.  Here is a closer view:

5.  The house structures were built to echo the shapes of the mountains.  People think that the structures originally had thatched roofs, and a few of these have been reconstructed as examples.  There were a few examples where the A-shaped walls had to line up exactly so that a crossbar could be put in, and they line up exactly. 

6.  When we were there in April, there were llamas just hanging out around the site acting as natural lawnmowers.  We enjoyed this and they were a huge hit with the visitors in general.  Some llama photos:

7.  Machu Picchu was on several Inca roads, or old well worn mountain paths that were used to travel from place to place.  We walked out to one Inca bridge, which you can’t actually cross but it is pretty cool to see the stonework and the way that the path is right in the side of the mountain.

8.  The drop offs are steep!  You can see the river that we walked along the day before, and get a sense of the altitude difference from the town below. 

I think those are the main highlights.  Here are some more of our favorite photos from our day:

 Thanks for looking at all our photos!