Scritti Politti

I guess this makes two posts in a row where I'm writing about walls in Peru. Very different kinds of walls. But walls nonetheless.

I have so many great memories of my week in Peru. Some of those are perspective-altering, monumental experiences I will carry with me for the rest of my life. Seeing Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas, for the first time, and then exploring it the next day. Hiking almost eight hours on a path laid down by the Incas more than a half a millennium ago. Exploring a farm that's been extracting salt from the same stream for hundreds of years. Flying over the Andes and then driving and walking on them the next day. Eating foods that I've never heard of and some that I certainly can't get on a menu at home. Alpaca, anyone?

And then there are some others that are, shall we say, a little more pedestrian, but which nevertheless form an essential part of my memory and an enduring image of Peru. Dogs roaming the streets in packs of two to five animals; apparently pets let out for the day but the best behaved dogs I've seen maybe in my life. Pairs of tiny clay bulls or "toritos" on the ridgeline of every house you drive by; ages-old idols to protect against lightning hurled down from the gods above. And walls just about everywhere painted with political party slogans and logos and names of candidates. I thought they were cool works of art although I may just have a signs fetish. So here's blog post number two in a row about walls in Peru.

The rainbow flag has been adopted as a symbol of the Andean people and can be seen everywhere. 

Politics seems to be a pretty popular topic of conversations with Peruvians. We got an earful from every taxi driver and tour guide we seemed to run into or walk with or ride a bus with. And with good reason. They have to have one of the most dysfunctional governments that is still a legitimate democracy.

I know that if you are American you have to be laughing right now. I mean how could any society really have a system more broken than the one we have in Washington right now? I mean literally, nothing is getting done right now. One half of Congress is passing bill after bill and the other half is just refusing to take any action at all. It's insane that we are paying these people to work for us.

Anyway...think we got problems? Talk to a Peruvian taxi driver.

Tired of a two-party system? Try more than 30. Fed up with politicians taking money from special interests instead of representing the people that elected them? How about having all your living ex-presidents in jail for money-laundering, bribery and corruption? Does that sound bad? It is. And it's not like there's just one ex-president still alive. There are three! And one of them has his wife in jail with him.

The yellow house with the pink roof is one of my favorites, often with Elvis right next to it. Assuming not Presley.

It actually gets worse. There would have been a fourth living ex-president in custody right now if he hadn't killed himself earlier this year to avoid arrest. All told, there have been six presidents since 1986 in Peru (not counting the current president) and five of the six were indicted or arrested or convicted or jailed or something. The only one that wasn't was an interim president whose only job in office was to find the next president. Where's all this bribery come from, you might ask? Apparently...Brazil. It's a real problem.

Emotions run deep here. And not in the ways you might think. Some people actually feel that some ex-presidents despite obvious wrongdoing should be walking free. Especially when it comes to Alberto Fujimori who served as head of the country for 10 years from 1990 to 2000. In his time in office, Fujimori legitimately did some good for the country, especially in stabilizing the economy and defeating insurgent groups within Peru, most notably the Shining Path, a Maoist revolutionary army of sorts. 

But apparently Fujimori was a little too zealous in his pursuit of wiping out the rebels because he got some non-rebels killed in the process. Which led to human rights violations accusations, a self-imposed exile in Japan, an impeachment, an arrest during a trip to neighboring Chile (I mean, why go to Chile when you are wanted in Peru?), a conviction, jail, a pardon by a successor president and an overturn of that pardon by the legislature which kept him in jail which is where he is today. And despite all that, there are a significant number of Peruvians today with a positive opinion of Mr. Fujimori, including the driver that took us from the airport to our Lima hotel and think he's done enough good to offset the whole corruption thing. Politics is complicated in Peru.

But that's not what this post is about. Not really.

Avengers Party? Not really, although at least two of our guides made reference to the A meaning that in jest.

So about those 30 plus political parties, which seemed chaotic at first but which I might welcome right now based on how stagnant our government here at home is. One of the benefits of having that many parties in Peru for someone infatuated with painted signs is that there are a whole lot of different colored signs by the sides of the road to look at and take pictures of. And they are not just here and there. Once we left the historic city center of Cusco they seemed to be everywhere. And I do mean everywhere. 

As graphic statements a lot of these signs are simple and powerful. Most feature the name of one or more political candidates along with a symbol of the party they represent. The names are always written (or painted really I guess) in the exact same colors and font. The symbols next to the names vary: a football (meaning soccer ball) or a shovel or a flower or a rainbow flag or an Andean head or a heart or any other sort of symbol that might become enough of a brand that could become associated with a name.

Football behind the lamppost.

I love how simple and straightforward the designs are and how different parties use different colors so that every color in the spectrum is collectively represented (although I guess all you need there is the rainbow flag sign to really do just that). They have to be simple so that they can be replicated over and over by many different people painting their own houses. And yes, that's what happens. Apparently people willingly decide to go to the hardware store (or wherever one buys paint in Peru) and buy their own paint so they can make the wall of their house or garden into a political advertisement. We were told that most people hope for favors after their candidate wins. Not sure how that works out.

There's also a story about the symbols. As attractive and graphically powerful as they are, they sort of seem unnecessary, unless you consider that significant parts of the population of the country are illiterate. Can't read your candidate's name? Just vote for the shovel! Or the rainbow flag or whatever else it is. How this process works on election day I'm not quite sure. Does the ballot have names and symbols next to the names? Didn't ask that question I guess.

I know, I know, all this sounds very complicated, right? Why wouldn't someone just not bother voting and take their chance with whatever party gets elected? I mean the odds that one of the more than 30 parties will get a majority is astronomical, right? There has to be a coalition or consensus of some kind to get things done, right? Surely someone sitting out a vote every now and then because they can't read couldn't hurt, right?

Wrong! Voting is mandatory in Peru. If you don't vote, you get fined. How awesome is that? Some politicians go to great lengths in my country to make it extremely difficult for some people to vote. Peru made it a requirement. Love it! Thus the flower and the football and everything else.

Vote for the flower!!!! Whatever that means in terms of the candidate (Hector, I guess?) that would be elected. 

I didn't actually take the time to track down what each sign meant or how things worked on election day with the whole pictures thing. I figured that would spoil the whole magic of this entire experience for me. Once I start getting entangled with politics, I'm not sure anything could save me. Better that I just appreciate these signs for their graphic quality. That's what drew me to them in the first place after all.

It is rare that I encounter something unexpected that intrigues me like this. Far too often on trips, I think of writing about these things too late (still regret missing the boat on the Yule Lads in Iceland...) so I'm glad I didn't let this opportunity slip by this time. 

Some of the pictures in this post are less perfect than I would want. If you'd noticed that (or more likely you hadn't) it's because I took every one of them from inside of a moving vehicle with a pane of glass between me and my subject. I'm pretty happy with the way they turned out even if I missed a few (regrets on missing the shovel especially...). But realistically, how many pictures of these signs could I have really posted? In case you think six is too few, here are two more to close this post.

I'm not exactly sure the llama logos (hidden behind the tuk-tuks in the last photo) are part of a political campaign. I didn't see these anywhere other than in the town of Chinchero. But they were one of my favorites so I couldn't pass up sharing them. May your next trip be full of surprises that bring you joy the way these did for me. 

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How We Did It
Take a ride in any sort of vehicle outside of the historic center of Cusco and you are bound to find one or two of these signs. Keep going and you'll find more. Keep going further and you'll find more still. The best part of this part of our trip? It didn't cost us anything extra. If you want better photos than I got, ask you driver to stop and let you out. Just ask them to wait for you though. Happy hunting!

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Inca Walls

Ready for a blog post that has tons of close up pictures of masonry walls? Good. This is the definitely the post for you!

Building with masonry, or small units of material generally stacked on top of one another, is a technique that most human societies mastered early on in their development. As soon as man was able to gather or quarry stone or make bricks out of mud or clay or any other material conducive to being formed into block-like shapes, he started building structures more permanent than grass or wood or whatever else was used before building with masonry was discovered.

The tradition of masonry building goes back centuries upon centuries and takes many, many forms. Giant stone Gothic cathedrals all over Europe; stone walls dividing farmlands into plots (or separating the Romans from the future Scots) in Great Britain; mud walls to shelter Masai tribes from the African elements (and wildlife); giant pyramids in the Yucatan peninsula; the list could go on and on and on. 

Some of these walls and structures are designed as monuments to form simple barriers and are not so concerned about keeping the weather out; the masonry in these walls or buildings is sometimes loose laid, which makes construction easier and quicker but does no good for making a comfortable interior environment. Other walls are designed to be waterproof and need to be sealed, so the gaps between the masonry units are filled with mortar or covered with a thin layer of applied material like stucco; the mortar or surface application has the added benefit of generally making the walls themselves stronger.  

Mortar is the stuff that allows masonry construction to be a practical endeavor for buildings today. Not only does it seal out the exterior environment and make the wall stronger but it allows the mason to work around imperfections in material manufacture or in craftsmanship. There's no realistic way to set stones on top of one another fitting together perfectly and sealing the building envelope without mortar. It makes a loose laid pile of stones or bricks or blocks into a building. Walls that have any sort of permanence just don't work the way they are supposed to without mortar.

Unless, that is, you are an Inca.

Calle Awaqpinta, Cusco.

One of the great unsolved historical mysteries is how the Incas built their walls. Because while the rest of the world was off using mortar to compensate for material imperfections and less than precise workmanship from craftsmen, the Incas were doing something different. They were building mortarless walls without gaps between the blocks on an astounding scale. 

Not impressed by masonry in the cover photo of this post from Machu Picchu? Good! You weren't supposed to be. I was sort of setting you up. Just because the Incas could build walls with perfectly fitted joints between blocks of stone, doesn't mean they always did. There was definitely a time and place to pull out all the stops and build a perfect looking wall. I assume it took a whole lot more effort than the alternative and maybe (and I'm totally speculating here) only certain masons could lay the best walls.

I came to Peru half ready to be blown away by the skill of these workers and half prepared to be supremely disappointed. I mean I've seen some pretty amazing craftsmanship, masonry and otherwise, in my day job as an architect. Surely some walls built 500 or more years ago by people who didn't have metal tools (gold, silver and copper don't count; the metal isn't hard enough to really make crisp edges on stone blocks) wouldn't be that fascinating.

Inca walls at Machu Picchu. The Temple of the Sun is at the top of the hill.

I was wrong. These walls are really very impressive. We started the Inca portion of our trip in Cusco and there are Inca walls all over the place in that city. The Spanish generally tore down every significant structure in Cusco when they took over the place but they didn't knock down the Inca foundations; they recognized how well built they were and just decided to erect their own buildings on top of the existing walls. The first day we were there we found a pedestrian street called Calle Awaqpinta with old Inca walls on both sides of the street: one a rough uneven stone wall and one of the finest Incan masonry work.

The side of the street with the finer masonry work (which used to be Cusco's Temple of the Sun) was pretty incredible. The blocks are so uniform and smooth and there is literally nothing between the stones themselves. They are perfectly fitted together and I wouldn't be surprised if the wall was perfectly plumb. I did not carry a level with me to Peru so I couldn't check; but my money's on plumb.

So what's the big deal, right? What's so special about this whole Incan stonework thing? Surely someone working long enough at a craft could be able to do this, especially if they made it their life's work, right? So it was 500 years ago. Who cares?

Check out those joints!!!

All those are good thoughts. And sure, I guess if someone whittled away at a piece of stone long enough they could get them close to perfectly rectangular, although they aren't quite that way in the photograph above, which actually makes it harder to fit together because each stone's neighbor needs to be just non-rectangular enough to match up with the adjacent block (it's complicated, right? we'll get back to that idea). Still, I can see it being done. To me, that's not the most impressive part.

These walls are generally built from quarried granite. Granite is pretty darned hard. To cut, carve, shape and polish granite, you generally need a material harder than granite (this applies to all materials, not just granite) and the Incas didn't have one. No tungsten carbide, no diamonds, no hardened steel. Nothing. We were told that the builders at Machu Picchu drove wood wedges into cracks of the rocks and then used water to swell the wood to split the rock. That all sounds good but did that technique really produce rocks that were almost perfectly rectangular and of the same size that would stack perfectly? Seems doubtful to me. We were also told at Machu Picchu that sand was used to polish the individual stones to the smooth surfaces that most have today. How long did this take? Seriously? Sand?

So what we were told about the structures at Machu Picchu was that with somewhat primitive techniques and no materials harder than the stones themselves being carved that the Incas could produce relatively uniform and geometrically perfect blocks which could be stacked on top of each other perfectly and stand in place for centuries. Sounds farfetched.

But you know what? I can buy it. Even with all the doubt I just sowed, I'm on board. We were told the Incas used interlocking blocks for stability rather than just stacking rectangles of loose laid stones on top of one another and we saw an example at Cusco's Inca Museum (shown below) of the type of shapes these stones were made to make these Incan walls. And you know what? They are big but not enormous. I can believe a team of workmen might be able to spend enough time getting that kind of a surface on a block and then laying it (along with hundreds of others like it) in place to make a finished, perfectly assembled wall. 

I can even get behind the idea that these same workmen could pull off something like Machu Picchu's Temple of the Three Windows, which uses less regularly shaped stones but with few enough that with enough time and sufficient motivation, a team of Inca workmen could have made it work.

Inca stone, maybe? At the Museo Inka, Cusco.

Temple of the Three Windows, Machu Picchu.

And then we went to Chinchero. And it blew everything away that we had seen in the whole week.

Chinchero is a small town in the Sacred Valley of the Incas about a 45 minute drive north and west from Cusco. Today at first glance it looks like a typical Inca town taken over by the Spanish hundreds of years ago: some farming terraces, some walls that are obviously Inca era, a church right in the center of town and paved streets with troughs or gutters (the Incan aqueduct) for the distribution of fresh water. 

On second glance though, Chinchero doesn't look anything like a typical Inca town. The whole place is laid out with its major planning axes oriented directly east-west and north-south and at the top of a hill with tremendous views to all sides. This place looks and feels important. And when I say east-west and north-south I mean exactly; we checked on the iPhone and it was spot on. 

It is thought today that Chinchero used to be a royal retreat or country home for the emperor Tupac Yupanqui who was the son of Pachacuti, the emperor thought to have built Machu Picchu. It makes total sense given the siting of the place. And in a place this important, you better believe the Incas were building their best walls. And they did. They are absolutely spectacular.

Chinchero.

At Chinchero you will not find stacked stones of similar size. In fact, you may not be able to find any stone identical to any other. These blocks are all custom cut and fit in such intricate patterns that all my acceptance of stories of quarrying, cutting, polishing and fitting are overcome by what you are faced with. I cannot even begin to explain how these things were put together.

Our guide, Paul, however did take a shot at this. First, he let us know that he didn't believe the whole wood wedges in rock cracks story we'd been told over at Machu Picchu. He also didn't let us blame the whole thing on aliens (we tried; believe me, we tried) or introduce a now extinct race of people who had metal tools capable of carving and shaping rock precisely like I have read in some accounts since I returned from Peru.

So story number one is that the Inca were gifted from the gods two plants that allowed them to manipulate stone. He even tried to show us a stone that was "bent" rather than carved as proof of this theory. I didn't buy it. Nor did I buy the second theory that said that once upon a time there was a bird in Peru that had a beak so sharp that it was able to cut stone easily and did so for the Incas. Although honestly, the second theory is way more fun and lacking any other credible explanation, I'm inclined to believe that one rather than nothing at all.

Just take a look above at the ridiculousness that is the Incan walls in Chinchero. How did they make these things? They are like jigsaw puzzles made of blocks of granite that weigh up to probably 300 or 400 pounds or more. Not something that any old regular person can pick up with one hand or two. And the joints are so precise and tight; I've actually seen real jigsaw puzzles that fit together worse than these walls and jigsaws are generally cut out of a single sheet of cardboard.

Find me two blocks in the wall above that are identical. You can't, right? Some of these things have seven sides and fit perfectly with their neighbors. It's an amazing construct. I can't imagine some workmen 500 or 600 years ago putting these things together in the field after hammering away (or whatever they really did to get stones shaped this way) in a super precise fashion to get these stones just the way they wanted them.

Want to be more impressed? Some of these things turn the corner. Yep, not only do you have to get one face of a stone block fitted perfectly to the stones around, above and below each block, now you have to make sure the sides of the stones match too.

Turning the corner. Not difficult enough to match one face perfectly? Try it with two.

I have nothing here. We walked around these things for 30 minutes or so trying to figure out how this was done. We were even able to see the backs of the walls and they were in most spots as perfect as they were on the front sides. It's honestly beyond my powers of comprehension to figure out how this was accomplished. If I can put aside all my doubts about the walls in Cusco and believe they were constructed by master craftsmen with skills beyond what modern science can explain, I can't do it with the walls in Chinchero.

Before I wrote this blog post, I tried to do some research into what the scientific community had to say about all this. The most credible explanation I found was that the Inca used byproducts of their mining operations to separate the stones when placed and that somehow this layer of iron mineral melted the edges of the blocks after placement so that they fit perfectly without appearing to have any material between each piece. I guess maybe that's a logical explanation but honestly it sounds to me no less farfetched than the bird with the sharp beak theory (which I still love).

If the Spanish that took over the Incan empire ever knew how these walls were built, they sure as heck never wrote it down. Who knows, maybe they were too preoccupied with conquering the Incas that they never thought that they would have anything to add to the history of construction or anything else. Their legacy is a series of walls all over the country that nobody can say for sure how they were actually put in place. 

We can replicate Incan walls today. I'm sure of it. I'm also sure that we'd have the wall cut out by tools controlled by computers off a model that would be built specifically for the purpose of each wall. I'm also not sure that the walls we'd build to day would withstand at least five centuries of earthquakes in an area of the world with significant seismic activity. These walls are impressive at Machu Picchu and Cusco. They are mind-blowing in Chinchero. Very cool stuff.

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How We Did It
Our trips to Cusco and Machu Picchu were arranged for us by our favorite tour company in the world, G Adventures. I am sure you can do both on your own. If you get stuck, I'm sure you can get a little help here and there from any number of tour companies.

We went to Chinchero on our own, which is to say that we engaged the services of Inkayni Peru Tours to drive us there and provide us with a guide to take us around Chinchero and two other sites (more on one of those two other ones to come later) on their Maras-Moray-Chinchero half day tour. We found these guys through Viator but there's no reason you need to go through that website. Just save the cost of the service charge you'll pay to Viator or better yet, tip your guide or driver or both a little extra. 

Based on our one day (or half day I guess) experience with these guys I'd highly recommend their service. The best part about this tour is that it's private so you don't have to share it with anyone else. There is an entrance fee for Chinchero which is not covered in the cost of the tour which is 70 Soles (about $21 US as of this writing). That entrance fee gets you into Chinchero and Moray (which was also on our tour) along with sites at Pisaq and Ollantaytambo if you choose to get to those some other way.

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51

Today is my 51st birthday. I've now made it on this blog one year past my original five year commitment that I made on birthday number 45. I don't think I'm stopping any time soon. For today, I'm at home and enjoying a little quiet non-traveling time after two major trips (New Zealand and Peru) earlier this year. Peru blog posts are coming fast and furious on either side of this annual birthday post. Got to get them all done before the next trip!!

Year number six of this blog was as eventful as any other. I was fortunate to be able to travel for pretty much six weeks in the last twelve months: taking a week and a half to drive from San Francisco to Portland; devoting a similar amount of time to England with a side trip to Germany; flying to the other side of the world to New Zealand for 14 days and then spending a week in Peru exploring the culture and landscape of that country. That last one was probably my favorite, although it's a close call with our time in the Napa Valley.

So what did all that do for me? Tons. I fell in love with wine and found out I still love beer (shocker!) while out on the west coast of the United States. I finally cracked the code on a Napa trip which I'm thrilled about; can't wait to go back. I also found out I don't love kölsch as much as I thought I did but had an excellent time in Cologne anyway, even if their beer isn't as good as the beer in Portland, OR and their food isn't as good as the nosh in Munich on the other side of the country. I visited Hastings to see where the foundation of my country was laid and chased kiwis at night on an airfield about as far from Hastings as you can get. I pushed myself harder than I have recently hiking the Inca Trail to get to Machu Picchu. I went to my second real football game at Selhurst Park and found out what it means to be South London and proud cheering for Crystal Palace F.C. on a Saturday afternoon.

All told, we spent time on four continents in the past 12 months and my Patagonia backpack that I bought before our 2017 trip to Japan has now made it to six in just two years. When I started writing this blog in 2013 I never would have thought that was possible. I'm glad we've done all that even if New Zealand was a long long trip home. I think it's broken my will to stay in coach on all flights. We'll see what happens when I get back down to that part of the world. And I do have to go down to that part of the planet at least once more.

Glad All Over at Selhurst Park. Until Palace lost to Southampton 0-2 that is.

As I usually do in this post, I need to check up on my goals. Having checked every box in my first five years, I added some new goals last year and there has been some significant progress already. I have to have goals.

My first goal was to head to Oceania and add a sixth continent to my list. Done! Although as I expressed in my first post upon returning from New Zealand, I'm now conflicted about the number of continents on our planet. The more you learn, the harder it gets sometimes. For now, I'm sticking to tradition and now just have one more continent to go: Antarctica. And believe me I think about it a lot. I check Antartica cruises at least once every couple of months. There's definitely an allure about being a completist. There's no way I'm ever going to do that with countries but continents stand a chance.

City-wise, I pledged to visit Cologne and I did. The cathedral was amazing. Definitely one of the best churches I have ever visited (if not THE best) and it seems like I've visited a lot. Maybe too many already. So the beer disappointed. It was still worth going.

In the wanderlust category, I committed to Machu Picchu or Easter Island in addition to Angkor Wat. Machu Picchu is done; doesn't mean Easter Island is off the table, particularly now we know about the Polynesian triangle of Hawaii (which we have visited), New Zealand (done!) and Easter Island. Seems odd to have two of the three, right? And Angkor Wat? I told you there was a reason we had to travel to the southeastern part of the planet again. Not scheduled. Not likely this year either. But eventually...

The final goal I set was to make it to all 50 of our United States. I have no progress to report. I'm still stuck on 46. Don't see that changing much in the immediate future. It's going to be an effort to get to Nebraska, Oklahoma, Arkansas or Kansas in a meaningful way.

So what's the immediate future hold? Honestly, we have just one trip planned other than a quick weekend in New York City. I have an inkling of where we might go but ultimately that decision has yet to be made. Any suggestions?

The Plaza de Armas at night, Cusco, Peru. I love Cusco. What an amazing city.

Chicha

It's beer time! Beer time in Peru, that is!

I pride myself on being a beer-tasting completist when I travel. To me, that means wherever I go I have to sample some of the local suds. Wherever! And Peru was no exception. I absolutely had to have some Peruvian beer before I left the country. 

Now by this I don't mean the perfectly adequate and unremarkable Cusqueña lager style beer we found in every city and town we visited. That stuff was all well and good but I mean I wanted something older, something more Andean. LOCAL beer. Not just European style beer brewed locally. And for me, that meant one thing: chicha.

Rohday describing the finer points of chicha appreciation.

It makes sense to me that a society which revered corn above all other crops (and has cultivated more than 300 varieties) would end up making a beer out of the stuff. That's chicha (sometimes called chicha de jora). Today the brew is most likely made by drying out harvested corn in the sun on porches until the grain starts to germinate, then mash the stuff, cool it and ferment it and then serve it when it tastes good. Along the way some yeast is added in so there's some alcohol present. The predominant production scale of this stuff is mostly very very local. Like homemade. Indeed we saw corn laid out in a couple of layers on house porches in many spots as we drove around the sacred valley. 

It didn't always used to be that way. The traditional way of getting the fermentable sugars (which yeast converts to alcohol and carbon dioxide) out of the corn is not by waiting for it to germinate on the porch. Instead, traditional chicha was started by the brewer stuffing a few grains of the corn in his or her mouth and chewing to crush the kernels and get at the sugar. A little human saliva apparently starts the release of sugars in the corn. From there, the mash is spit out, flattened out and left until it's ready to be mashed. Sounds fun, right? Nothing like a little spit in your beer. :)

A closer look at the (very sanitary looking) cup of chicha beer.

Now, you can't find a glass of chicha by walking into your local bar or restaurant or hotel lobby. You have to know where to find it. Specifically, you have to look for a red bag on a stick. Seriously. That's how you find a chicheria. A red plastic bag on a stick. Once you see one and you know what it means, you start to see them everywhere. Home brewing in Peru is apparently a big thing because we saw many many red bags on sticks.

The chicheria we stopped at was in Ollantaytambo, the old Incan town where the rebel emperor Manco Inca held off the Spanish, one of the very few battles that the natives won against Pizarro's conquistadors. And by "stopped at" I really mean that our guide, Rohday, ducked into the place and emerged out onto the street we were gathered in with a cup of opaque yellow liquid. One cup, ten people. Looks like it's a sharing situation right there on the street in front of a massive old Incan wall. How perfect.

I'd describe the appearance of the beer as I would a wheat beer, although with perhaps a little more opacity and a deeper yellow color. The consistency of the brew matched that type of beer also; it was a heavy type of drink. Thicker than a commercially available lager type beer. The taste was actually good. Not good like I'd drink this if nothing else were available (like the banana and millet beer I had last year in Tanzania). I mean good. The predominant flavors I got were apple and pineapple, which I guess are a little strange flavors to get out of beer but I've had other beers in the past with these types of tastes that I like. The beer went down easy with a just a bit of a sour note at the end. I have no idea whether our chicha contained the brewer's spit. I'm hoping ours was brewed the more modern way. 

Here goes nothing. Hoping for an aftereffect free experience. 

For whatever reason, my chicha drinking experience ended up being unsatisfyingly short. I guess Rohday is responsible for the health and safety of our group and in his estimation, getting a bunch of people onto a bus after a one sol cup (that's about 30 cents; yes, for the whole cup) of chicha each wasn't that good an idea. He blamed it on the tendency for first time drinkers to experience diarrhea. Who knows if that's true but it's not like we are drinking something that's been heavily processed in a sanitary facility or anything so he might just be right. Rohday also claimed this stuff prevented prostate cancer; I'm less confident about that claim.

In drinking a few sips of chicha I felt connected back through the ages to the ancient Inca. The emperor Atahualpa served chicha to Hernando de Soto in the year 1531 when the Spanish first encountered (but before they betrayed and executed) the emperor. Five years later, the rebel emperor Manco Inca bound his noblemen to the cause of defeating the Spanish by sharing chicha from ceremonial jugs, sort of like our party did on the streets of Ollantaytambo. Except we didn't then go out and try to kill a bunch of Spaniards.

And just like that, our chicha experience was over. One more country down. One more beer experience down. I'm sure there are many many more to go. Can't wait for the next one.

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How We Did It
There's not much to say about this one. Look for the red bag on a stick and take a chance. Remember what Rohday said about the diarrhea. Good luck!

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Old Peak

On our bookshelf at home is Lonely Planet's Ultimate Travel, a list of 500 places on Earth worth traveling to ranked 1 through 500. At number 3 in that guide is Peru's Machu Picchu. The description of this awe-inspiring wonder in that book is accompanied by a picture of a smiling Andean woman and the classic view of the old Incan citadel looking along its entire length with the high mountain called Huayna Picchu in the back. If you've ever seen a picture of Machu Picchu, I know you've seen this shot. If you haven't or can't recall it at the moment, just go back two posts on this blog and you'll find it taken by yours truly.

I'm not exactly sure I can recall seeing any other picture of this site in a book or magazine or on line other than that view. It is so classic and iconic that it seems no other photograph is even necessary. It's really all you need. Done. End of story. Don't even need to visit there.

Except not for me. One of my biggest thrills in visiting Machu Picchu was that I would finally get to see more than that. I'd get to see up close how the town was laid out and to understand which functions of the citadel were in which spot and how the Incans put the whole thing together. This post is all about just that: what I got out of my visit to the top of the mountain that isn't that one picture. So with no disrespect to that view of the site, I'm only posting pictures other than that on this blog post. And I'm limiting my discussion of my visit to the details and to what I learned about that most fascinated me from my five or so hours roaming around the old city.

But first...some context.

Llamas at Machu Picchu.

At the turn of the 19th century, Machu Picchu was unknown to most people outside of Peru. No, that's not really right; it was unknown to most people inside Peru also. In fact, it might have really been unknown to about everyone on the entire planet except for a few native Andeans living around the site itself who used the old Incan terraces sometimes to raise crops. It was these people who in 1911 led the American explorer Hiram Bingham up to the top of the mountain to take a look. Bingham became famous and was credited with the "discovery" of the site when he published photographs and descriptions of the place in National Geographic Magazine two years later. You could argue all he did was discover someone's vegetable garden. He was even led there by the garden owner's son. Fame is like that I guess.

Almost 400 years earlier, in 1526, Francisco Pizarro of Spain "discovered" the Incas. Pizarro was the illiterate, illegitimate son of a Spanish infantry colonel from Trujillo, a Spanish town just east of the Portuguese border. He had come to the new world for one purpose: to get rich and powerful, something he could never do from his station in life in Trujillo. Five years after first contact, he'd start his conquest of the Incan empire by traveling to Cajamarca in present day Peru where he bumped into the emperor Atahualpa on the road to the Incan capital of Cusco. It was about as fortunate an encounter as Pizarro could have wished for: the emperor was on the road in the midst of a civil war with absolutely no idea a group of 150 or so men with strange beasts (horses) were on their way to take charge of his empire. Pretty quickly, Pizarro made sure he did whatever he needed to do to take the emperor hostage.

Two years after Atahualpa's capture, Pizarro executed him and then captured Cusco. But that wasn't the end. It would take 39 more years and a lot of focus on a very small number of settlements for the Spanish to completely conquer the Incan empire. In the meantime, parts of the empire's territory were reclaimed by the jungle and the mountains and hidden from the Spanish invaders, including the citadel later known as Machu Picchu, or "old peak" in the native Quechua language.

More llama. In front of the granaries.

There is a good deal of debate about the history of Machu Picchu. It is believed to be a sort of royal retreat built by the emperor Pachacuti (Atahualpa's great-grandfather) who ruled from 1438 to 1472. But nobody really knows for sure. Incan history was primarily oral and it does not appear that anyone who actually lived or worked at Machu Picchu passed that history on to anyone who chose to write it down. The evaluation of the history of this place is still going on today as more and more parts of the city are unearthed slowly. There's even some thought to some of the stonework being pre-Inca in origin.

If Machu Picchu was built by Pachucuti, it is likely that the city was abandoned during the Incan civil war less than 100 years after its founding. With no supplies being delivered and no emperors coming to retreat for the weekend, it's likely all the people living and working probably just went home and left the place as it was.

Between the time of Pachacuti and 1911, there is not much recorded history of the old peak.  Like pretty much none, actually. Presumably when the Incas abandoned the mountaintop, the city was richly appointed with gold and silver temple walls but any precious metals were long gone by the time Bingham got there, as they were nine years earlier when Augustin Lizarraga partially cleared the site for the first time in centuries (and wrote his name on the walls of the temple of the three windows). Maybe it was there when Diego Rodriguez visited and wrote about the citadel way back in 1565. "Who got the gold?" was my number one unanswered question and I don't suppose it will be answered any time soon. My money's on Rodriguez.

We arrived at Machu Picchu for the first time after our seven and a half hour hike from Chachabamba. And promptly went right back to our hotel in Aguas Calientes exhausted after a very quick walk around. The next morning we went back determined to see this place beyond the signature photograph we'd seen in every book and on every website. This is my five hour take on what I found fascinating about the site. 

The Quarry

One of my first questions (after "who got the gold?", that is) about Machu Picchu was where did they get the stone from to build all these buildings? There are some ancient sites (see: Stonehenge) where people a long time ago dragged some massive stones an awfully long way for some reason to put them where they are famously today. Surely the Incas didn't drag a whole bunch of hunks of stone up a mountain, did they?

I have no idea why I asked this question. My first impression of the site from the Sun Gate when I first laid eyes on this place was that it was like someone shaved off the top of a mountain. They had to put the stone they removed somewhere, right? I guess they could have tossed it down the slope and brought a whole new batch up but no, they did not. Want to build a city out of stone on top of a mountain peak? One of the best ways to do that is to use the stone at the top to do it. The Incans just turned the top of the peak into their very own quarry. 

I always had the impression that Machu Picchu was fully constructed way back when the Incas were making full use of the place. Clearly by the very large boulders that we saw just sitting around the site, it was not. There is still plenty of raw material in what is surely one of the strangest quarries I have ever seen in my life ready to be cut and put to use. I think of quarries as excavated pits. Machu Picchu's is more a pile of loose rocks on a hill.

Machu Picchu's quarry, feet from completed walls. With a trail of some of the 4,000 tourists per day on site.

It's difficult to imagine where the remaining buildings at Machu Picchu would go that the Incas might have intended to build, although a great space for a build out would be where the stones themselves are currently piled. It certainly would have cleaned up that part of the site where loose rocks sit feet from completed, precisely laid walls.

The Incas are famous for having laid very large, very precisely cut pieces of stone on top of one another and just how they cut, carved and shaped these rocks into the shapes they did and then moved them into place is one of the great mysteries about this culture. I guess in addition to nobody passing down what life was like at Machu Picchu, they remaining silent about their masonry skills. People today can't even figure it out for sure. 

While gazing in wonder at the quarry, we were told by our guide that the boulders were broken down into more reasonably sized pieces by creating small holes or slots in the granite using hematite tools into which dry wood shims or wedges were placed. The masons would then saturate the joints with water causing the wood to swell and split the rock. I don't know if that's true or not. We'd be told later in our trip (by a different guide) that it was not. I'm not going to debate it in this post. Suffice it to say we didn't expect to find a quarry on the top of a mountain.

God Is In The Details

OK so it was the German architect Mies van der Rohe who famously uttered the words "God is in the details" but it might well have been the Incas. There are probably many many blog posts I could write about the way the Incas built. I won't. I'll just pick one detail that fascinated me more than the others. And, yes, you'll have to forgive my architect nerdiness on this one.

In all three of the Inca towns we visited (Chachabamba and Wiñaywayna on our hike to Machu Picchu and then Machu Picchu itself) while we were in Peru, we found complete, still standing stone walls from Incan times. How many of these had been standing for centuries I can't say because at least 30% of Machu Picchu today has been rebuilt. But for sure, some at least had to be real.

In Chachabamba and Wiñaywayna, we noticed the same types of construction, parallel gable end walls (meaning with a sloped triangular roof profile) which must have had roofing materials of some kind spanning between them, likely less permanent than stone, which are now long gone, having probably been destroyed by rain and wind since the towns were abandoned for good. Along the sloped edge of the end walls, we found stones fashioned as pegs of some sort, sticking out of the wall at uniform intervals. What on Earth were these for?

Machu Picchu provided the answer.

They are pegs. And they are designed to hold the roof on.

There are a few reconstructed buildings at Machu Picchu. Some of these have had roofing resembling something close to the original bamboo and grass roofs added back on to show just how the Incas might have protected their structures from the weather, although they are using eucalyptus trunks in lieu of bamboo. The roof structure consists (based on the photograph above) of three separate progressively smaller wooden spanning members with a final layer of grass as a waterproofing membrane.

The grass is likely q'eswachaka, a grass the Incas have been harvesting for use in rope suspension bridges for centuries and known for its water resistance. The only issue with this material is it won't last long, which means that there are no Inca empire-era roofs left and that the roofing was probably replaced every couple of years or so. 

The bamboo and grass likely formed a fairly secure enclosure and the whole assembly was strapped to the stone walls with alpaca leather, just like it is in the reconstructed version in Machu Picchu. This is one of the clearest and coolest architectural details I've seen in my travels.

The Inca Bridge

After a full day of walking up and down the sides of mountains, the last thing I wanted to do in our day at Machu Picchu itself was take a hike. But the only way to get to the Inca Bridge is to do just that. So aching knees and calves and all, I agreed to make one more walk along the side of a cliff to take a look. I'd heard this was something you had to see.

What we found ourselves looking at after a 30 minute or so trek while clinging to the rock faces on our left like it would really do any good was the view above. A sheer cliff face with a  teeny tiny path running along a very narrow ledge of the same cliff face. But along part of its length was a gap spanned by a very flimsy looking plank of wood. A closer look revealed that this wasn't, in fact, a plank of wood but five tree trunks. Ladies and gentleman...the Inca Bridge.

Go ahead and think it. I did. If the Incas were such great engineers (and they were), why is this impressive in any way? I could have come up with this as a small child. 

The answer, of course, is this is not the bridge the Incas built. Remember the grass they made their roofs out of? Come on, sure you do, it was like four paragraphs ago. I also wrote way back there that they used the same grass for ropes in their suspension bridges. And every year they would build a new one. So...no Incas, no bridge. Gotta fill it in with something.

The caretakers of Machu Picchu are not renewing this bridge on an annual basis so it remains a bridge of five tree trunks. I'm sure after visiting the Inca Bridge that I don't totally understand what would be there in place of this thing. There are a series of rocks protruding from the Incan wall below the bridge location. Perhaps these had something to do with it way back when? It's unlikely that this path, which represented a sort of back door into the property, will be back in use any time soon with the current bridge or any other one.

The Temple of the Condor
Machu Picchu is a city of temples. We passed by or through at least four in our brief walk around the old citadel. The most famous is perhaps the Temple of the Sun, which is oriented towards the Sun Gate at the pass of Machu Picchu mountain that we passed through the day before on our Inca Trail hike. At sunrise on June 21 (the winter solstice in the southern hemisphere), there is a magical alignment of the two structures connected by the sun's rays. 

We passed by the Temple of the Sun briefly in addition to lingering by the main temple near the quarry for a few minutes to admire the mortarless stonework. We were also able to check out the Temple of the Three Windows, which featured maybe the most incredible masonry work we saw in our week in Peru.

But the one that got my attention the most was the Temple of the Condor. The Incas had a spiritual connection to the Earth, mountains and sky, represented by the snake, puma and condor so I feel this temple was pretty darned important. We breezed by this place towards the end of our time in the morning timeslot we owned that day and barely had time to snap the picture above.

What struck me about this temple was how it was totally unlike the others we'd seen. The three others were geometrically regular, either circular or rectangular in plan, with carefully laid ashlar masonry stacked one block on top of the other. Not so the Temple of the Condor, which seemed to be dominated by an enormous twisting, turning central single stone surrounded and topped by more regular walls. Maybe it's a ruin of some sort and it wasn't really like this when Machu Picchu was alive back in the 1400s but it seemed way more dynamic and free than the other three temples.

Earthquakes 

One of the more surprising facts we learned on our tour of Machu Picchu was that the trapezoidal windows you find in all sorts of Inca structures actually improve the buildings' resistance to earthquakes. Really? As an architect I was naturally skeptical of this statement so I figured I'd check it out to see if it was true.

I have to tell you I couldn't find anything on the internet (which is of course the source of all things truthful) about these windows enhancing earthquake resistance except maybe a couple of blog posts from people who sounded pretty much like me fresh off a guided tour of Machu Picchu. No calculations, no empirical evidence, no thesis papers from structural engineers. Nothing.

But I did find some other things that were interesting. Particularly the accounts of the behavior of Incan walls during earthquakes. The apparently rattle. Like they get shaken by the Earth's motion, rattle a little and then settle back into place perfectly as if nothing had ever happened.

I also found validation of one other thing that our guide told us while we were roaming around the site: that there's a fault line running right through pretty much the center of Machu Picchu just like he said. Know what the Incas built right along the fault line? Absolutely nothing. They just left a six foot wide or so grass strip as shown in the photograph above. There had to be some trial and error here right? Earthquake hit after they started building maybe?

Trapezoidal windows. Rattling stones. I'm not sure if either of these things are true. But I know one thing: there have been earthquakes in the Andes a lot since Incan times and there are a ton of buildings still standing. They must have know a thing or two about building structures that can withstand a little or maybe more ground movement every now and then.

The View
My first impression of seeing Machu Picchu was something along the lines of "wow! what a view!". The siting of the city on top of a mountain plateau (albeit mostly man made) was awe inspiring and spectacular. Know what's more awe inspiring and spectacular that the view of Machu Picchu? The view of the surrounding mountains from Machu Picchu. 

Machu Picchu is situated just a little ways down from the top of the mountaintop of the same name. Just before the smaller peak of Huayna Picchu the slope of the mountain flattens out a little and gave the Incas the ideal spot to place a royal retreat. And all around the place the Incas built? Gorgeous, sheer mountains with slopes higher than the spot you are standing, sometimes with views to taller peaks in the distance with glaciers visible at the very top. The view is spectacular. 

You know what they say about real estate, right? Location! Location! Location! And the spot where this city was built is some kind of location. People build houses today in places like the Hollywood Hills specifically for the view. I can't imagine the Incas were thinking anything different when they picked this place. This is some kind of view. I can't imagine anything better really. It seems strange to talk about a place at 8,000 feet above sea level as being in a sunken location but that's exactly what it is. While its on a huge pedestal with steep slopes suddenly way down on all sides, the peaks around it are all up.

That's pretty much what I got about this place.

To those of you who have been to Machu Picchu already, this blog post may seem like I'm skipping way too much detail about the site. I mean how can I really boil down about a century or more of research and archaeological study of this incredible place down to some stone, a bridge (which is not really a bridge), some earthquake-proofing which is almost completely invisible, the adjacent mountains, a grass roof or two and a single structure on the site? That's not my intent. But in the limited time I was granted on the property, that's what I felt I learned most about. 

I also managed to solve one of my personal frustrations about how to spell the name of the site.

For the longest time, I've been having difficult remembering which of the two words has one "c" in the middle and which has two. Is it "Machu Picchu" or "Macchu Pichu"? Maybe not now since I've written a whole blog post dedicated to the place but it was a serious problem before. It turns out the trick is in the pronunciation. I had always assumed the name was pronounced "ma-chu pih-chu". It's not. It's really "ma-chu pick-chu", which completely solves the spelling of the place. The only way one of those two words logically has a double "c" in it is the second one. Problem solved.

Visiting Machu Picchu was one of my goals in the second five years of this blog. I got it done in the first year. I'm proud that we made it all the way there, especially since the first day we made it there on our own two feet. It was definitely worth going. So was the rest of Peru that we visited. But that story is for other blog posts. 

Couldn't leave Machu Picchu without one more llama picture.

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How We Did It
We booked our trip to Machu Picchu as part of a larger tour package in Peru with G Adventures, so I don't have a lot to offer about how we made arrangements to get to the site because they took care of everything. 

I do, however, have some opinions on how to spend your time once you get into Machu Picchu. First and foremost, I would suggest you make sure you have a ticket to the site in advance of your visit. The current daily visitor limit for the site is 4,000 people which seems like a lot (especially when you are in the middle of a whole bunch of tourists) but if there are no tickets available, you are not getting in. That's a long way to go to be left at the door.

Second, Machu Picchu is a one way circuit. While I'm sure there is some limited backtracking allowed, you need to make sure you visit everywhere you want to see before moving on. When we first got there in the morning, there was hardly anyone roaming around the lower terrace of the property which is the end of the route. By the time we got down there three hours or so later, the place was packed with tourists. I'm sure there's a fine line to toe here between rushing and taking enough time to see everything carefully. 

If I had enough time, I guess I'd have visited two days in a row (although I kind of did do that). It would have been nice to have done everything at the upper section of the property one day (including watching the sun rise and bathe the whole place in sunlight) and have been alone on the lower terrace the second day. There's never enough time, is there?

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