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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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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The Inca Trail

The original plan was to walk the entire Inca Trail. All 42 kilometers. Or 26 miles, if you prefer. Four straight days of trekking from Ollantaytambo towards the ancient Inca citadel of Machu Picchu which would be the ultimate payoff after miles and miles of walking at extreme elevations. Nights spent in tents under the stars after a meal cooked over a campfire. Just us and nature and the heavens and however many people were with us on our trek. Sounds good, yes?

We didn't do it.

There were two problems here. 

First, I don't camp. My idea of roughing it goes about as far as staying in some kind of RV. Tents? Probably not going there. It was close here. Like really close. If there was any experience that could have got me into a tent for three nights in a row, it would have been this one.

Second, it's too long. I don't mean that in the sense that I couldn't walk 42 kilometers in four days because I believe I could. I mean that for the limited amount of time we were planning to be in Peru, it would have consumed too much of that time I wanted to do other stuff. 

So we pivoted. And walked for just one day. And it was incredible.

Our itinerary for the day. Maybe. Maybe the distance was a little further than advertised.

Perhaps a couple of disclaimers are in order. First off, I realize I have no right to state that I could have done the full, four day hike since we opted not to do it. No offense is intended to those who have done it. One day is certainly not four and the morning of our one day was one of the most physically challenging things I have undertaken in recent memory. It was tough. No question about it. But we also got through it and spent a ton of time walking the very next day. I may have been slow but I believe I could have done it. I'm not that old. Yet.

Second, there is no one Inca Trail. Sure, when people use those two words together they usually mean the 26 miles to get from Ollantaytambo to Machu Picchu but that doesn't mean that's all there is. There are literally thousands of miles of trails in what used to be the Inca Empire. At one time, they controlled territory from what today is western Colombia all the way down to about the midpoint of Chile. That's some 4,000 or 5,000 miles or so just north to south. There are main trails and secondary trails and side paths and shortcuts and all sorts of ways to get from point A to point B. The term "spiderwebs" was used by our guide to describe just how many paths existed for the Incas to get around. 

That means there are other paths to walk than just the 26 miles. And some of them also end up at Machu Picchu. One of those other trails is where we started out.

Well, actually more accurately we started out our day of walking on a train. Which stopped about an hour into its journey to Aguas Calientes at kilometer 104 for us to scramble off. Or maybe jump off is a better word. No station. No platform. Just a drop of about two feet to the dirt at the side of the tracks. Then down a stepped path and across the Urubamba River to the first checkpoint. There was no turning back then. The train had gone and left us. The only way to get to where we need to get to was on foot. One step after the other. And there would be a lot of steps.

Everyone off the train!

We started our day for real at a place called Chachabamba in the woods. According to the sign located just after the entrance gate to the trail, our route that day would take us 10.5 kilometers in three sections: 6 kilometers to a place called Wiñaywayna, a further 3.5 to the Sun Gate (or Intipunku) and then a final 1 kilometer down to the citadel itself. Later on, about half a kilometer past Wiñaywayna, we'd find a sign to Machu Picchu with a distance of 6 kilometers. That's right: the two signs didn't say the same thing. When we got to that spot our guide also told us we were halfway done. That math didn't quite work either.  I believe we walked closer to 12 kilometers, but I couldn't be truly sure. That's the story I'm sticking with.

Sunscreen. Insect repellant. Extra water. Bathroom break. Picture in front of the sign with the map of Ruta 05 on it. Ready to go. The two of us, our new friends Erzsebet and Balazs from Hungary and our guide, José. All of us ready. Let's go! 

Or haku! as they say in Quechua.

About five minutes later, we found our first Incan ruin.

Chachabamba.

I can almost imagine the early explorers of South America coming across the ruins of Chachabamba, a small jewel nestled in the jungle of Peru, albeit covered in vines and undergrowth and trees but all still there. There are so many Incan sites scattered about the country that these kinds of unexpected and chance encounters must have happened pretty regularly once quests for sites made by the Incas started in earnest in the late 19th or early 20th century. It's quite likely that people native to the area were living in and around these ruins with full knowledge of where and what they were but the process of unearthing these places must have been spectacularly exciting.

Today, of course, Chachabamba is fully excavated and visible, the stone walls pretty much fully intact with the wood and grass roof structure long gone and taken by the jungle. The buildings were likely a way station, a stopping point for travelers on the trail that we were about to walk and a resting point for the chaskis, Incan messengers that would run coded documents from wherever they were stationed to the next waiting runner typically about 20 kilometers away. These men were the Incan pony express, using their feet to get from one spot to the next, instead of riding a horse (which didn't exist in South America at that time).

It was the first glimpse we got close up of how gorgeous these ruins in the Andes are. The stonework looks like it has never been touched, standing intact for the better part of a millennium with the backdrop of the mountains behind and in front and on all sides. Under the morning, and later mid-day and afternoon, sun it seemed we couldn't take a picture that wasn't just gorgeous. 

We also found an altar in Chachabamba and got our first good look at the Incas' signature trapezoidal windows, which some people feel has allowed these structures to withstand the earthquakes that must have threatened them many many times over the centuries. The Andes, after all, are formed by tectonic action, not by volcanic eruption. Heck, we even found ourselves in the middle of a very small quake the first full day in Lima when we were getting ready for bed.

But we weren't there to visit Chachabamba and we had a long way to go and stopping for a serious break just five minutes in wasn't the way to get through 12 kilometers (or whatever it really ended up being) in a single day. Besides there was a schedule we had to meet. The first milepost at Wiñaywayna had to be passed by 2 in the afternoon. Haku!!!

On our way along an Inca trail. Oh so far from the end.

From our vantage point at Chachabamba, we could see a little of the route that we'd be taking. Way off in the distance below what looked like a massive set of Inca farming terraces, we could see a white rock. José told us we'd have to walk right below the rock and that it would take hours to get there. To be honest, it did look far away but these kinds of things often do. I figured one step at a time would do it. And by that I figured I'd be walking for a while over a smoothish path of varying slope. After all, at one time they had to carry the royal family along routes like these on litters. There couldn't be any actual steps, right? Meaning stairs, right? Right?

The route that we traveled was absolutely beautiful. I have walked and driven through a lot of mountain ranges in my life and I have to tell you I've never spent a day in the mountains like I spent walking in the footsteps of the Inca that day. You are in absolutely the middle of nowhere on the side of a mountain on a trail bound for somewhere that you don't know exactly where yet other than you know that Machu Picchu is at the end and that it's probably a spectacular payoff. There were spots on the trail where there were no people visible in front of us or behind us. And with the cloudless sky above, most any birds that would have been out were already sheltered from the heat so the only noise we could hear was the sound of the Urubamba below and our footfalls as we took step after step after step.

Now, this is not the kind of walk where you can gaze at the scenery while you are moving along the trail. Oh no, not at all. Why is that, you may ask? Well, quite simply because the average width of the trail in the first part of the day was maybe three feet wide. Sure it was narrower in spots and wider in others, but pretty much three feet was about typical. On the left side? The upper half of a mountain with hundreds of feet to the summit. The other side? The other half of the mountain with hundreds of feet about straight down. You do not want to slip here because it's a long way down and you are not likely to stop falling, rolling or tumbling any spot close to the trail. No looking around while walking, folks. Every view I took in and every picture I snapped on the way was taken with me standing dead still. And I'm here today because I did it that way.

Tiny trail carved on the mountain. All the trail pics are looking backwards. I was in the back, after all.

I hate stairs. Not so much before I visited Peru but I learned to hate these things pretty well by the end of this day. And maybe the next day after that. Our morning consisted of walking a distance of 6 kilometers horizontally and 550 meters up. That's like walking from Washington Square Park in New York City to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (about 77 city blocks, if you must know) and walking up the stairs from street level to the observation deck of the Empire State Building. And then about 50% higher. Of course there were stairs. What was I thinking?

Oh, and it was hot. Like pretty hot. Like no clouds in the sky and close to the sun hot. I already mentioned this was one of the most physically challenging things I have done in my recent past, right? Now you know why. This was some serious, serious work feet (or in some cases foot) from much falling and bodily harm. Lots of sips of water. Take it slow. Lots of stops along the way whenever we could find some shade. But not too slow or too many stops. That clock's ticking after all. Got to make those checkpoints!!!

This went on for a couple of hours. About two hours and 15 minutes into our walk under the sun, we reached our first set of monkey steps. And peeking around the corner was the old settlement known today as Wiñaywayna. Finally our first major milestone (not to mention our lunch spot and the halfway point of the whole ordeal) was in sight! I have to tell you there was some joy in this.

And monkey steps? Steps that you have to use your hands and feet to go up because just using your feet is too darned dangerous. We'd find two more sets of steps with names along our hike: a flight of gringo killers at Wiñaywayna and a ladder-like stack of oh-my-God steps closer to the Sun Gate.

Monkey steps! With a glimpse of Wiñaywayna in the upper right.

Wiñaywayna is larger than Chachabamba. Much larger. It's a series of a little more than 50 terraces defined by retaining walls on a steep side of one of the Andean mountains. The Inca created terraces like this so they could raise crops and livestock literally halfway up a mountainside. It's way easier to farm on horizontal pieces of land than it is on slopes. All over the Andes you can find terraced farms like the one at Wiñaywayna even in the most unlikely places that seem absolutely unreachable. If there was a spot the Inca could create a reasonably sized shelf for farming on a mountainside, it seems that they did. This was the first one we'd be able to set foot on.

This would also be the first time we'd been in any seriously sized Incan town. We had seen the fortresses of Sacsayhuaman and Ollantaytambo earlier in the week but had not reached either on foot. And passing through the post of Chachambamba didn't really count as a visit to a town.

Arrayed on the terraces of Wiñaywayna are two sets of structures: a series of storage buildings (again with their wood and grass roofs long gone) about a third of the way up the slope and what was likely a temple of some sort closer to the top, placed higher than any other building on the site in accordance with its importance. The storage buildings or granaries are arranged parallel to the terraces with good sized walkways outside and openings just below the roofline to allow cool air to circulate over the stored crops, keeping them dry and extending their shelf life. 

The first good full view of Wiñaywayna, about 40 minutes before our arrival.

It is pretty much impossible for me to explain how incredibly beautiful the ruins at Wiñaywayna are set as they are in the Andes. Standing there on those terraces would be one of the most incredible sights I've ever seen in my life without any sign of human habitation. But the Incas chose to make something there in the middle of literally nowhere, in a spot that no rational people would think today about building anything. They had their reasons. They lived in places that were almost unreachable to keep themselves safe and developed ways to survive in the spots where they'd decided to settle. It's also super hard to argue with the view. 

But the best part of Wiñaywayna for me was that we earned it. There's no way to get to this spot by car or by train or by plane or by helicopter. There's only one way to make it there and that's on foot. And it's a hard climb. It's tough work. And you don't get to go home quickly after you reach it. You can't buy this. You have to make it there yourself with your legs and your lungs and your will. Sure, there are hundreds of people who pass through that spot every day and thousands each year but it still takes sweat to get there.

Visiting Wiñaywayna made this trip for me. If I hadn't done this, (and look, there was still about half of the total hike to go so the fun was by no means over that day) Peru would not have been as incredible as it was. We saw landscapes and sights that few that go to Machu Picchu will ever see because they haven't walked for hours up and down too many steps to reasonably count to get there. The whole day was special; it's been the first thing I talk about when I tell anyone about this trip. Wiñaywayna is the most tangible symbol of the day so that's the spot that is remembered most fondly.

And looking at the structures the Incas made in the middle of that range of mountains is about the most incredible sight I've seen. I'm just going to leave the uncaptioned photographs below as evidence of how awesome and beautiful this place is.

From the time we saw Wiñaywayna for the first time it would be about 30 to 35 minutes before we got there. While we didn't know it at the time, this would be the last climb in the baking sun until Wiñaywayna itself where we would have to ascend the gringo killer stairs we'd been warned about earlier. The gringo killers were in fact the central staircase from the granaries to the temple.

The waterfall might have saved me from the sun. 

A few minutes before you get to the terraces of Wiñaywayna, there's a waterfall with a pool at its base. I was ready to get into the shade and stay there by the time we reached the pool and I'd have to get up every terrace before we could get some shade. I needed to cool down and the waterfall let me. I've never been so grateful for cold water to dip my head and hat into and keep going.

After Wiñaywayna came lunch and after lunch we passed through the first checkpoint. The one we had to be through at 2:00 pm. It was 1:20. 40 minutes to spare. José told us that the morning was going to be tough and he was right. He said the afternoon would be "papayita" or a piece of cake (actually a small piece of papaya) compared to the walk before lunch. He was almost right there too.

On the gringo killer steps.

Wiñaywayna was the spot where our Inca Trail met THE Inca Trail. From now on, we'd on on the route that the emperor would have taken (or been carried over) to get to Machu Picchu. That meant one thing right away: a wider trail. Gone were the three feet wide dirt trails that sometimes narrowed to 24" or so and sometimes expanded to a whole four feet. From now on pretty much without exception we'd be walking on paths maybe six feet wide on average and paved. Not paved as we think about it today; paved with boulders.

All that didn't mean there was no danger of falling off the side of the mountain, just that there was way more space to avoid falling off the side of the mountain.

The afternoon hike was also mostly in the shade. José was really truly mostly right. After lunch, it was way easier. The only thing that made it hard was that I'd already walked 6 kilometers in the baking sun while walking up about 2,000 feet. The only thing that made the afternoon hard was the morning walk. It was more comfortable, flatter, cooler and by and large without huge flights of steps.

We made it to the white rock we'd seen way back at Chachabamba about an hour after lunch and we could look back into the valley and see how far we'd come. We could see the train tracks that we'd ridden on; the Urubamba River that we'd crossed; the first buildings that we'd seen just five minutes into our walk; and pretty much the entire trail running along and straight and steadily up the side of the mountain we'd ascended. It encapsulated in one view everywhere we'd been for the last four and a half hours. It was pretty impressive.

And we were getting close to Machu Picchu which was after all what we were walking to see.

The afternoon path. Shade!!!

The view from the white rock, with Chachabamba in the distance and the thin line of the trail up the mountain.

It would be about an hour and a quarter after the white rock that we reached the oh-my-God steps, which is basically a pile of stones stacked on top of one another at about an 80 degree angle or something insane like that. After the nice leisurely walk in the shade of the afternoon, they weren't that bad to climb. I just used my feet and hands and scampered up. Way easier than the gringo killers back at Wiñaywayna.

15 minutes later, we saw what looked to be a golden glowing doorway at the top of another set of stairs. It was the Sun Gate, or Intipunku. This was the last climb up. This was it.

The Sun Gate is little more than a few columns and a couple of walls standing where what used to be (I'm guessing a little here) a roofed over structure of some sort. Not too fancy; something just substantial enough to seem like an entrance into some other sort of world. A world that contained something as wonderful as Machu Picchu, a royal retreat for the Incan emperor.

When we reached the summit, at about 3 pm or so, the sun was focused squarely on the top of the hill where the Sun Gate was located and straight in our faces. But laid out there a mountain or so away was the citadel of Machu Picchu itself. This was the reward we'd been after for six hours of taking step after step up and down (mostly up) since 9 o'clock that morning. Suffice it to say that we just stayed there a while just looking. This was supposed to be one of the most spectacular sights in the world and so stopping and staring after a long day of doing nothing but walking towards that spot seemed justified. Over the next 24 hours or so we'd see something like this view from a variety of angles close and far. It was never better than those 15 or 20 minutes or so at the Sun Gate.

Looking down on Machu Picchu that afternoon, it was easy to understand why this site remained hidden from the general public for so long.  There can't be many spots that are easily accessible where you can see this place. Sure, where we stood at that very moment was an exception but exactly where we were standing was likely overgrown by the mountain forest in pretty short order after the Incas abandoned this place. From below, it must be impossible to make out. It's like the people who created this place shaved off the top of a mountain, built something smaller and less obtrusive and then made as few alterations to the rest of the landscape as humanly possible, while also making the site suitable for farming. If they had done nothing to the landscape, it would have been barely less noticeable.

From the Sun Gate, the whole site was a brilliant green color. It doesn't come through in the photograph above but the green color stood out vividly in real life. I'm sure modern grass growing technology makes it way greener than it was back in the time of the Inca. Although if they had the same number of roaming llama as there were when we were there then the fertilization certainly would be good enough to make it as green as it is today. The picture definitely doesn't do the view justice. The sun on the lens inhibits the image way more than the sun affects the eyes in real life. 

If the payoff seems like it was disappointing, it wasn't. I mean this is what we came to Peru to see. And viewing it as the Incas would have done when visiting the site was way better than taking a bus from below and climbing up to the site. It was all at once exactly what we expected and also at the same time enhanced immeasurably by the journey we had just taken. In the end, it was as much about the journey as it was about the view.

Of course, at the Sun Gate, we weren't done with our trek. It would be another 90 minutes before we got to the bus that would take us to Aguas Calientes and to our hotel. In between were more stairs. Lots more stairs. The difference was the view. We were no longer in the shade but the further downhill we stepped, the closer to Machu Picchu we got.

Ultimately, we didn't spend much time at the citadel when we reached it that day. A quick walk around one of the upper lawns, a few quick pictures and then off to the bus. We'd have plenty of time the next day. By the time we were sat on the bus, we had been on the move for seven and a half hours. I can't tell you how glad I was to sit down and at the same time there was no way any experience in Peru could have topped this day. The sense of accomplishment and the exclusivity of the journey (albeit shared by 250 people per day) made this day the most unforgettable in our entire trip. Way worth it. More than anything else we did.

I don't know if there's anything that tops this view.

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How We Did It
We booked our day on the Inca Trail as part of a larger tour package in Peru with G Adventures, who have become our preferred adventure travel (such as it is at this point in life) company. This was our third tour with these guys, having previously been with them to the Galápagos Islands in 2016 and Kenya and Tanzania last year. If you need a reliable, trustworthy, responsible travel company committed to giving back in the places where they run tours, I can highly recommend G Adventures.

Because we let someone else handle the arrangements for us, I don't have a whole lot to say about the logistics in booking a one day (or four day) hike to Machu Picchu. After all, all I did was pick up the phone and pay someone to take care of everything for us. It seemed to me that there were tons of tour operators in Cusco offering day trips to all sorts of places in the Andes; I'm sure one of those tour companies runs Inca Trail tours.

I do have a few words of advice to offer, however. First, you can't do this experience alone. And by that I don't mean you should take a buddy along to keep you company; you have to have a guide with you. No guide, no ride.

Second, there are 500 four-day hikers and an additional 250 one-day hikers allowed on the Inca Trail at any one time. This is a hard limit. Book early, which is always sound advice. There were two people in our group who tried to find a way on to the trail the day before and found it sold out. They took the train all the way to Aguas Calientes and heard about the whole trekking experience from us instead of doing it themselves. 

Finally, take plenty of water. We almost messed this up. We had a pretty good sized refillable water bottle each along with a bottle of mango juice each in our boxed lunches. We decided to buy an additional bottle at the stand just inside the train entrance at Chachabamba which was a great idea. We'd have had some difficulty rationing what we had before buying that extra bottle. Water doesn't weigh that much. It's always better to have too much than too little.

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