Home: Catari’s House

Rett had been hoping for 6am tickets to Machu Picchu in order to see the Lost City of the Incas revealed by sunrise. But upon leaving our hotel and getting a view of the fog-draped mountains, it was obvious that even with our 7am tickets, we were unlikely to see sun at all. So at least we had been able to sleep an hour later, though we were still in the long line for the buses before 6am.

A stream of buses run up and down the mountain in a fairly-uninterrupted cycle, and while your bus ticket itself is untimed, boarding is managed based on the time of your Machu Picchu ticket. So much of our time was spent just waiting for the buses to even start taking “7am” people up the mountain, because otherwise they would have gotten us there too early.

The bus company’s failure to relinquish their monopoly is the driver of protests that delayed our trip to Machu Picchu. I’m generally a “competition in the free market is good” kind of guy, but after using Consettur’s well-oiled monopoly system, it really feels like this is a rare case where a (government-regulated!) monopoly may actually be the best solution. Just to turn around in town to pick up a new load of passengers, each bus needs to hang its ass over the river in a specific place while executing a 3-point turn, and the drivers are experts at pulling over in wider pockets of the one-lane gravel mountain road to allow passing with minimal delays. Adding a second company into the mix would seem to bring chaos raining down on the mountain, or even if the new company is expecting to take an exclusive role, it will take them a long time to tune their system to be as efficient as the incumbent’s.

Just the bus ride itself was pretty great, as we had a near-constant view of Putukusi, the gumdrop mountain directly across from Machu Picchu, while we escalated up 1400 feet. We initially got in a long line that was waiting for Circuit 3-A, only to discover that our Circuit 1-B entered higher up and had no line. Even better, as the least-popular circuit, it had almost no other people, and with two hours until our 9am Circuit 3-A ticket, we were able to go as slow as we wanted and enjoy the atmosphere.

Because it appeared that “atmosphere” is what we would be enjoying, rather than vivid images of the Inca estate arrayed below us. The fog wreathing the mountains had not cleared, and in fact, seemed to be getting denser. This is a regular “risk” when visiting Machu Picchu, but unlike rain on your wedding day, it’s not an outright negative, more just an alternate flavor of the experience, yet equally tasty.

Unfortunately, by the time we reached the prime viewing area, the once-atmospheric threads of fog had tightly woven themselves into an opaque blanket. Our second ticket, for Circuit 3-A, would take us on a diverse multi-hour hike, first through the ruins of the city and then up to the high point of Wayna Picchu mountain on the opposite side of the city from where we were standing now. But the sole purpose of Circuit 1-A is to do a short walk, enjoy this classic wide-angle view of Machu Picchu, collect your photo, and then return. And now the fog was so opaque that I didn’t even know where I should be looking to catch a glimpse of the city hidden beneath the white blanket.

So we found a rock to sit on while we waited to see if the view would clear.

There were a handful of other people near us at our particular viewing platform, but it was a relatively-quiet place and Rett was able to close her eyes and absorb the atmosphere of the environment through her other senses. We were “forced” to do something we rarely do of our own volition: sit motionless in a place and do nothing. It was nice.

We’d arrived to the platform just after 7:30am, and a new influx of visitors holding 8am tickets began appearing half-an-hour later. I had read that site workers will nudge people along if they’re spending more time in a place than they should, and with nearly all of the 7am ticket-holders still refusing to move on, worried that someone would notice the “crowds” and start moving us out. But thankfully that never happened; maybe peak season would have been different, but the viewing platforms never actually became “crowded”, so everyone got to wait as long as they liked (and their ticket/train/flight schedules allowed!)

I spent 50 minutes watching the fog become maybe a little less thick, occasionally glimpsing the moon-like disk of the sun overhead, but then sitting back down as the alarms were repeatedly falsified. But then, a dark patch: is that an extra thickening of the fog, or a thinning, revealing a mountain behind? It’s a mountain! And a city emerging from the mists! The thrill was brief, less than a minute, and incomplete, before the blanket swept back over it all again. We still had time before our next circuit, so we decided to wait a bit more for another, better view.

Thus we were still there at 8:42am, more than an hour after we arrived, when the mountains and the stones of the city abruptly pierced through the veil. Oohs and ahhs went up from the crowd, and we snapped photos as quickly as we could. The window of clarity felt longer than the mere two minutes recorded by my camera, but perhaps that’s an example of the stretching and bending of time that occurs at this mysterious place. Rett later said that it was her favorite moment of our time at Machu Picchu, with the brief emergence of “The Lost City of the Incas” echoing her attraction to the shrouded legends in “The Mists of Avalon”.

If the air between us and the peaks and walls of Machu Picchu had been completely-unobstructed, we probably wouldn’t have spent that much longer viewing the scene than the two minutes that we actually got. We would have moved on, completed the circuit much earlier, and then gone to the snack bar outside the gates to wait for admission to our next circuit. Instead, the fog “forced” us into a much more valuable exploration of our emotions of anticipation, boredom, frustration, and finally, elation.

When we finally got around to completing the circuit, we expected to exit the gates and then get in line for our 9am entry to Circuit 3-A. But on our way down towards the gates, I saw a yellow arrow on our path pointing to Circuit 3, and the guard at the junction was happy to just look at our paper ticket and let us continue directly onto our new circuit.

I know almost nothing about the city or buildings at Machu Picchu, but that’s partly because there is almost nothing to know. The Incas had no written language, and little to no overlap with their Spanish conquerors before smallpox or other forces left nothing but these walls to speak for them. Thus, I had little interest in the buildings themselves; my main attraction was the otherworldly setting in which Machu Picchu had been laid, perched high atop a thin neck stretched between green-carpeted peaks. I was more fascinated by the fact that a city had been built in this place, than I was by the city itself.

Thus, the middle section of our day, the first part of Circuit 3-A, which took us on a winding path through the buildings and lanes of the “lower citadel”, greatly exceeded my expectations. This place was nothing like the Inca ruins we had seen so far. It was far richer, more-complex, and even luxurious.

The guy we met from Michigan a week ago offered his semi-conspiratorial opinion that the city must be far older than the ~500 years that “the scientists” say that it is (in his defense, he lives in a house built of stone outside Detroit, so maybe he knows more than most!) But my impression was exactly the opposite: the city felt incredibly modern to me, built by people with enough wealth that construction went far beyond mere practicality. Fine finishes, large (and tall!) spaces, and intriguing features made it easy for me to imagine Inca couples appearing on HGTV’s “House Hunters: Machu Picchu”, and demanding only the best.

Even the city’s existence here hints at the privilege of those who built it. I can imagine a group of young Inca men out on a camping trip to this hidden place deep in the valley, sitting around their campfire amazed by the dark shadows of the mountains towering over them, with the moonlit fog rising from the river far below, and saying “dudes, wouldn’t it be sick to build, like, a city here? Then we could just hang out in this awesome place all the time, right?” And because they had wealth and power and technology comparable to 21st-century first-world citizens, they went ahead and did it!

A lot of people explore the site with guides, and while I’m sure some like to repeat stories that have little to no basis in fact, those we overheard generally expressed an appropriate level of agnosticism. Similarly, I was glad that there were zero informational signs posted, since I would have had no reason to trust anything written on those signs. Because Machu Picchu, like most of the Inca civilization, truly is a “lost city”. The chain of human communication that could have brought its story into modern times was broken long ago, and absent a time machine, even the most brilliant archeologists will fail to reconnect that chain. As someone who loves data and information, its absence here at this mysterious, incredible place is sad, but also mystically exciting, with the fog we saw this morning remaining to obscure these mountaintops for eternity.

At the far end of the city, we began Phase 3 of our day, a physically-demanding hike to the top of Wayna Picchu, the tallest peak in the iconic backdrop of the Machu Picchu. We hit an unexpected and unexplained line that frustrated Rett, causing her to attempt to cut ahead, only to discover that it was a booth where all hikers needed to manually enter their information (including passport) into a logbook. That still did nothing to explain the logjam since everything else here is handled electronically, but it had at least something to do with safety (they ask you to sign out on your way back, presumably to track whether anyone is lost/injured up on the mountain), and perhaps it was even a way to spread people out on the steep, narrow trail.

Because with the 7am ticket-holders coming down while we went up, we hit several spots where we replicated “Peruvian traffic jams” on foot that we’ve also seen happen with vehicles on narrow roadways in this country: two parties approach in opposite directions, with neither stopping in a “pullout” to let the other by, which slows everyone’s progress far more than briefly hanging back would do.

We made it back down to sign out at the logbook just over two hours after we’d signed in, and that included a lengthy break to enjoy the views at the top. Rett was suffering badly in the heat, and needed a break in the shade before we completed our final phase, crossing back through the lower citadel (via a different route than our entry).

There is a hiking path/stairway back down to Aguas Calientes that can be used as an alternative to the bus, and while we never considered walking up to Machu Picchu, we had left open the possibility of walking down. But Rett’s suffering from the heat meant that we didn’t even discuss that option, and went straight away to buy bus tickets. Though we briefly doubted that choice when we needed to walk a couple hundred yards to reach the end of the line. A tour guide with an American woman behind us said it would only take half-an-hour; he was wrong, but only off by five or ten minutes, so it was still a better choice than walking (even if it meant we paid another US$24 to the illegally-operating bus company!)

Back in town, getting a late lunch won out over getting out of our sweaty clothes and showered, and at the former we enjoyed a nice discussion recapping our Machu Picchu experience, something we don’t seem to do as much as we used to. Places that are so famous and Instagram-hyped can have a hard time living up to their reputation, but for us, Machu Picchu was completely worth the journey, the delay, and the cost. We’re lucky that we’ve seen much more of Peru than the average Machu Picchu visitor, so we’ve witnessed a host of superlatives comparable to this world-wonder™, but we definitely don’t regret going out of our way to experience one more!