ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 3, 1995 TAG: 9512010061
SECTION: TRAVEL PAGE: G-6 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: MACHU PICCHU, PERU
SOURCE: CHRISTOPHER REYNOLDS LOS ANGELES TIMES
It's noon on a gray South American summer day, and some of the oddest rocks in the world are again playing to an awe-struck audience.
These stones weigh tons, yet they've been lugged up a mountain and fit snugly together with unearthly precision. They point as accurately as a compass needle and line up with the sun and moon. Rare orchids curl from their crevices. Jungle mists cling to their flanks. Llamas nibble at their fringes. And now someone with a crude flute is blowing that old Andean folk song ``El Condor Pasa.''
This is a remarkable scene, no question. But not just for the rocks. Those, after all, have been here for at least five centuries. The freshest marvel on this mountaintop, given Peru's more recent history, is the company standing among the stones.
Here is Augusta Barreda, Peruvian-born and once a regular visitor here, picking her way along these paths for the first time in this decade. After seven years of staying away and worrying about the terrorists of the Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) movement, she has returned with two Venezuelan friends in tow.
Here is Despina Mallios of Albany, N.Y. For six years an old college classmate has been inviting her to visit, and for six years Mallios read U.S. State Department warnings and various headlines about bombs and rifles, and waited. Now she has explored Peru, a veteran of power outages in Lima and weak water pressure in Cuzco, but merry and unscathed.
After several years of rampant terrorism verging on civil war, Peru's reputation is under repair, and the archaeological and natural wonders of Cuzco and Machu Picchu are again points of pilgrimage for adventurous travelers. Since the worst days of 1991, 1992 and 1993, when the entire nation of Peru averaged a paltry 2,500 foreign arrivals per month, the volume of international visitors has tripled. Once in the country, most of them fly to the ancient city of Cuzco and take a train to nearby Machu Picchu.
At the Machu Picchu ranger station, administrator Abel Martinez recalls a day in 1991 when the most famous architectural site in all of South America recorded just one visitor from sunrise to sundown. By last year, the ruins were averaging about 400 visitors a day, up 150 from the year before. This year, rangers say the figure may be closer to 600 - about as many as were arriving daily when I first visited the ruins in 1987.
I went back recently to see what was changed and what wasn't.
Peru is still no place for the delicate or the heedless. Lima, the capital that most travelers pass through to reach Cuzco, has chronic problems with infrastructure, pollution and crime. Machu Picchu is a steep mountaintop with narrow trails and precious few handrails. And the State Department is still dispensing this disquieting sentence to would-be travelers: ``With the exception of certain tourist areas, which have been free of terrorist activity, terrorist bombings and shootings occur throughout Peru.''
So what is it that persuades people to come?
Flying into Cuzco, you rise to 30,000 feet, pierce clouds, dart past sharp, snowy Andean peaks and mountainous jungle, and then suddenly are surrounded by red dirt hills, green stubbled slopes, stone-terraced farms and uncountable rows of potatoes and corn.
You land at the busy airport, step out of the plane, and are immediately short of breath: Though you're on the floor of a deep valley, you're 11,000 feet above sea level.
``Soroche'' is the Spanish word for altitude sickness. Newcomers are advised to take a nap upon arrival, sip some coca tea and go easy for a few hours.
Cuzco may be the oldest continuously occupied town on the South American continent. The Incas made their capital here for generations, laid out the city in the shape of a puma, adorned the monuments lavishly with gold and silver. The Inca thatched roofs have long since been overtaken by Spanish-style red tiles. But its art and architecture are unique in the world - a shotgun marriage of the Incan and Spanish
In country churches, Sunday Mass is celebrated in Quechua, the language of the Incas and Peru's enduring indigenous population.
In a single block on Cuzco's narrow streets, a walker will often see a precisely fitted Inca wall, a bowler-hatted Quechua woman who will demand money if you take her picture, and an ornately carved second-story balcony that seems to have been imported straight from Moorish Spain.
Most of the storefronts around the Plaza de Armas are now adventure outfitters, snack bars and souvenir stands.
Cuzco makes an impression. But a tour of the surrounding countryside's villages and ruins can overshadow it. Leaving behind the grid of streets, you rise into a stark world of Andean hills and Quechua nomenclature.
The village of Pisac, 20 miles northeast of Cuzco, fills every Sunday with a prosperous market that draws tourists by the busload. The glory of Pisac, though, is the series of ruins above the town - terraces topped by a temple. From the end of the nearest road, it takes an hour or two of hiking to reach the highest peaks, but once you do, the view is mesmerizing. Yet Pisac's ruins get fewer than one visitor for every 10 who reach Machu Picchu.
At Ollantaytambo, site of a rare Inca victory over the Spanish in their early skirmishing, an old Inca temple and a granary cling to a hillside, along with a series of steep and well-preserved farming terraces. In the lively village below, about 30 miles northwest of Cuzco, families still reside in homes first raised by pre-Hispanic builders.
From Ollantaytambo, the railroad tracks run west through a narrowing and twisting valley. Twenty miles down the valley lies Machu Picchu.
When archaeologist Hiram Bingham first came upon Machu Picchu in 1911, writes author John Hemming, his opening glimpse was ``a magnificent flight of stone terraces, a hundred of them, climbing for almost a thousand feet up the hillside.'' So they remain, the overgrowth trimmed away, the steps steadily trod by travelers. The ruins are open from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day, and are served by a fleet of 16 tourist buses, which never leave the neighborhood. All day long, they rumble up and down the harrowing switchback mountain road.
Most visitors are day-trippers. They arrive from Cuzco via train, file onto a bus for the 2,000-foot ascent, arrive at the ruins sometime after 10:30 a.m., take a guided tour, and eat a cafeteria lunch at the Turista Hotel. By 3:30 p.m., they've been carted away on a downhill bus.
Pity them. The ruins are not a compact collection of buildings but a small city, with no end of curious structures, stairways and viewpoints. Here, a steep path leads to the neighboring peak of Huayna Picchu. There, a path joins the climactic stretch of the 20-mile Inca Trail, magnet to backpackers the world over.
To explore the site reasonably - and with very few others around - a noncamping traveler can do one of two things. You can plan far ahead and reserve one of the 41 rooms at the Turista, a mediocre place that gets away with rates of $102 a night because it's the only lodging on the mountaintop. Or you can stay down the hill in the hamlet of Aguas Calientes, and earn the view by scorning the bus and hiking up the mountain early in the morning (one to two hours) before the buses start, and hiking (or taking the bus) back down the mountain in the late afternoon (about 45 minutes).
Amid drizzle, I marched away from the central ruins by following the old Inca Trail - carefully, because the path was 3 feet wide, the stones were slick and the fall to my left would be approximately 2,000 feet, possibly concluding with a splash into the roaring Vilcanota River.
After two twisting uphill miles, I was at Intipunktu, a ridge-top ruin with a staggering view of the jungle, the river and the ruins of the old city.
Getting there, I passed only a half-dozen other hikers. Arriving, I found one other man, who kept silently to his own end of the hilltop. On the hike back, the trail was busier. Two Spanish speakers. Six English speakers. A couple of nonspeakers. A red and black centipede. And four damp llamas. If this kind of traffic is what the re-rediscovery of Machu Picchu means, I'll take it.
LENGTH: Long : 143 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: CHRISTOPHER REYNOLDS/Los Angeles Times. 1. A villager inby CNBOllantaytambo, a small town about 20 miles from Machu Picchu, offers
a captivating smile. 2. Visitors pause to take in the view of the
Machu Picchu ruins. The ruins, open daily from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.,
are expected to attract some 600 visitors a day this year, up
considerably from an all-time low in 1991. 3. Centuries later, the
ancient stone terraces at Machu Picchu still are holding up. color.