Machu Picchu, Bob

The seed of the Machu Picchu trip was planted fourteen years ago when Doug and I were students in Mr. Richardson`s (affectionately called Mr. Rich) sixth grade social studies class. Mr. Rich was a short, roundish man with large, boxy glasses, and straight, dark hair - always immaculately parted. In spite of his average appearance and professional dress, Mr. Rich was a delightfully odd man. He referred to all of his male students as "Bob" and all of his female students as "Bobbie Sue", and when the classroom telephone rang, he would answer, "Hello, Domino`s Pizza." Then one day we read about Machu Picchu in the Scholastic News Reader and saw stunning images in the accompanying Scholastic News Reel. That word of Hiram Bingham`s 1911 "discovery" of Machu Picchu didn`t reach Greenfield Middle School until 1994 may seem baffling, but the news came as a welcome update to our textbook, whose world map showed a large sea creature with the words "Here Be Monsters" in the place of South America. Anyway, after our discovery of Machu Picchu, sixth grade was never the same again. Because Machu Picchu is a lot of fun to say, Mr. Rich added it to his vocabulary in place of "hello", "good morning", and "good afternoon". From then on, he greeted students exclusively with "Machu Picchu, Bob" (masculine) and "Machu Picchu, Bobbie Sue" (feminine). It caught on, and in my group of friends, we continued to use the greeting (which in Quechua means "old peak") into seventh and eighth grade.

I won`t even try to write words about Machu Picchu itself because it is too impressive for words. I will say that we had perfect "ruins weather" for our visit - gray and misty with a light rain. It felt very mysterious. Gray and misty with a light rain also happens to be ideal photography weather so Doug and Dave took hundreds of stunning photos. I forgot my camera. I went to Machu Picchu without a camera. That`s like going to the beach without a bathing suit (or, if you`re my Dad, a book). The leaving in a hurry at 4 am (more on this later) might have had something to do with forgetting the camera, but I didn´t forget anything else. So I wonder if leaving it behind was my subconscious rebellion against being a "tourist". As incredible as Machu Picchu was, I couldn´t ignore the part of me that felt more obligated to be there than excited to be there. The journey was certainly exciting though. In fact, the adventures that we survived to spend two and a half hours exploring the actual ruins give new meaning to the old truism that it`s about the journey, not the destination. The most popular - and expensive - way to get to Machu Picchu is by train, but if you`re not in a hurry and don`t mind "roads" whose loose gravel clings to the side of mountains only because it`s scared-to-death of the sheer drop-off too, then there are other options. The first leg of the trip was a nearly four hour ride in minivan from Cusco to Santa Maria. The roads were winding (miles of switchbacks up and down a mountain), two-way only because vehicles drive in both directions, and often rough enough to shake fillings out of teeth. From Santa Maria, we hired a taxi - a Toyota Corolla wagon - to drive us to Santa Teresa. These roads were worse. No one in the States would even consider braving these unpaved paths (if you´ve ever hiked a ridge, that`s a pretty good reference point) in a vehicle without four-wheel drive. In fact, it was the kind of driving you see on commercials for SUVs and, if you`re like me, scoff and mutter to yourself that roads like that don`t even exist. The irony, of course, is that we (I`m using the royal we here) drive our Hummers and Landrovers on beautifully paved highways, while in Peru they use Toyota Corollas to perform the kind of stunt driving that the fine print on the bottom of the screen warns you not to try at home ("Professional Driver on a Closed Course", right?) Well, Perú is one big closed course, and pretty much everyone who owns a automobile is a professional (read: taxi driver).

We slept the night in Santa Teresa. If you ever have the pleasure of spending the night in this small town in the shadow of Machu Picchu, watch out for Angel. He seems so kind and helpful - which he is to an extent - but he was born to be a middle man. On the first night, Doug and I wanted a cold Gatorade-type drink to refresh ourselves after a long day of bouncing and breathing diesel exhaust (imagine the exhaust system of a Corolla that drives over mountains daily). Angel keeps an entire refrigerator stocked with cold beverages to sell to his thirsty guests, but the only electrolyte drinks were at room temperature. Doug and I declined the warm fruit-esque drinks and began to walk across the street to the convenient store, located literally across the street. Angel politely asked us to wait and ran across the street to buy the drinks for us so that he could make approximately thirty cents on the transaction. I find that this is not unusual behavior in Perú. We spent the night in Santa Teresa and woke at 3:30 the next morning to continue our journey. After an exciting forty-five minute taxi ride - it had rained overnight, and in one place the "road" had washed down the side of the mountain so much that the driver asked us to get out so that he could risk crossing it without our lives in the car too - we arrived at a hydroelectric plant where we began our two hour walk along train tracks to the base of Machu Picchu. Walking the tracks was especially difficult in the darkness, but rewarding. The morning was warm and the wet air so intensely floral that it smelled almost as though God had sprayed everything with Glade in anticipation of our arrival. It didn`t give me a headache though, so it must have been the real deal. Especially beautiful and terrifying was the railroad bridge which crossed a rushing river. We crossed not on the tracks, but the thing next to the tracks, which - still wet from the rain - could only be described as a greased cookie sheet with a flimsy handrail.

The trip back to Santa Teresa from Machu Picchu is worthy of an entire chapter in the book of my travels, but I`ll condense it to a paragraph here because I`m hungry. Because we were tired and Doug wasn`t feeling well, we took the train back to the hydroelectric station instead of walking. At the station, dozens or hundreds of people (mostly Peruvian) descended from the train, and somehow squeezed into four or five cars and vans. There was no special, cushy tourist escape vehicle waiting for me, Doug, and Dave. We waited. And waited. Eventually, Angel signalled for us to board an enormous human cargo transport. That`s what I call the enormous pickup truck whose bed we stood in with twenty-five other people under a blue tarp ceiling. We held on to the metal bars that formed a canopy over the bed as if riding a subway car - a subway car that drove on the side of a mountain, and even drove right over the washed out spot that had scared the morning driver in the much smaller vehicle. I would have died from the mere sight of the river hundreds of feet below us, but the blue tarp saved my life by obscuring the view. Later, surprised to be alive, I stumbled down the metal ladder and out of the human cargo transport only to find that we still had to cross the river back to Santa Teresa. And while men worked on the foundation of a bridge nearby, the current method of crossing appeared to be a metal box on a zip line. Two at a time, we crouched in the box and used the rope to pull ourselves across the raging rapids far below. (You can see great photos of Doug and Dave performing this craziness in the Machu Picchu album here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/elgringoandante/)

We survived. And I no longer find it so surprising that Machu Picchu wasn`t "discovered" until 1911. It`s not the kind of place you just end up by accident.