Michael Batson

Peru’s Machu Picchu has survived 500 years of rain, earthquake and landslides. The mountaintop religious retreat and citadel city is one of the world’s greatest archaeological achievements, built by Inca emperor Pachacutec probably in the 15th century, to prove his place among the gods.

It’s an early start in the cold morning at Cusco railway station. I was wary. I’d been told that two English women were recently mugged near the station. They lost their bags and clothes including, apparently, the ones they were wearing. At knife point they were told to strip to their underwear, before the gang made off with their belongings.

I boarded the train to kilometre 88, the jumping off point for the trek through the Andes, the Inca Trail, and a three-day walk to the fabled “Lost City of the Incas”. Alternatively, simply stay on the train, and save the foot slogging. Most people opt for the day-return journey, courtesy of Peruvian rail.

My mate and I had met up with a South African woman, who after some time working in the UK, had an accent somewhere between Cornwall and Durban.

Your options are guided tours out of Cusco, or, as in our case hiring any essentials and doing it yourself. We were for the latter. So stocked with food, a hire tent, and a jumper made of fine alpaca wool recently purchased, off we went.

There’s an entrance fee for doing the trail, a flat rate payable at the stop with pristine notes, all in US dollars.

To exit Cusco, the train climbs a steep embankment before reversing back on itself in order to make the next leg of the ascent. All the way up I was seeing the local refuse system in action. All the houses backed on to the hillsides, and up follows down, out went the rubbish, strewn all the way down the escarpment in places.

Transporting coca leaves in Peru is illegal. This of course, doesn’t stop people doing just that. Indian women with voluminous garments and the ubiquitous hats, a relic of the colonial era, carry bundles of the distinctive green leaves with them.

The authorities for their part carry out enforcement raids. Whenever they appear on the train the women simply retrieve their illegal bundles from the luggage racks, and deposit them under the clothing. The authorities are nothing if not determined, and promptly bayonet any luggage looking most likely, including my MacPac, which survived the ordeal.

Once the train shuddered to a halt en route, we were off. There’s no station, signposts or any markings, the train simply stops and you climb off and make your way down a path to a hut, the only presence of officialdom, to pay your money. Following a brief inspection of the bank notes to ensure their pristine condition – no creases, tears or marks accepted – we continued, though there appeared to be no trail.

At one point we wondered off up a hillside before thinking better of it and continuing along the valley following a small stream. A three-day hike at followinga bout of giardia would either kill of cure me, I thought. I was right.

The trail consists of two 4000-plus metre mountain passes, where the descent is harder, at least to the joints. The weather, notoriously fickle at best, was fine, until the last afternoon, whereupon it poured it down. Our hire tent didn’t cope and began to leak sometime during the night.

On the ascent to the first pass we encountered Manco, a Quechua, who made a living as a porter. Whereas tourists unfit and unaccustomed to altitude take up to four days to complete the 40-plus kilometre trail, porters hold an annual race where the winner comes finishes in a matter of hours.

For a daily fee Manco would haul all Liz’s gear over the lung-busting route. I found going down harder than any ascent, though the rarefied air gave pause for breath and an appreciation of those mountaineers like Meisner, who conquered the world’s tallest peaks without any oxygen. I wondered what those born and raised here made of descending to sea-level, but gave up on the physiology of it.

We passed a large tour group on the morning of the last day during a thunderstorm and stopped for tea in what was their mess tent, a canvas tent, which leaked rain all along the seems. The thought of carrying such a load over these passes was mind-boggling.

By mid-afternoon we reached a restaurant high above jungle covered bluffs with the mighty Urubamba River far below. Even from here the roar of its numerous rapids was audible.

After lunch and much energised by a hot meal, we pursued a group of porters along precarious stone-paved paths clinging to the cliffsides. Barely a metre-wide presenting a lethal drop to the jungle covered river valley.

A British tourist we encountered had found out just how hazardous this route was. Striding along the path on to Machu Picchu he had struck his head on a protruding tree branch, and knocked semi-conscious, had fallen over the edge. Death was certain were it not for sheer chance a sturdy tree breaking his fall. By the time we got there the porters had lowered one of their number and, after tying a rope to the stricken man, hauled him back to safety.

He made the rest of the trip horizontal on a rigged stretcher. The porters simply added him to their prodigious loads. The path breaks the jungle and there it is, the famous view overlooking the ruins of the Inca city, breaking magnificently the vista off to the mountains in the distance.

Entry passes to Machu Picchu are time-limited but having saved a day with a fast hike we afforded a night’s rest in Aguascalientes, the town on the river below. The town has no road, but a train track which breaks the main “street”. I fell asleep on a rough hotel bed to the sound of the river crashing by a stone’s throw away, oblivious to the bed bugs.

The site is 2450 metres above sea level and sits 450 metres above the mighty Urubamba River which rips through the valley at such frightening speed and with much ferocity that should anyone fall in they’d never be seen again, drowned and their bodies dashed against the river’s boulders.

The footpath to the city is up a vertical climb and criss-crossed by the road hauling up tourists by the busload, appearing from who knows where. It was hot, the rain had gone overnight, and the sand flies having replaced the raindrops, showed no mercy.

Sixty percent of Machu Picchu is underground consisting of back filling the stonework for the walls, paths and irrigation all the way down to the valley below. The sophistication of the terraces is impressive. Tons of stone was brought up the mountains from quarries to the site, sometimes weighing as much as 15 to 20 tons.

The Incas greatest challenge was their lack of sophisticated building equipment, for they had no cranes or wheels. To move the stone they shaped the under sides like the bottom of a boat or barge to decrease resistance for dragging and often placed smaller stones to ease movement. It is surmised that they used fixed sleepers across which the Incas placed rung ladders and then used poles to lever the ladders over the sleepers.

Despite the terrace workings the site is prone to landslides in a region of heavy rains and earthquakes. In places up to 140 metres has given way along natural fault lines. To compensate they placed 130 drainage spouts to which drains the water into the rain forest below.

Engineers worked with nature, sculpting it.

Machu Picchu is built on two geological faults, now clearly visible from the air, which had collapsed to form the site.

The site is also susceptible to very strong winds. Roofs were latched to the stone structures by series of stone pegs, least they blew off. Windows and door were framed out of stone. Today only the rock walls remain. Stones were secured without the use of cement, yet were joined precisely, without iron tools. Stones were pounded into shape with progressively smaller hammer stones, collected from river beds.

One stone face was concave and the other made convex by constant grooving and refitting. The stones didn’t need to be flat, they just needed to fit with each other, alignment was key.

One building alone is curved, a temple used as a solar observatory, the temple of the sun. The centre point of the room is a compass. Beneath the temple is a giant substructure and a third feature, an enlarged cave for ceremonies or mausoleum for mummies.

Stonemasons enlarged the room with small enclaves in the walls, perhaps for sacrifices and to allow rainfall to run through the site.

At Machu Picchu the Inca king harnessed water to prove his god-like power, but he also wanted to control the sun. a single point of bedrock high above the site lies on a north-south line bisected by another east-west line. Twice yearly on the solstice the sun sits above and casts no shadow – this is the so-called “hitching post of the sun”.

Machu Picchu represented the pinnacle of Inca power, and is indeed an archaeological wonder. It is not known how its builders conquered all obstacles, only that they did. Machu Picchu is the proof.