I'm not sure why something had to be sacrificed so that Machu Picchu could be included as one of the "new" Seven Wonders of the World. Instead, couldn't there have been eight or nine? Or however many it takes? The world is a large place, and it saddens me to think that only seven places in it can be considered "wonderful."
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I felt like the journey that brought us to Machu Picchu and back was almost as difficult as it was for Hiram Bingham to discover the damn city in the first place.
It involved leaving Cusco early in the morning and driving two hours through the Sacred Valley to the train (conveniently named for the intrepid NatGeo explorer and inspiration for Indiana Jones, himself), and after two or three hours aboard, continuing an additional thirty or forty minutes by bus up the peak of Machu Picchu.
As a resident New Yorker and frequenter of the Metro-North Railroad, the Hiram Bingham was like nothing I've ever experienced. The blue, gold, and magenta steam engine looked like it chugged right off the tracks in 1911 and into 2013.
In back was an open caboose with oak railings, a chandelier, and a bar complete with plush velveteen and leather armchairs. The specialty drink of the day was called a Pisco Sour--composed of pisco liqueur (white grape brandy), limeade, egg white froth, and traditionally topped with four symmetrical dots of either cinnamon or bitters.
(It knocked back like nostalgia, as it tasted identical to "The Joker"--a twist on the whiskey sour and a specialty of my favorite neighborhood bar in London. Having come practically straight from Heathrow International Airport to Lima, my day to day life over the last two weeks had yet to spiral into culture shock, instead melding into one continuous blob of whirlwind consciousness, taking place in one location unrecognizable from the rest)
Maybe it was the potency of the pisco, but the view from the back of the train was surreal. Something you don't see outside of a meticulously shopped and color-cooridinated photograph in the spread of National Geographic.
The first half of the trip, the landscape was that of the foothills of the Andes, which, with my limited vocabulary in the areas of geology, geography, and topography, most closely resembled Wyoming or Montana--bouncy, hearty brush, red, rich soil, rolling hills and flat, shallow rivers whose reflected skyline was broken by black and purple boulders and the subsequent white water wakes. However, by the time lunch was served on white linens with candlelight lamps in the dining car, the jagged red mountains had become dense and green, the river wider and darker, and vines and vibrant flowers where the springy, succulent plant life had once been.
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The train stopped in Aguas Calientes-- a scene straight out of a Discovery Channel on-location special. The train station is located right in the middle of the city center. The buildings sit stacked and ascending on either bank of the river on concrete high rises that eventually give way to one main road traveling up the side of the mountain.
Between the train station and the bus stop was a covered market. The colors and textures were absolutely overwhelming. I'm not sure what my fascination with fabric is, but I love anything knitted, spun, or woven. So, in a community that's driven economically by the farming of alpaca wool, I wasted no time in buying a large wall tapestry depicting the major Incan gods at war with the kings-- paying only $20 for something that would easily sell for 80 or 90 (and most likely would've been manufactured in China or by a machine somewhere in a warehouse in Ohio) back in the United States, I didn't have the heart to haggle the price down, particularly after watching a woman in the adjacent stall spinning her own wool.
However, my cousin found herself with an even better story to take home: While stopping to pick up more passengers en route to Aguas Calientes, the station sat adjacent to a small wool market. Women from the town were walking up and down the street with baskets of yarn, scarves, shoulder bags, blankets, and tapestries--one of which caught my cousin's eye. She called the women over and bought a woven backpack right off the back of the train as it slowly started chugging away.
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When we had passed through the market and arrived at the bus stop, it was a harrowing journey up Machu Picchu. The road (singular) was three-quarters of the width of those in Cusco and only set in moist, red, mountain clay and whatever rocks had dropped off of the cliffs and planted themselves along the sides. Every 50 to 100 feet, was a switchback, the corners around them obscured by the jungle vegetation. On several occasions, we were met by other buses and passenger coaches bringing tourists down the mountain, forcing one vehicle or the other to reverse until the turn in the next switchback where the road widened just enough for the buses to eek by one another with brush or tap of the side view mirrors.
The whole journey felt like a carefully engineered and choreographed Disneyland ride, except with a serious risk of careening down the side of a mountain into the riverbed below.
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