June 9, 2016 – Post Cards From Machu Picchu

June 9, 2016 – Post Cards From Machu Picchu
The adventure is real. The place is real. Getting to Machu Picchu is at least a quarter and perhaps as much as half of the experience. I don’t really know how to describe this day yet. I’ll write a proper post later trying to capture at least a modicum of what I felt and what went through my head then and to this day regarding this supposedly “Lost City of the Incas.” In the meantime, I’ll mainly use this as a photo gallery of the various sights and moments. Some I’ll try and offer commentary on here and there but mostly this’ll be a visual stimulus overload with very little prose. I’m still trying to wrap my head around the notion of visiting this stop on the Seven New Wonders of the World.
I overdid it at breakfast this morning, thinking I’d need my strength to climb the various steps and hillsides of Machu Picchu. At the train station, I boarded the wrong train and despite being seated and settled in with the Knox women a few rows behind me, I was pulled from the train to wait 15 minutes for the apparently much more swank VistaDome service. I tried to convey to the conductor that I thought the Knox party might also be on the wrong train but my broken Spanish and her broken English meant never the twain nor train should meet.

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It all worked out – I got there 15 minutes after them, having enjoyed on the VistaDome a front row seat with nary an obstruction to my view.
The one side note of weirdness is that during the complimentary snack service the options were limited to Coca Cola, Inka Cola (a sorta Mountain Dew-ish yellow), coffee or tea. I thought it a long shot for a Coke Zero or Coke Light and was rebuffed so I asked for just a glass of water… which apparently they didn’t offer on the drink service. I had my own water with me so I declined but took a mint tea as that’s what my seatmate ordered. Still – no water? Weird.
At the Estacion Machu Picchu, I met up with the Knoxes and out Condor Travel tour guide, Leo. We had to take a bus to the top of the mountain to enter Machu Picchu and it was a, “they leave when they’re full” deals… but they never seemed to have a problem filling the bus. Leo told me there used to three seasons at MP – slow, medium, and high. These days, with an explosion in tourism, there was medium, high, and CRAZY season.
The bus ride involved 14 corners, switchbacks that wound us up the mountain to the city proper. There were ominous, mysterious clouds hanging about, even a few drizzly drops of rain. Leo said this was very rare and I thought it added to the vibe of the place… but it made the early morning photos a bit difficult to take. On the plus side, as the day wore on, the clouds dissipated and the shots got ever more amazing.
In 1911, Hiriam Bingham “re-discovered” Machu Picchu. He wasn’t the first to get there, as there were markings and indications other treasure hunters had been there. But he was the biggest cheerleader and proponent of the place and effectively put Machu Picchu back on the map as a place to study and to see.
There’s a lot of facts and figures I could include here, some of which I retained from Leo’s strolling tour, but in truth I think I’d prefer to just let the photos speak for themselves. This is one of those cases where I really do think the pictures are worth thousands and thousands of words.
So here we go – Post Cards from Machu Picchu:

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