MAGICAL DAY AT MACCHU PICCHU

Feb. 27. from Agua Caliente (Hot Springs although haven't seen them yet) We spent a restful night here at Pirwa (it's a chain of hostelB and Bs here in Peru) and woke for breakfast at 4 30 am to catch the 5 30 bus for the 30 minute switchback road trip up to Machu Picchu. We wanted to be up there to see the sunrise, even though we weren't meeting our guide Pedro until 8. I had to shut my eyes for much of the trip as it looked like a straight shot down to the Uribomba roaring river (it's the rainy season). Several people here were hiking up: they said 2 hours but it would have taken me more like 4! A young French girl we met last night when our tour group met with Pedro, and she's studying in Buenos Aires, said her friends when on ahead of the climb. She was exhausted!! If I was 50 years younger and poor we probably would have done it! But we took the bus and arrived to be some of the first group in at 6 a.m. We wandered and climbed away from any people and had it all to ourselves. It was magical!!! The clouds would cover the mountains and then disappear. We saw the sun come up. We sat on a wall and meditated!! We stood in places that later the guards would blow a whistle and tell you not to do that! I wrenched my knee on one huge step so it made the rest of the morning a bit painful. The steps are varying heights and some very high! But it was SOOOO cool and I would have been disappointed in the rest of the day if we hadn't done this first. I can't upload any pictures from this computer at Pirwa's (while we are waiting for the train back down at 6:30 pm). Our group met back at the gate at 8 am and they divided us into Spanish and English, which was good because I hate to waste time having the guide repeat stuff. I'm getting cranky!! Eddie our guide today took the English group. He was very good and knowledgeable. He took us to many spots B and I hadn't been in the morning. Info about MP: It reminds me of Anghor Wat in Cambodia. It was build in 1430 or so and was sort of a school for the nobles to study the sun and it's movement. There's no record of a calendar like the Mayans (I asked!) because the Spanish tried to destroy everything Inca when they took over. There was a language (he showed us some characters on a hat) but no one knows what they are because there wasn't enough left to decifer, like hieroglyphics. No Rosetta Stone! On the mountains around two peaks form a V and on summer solstice the sun rises between them. then each month for 6 months it moves to the right until it reaches another peak. Then reverses. So they knew when to plan. A large section of MP are terraces for growing crops. They were made of rocks and the soil was carried by llamas, the beast of burden at the time, and now, I think, up to fill them in. Now they have the llamas grazing there so no one has to mow! Alpaca they use the fur and eat; but not the llama. BTW, I bought little llamas in Cuzco for Jackson and Sarah so they can hold them when they read Kerry's favorite book, Llama, Llama, Missing Mama! I think it's called! Cute! At one time Inca world was 15 million or so. I think he said about 800/1000 lived in MP, nobles on top, commoners down lower. BTW, they determined nobles when a baby was born. If he/she didn't have any moles, they were noble. Otherwise, commoner! :) Capital of the empire was Cuzco (which means dog if you pronounce it that way; it's supposed to be pronounced Cosco, which means navel or middle of the earth!)  They communicate by messenger from the capital with runners going about 12 KM and then another runner was ready. A message could come from Cosco in 5 hours! It took us all day to get here!! Lots of 3s in their world: up above, the condor; in the middle, the puma, below the snake. Three laws: don't kill, don't lie, don't be lazy!  Three works:  You help me; I help you; we all work together as a community to work.  There are 3 worlds: upper, middle and lower but I can't remember their names. I'll edit later if I find them. Nobles were buried in the fetal position so they would be ready to be reborn in the upper world. They were mummified somehow and when the Spanish came here, they assumed the mummies were buried with gold so they dragged the mummies out of their burial chambers and threw them around. No gold! They used gold for mirrors to signal distances. It wasn't a currency. If there was a cave or dark chamber, they put gold to catch the sunlight to lighten the area. Many years were spent by the Spanish hunting for the Lost City of the Incas, or the City of Gold, or El Dorado! To no avail! Actually MP was abandoned (but never found or destroyed by the Spanish) and was refound by a Peruvian around 1901. But Hiram Bingham is given credit for the discover of the Lost city of the Incas in 1911. He was looking and a small 8 year old boy in Agua Caliente took him to the overgrown city that was hardly recognizable. He came back with money from Yale and National Geographic and they burned away the growth, leaving the buildings exposed. Many of the ceramics and artifacts were moved to Yale, I'm assuming the Peobody Museum, but have since, in the 1990s, been returned to the Archeological museum in Cuzco. Bingham and other groups did a lot of rebuilding until in the 1980s the UN declared it a heritage site and told them to stop rebuilding as they were ruining it. A few buildings had a new thatch roof put on so you could see what they looked like completed. Machu Picchu means "Old Mountain' and opposite is Wayna Picchu meaning New Mountain. Apparently this NM is a quite dangerous narrow trail to the top that you have to book 2 or 3 months in advance to climb. A couple of years ago 2 people fell off, Pedro said, so now it's become a real challenge for hikers. We could see people up there in the distance. No interest here! This was challenging enough for me! There's an ornament they call the Inca cross with a hole in the center, and 3 steps on four sides that each symbolize the 3s of the Incas.(see the paragraph above about the 3s)  I want to shop and try to find one in a necklace.  The roaring Uribamba river circles around the base of MP and a serious rafter or kayaker would DROOL to run it. Again, no thanks!! It merges miles down with another river, and then empties into the Amazon in Peru and then of course flows through Brazil to the ocean. The whole experience was really cool and we had a beautiful sunny day to see it. Apparently yesterday it was rainy, this is the rainy season after all. Still haven't done that last day in the rainforest where we visited the village and the parrot lick. I'll get to it! S.