What are They Doing in Arica?

Trip Start Sep 25, 2007

Trip End May 29, 2008

Loading Map

Map your own trip!

Map Options

Show trip route

Hide lines

Flag of Chile Arica, Arica, Chile
Monday, May 19, 2008

We left you last to head for Machu Pichu, the famous lost city of the Inca Empire.
You need to understand about Machu Pichu that no one is sure what it´s doing there. It´s quite close to Cusco, the capital, and not really on the way to anywhere. People speculate it was some kind of resort the rich escaped to in winter for a bit of R&R, but who knows. It´s a big complex on a hill at 2300m, with extensive agricultural terracing, housing, common areas, ceremonial areas, watch towers, storage huts, and quarters for nobles. You walk through the ruins listening to guides saying things like, ¨...so this area may have been the school where young girls were taught about the priveledge of serving the gods in the afterlife once they were sacrificed, or it might have been priests´ quarters, or some other kind of building¨. It´s very, very impressive though. If you are in South America, see it - everyone else does.
We checked out of our hotel at 5.30am after a breakfast that didn´t even include instant coffee (it was ECCO, the sadists) and headed down to get the first bus up the mountain - as did the other 500 tourists in Aguas Calientes that day, all keen to beat the crowds. We were bused up promptly and joined the long queue at the top, all the time wondering if we would get in before dawn broke (which we did). It was all worthwhile, though - it´s just breathtaking to get to the top and look down at the expansive remains, and then consider that the temples were covered in gold while in use, and thousands of people lived there, and the multi-storey buildings had wooden floors, and the roofs were thatched and terraces covered in crops, not grass.

Machu Pichu

Then consider that this was probably a fairly minor settlement of the empire - Cusco certainly had many, many more people and buildings - it´s just that the Spanish turned up and built on top of most of it - even now many ordinary buildings in Cusco have some of their ground level walls and foundations of original Inca construction. What´s unique about Machu Pichu is that it was left intact by conquistadors.
It´s also amazing to look at the way the architecture works in with the site - which is not only a steep hill which is extensively and probably painstakingly terraced - but it´s also covered in massive boulders, which are simply intergrated into the buildings and pathways. It´s frightening to think how many slave hours it took to build.
An unexpected hightlight was stumbling across a pair of viscachas, very close, warming themselves in one of the unrestored buildings (still overgrown and full of rubble). If you don´t remember these rabbit like creatures of the altiplano, we got excited about seeing some of them on the Salar de Uyuni tour. Accustomed to gringos, they kept an eye on us and groomed each other until a big tour group turned up.
That afternoon we took the train to Ollantaytambo. This is a little agricultural town not far away, but the contrast between the 2 towns is huge. Aguas Callientes is an aggressive tourist trap. Ollantaytambo sees some tourists, but once you step outside the main plaza it could be nearly any century - the walls and cobbling is mostly original inca, and many of the houses are still thatched.

Amiria at Machu Pichu

Most crops in the area, and in most of Peru at this altitude, are still tended entirely by hand, which means tiny women in their fifties and sixties out with their scythes, and carrying the harvest into town on their backs. Clothes are often still washed in streams, and laid out on bushes to dry in the sun. It was a really nice place to wander about and watch the world go by (as well as see more hummingbirds, which we´re still not over), and for me a chance to rest my knee which had been hurting whenever I climbed stairs since we got off the marathon of buses to Arequipa.
Back in Cusco we tried to get on the next bus south, but South American politics had finally caught up with us - there were road blocks on all the roads to Puno in response to some international leaders´ meeting being held in Lima. In the spare day in Cusco this stranding got us, I finally got my knee seen by a doctor.
Certainly, the private clinic smelled the money, and they wouldn´t diagnose without insisting I be put into a wheelchair and pushed around the hospital getting blood tests and x-rays done (cutting in front of the poor locals). In the end they told me my knee was inflammed and I needed to rest it, shot me in the arse with I´ve no idea what drugs for 2 days, and wrote a report diagnosing me with ¨Painfull Knee Sindrome¨. Without a miracle cure we decided it would be a bad idea to do our trek in Bolivia, ascending up to 4700m on inca stairway then down to about 2500m.

Machu Pichu 2

Cancelling the trek suddenly presented the exciting prospect of NEVER HAVING TO DEAL WITH BOLIVIAN ROADS AGAIN - which as you can see was seductive and appealing. We decided instead to go south down the coast, probably saving about 12 hours on off road buses, and get to Salta from Chile.
The trip to Arica was pretty tough - neither of the windows by us shut properly, the bus climbed to about 4200m overnight, and we´d probably have gone hypothermic if Nick hadn´t seen a local with a spare blanket and asked them for it very nicely at 2am. It deposited us in Tacna at 7am, where we took a shared taxi across the border to Arica,along with three middle-aged Chilean women who´d stuffed the boot with all the Peruvian toilet paper they could get their hands on.
Nonetheless, it´s really nice to be back in Chile, the land of Nescafe and hotdogs for every meal of the day. Arica is clean and spacious, and Chileans are incredibly and considerate and nice (and clean) after Peru and Bolivia. No one bellows at the bus station, ´La-Paz-a-La-Paz-ALAPAZ!´ (To La Paz, etc.) - they just politely ask you where you´re going if you stop in front of their counter. We saw a solitary guy sifting through the rubbish bins yesterday, and he was in immaculate pressed, clean trousers and a jersey. We stopped to look at our map on the street and someone stopped to actually offer directions - NOT to get commission by ushering us into a travel agents our hotel. No one is pissing in the streets (and it really did run everywhere in hilly Cusco). Just incredible! And don´t get me started on their dual shower curtain system here...
Tonight our bus hopefully takes us to Salta in Argentina, taking about 24 hours. Salta´s an area we regretted not seeing after Iguazu last year, and is supposed to have some of Argentina´s most stunning landscape. And with no trek, we might even be able to afford a nice meal and a tango show in Buenos Aires before we go home.