Peru - Lonely Planet Publications [221]
Buy a return ticket to avoid getting stranded in Aguas Calientes – outbound tickets sell out much quicker than tickets in.
Check PeruRail’s website for up-to-date schedules and to buy tickets.
BUS
The cheapest way to get to Machu Picchu is via Santa Teresa. Catch a bus headed for Quillabamba, get off in tiny Santa María, and catch frequent local transport to Santa Teresa, where you can buy your train ticket to Aguas Calientes – Click here for more information.
You can also do this route as a guided multisport tour (Click here).
There is one train daily from Aguas Calientes to the hydroelectric station in Santa Teresa, at 12:30pm. Tickets can only be bought from Aguas Calientes train station on the day of departure, but trains actually leave from the west end of town, outside the police station.
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MACHU PICCHU
For many visitors to Peru and even South America, a visit to the Inca city of Machu Picchu is the sweet cherry on the top of their trip. With its spectacular location, it’s the best-known archaeological site on the continent. This awe-inspiring ancient city was never revealed to the conquering Spaniards and was virtually forgotten until the early part of the 20th century. In the high season, from late May until early September, 2500 people arrive daily. Despite this great tourist influx, the site manages to retain its air of grandeur and mystery, and is a must for all visitors to Peru.
History
Machu Picchu is not mentioned in any of the chronicles of the Spanish conquistadors. Apart from a couple of German adventurers in the 1860s, who apparently looted the site with the Peruvian government’s permission, nobody apart from local Quechua people knew of Machu Picchu’s existence until American historian Hiram Bingham was guided to it by locals in 1911. You can read Bingham’s own account of his ‘discovery’ in the classic book Inca Land: Explorations in the Highlands of Peru, first published in 1922 and now available as a free download from Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org).
Bingham’s search was for the lost city of Vilcabamba, the last stronghold of the Incas, and he thought he had found it at Machu Picchu. We now know that the remote ruins at Espíritu Pampa, much deeper in the jungle, are actually the remains of Vilcabamba. The Machu Picchu site was initially overgrown with thick vegetation, forcing Bingham’s team to be content with roughly mapping the site. Bingham returned in 1912 and 1915 to carry out the difficult task of clearing the thick forest, when he also discovered some of the ruins on the so-called Inca Trail. (Over the course of his various journeys, Bingham took thousands of artifacts back to the USA with him; Click here to learn about the fight for their return to Peru.) Peruvian archaeologist Luis E Valcárcel undertook further studies in 1934, as did a Peruvian-American expedition under Paul Fejos in 1940–41.
Despite scores of more recent studies, knowledge of Machu Picchu remains sketchy. Even today archaeologists are forced to rely heavily on speculation and educated guesswork as to its function. Some believe the citadel was founded in the waning years of the last Incas as an attempt to preserve Inca culture or rekindle their predominance, while others think that it may have already become an uninhabited, forgotten city at the time of the conquest. A more recent theory suggests that the site was a royal retreat or country palace abandoned at the time of the Spanish invasion. The site’s director believes that it was a city, a political, religious and administrative center. Its location, and the fact that at least eight access routes have been discovered, suggests that it was a trade nexus between Amazonia and the highlands.
It seems clear from the exceptionally high quality of the stonework and the abundance of ornamental work that Machu Picchu was once vitally important as a ceremonial center. Indeed, to some extent, it still is: Alejandro Toledo, the country’s first indigenous Andean