Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [118]
“I think that photo was taken not long after I walked the Inca Trail for the first time. Did I tell you about that? That must have been the first time I did it in bare feet, too.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the Inca Trail covered in rocks?”
“Oh, it’s not too bad if you’ve trained your feet for it. Feels good to have your soles in contact with the earth. All the porters kept complimenting me for being connected to the Pachamama, the Mother Earth.” For the record, John had walked it twice in bare feet and four times in flip-flops. He was planning to wear boots this time.
We strolled down the cobblestones of Triunfo Street, through the Plaza de Armas, where the annual Inti Raymi festivities were in full swing. This celebration, which dates back to the Incas, originally honored the bond between the sun and his son the Inca. It also marked the new year. Every street surrounding the main square was filled with garishly dressed marching bands, girls in traditional costumes and boys wearing ukuku masks, which look like ski masks with clown faces knitted onto them. It was as if the Colorblind Junior Majorette Society of Greater Cusco had scheduled a social mixer with the Future Bank Robbers of Southern Peru.
Our plan was to start the Inca Trail on June 18, arrive at Machu Picchu on the twenty-first, and ride up to the ruins early on the twenty-second to see the sunrise over the sacred peak and, with any luck, the light beam shooting into the Torreon. (The solstice lasts from the twenty-first to the twenty-fourth.) I’d read everything I could find on the subject but hadn’t encountered anything conclusive. John had checked his personal archives and confirmed that while various anecdotal reports testified to something interesting happening at the Torreon on those mornings, digital compass readings indicated the window didn’t align with the same solstice angle—roughly sixty-five degrees—that shot straight through the center of Machu Picchu to the riverside Intihuatana shrine and the corridor at Llactapata. And the Incas, I’d been told repeatedly, simply didn’t make engineering mistakes.
There was one potential hitch in our plan. A group of farmers outside of Cusco, angered by the price of cooking gas, was calling for a paro, or general strike, on the day we were scheduled to leave town. In New York, the word “strike” conjures up a picture of people with picket signs parading in front of an office building, slightly inconveniencing any smokers who stepped outside to light up. If things get serious, the strikers might bring along a giant inflatable rat to express their displeasure with nonunion laborers. Evidently the word has a somewhat stronger meaning in Peru. All roads inside and outside of Cusco were blockaded by farmers, who rolled rocks into every throughway wider than a mule path and then sat sentry over those barricades, fortifying their political convictions by drinking heavily all day. Schools were closed during general strikes. All trains, including those to Machu Picchu, were canceled. Attempts to sneak through a checkpoint were generally frowned upon. “You really don’t want to drive through one of these blockades,” John told me over a vegetarian lunch. “Every time there’s a strike, you see pictures in the next day’s newspaper of cars and buses burning.”
One of the most famous strikes in Cusco had taken place in 1999, in reaction to a government plan to build a cable car to Machu Picchu. Theoretically, the number of persons admitted to the site each day is limited to twenty-five hundred, though I’ve never heard of anyone being turned away. The planned funicular would have allowed as many as five thousand daily visitors. Several years ago, UNESCO recommended that to limit damage,