Article reproduced from page 29 of December 2000 issue of Monocle Magazine.
From the Air Cusco resembles a Mediterranean town which, unaccountably, has been set down among the Andes two miles above sea level. The impression continues for a while at ground level with the highly decorated churches and comfortable cafes and restaurants. Then the perspective shifts and you become aware of one culture, the Spanish, set vertiginously upon another, the Inca, with no intervening centuries of transition. It is the presence of the Indians which first brings that home, emphasising the 400-year rift in the social fabric of Peru. It's as though, in England, the rural population was still dressing and speaking like the Anglo-Saxons with the urban people speaking Norman-French and dressed in modern clothes.
And after the shift in the human perspective comes the architectural, with the awareness of the vast stones of the Inca city immediately underlying the Spanish: the streets still following the pre-conquest pattern, the churches built on the foundations of the temples. And looming over all is the fortress of Sacsaywaman where the Spanish smashed the last Inca rebellion in 1536 and put their seal, finally and brutally, on the land of Peru.
I was en route to Machu Picchu, having flown in from Lima. Two trains go there from Cusco: the 'tourist' train and the so called 'Indian' train. The tourist train allegedly leaves at 7 am, but in fact rarely gets away much before nine and goes direct to the base of Machu Picchu in about three hours, decanting the passengers direct into coaches for the ascent of the mountain.
It's perfectly possible to have breakfast in Cusco, an expensive lunch in Machu Picchu and be back for dinner in Cusco. But it's a bit like getting a tube from Victoria Station in London to the Tower of London and feeling you've done London. Nothing can eliminate the impact of Machu Picchu but, viewed in isolation without reference to its geological and historical position is to reduce it to a picture postcard. Abandoned sometime after the Spanish conquest of the 16th century Machu Picchu was a genuine 'lost city' until its discovery by an American explorer, Hiram Bingham, in 1911.
The 'Indian train' is the local stopping train leaving, for some arcane reason, near enough to its appointed time of 6 am. It has to climb an almost vertical cliff to get out of Cusco and does so by chugging endlessly backwards and forwards, covering several hundred yards horizontally to gain a few feet vertically.
At the top of the cliff the train seems to take a deep breath before beginning the immense descent that will take it down from an alpine to a tropic environment. It presented a remarkable variety of casual dangers: a broken window with jagged shards; a large hole in the floor of a carriage in which a child's foot became trapped; a broken lock upon one of the doors. The carriages were connected simply by couplings, passengers passing from one to the other by stepping over the void. And passengers were continually doing so, for the train was packed. The most hair-raising was a blind musician with a child leading him, stepping backwards and forwards over the appalling danger.
Almost as remarkable were the Indian women selling food, ranging from bread to huge, delicious lumps of roast pork. Each woman was wearing the brightly coloured shawl in which, as often as not, the inevitable baby was wrapped up along with the vegetables, bread and the rest, each woman carrying a bundle of wares for sale, achieving miracles of balance clambering in and out of doors - and windows - as the train racketed along. There were few clearly defined stations, the train simply stopping at Kilometre so-and-so, a point distant from Cusco recognisable only by natives. At each stop it was besieged by yet more Indian women selling food and drink.
And here, even in this local train with its predominantly local population, one became uneasily aware of the clash of cultures, of the impact between members of an advanced, affluent technological society and people still in the Middle Ages. It was summed up for me at one stop where a pretty young girl, wearing a traditional skirt and top hat with a child at her breast and offering little cakes with her free hand, was pounced on by a European with an immense camera. Others joined him and for three or four minutes the bewildered girl was surrounded by glittering equipment thrust in her face. Satisfied, the photographers withdrew. Timidly she came forward to offer her wares but the tourists waved her irritably aside, even though their monopoly of her had cost her the precious few minutes of the halt. But there was a grace note. An elderly American lady, somebody's formidable grandmother who had been watching the scene, thrust her head outside the window and cried: 'You are stealing that poor girl's face. You have taken up her time. Give her something.' Shamefacedly, they did.
The local train terminates at Aguas Calientes, a couple of miles short of Machu Picchu, a ramshackle township with the train trundling down the centre of its single main street.
Here, for around 25p I got a bed for the night, sharing a concrete cell with four or five other people. On waking the following morning it was with some surprise that I observed that one of my companions of the night was a woman, a middle-aged lady of impeccable respectability who, pulling a brightly patterned dress over an armour of pink corsetry, departed without a backward glance.
And this hour, shortly after daybreak, explains why one endures the vagaries of the 'Indian train'. It was quite magical, the vast gorge silent except for the rushing Urubamba river, the purple and scarlet heraldry of banana flowers proclaiming that one was really down in the tropics.
At the foot of Machu Picchu the first coaches were waiting to take the handful of passengers up the zig-zagging road to the 'lost city of the Incas.' Photography has all but killed the sense of wonder in travel. It is now impossible to see the Taj Mahal or the Parthenon or Piazza San Marco for the first time, so blurred have their images become through an infinitude of photographs. Machu Picchu is one of the rare places where reality far transcends anything that can be caught on film. The eye is stunned with the vast spaces - the gorge far below yet peaks soaring high above, anthropomorphic, the clouds around them looking like shawls on titans. One realises why the Greeks put Zeus on Olympus.
And suspended between earth and sky is the city itself. No one knows why it was abandoned: many of its buildings remain enigmatic; there is much for the imagination to work on. Then at midday the 'tourist train' arrives in the gorge below. At around 1 pm the city, once as remote as the moon, is swamped with a camera clicking horde and it's a good time to leave and descend to the valley below.
