They existed in a time before our time, in a world that existed before ours. These beings inhabited the planet long before us and were called the Ñaupa by the indigenous peoples of the central Andes.
Their earth was different from ours. There were no bright days or dark nights, just an ambient glow and a steady temperature. When this began to change and the great Inti, the sun god, brought night and day to the world, the Ñaupa retreated to the tallest mountains to dwell within them.
I’ve found this really great video of a walk around the ruins of the
Inca citadel of Machu Picchu. Enjoy.
The Spanish had yet to arrive in Peru but there was such frantic activity throughout the empire in the week leading up to the 24th of June that it was obvious that something just as big was happening. In fact it happened every year and was very important – but thankfully well-rehearsed Inca rituals meant there was no real cause for alarm.
An event which attracts over 10,000 people each year, mostly local Quechua and Aymara people, Qoyllur Rit’i is a Catholic tradition wholly invented by the indigenous in the 18th Century. This religious experience, rather than being violently imposed on them from Europe, belongs completely to them and is gaining popularity among outsiders.
Chinchero is a bustling market town on Sunday and a sleepy Andean village the rest of the week.
Other than the market, and the stunning views of the grassy plains and icy mountains that surround the area, the main attraction is a colonial adobe church built on the foundations of an Inca palace for late-15th-century Tupac Yupanki, in what was once an Inca city.
The quality of the Incas stone work is what many people notice when visiting their ruins, or even just walking through the streets of Cusco. But how did they manage to carve so accurately, to a degree we can only just achieve today with sophisticated technology such as lasers? How could they cut the stone bricks and place them so tightly together that you couldn’t slide a sheet of paper between them – that not even air can blow through?
From the works of Hiram Bingham to many recent studies, several hypothesis have been put forward. But could the answer be not so different from our modern lasers?
The Intihuatana (or Intiwatana) is referred to as the Hitching Post of the Sun – as that is what many experts think its function was, to symbolically tie the sun the the earth at the two equinoxes so it could not move further in the sky. At the time of an equinox the perfectly carved 14 degree angled stone has no shadow, yet does have one all day and all year round when not an equinox.
In front of Huayna Picchu is a massive slab of rock that is said to take the shape of the mountains behind it. This rock, like all large rocks, was sacred to the Incas.
A major part of Inca beliefs were that such rocks store vast sums of energy that can be transferred to people. All things in nature were similarly thought to be special in some way, from water to the Sun.
Of course, the biggest rocks that exist are the Andes themselves, and this is why the Incas built everything at the tops of them, the pinnacles of the stores of energy.
As if climbing from Aguas Calientes to Machu Picchu, then from Machu Picchu to the Sun Gate on a mostly empty stomach was not enough, I was determined to hike to the top of Huayna Picchu.
Machu Picchu means “old peak” in the Inca language of Quechua, as Huayna Picchu the thin point mountain at the other side of the ruins means “young peak”. These are not Inca names, we don’t know what they called the mountain, nor their city, rather the name was given by a geographer and cartographer working to document the region…
Walking back from the Sun Gate, back to where we arrived at the end of our long climb from the valley below, we found ourselves at the Watchman’s hut. From here we got our first proper postcard view of the ruins.
By now, thousands of day-trippers had arrived on the trains from Cusco, and any chance of a good photo was ruined. But there is a massive benefit to having to cope with all these people – free custom tours of Machu Picchu!
We arrived to Machu Picchu to see it shrouded in fog. Already exhausted from our walk from the valley below, we climbed down onto some Inca farming terraces, just below the famous Watchman’s Hut and sat down in the rain to rest. We could see next to nothing of the ruins, so we decided to take a walk in the direction of the Sun Gate, from where groups of hikers were arriving from their days of hiking the Inca Trail.
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