Playing Tennis

The deed is done! I have rediscovered the forgotten city of Machu Picchu (pronounce PiKchu). I don´t know what the fuss is all about though, ´cause you can just take the train there. No problema ;-)


Nope, I didn´t do the "Inca Trail" trek. I wanted to do a good hard no-thrills trek like in the Cordillera Blanca, but the only thing that was on offer was the all-inclusive standard Inca Trail with a lot of stuff I did´t want to pay for. So after spending a day or two with the now well-known Rachel from Lima and her friend Alexia, I decided to coincidentally bump into "The Germans", from Chachapoyas and Kuelap and head down the valley.

However much the ´scientific discoverer´ of Machu Picchu, Hiram Bingham (he found it in 1911), wanted it to be, it was not the ´Lost City of the Incas´. If you remember, we left our story of the Spanish and the Incas in Cajamarca with the capturing and killing of the Sapa Inca Atahualpa by Francisco Pizarro. The Inca empire had been hammered already by two prior events:
An epidemic, very probably from Spanish origin from Mexico, had wiped out about one third of the population, including the Sapa Inca at the time, Huayna Capac. A bloody civil war broke out for the throne between his sons Huascar and Atahualpa, the latter emerging victorious. Atahualpa was traveling back south to Cusco after his victory when he met his untimely death in Cajamarca.

The Spanish wasted no time. With the help of some of the for revenge aching tribes that were conquered by the Incas, they went for the heart of the empire, for Cusco. And with their extreme determination and ruthlessness, they took it, and installed a puppet emperor, called Manco Inca. However, after a few years, he rebelled and managed to gather a huge force of indigenous warriors to lay siege to Cusco. Heavily outnumbered, the Spanish, feigning to flee, stormed the fortress of Sacsayhuaman and, amazingly, took it. After this, the Inca power was broken and they were forced to flee into the direction of the Vilcabamba jungle, where they built a new city ("The Lost City of the Incas") to wage a rather ineffective guerrilla war for another 30+ years. This lost city of the Incas was only discovered in the 1960s. (more info in the links)

So what is Machu Picchu ? Noone really knows, so it can be anything you like it to be. You can roam through the buildings, naming them whatever you want. (There is actually an "indoor tennis court", close to the "veranda"). You can just sit up high and wonder about the comings and going of the Incas here more than 500 years ago. The views are stupendous.

The site was actually abandoned years before the Spanish came, which was why they never found it and couldn´t destroy it. I go with the theory of the "winter resort" for Pachacutec, the greatest of all Incas. He liked to play tennis, you know ... :-)