Machu Picchu - City of Secrets

The summit of Huayna Picchu, also known as Wayna Picchu, gives trekkers a bird's-eye-view of Machu Picchu.

Machu Picchu’s cascading terraces and precision-cut stones provide evidence of the masterful building skills of the Inca, whose empire included a vast realm of 12 million people at its height.

Mountains rise above stone walls at Machu Picchu, which served as a royal retreat. The Inca quarried and moved stones weighing more than a hundred tons despite lacking wheeled vehicles and iron tools

Visitors to Machu Picchu take in the view from Huayna Picchu, the peak that looms over the Inca site. The Urubamba River cuts through the valley below.

According to Hiram Bingham, who uncovered and excavated the site during an expedition in 1912, the quality of the stonework at Machu Picchu dwellings reflected the status of their residents.

The Urubamba River is seen below terraces carved into a ridge at Machu Picchu. The rich soil of the Urubamba River Valley continues to support the high-yield varieties of corn developed by the Inca.

Llamas graze beside the ruins at Machu Picchu. Both llamas and alpacas served crucial roles during the Inca’s reign. South America’s only draft animal, a llama could carry 70 pounds of gear on its back

Hiram Bingham was a 35-year-old assistant professor at Yale University when he set out from a camp on the Urubamba River to investigate reports of ruins on a towering ridge known as Machu Picchu (“old mountain” in the Inca language). What he found was an Inca ghost town that had been hidden from the outside world for nearly 400 years.

In a few generations, the Inca conquered 2,500 miles along South America’s mountainous spine, building the largest empire of the New World’s native civilizations. The empire fell apart after the Spanish conquest in 1532.

Nearly 2,000 people visit Machu Picchu each day. The remote retreat was one of the few Inca sites untouched by the Spanish invaders

Terraces are carved high on Huayna Picchu. For decades Machu Picchu was a puzzle for archaeologists and historians. A 16th-century legal document and studies of the site’s architecture and artifacts in the latter 20th century have suggested a mountaintop retreat for Inca ruler Pachacutec Inca Yupanqui.

It’s not actually the Lost City of the Inca:
When the explorer Hiram Bingham III encountered Machu Picchu in 1911, he was looking for a different city, known as Vilcabamba. This was a hidden capital to which the Inca had escaped after the Spanish conquistadors arrived in 1532. Over time it became famous as the legendary Lost City of the Inca. Bingham spent most of his life arguing that Machu Picchu and Vilcabamba were one and the same, a theory that wasn’t proved wrong until after his death in 1956. (The real Vilcabamba is now believed to have been built in the jungle about 50 miles west of Machu Picchu.) Recent research has cast doubt on whether Machu Picchu had ever been forgotten at all. When Bingham arrived, three families of farmers were living at the site.
It is no stranger to earthquakes:The stones in the most handsome buildings throughout the Inca Empire used no mortar. These stones were cut so precisely, and wedged so closely together, that a credit card cannot be inserted between them. Aside from the obvious aesthetic benefits of this building style, there are engineering advantages. Peru is a seismically unstable country—both Lima and Cusco have been leveled by earthquakes—and Machu Picchu itself was constructed atop two fault lines. When an earthquake occurs, the stones in an Inca building are said to “dance;” that is, they bounce through the tremors and then fall back into place. Without this building method, many of the best known buildings at Machu Picchu would have collapsed long ago.
Much of the most impressive stuff is invisible:
While the Inca are best remembered for their beautiful walls, their civil engineering projects were incredibly advanced as well. (Especially, as is often noted, for a culture that used no draft animals, iron tools, or wheels.) The site we see today had to be sculpted out of a notch between two small peaks by moving stone and earth to create a relatively flat space. The engineer Kenneth Wright has estimated that 60 percent of the construction done at Machu Picchu was underground. Much of that consists of deep building foundations and crushed rock used as drainage. (As anyone who’s visited in the wet season can tell you, Machu Picchu receives a lot of rain.)
You can walk up to the ruins:
A trip to Machu Picchu is many things, but cheap is not one of them. Train tickets from Cusco can run more than a hundred dollars each, and the entry fees are an additional $43. In between, a round-trip bus trip up and down the 2,000-feet-high slope atop which the Inca ruins are located costs another $14. If you don’t mind a workout, however, you can walk up and down for free. The steep path roughly follows Hiram Bingham’s 1911 route and offers extraordinary views of the Machu Picchu Historical Sanctuary, which looks almost as it did in Bingham’s time. The climb is strenuous and takes about 90 minutes.
There’s a great, hidden museum that no one goes to:
For visitors conditioned to the explanatory signs at national parks, one of the strangest things about Machu Picchu is that the site provides virtually no information about the ruins. (This lack does have one advantage—the ruins remain uncluttered.) The excellent Museo de Sitio Manuel Chávez Ballón ($8 entry) fills in many of the blanks about how and why Machu Picchu was built (displays are in English and Spanish), and why the Inca chose such an extraordinary natural location for the citadel. First you have to find the museum, though. It’s inconveniently tucked at the end of a long dirt road near the base of Machu Picchu, about a 30-minute walk from the town of Aguas Calientes
There’s more than one peak to climb:
Long before dawn, visitors eagerly queue up outside the bus depot in Aguas Calientes, hoping to be one of the first persons to enter the site. Why? Because only the first 400 people who sign in are eligible to climb Huayna Picchu (the small green peak, shaped like a rhino horn, that 1,640 feet it is twice as tall, and the views it offers of the area surrounding the ruins—especially the white Urubamba River winding around Machu Picchu like a coiled snake—are spectacular.
There’s a secret temple:
Should you be one of the lucky early birds who snags a spot on the guest list to Huayna Picchu, don’t just climb the mountain, snap a few photos, and leave. Take the time to follow the hair-raising trail to the Temple of the Moon, located on the far side of Huayna Picchu. Here, a ceremonial shrine of sorts has been built into a cave lined with exquisite stonework and niches that were once probably used to hold mummies.
There are still things to be found:
Should you wander away from the central ruins at Machu Picchu, you’ll notice that occasionally side paths branch off into the thick foliage. Where do they go? Who knows. Because the cloud forest grows over quickly in the area surrounding Machu Picchu, there may be unknown trails and ruins yet to be found nearby. Several newly refurbished sets of terraces are being made available to the public for the first time this summer.
You see the city is full of secrets. It's a wonderful trip for the adventurer and the explorer in all of us. I'm going. See you there??