TRAVELOGUE
Mystic Mountain
A land shrouded in insurmountable beauty, culture, and mystery, Peru’s Machu Picchu is a must-do on your travel destination list.
I
t’s impossible not to be awestruck upon taking your first steps into Machu Picchu. The sacred city in the clouds is rightly famed for its stunning views, meticulous terracing, precise stonework, spiritual aura, and mysterious origins. Surrounded by peaks covered in the lush green of the rain forest and jutting nearvertically into the sky, the first question that comes to mind is how our fellow human brethren from centuries past were able to accomplish such an astounding feat. Perhaps more pressing in my thoughts, though, were the questions of who and why.
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I blame Andres for my predicament. He was my tour guide from Mountain Lodges of Peru, which provides fully customizable packages of five to seven days, with additional stays in Lima and Cuzco. A few nights earlier in the comforts of the Huacahuasi Lodge, a private lodge exclusive to MLP, Andres had given a presentation on stargazing and the archeoastronomy of the Incan empire. We were high in the Andes, above 14,000 feet, and sated after a meal featuring locally sourced fish and the obligatory but always welcome pisco sour. His lecture was intriguing. Machu Picchu, Cuzco, and other Incan temples
were built on a line in accordance with a series of astronomical alignments. The astronomy upon which the alignment was based is not visible today but graced the sky in the distant past. That Peruvian’s ancient ancestors had the astronomical and architectural prowess to conceive, design, and construct Machu Picchu left me starstruck. Of course, by now I had come to expect the unexpected with Peru. Here I was high in the outback of the Andes, yet later that night I was relaxing in my room’s private hot tub overlooking a thousand-foot valley and waterfall, framed by jagged mountains higher than the Rockies and
AMANDA KERR/PEXELS
BY DONALD PADGETT
9/4/21 10:17 AM
