Hoosier Prof in Peru

From the high ground at Machu Picchu, by the Hut of the Caretaker of the Funerary Rock, the vantage point for many a calendar shot, it can be challenging to take a good photograph of the temples, sanctuaries, residential compounds and green spaces below, no matter how exquisite the stone handiwork: the tourists keep getting in the way.

On the day that we were there, we heard a lot of English (U.S. and British accents) and some German. We also heard plenty of Spanish, especially from the clusters of children who were there with classmates from elementary and high schools.

As one of the New Seven Wonders of the World, Machu Picchu has global cachet. Tens of thousands of tourists visit the Inca archaelogical site every month, crowding the “lost city.” In August, Peru’s National Statistics Institute said that the number of visitors in May, 47,192, represented an increase of 13.1 percent from the year earlier. Some organizations are predicting that tourism could rise by 20 percent each year.

It’s easy to see why. One can start out the morning soaking in the hot springs in Aguas Calientes, down in the valley. In the village, one finds fast Internet, craft vendors, bottled water, hiking sticks, hotels and hostels, massage services and restaurants (with lots of brick-oven pizza) — all appealing to foreign visitors. In the town square a statue of the ninth Inca, Pachacute, credited with turning a regional tribe into the powerbroker of South America, keeps watch over the commercial buzz. Buses provide a comfortable ride up the mountain, even with the hairpin turns, and vistas that keep getting better.

Machu Picchu itself is just amazing. Every turn, every step, provides something rich for the eye to see, up close or far away. At the end of the day, what I wished for more than anything else was time alone to sit in this place and just imagine what it would have been like to have lived in a stone hut here, in a world set apart, grateful to the sun and the mother earth for potatoes, corn and other necessities of life. But we had only a few hours, and kept moving on.

The day after having visited Machu Picchu, we were in a taxi, crawling through Lima traffic, the sun, as is so often the case, blocked by cloud cover. Lima never seemed so dreary. The driver, who had picked us up at the airport, asked where we had been. When I told him that we had been to see Machu Picchu, and said how impressed we were, I asked whether he too had seen this Inca kingdom 8,000 feet high in sky. I should have known better.

“No,” he said quietly, with a weary resignation, “it’s too expensive.” He went on to say that he had been born in Piura, north along the coast, another beautiful place where the sun shines, but that he had moved to Lima because there were few jobs to be found in Piura. It’s a sad reality that Peruvians continue to crowd the capital city in the hope of bettering their lives, and that even with two jobs (not unusual) most will still not make enough to afford a ticket to Machu Picchu. (The entrance fee was about $40; the bus, $12; the train, $57; and the plane from Lima to Cusco, $158).

Knowing this, it’s hard not to feel discomfort in the company of throngs of foreign tourists. But it was encouraging to see so many school children there on the day that we went. The government should take some portion of the ticket sales — perhaps it already has — and subsidize the visits of Peruvian children, in public and private schools. In time, then, visiting Machu Picchu would become a rite of passage for every Peruvian, a place of solidarity where the number of nationals would overwhelm the foreigners.