Foreword: Sorry this one took so long guys, I was trying to write something a little more substantial this time... and since I've spent a whole week writing this, I'm going to indulge and make write the title again. Enjoy.

 

Machu Picchu is a Thieves Den of Iniquity feat. Juan Carlos: Pussy

 

For those of you playing at home:

S = Peruvian Nuevos Soles

$1US = 2.7S (approximately)

 

Heresy, slander, sideways rantings from the desk of a idiot – the title alone may drive many the starry eyed traveller to revulsion, but listen close ye many. Machu Picchu is the same as any other lost city or ruined temple, the only difference is you've heard of it...

I travelled with two tall European creatures; a Dutch and a Danish, who were in clear possession of more money than I for this trip. For the purposes of one-stop cultural profiling, it's much easier to think of these two simply as 'Europeans' – they all love the same stuff and do the same shit anyway – but to avoid any nationalistic, foam-at-the-mouth backlash I guess I'm going to have to describe them individually.

The Danish boy, Mikkel, was, and still is I guess, about 1m85 with short blonde hair, blue eyes and a strangely endearing impatience – the complete Scandinavian package. Not nearly as willing as I to slum it up for the sake of saving money (I don't think many travellers realistically would be), Mikkel's likes, as far as I could discern during out travels, include hot showers, clean clothes and good meals. He dislikes eating two day old spaghetti out of a plastic bag. He insisted on being able to see every single attraction possible in the giant theme park of tourism that is South America, and he was willing to go to extreme lengths to do so – he once suggested running the last part of a walking trail just to get one fleeting, huff-and-puff glimpse of the ruins at the end. A sign of a true dedication to travelling and his desire to get the most out of our time on the road maybe, or maybe evidence of the well-oiled tourism machine at work? Who could say whether these experiences would lead to any real, tangible gain? Especially so early in the game.

Sjoerd, the other towering European, was born Dutch but had lived in Belgium most of his life until taking the obligatory gap year many of these younger Euro types seem to take at 18 years old. Machu Picchu was only the beginning of the adventure for Sjoerd; whilst Mikkel and I would be heading home a few days after Machu Picchu, Sjoerd's onward plans included Chile, Argentina and wherever else in the continent had doors high enough to accommodate him. Sjoerd's 'Lonely Planet: South America on a Shoestring' travel book was like a bible to us in the days leading up to Machu Picchu; our eventual misplacing of it was brimming over with biblical overtones and echoed, quite clearly, the events of that time. So much symbolism.

We didn't have a lot of money between us to make it to the Sacred Valley, and what we did have was severely stacked up in the European corner, but having already survived three days of eating corn mash I was confident in my ability to make ends meet. We arrived in Cuzco by bus in the early hours of the morning as bare daylight had just begun to blare down on gringo town. Finding a hotel proved difficult at first and although Lonely Planet had referred us to a certain individual out of town who 'was very smart' and would 'let rooms for free' to 'travellers' with 'no strings attached'... well, in town just seemed a much surer bet. 80S a night, $50US a night, $90US a night... near to the centre were a whole heap of beautiful, charming hotels and hostels, each one more unaffordable than the last. Starbucks was a safe, gringo haven of free Wi-Fi where we killed the first hopeless hours of that morning.

The hotel we landed in was a diamond in the rough, so to speak, in that it immediately looked like it would be just another in a long line of 'thanks but no thanks' dejected walkouts. I remember thinking, “god damn you and your lofty aspirations Mikkel, this place has fake plants, it's way too good for us... maybe the landlady will let me sleep in her clothes basket.” “We might as well try it,” replied Sjoerd after reading my mind through my eyelids – pragmatic as always. The desk clerk made the Spanish sounds indicating that a room for three would be 90S a night, my eyes darted up. “Hot shower?” Asked Mikkel. “Si”. “Wi-Fi?” “Si”. “Free morning massage?” “No”. “Well beggars can't be choosers,” I moaned begrudgingly, “lets take it... maybe if we slip the old lady over there some money on the side she'll come up early, before tendinitis takes both her knees.”

The room had TV as well and we all got comfortable taking showers and abusing the toilet. I played Fruit Ninja on my HTC while my socks dried out of the window and the rest of my clothes nestled in to their new home on the floor. I was still a little confused as to whether we'd be allowed to use the kitchen that night; I was sure we'd asked, I asked myself and remember the answer sounding something like, “you can use the cooking and for the when and you but if you can't and maybe so who knows... HAHA!” – I still have a bit of trouble translating on the go. I'd been given all these sauce sachets for spaghetti and lasagne from some previous travelling companions who had been unable to take their loot over the border to Chile and so a bit of Jamie Oliver magic at dinner time was looking likely.

The hotel was eerily empty, especially considering how good the price was with the services we were getting. That whole day plus the next morning I don't remember seeing one other guest. The tourism industry in Cuzco is a brutally cut-throat business; this hotel was nice, friendly, and full of free Wi-Fi, yet no one else had noticed. I put it down to the dodgy location on a busy highway-type street, surrounded by dusty Peruvian market-stores on the southern edge of the gringo district. Being however, as it most probably was, that any number of other, lower quality hotels closer to the main plaza were charging double or triple what we were paying for an iron sprung bed and a slap in the face at 8am, I was pretty pleased with our efforts. Cuzco as a city has made an entire industry on drawing foreign tourists in with the siren's song of the famous lost city of the Incas and matching our uncompromising greed for fancy ruins with their savage hunger for foreign dollars. With every stupid-grin, 'I'm going to Machu Picchu' alpaca wearing moron visibly leaking money as they walk down the street, I couldn't blame them for trying to sell us all t-shirts.

You would think, having said what I just did about the tourist trap that is Cuzco, that I would have cultivated a level of immunity to it's frivolous sights and pointless attractions... you would think that. You'd be wrong though – hindsight is a wonderful thing. The '12-sided stone' in the wall of a building down some shady side street; yep, we went and saw that. It does deliver what is promised though; a stone in the wall with twelve sides. I had entertained naive hopes of some sort of dodecahedron sitting on a pedestal somewhere in a square or plaza but this was actually just an actual, literal stone, with twelve sides, that had been used as a brick in the wall of a Colombian-era construction, then advertised throughout the city as a tourist attraction. The greatest joke on white people in the history of the world. Ever. Even the McDonald's on a corner of the Plaza de Armas (Cuzco's central plaza) drew me in as a tourist attraction in and of itself. In Bolivia, where I have been living for the last 3 months, there are no McDonald's 'restaurants', so a tasty piece of homesick remedy seemed like the most amazing thing in the world at 4pm that Thursday afternoon. We were visiting things in this foreign city that were not only mundane every day features in our own cities, as with the '12-sided stone', but in the case of McDonald's, actually despised and spat upon back home. “What have we become?” I mused philosophically through a mouthful of McPollo. “Fuck it, tomorrow I'm going to KFC,” grinned Sjoerd.

After removing my goggles of stupidity – having been completely tipped over the edge by a museum dedicated to an artist with an acute fetish for depicting every person to have ever lived with a neck like Gumby after a failed hanging – we set about not spending any more money. Sensible. Straightforward. Don't feed the monster. Our hotel did end up letting us use their kitchen, kind souls that they were, and we cooked up a spaghetti-smelling storm to the tinny, mobile phone sounds of Mos Def's 'Black on Both Sides' – now that's something everyone can enjoy. Of course the spaghetti was gluey and the sausages weren't skinned before cooking, but what did we care, we were doing something for ourselves, finally. Last vestiges of independent dignity in tact we sat down to eat our tolerable meal and drain some more Wi-Fi. I bagged the rest up in double-wrapped plastic for tomorrow because I was, as I myself put it, “in this shit for the long haul na'i'mean.” Mikkel stated on several occasions that he did not, at all, “know what I meant” – “I can't believe you're going to eat that with your hands.” Sorry dude, sometimes in life...

We had booked our tour of Machu Picchu at the same time as we had booked the hotel and... well to back it up a bit, that morning we had been led around by a frantic Peruvian fellow who had sorted our tour out, booked Mikkel and I a bus back to La Paz for Saturday night, told me where to get a student card for cheaper entry, and then taken all of our money. He was the kind of guy who speaks at a person, as opposed to to them, and expects all answers and questions to be given in single phrases, ten words or less. His sentences ended with an exclamation point, always. “The tour right, it's very simple!” So far so good. “You catch the bus up and walk into the valley where you'll sleep the first night!” he explained, while charging ten metres in front of us towards the student card printing office, “then in the morning wake up at 4am for breakfast, climb the mountain and see Machu Picchu!” He climbed the stairs while we chased him like frightened children, lost in the mall. “Three meals provided, lunch and dinner on Friday, breakfast on Saturday!” Sweat poured off of my face and Sjoerd smacked his head on the stairwell's low crossbeam. “Don't forget passports and YOU! (me, SHIT... uuuh) don't forget this student card!” We were at the office. “But how do I get this card? What do I need...” “TOO MANY WORDS!”... that is what he would have said... probably... if he had heard me, but he was gone already. Off in a puff of Peruvian smoke. Too fast for the gringos. Never been caught.

*****

We woke up at 7:30am on Friday morning to phone alarms and a hot shower. Oh yes. Mr Exclamation Mark was ready and jumping at 8 to herd us into our minibus and set us on our way. “I said 8 not 8:30!” He screamed with a fat, confusing smile breaking out over his brown face. “Well you didn't, but how can I disagree with someone that eccentric,” you never know what these tourism-industry types are liable to do at any moment. After he'd whipped us down the stairs with a 10-foot lasso and chucked us into the bus with the rest of the tour, he was gone once more, just as suddenly as he had popped into our lives, never to be seen again. He told us the bus tickets Mikkel and I would be waiting for us in the hotel lobby when we got back at 9pm on Saturday. They probably would be.

Our bus-mates were speaking what I eventually discerned was Portuguese amongst themselves, or not speaking at all. I tried to read but South American transport outside major cities is notoriously bumpy and these buses are designed specifically to be way too small to stretch your legs out, but just slightly too big to be able to wedge yourself comfortably between seats. This is so that all passengers are forced to remain alert and awake throughout the journey in the event that a civil war should break out – clever design. I put my knees up on the sides of the seat in front of me and tried to get in a nice enough position – upside down with one leg behind my head and my back twisted into a figure '8'. I felt a hand from in front brush against my bare ankle and grab it. Slow down lady, I'm not into bus-voyeurism. No, she did it again, her purple jumper hiding the rolls on her flaccid forearms as she attempts to suggest that maybe my ankle is intruding into her carefully procured personal space on this SOUTH AMERICAN TOUR BUS.

I like to sit with my knees up, in kind of a foetal position in these buses because, wouldn't you know it, we don't all get beds or a Lay-Z-Boy for the 6 hour trip into the valley. Mrs Purple Jumper Frenchy Bitch has other ideas though as she makes it her personal mission to fuck with my shit from as early on in the tour as possible. The Brazilian guy next to me looks over and laughs as she explains in poor English that the seats in this vehicle do, in fact, recline, if I should desire that they do so. “I can see that quite clearly actually, as you have done a very good job in demonstrating with your own seat, reclined as it is to within 30cm of my face.” I should have said that, but I'm not that funny or clever in real life. Plus I doubt she would have understood... Remember Hitler? And how much that guy hated Jews, like he really didn't like them, and they hated him right back. Well if you take all that hate, from both sides, and bottle it. Put it right in there in a tiny glass coke bottle and slam the lid on tight... then maybe you have something comparable to the amount of pressurised hatred I am feeling for this Parisian whale right now. I can't do anything about it so I throw the bottle at her head in my mind and put my knees right in the middle of her chair. The Brazilian guy offers me a consolation wafer and another chuckle.

At lunch we stop in the last town before the Sacred Valley and have a chance to quell the shakes after being strung along a tightrope of a road that wound it's way around the mountainous highlands. The bus driver obviously didn't give any fraction of a fuck about when and how much we were going to eat as he leant against the bus with his lunch, but I thanked all manner of imaginary gods that he was, at least, a phenomenal driver. Lunch consisted of a depressingly small chicken schnitzel-type concoction with rice and a single slice of tomato, Mikkel was markedly upset with the situation. I asked for more salt and Sjoerd quickly asked me to append some sauce to that request... “let's stick to the basics man, I don't want to stress these people.” I don't know whether I'm being ironic or not, but either way Sjoerd ends up sauce-less.

Towards the end of our meal (so basically at the start – ho. ho. you nailed 'em good there Taco) another frantic Peruvian man comes in and asks us for our names on a piece of paper. He explains that our tour guide will be one Juan Carlos Q. (I oh-so-considered putting his phone number in here, but better not ay?) and that we would be meeting him at the train station for our walk into the Sacred Valley to our hotel for the night. Exhibiting the same power of dissipation as the man in Cuzco, this messenger was out of the restaurant and into the horizon. Looking around I noticed, for the first time, the extraordinary number of people travelling with us, “surely these aren't all in our tour group with one guide,” I mused hopefully to Sjoerd. “At least some of these people speak English,” he replied, “there was even a French lady on our bus.” “Don't go near her, she has a disease,” I quickly warned him, “the woman asks stupid questions.” I cast my eyes over to our bus driver, directing the others to do the same, where the creature was grilling our apathetic driver about who knows what, both hands in the air and purple jumper around her waist. Mikkel lets out a groan, “I hope she doesn't speak fucking English.” “Oh but she does, and you will see...” we had made it to Peru for the freakshow.

After the final push an hour or further down the dirt road of insanity we made it to the train station in the depths of the Sacred Valley and got out of the bus with bags and cameras, ready for a 2.5hr walk to where we were supposed to be sleeping – such blind faith, such unwavering trust they had inspired in us. We were approached by a shorter than average, smaller than average, duller than average Peruvian. He introduced himself as Juan Carlos: Tour Guide. He had an earpiece in one ear attached to his mobile phone that would ring constantly throughout our trip and a frantic look about him as he rounded up our group of around 30 tourists... “Jesus this guy is going to struggle.” He spoke hastily but in an oh-so-soft, meek whisper so that any background noise could easily steal the attention of the group away from his ill-prepared words – a cunning ploy. Obviously he spoke in Spanish so I understood only around 60% of what he was saying, but nevertheless, I know when someone needs to speak up. He took everyone's identification with the intention of taking them to the town to make tickets for our entry in the morning, and then sent us on our merry way. He would not be accompanying us. This was not, of course, before our French jester could interrupt to make a string of ingeniously stupid interjections; something about the colour of her passport or the size of that tree over there just to prove that, along with her crappy English, she didn't speak very good Spanish either. Juan Carlos stopped to dwell on this woman's ranting for way too long and the crowd around him slowly dispersed; we get to walking.

*****

“I wonder what the hotel is going to be like, I hope it's pretty decent,” thinks Mikkel out aloud to Sjoerd and I, we had just crossed a bridge that was apparently, clearly marked with a 'do not walk on train tracks' sign which I only read after walking on the train tracks. “I saw pictures in the brochure thingy,” replies Sjoerd, “it looked pretty nice.” “Yeah I hope it's pretty nice, I want a hot fucking shower.” Our Danish hero isn't compromising on shit. I thought about adding in something about lowering our expectations a little considering we had taken a $120US tour when most other tours were starting at $150US, but then I thought again – what's the point in dashing this boy's hopes and dreams on the walk up there? We might get lucky. “I hope the dinner's good,” I choose this similar conversation as an alternative, “we could eat the guide if not though...” “he doesn't look like he has much meat on him,” laments Mikkel in all seriousness, “could be good sport though.” The mood was expectant, but somewhat sour for most of the walk through the jungle.

There's no denying it, the jungle and the valley were drop-dead gorgeous. Whenever you see a postcard or a website or a BBC documentary about some famous this or that or some lost whatever it always looks so beautifully lush and green. When you go and see something like what has been shown and advertised to you though, it never quite lives up to image that has been plastered into your brain, and so when you leave you keep the first image there, and tell yourself that's where you went. We all need to avoid that disappointment. It's like the tourism industry doesn't believe in it's own product, and has such little faith in the consumer's capacity to be awed that it slaps a green filter on every promotional camera lens, short of selling green-tinted cellophane visors to everyone walking in, they try and blur our vision too. Well anyway... that's what normally happens yeh? Like in every sub-par 'rainforest' I have ever had the faith to go and visit with expectations. But this jungle... this shit stood head and shoulders above everything else. The rain from the morning had left the whole place dripping with green brilliance and the muddy river raging to our right for the whole 2.5hour walk made me feel like I was actually in an Indiana Jones movie. It was so nice it compels me, even now, to use such terribly lame descriptions because... ugh... fuck. The forest made me take down my guard momentarily and step back in wonder at this amazing place. For a second, I didn't care about the fact that we were being taken for a ride by these slick-talking Peruvians, or that we were, in turn, exploiting the shit out of this beautiful place just by being here and adding to the erosion. The beautiful majesty of the rainforest disarmed me; it was all very carefully planned.

After the walk in we were met again by Juan Carlos and led teasingly up another path towards the town of hotels, restaurants and bars nestled in the Sacred Valley. The place may or may not have had a name, and that name may or may not have been told to me at the time, but it doesn't matter because even if I knew it I wouldn't repeat it here. The population of whatever you want to call it (Town A) consisted almost entirely of tourists staying only for one, maybe two days, solely for the purpose of greedily feasting their eyes on the lost city of Machu Picchu, before returning to the real world with pictures and bragging rights. Maybe 10% (fuck it lets just throw some random numbers out there, I definitely did NOT research this at all) of the population of the town were there for more than a few nights, and they, of course, were the staff. The existence of such an openly false shell of a town was outright depressing to contemplate – walking in with the raging river on our right and the completely engineered facade lying to our left felt like stepping into something that should never have been.

Juan Carlos' feeble attempts at instructing our 35-strong group were met with frustratingly strained ears, but the confused herd attentively followed him up the steps and towards whatever hotels he pointed his unsteady gaze towards. The earpiece dangling from his face and into his pocket made me think for a second that our phones would work all the way out here and that maybe the plastic comforts of the town extended even to a signal tower but it was not to be – somehow all the tour guides had rigged up their own private network. I wondered at their deft ingenuity. The result of this network was an annoying pause in the already scattered dialogue of Mr JC: Leader of the Pack every five minutes as he answered his phone via headset to confirm, “yes, yes we're still in the Sacred Valley, yep just coming up the road now, yep... uhuh... yeah, yeah the same one, yeah we're still walking... hold on, I just saw a dog, yep, yuhuh.. what? No no a brown one.. yeah I know.” Relaying integral information about the trip to those who need to be kept in the loop.

We were shown to our hotel and instructed to meet back at this restaurant in an hour for briefing and whatever goes with that.”Oh by the way I need your passports so that I can get your tickets for the morning.” “Juan Carlos, would you care to explain to me otro ves why it is exactly that you need my passport and why I can't get the ticket myself, thus remaining in full, assured possession of my valued personal effects?” He didn't say much but it was obvious he was in a hurry so I begrudgingly gave him my shit and he scurried away into the secret guides club for guides to line up and get our tickets. The blind leading the blind.

Back at the restaurant an hour later and spirits were less than high, but definitely not subdued. An equally lost companion of Juan Carlos had taken over proceedings, which consisted mainly of reassuring the restless mob that Juan Carlos: Trusted Individual, was not about to elope with our identities and start a banking scam in Nigeria. He was, in fact, a entirely lovely young man who would, no doubt, be returning with our passports and tickets as soon as was humanly possible. Tensions rising. I finished my paltry serving of chicken as soon as I had started it and moved into a chair away from the food to prepare myself for the melee that was bound to ensue upon Juan Carlos' return. The restaurant was divided into two sections, the lower was all tables and chairs for travellers to sit and eat at, while the higher – connected to the first by a small set of stairs – had one lonely table with a few chairs and the kitchen tucked away at the back. I sat at the top so I could remove myself from the pit of despair that the lower section threatened to descend into.

So after like an hour of waiting and like the shittiest dinner in recorded history we were like... fucking pissed. Everyone, not just me, and not just my English-speaking friends, oh no. Everyone was pissed. He walked into the room with the air of someone who was about to do something important, but dispelled that illusion as soon as he opened his mouth – come on dude, can't you at least speak up? For fuck's sake weren't you ever forced to be in a choir in school? DIAPHRAGM!!! He kept scurrying around the room evasively, changing position every few sentences to reposition himself away from the pack that would inevitably form around him each time. He must have felt pretty intimidated and I'm not trying to be a complete bastard here... but surely it's not that hard to be prepared before the meeting so you can take control of this sort of situation and give the people the information they want and need to hear... surely. These are the questions that keep me awake at night. Everyone eventually quietened down under the understanding that Juan Carlos: Leader, was about to explain everything. He assumed his final position atop the stairs only after sampling every other possible position in the small eatery; “come on son,” I pleaded under my breath – maybe I should have pleaded in Spanish.

He started to talk; “get up at 4am tomorrow, breakfast here, head to Machu Picchu (murmurs) either walking or by bus.” These snippets of information came first, then after this no-doubt meticulously planned opener our hero seemed unsure of how to proceed. “Fuck, we're done for” I turned to Mikkel to see his similarly knowing look of doom, “and this fuck still has my passport...” I struggled to stress how completely the fact of my passport being in the hands of someone I wouldn't trust with a pencil case was stressing me out. The purple French woman appeared at the front of the crowd once again to ask a ridiculous question – first in broken Spanish, and then, forgoing that effort, speaking French -TO ME- and imploring me with her stupid eyes to translate for her. My temper was really starting to fray, I don't deal well with large amounts of stress and Juan Carlos: Invalid was really pushing it when he stopped the entire discussion to answer PurpleFrench's question. He stopped everything. Everyone has to wait. “I can't deal with this,” I said again to Mikkel and Sjoerd, as if they couldn't already see it. Mikkel laughed at my creeping insanity and pointed out nicely that they had already retrieved their passports and gotten their tickets for tomorrow. “Fuck this then, I can't stand another second watching this circus of ineptitude, let's go to bed. Dinner was at 9, we went to bed at 11:30.

*****

To be fair (for the record, fairness is not one of the main objectives of this blog) Juan Carlos and many of the other inept guides in that rape dungeon of tourist greed are more or less victims just the same way we are; victims of insatiable human greed and selfishness. The companies, which we, as tourists, of course have to hire to get that irresistible glimpse of the ancient, lost city, are known for venomously cutting costs and corners in order to provide the cheapest tour possible in a ridiculously competitive market. Can't fill your bus? Well you just wasted a whole lot of money then Cheechy, meanwhile Enrique Gonzalez-Trump over there just made bank by slicing $10 off of the price his tour, thereby selling more tickets and filling bus after rickety bus. Under-training guides and providing soup kitchen-grade slop for meals is the name of the game and if you can't handle the pangs of conscience, then you're obviously not going to be wringing much money out of this international tourist attraction; ripe for exploitation as it is. The guides suck and the food sucks and the accommodation sucks and the organisation sucks... but we don't give a fuck... the tourists, the gringos, the sightseers, the photographers, the snapping beasts on the buses... We. Don't. Give. A. Fuck. All we care about is those few hours inside the pearly gates when we can drink in the experience, not of witnessing the awe-inspiring remnants of an ancient, lost culture – the reason we all like to think we are visiting – the draw is of experiencing something that few people in this world will ever get to experience. Derive the validation.... oooooh that sweet, sweet validation.

*****

On the morning of the big day we woke up at 4am, as stipulated, and stumbled to the restaurant for our breakfast of unsurprisingly low quality – a piece of bread with butter, no amount of irony can accurately depict my exasperation here. The lack of surprises continued for the next hour as news came and came again that Juan Carlos was still scampering around the annals of the guides club photocopying passports and making tickets... there really are no words here, why was that still happening now? The plan had changed and now we were to wait for JC at the entrance to Machu Picchu. That's, 'wait for the missing tour guide to arrive with my documents of identity, in the rain, while he takes the next three hours to... ok, I'm really struggling here guys. So we get to the top, wait a little, I stress out and Mikkel takes a picture of me doing so which he will later claim to be me 'almost crying'. Well fuck it, I'm not even going to deny it, but contrary to the collective disillusionment, Juan Carlos: Punctual Human arrives eventually, and eventually we were able to walk through those magical gates at the top of the old mountain and feast our senses upon what we'd all been waiting for. YES! YES! YES! “I've been to Machu Picchu and you haven't; EAT IT!” The roller-coaster of emotion, anger, loathing, sadness, resignation, elation, resentment, insane laughter... those kind of feelings, you know.

Juan Carlos' tour was pretty reasonable, for the record – that was, of course, after he had tried and failed to palm me and my friends off to an English-speaking tour guide to make his life easier. Looking back, maybe blurting out, “mate it's find I can fucking understand fine!” wasn't the best way to explain the situation to our Spanish-speaking guide but whatever. We got to learn about Incas knowing the difference between magnetic North and geographic North and how they built the tiers of ground on top of the mountain and what kind of people lived there and it was all very interesting trivia because sometimes it's jolly to know what one's looking at. We walked along a path carved into the cliff face to the Inca Bridge and took photos of that and when the morning fog cleared we were treated to a postcard view of the mountain top. We were delivered all that we were promised and drank it in greedily. We all took the stereotypical tourist shots and gave in to mindless consumption because, as I have rationalised, when something is as hyped as Machu Picchu, there really is no point in playing the dignified, self-conscious prick who refuses to conform to the tourist image... we have made it this far and we're all here for the same reason, let's not lie to ourselves. Stand over there... come on buddy. Make a peace sign. Say hi to mum. BIIIIIIG SMILES... now that wasn't so hard was it? There's one for Facebook.

We left at around 11am to climb back down the mountain, sated and satisfied in every way – happy with our experience despite the difficulties beforehand. Walking out of the city I spoke at 'please overhear this conversation' volume about the devastating landslide that had ravaged the site's promised beauty: “really sucks about that earthquake hey... how long did they say? Closed for 6 months, fuck it's lucky we got here early then hey.” Life seems so much more enjoyable when everything's done and sorted. Four hours before I would have stabbed any and everyone if I had heard such a stupid joke made by a stupid dickhead walking past me, but we were done, everything was cool and we didn't need to see Machu Picchu any more. Bragging rights: obtained.

Juan Carlos was visibly more relaxed too, when we made it down the hill and back to our crappy restaurant he asked us how we liked it and his friend smiled and shook my hand. “I was ready to cut you open last night dude,” I laughed to him; I doubt he spoke English but he laughed and nodded vigorously as well. Mikkel was a little pissed that we didn't see the sun bridge or whatever other part of the city there was that we could have seen and had our photos taken in front of, and we didn't get to climb Waynu Picchu either or probably do a whole heap of other stuff... but I didn't care one bit, in fact I still don't. And I didn't care as we were leaving the lines of people and swarms of cameras at the top of the hill that our footprints had just contributed to 1cm of erosion per year at the globally-protected site. I honestly don't know where the whole conservation argument ends up, because, as it is traditionally understood, we are supposed to be 'looking after these beautiful sites so that our grandchildren can enjoy them'... but if in the act of being there alone we are contributing to Machu Picchu's destruction, then what? We have to look after it by not going there so that our grandchildren can have the opportunity to fuck it up themselves... or they could not go there either and the whole thing goes on and on... in the end we might as well just bomb the whole thing and build the world's biggest interactive porn and water-slide themed amusement park in the rubble? I'm sure they could charge more for drinks.

I don't regret going to Machu Picchu, and I'm not going to tell you not to go there or to shy away from the thing just because of some imagined responsibility you think you have to some bearded, history major hiking enthusiast who hasn't been born yet. For me, or anyone who has tasted the deliciously forbidden fruit to turn around now and say, “oh hold up guys, no no we better not have any more, there are plenty of pictures on Wikipedia,” whilst wiping crumbs of forbidden fruit pie from around their mouth, for anyone to do that is hypocritical and really pretty retarded. It's all well and good to be concerned about the planet being a non-renewable resource, but in this case... well I'm sure there's an oily seal somewhere that could do with the attention. Machu Picchu is not of directly vital importance to anyone other than the citizens and government of Peru who, by the looks of things, are prepared to drain it for every cent it's worth. I walked away knowing that I had caved in to the massive tourist machine that is Cuzco, Machu Picchu and the Sacred Valley, and I was happy with that. I am happy with that. I got to see it and, despite all the hassle and bullshit, it was worth it for that fleeting moment of satisfaction. My feelings were manufactured by the machine and I know it, but they felt good, so fuck it. Anyone out there who thinks they had some higher calling and greater purpose in seeing Machu Picchu is talking a wheelbarrow full of pretentious, hipster shit. Go see another ruin, there are plenty more where that came from and they don't charge 15S for water at the gate.

Go and see Machu Picchu, the oldest theme park in the world. Take your camera and your gringo jacket. Take the picture. Do the tour. Gawk, deliberately open-mouthed at the mildly fascinating historical artefacts. Buy a hot dog.

But don't hire Juan Carlos as your guide... he's a fucking pussy.

Peace, Taco.