Turn Right at Machu Picchu: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time

Should you find yourself in Cusco en route to Machu Picchu, I highly recommend that you stop for a drink at the Cross Keys Pub. Not only is it the best place to get a beer in town, but just inside the second-floor entrance, to the right, are some old scrapbooks that are well worth a look.

“Okay, open your eyes. This is my way of saying, ‘Welcome to the Inca Trail.’”

“There’s one fellow I know from Amazonas Explorer named Efrain—he’s very, very good. Speaks Quechua and English, knows his history.

“A place like Angkor Wat is fantastic,” he said, referring to the enormous twelfth-century temple complex in Cambodia. “But they didn’t have the problems there that the Incas did here. This place is a statement: look at how we can tame nature.”

The Machu Picchu Guidebook: A Self-Guided Tour, by Ruth Wright. An excellent guidebook that explains how and why the Incas built the various structures at Machu Picchu.

Patallacta is now believed to have been a satellite of Machu Picchu, a settlement where several hundred laborers resided and much of the food consumed at Machu Picchu was grown.

According to the fascinating book The Languages of the Andes, Quechua includes a vast number of words to denote the act “to carry.”

putative

For the first time since dropping out of graduate school, I remembered an unpleasant weekend spent struggling to comprehend the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s explanation of the difference between calling something beautiful and calling it sublime. Nowadays, we throw around the word “sublime” to describe gooey desserts or overpriced handbags. In Kant’