Deb and I walked to a place that tourists never go, unless they hire horses just for a pleasant ride along the terraces. It isn't in the guidebooks, but it is in one of the history books I've read over the past month. It's where Manco Inca's warriors tried to knock the Spaniards off their horses as they approached the temple city of Ollantaytambo along the Rio Urubamba, coming from Cusco. It is probably the site of the first and only devastating defeat of the Spanish in battle by the Incas. It fits the description better than the main temple site.
This is the battle site described in the Wikipedia account, in the sections titled Battle, and Battle Site. The site should be famous but is ignored by local guides and unknown to most tourists who just come to see Machu Picchu and race home. The walk to get there is along a beautiful stretch of treed terraces overlooking the Urubamba valley, with hummingbirds and rock waterfall features that are part of the aqueduct system irrigating the terraces. It should be developed as a municipal park and alternate destination for tourists. I didn't even know it was there until I stumbled on it and suddenly recognized where I was from the description I'd read. There are no plaques or signposts. I'm hoping I'll get a chance to guide a visitor or two there myself before I leave, and enjoy their astonishment.
I have finished the last of the books on my reading list, an older (1997), dryer Penguin book by Nigel Davies called The Ancient Kingdoms of Peru, which covers what is known about the pre-Incan cultures, of which there were many, stretching back thousands of years. A lot of the ruins we call "Incan" were built by earlier peoples in the same areas who were conquered by the Incans and incorporated into the Empire. The empire has been compared to the Roman Empire, but in some ways the Inca seem more like "the Borg". Many cultures gave up without a fight as the Incan Empire expanded - "Resistance is futile", say the Borg. If a culture resisted, they were brutally defeated and their citizens marched off en masse, thousands at a time, to other parts of the empire for resettlement and indoctrination.
This was part of the Incan administrative genius for empire building and social engineering - cruel, but effective. People could be slaughtered for any number of reasons, and that included regular child sacrifice. How did parents and communities ever come to accept that? Free trade was discouraged and carefully controlled, in favour of economic "vertical archipelagos". The system remained stable because nobody starved. Today's New Agers are impressed with the Incas as the first "socialist" or "communist" society, a mystical society with no writing but with skilled astronomy; they conveniently forget the brutality and repression, the extremism of the Emperor cult, the constant need to sacrifice people and animals to the Inti and other gods.
It was not a time and place I'd have wished to live, no matter how impressed I am, like everyone else, with the stone building technology. As one U.S. soldier from Kabul said when he was here two weeks ago on a break with his wife, "It's amazing what you can accomplish if you have enough slaves." Yeah, that kind of cuts through some of the mystery, doesn't it?
Apparently it took 50,000 men 20 years to build the temple I looked out on as I wrote this, and the town between me and the temple. I don't know where they were all housed at the time, but from what I've read their diet was poor, and the commoners in Cusco lived a squalid existence. The military, the luxury goods craftsmen, the priests and administrators, and the Emperor all ate well. It more closely parallels the Soviet Socialist experience than any sort of New Age enlightened socialism or Christian communism.
Not that the indigenos were any better off under the Spanish, mind you...
We're getting fresh Helpxers shortly. Mike and Monica from Eugene, Oregon, have been travelling and blogging in S. America since last September, but they've started at the bottom and worked their way up, staying in hostels and travelling like locals, and riding in some of the amazing trans-continental buses.
Deb and I held the fort alone, this time all day, with the help of Gregorio and Pancha. Gemma, Cesar and Carlos have a day off to experience the magic cactus, with Louise' blessing (I didn't have Deb's blessing to join them!). Louise and Ruth are both went to Cusco for the day. We only had one family of four for breakfast, a pretty nice family from Houston. The son, about ten, had a steel-trap memory and was a bit of a rainman. We talked about why people built in high altitudes here, and I mentioned the desert between the Andes and the coast, and common diseases of the forested lowlands, in particular Leishmaniasis, known as Uta in South America. "Oh," said Thomas, "that's caused by sandflies, isn't it?" His astonished mother said, "How did you know that?" "It was on a TV show about horrible diseases that we watched together a few months ago", replied Thomas. Later I mentioned that we had 1800 species of birds here, second only in number to Colombia. "Cool," said Thomas. "We only have 600 species in Texas."
Next diary entry: Visiting Juan Carlos
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