Equipo Williams

We are currently in the empire of the Incas. The Incas were a people that were born, thrived, got very far in terms of modern technology, and had their entire world collapse in the span of only one hundred and fifty years. The Incan stretched from Colombia down to Santiago in Chile. I know that the whole idea of such a huge empire in such a short amount of time sounds crazy, but even before the Incas, there were other highly advanced civilizations and cultures such as the Huari and Tiwanaku people who had developed cultures as early as six hundred CE. The Inca just adopted these people and their cultures into their own mega-culture where they all followed Incan traditions and worshiped Incan gods.

The first place we went to was Tiwanaku. Tiwanaku is an area in central Bolivia where ancient people lived and thrived a really long time ago. On a hill in this place there is a stone door called the Sun Gate, which aligns with the sun on the solstice, and has a carving of Wiraqocha on it. It is said that Wiraqocha himself ordered this place to be built by the first humans. Wiraqocha is the creator god of the world and everything on, in, and around it. He was born from Lake Titicaca, but beyond that it gets a little bit hazy. You see, Incas and people before them didn’t keep written records (other than quipus, a form of writing in knots on strings, which has not been fully decoded yet) so each area or town has a different version of the gods and their creation. The two main beliefs are that either Wiraqocha gave birth to Inti (the sun god), Mama Quilla (the moon goddess), and Pachamama (the earth mother). The other belief says that Pachamama gave birth to Mama Quilla and Inti, so we’ll never really know.

Next we went to Sun and Moon Island. These are islands on Lake Titicaca which had a very big religious importance to the Incas. This was said to be where Mama Quilla and Inti were born, so the Incas had temples and even a sacrificial area here. I talk more about these places in my Sun and Moon Island post, as well as the gender-based temples that were on these islands. One of the most well-known Incan symbols is the Incan cross, a cross with three little notches in it. The Inca always did things in twos or threes. Two because some things had to be even and mostly for superstition and balance, because a lot of things in the world come in twos, such as male and female and the sun and moon. Three was more interesting. There were three Incan worlds. One that was the stars, the sky, the future, and represented by the Condor. A second was the earth, the land, the present, and represented by the Puma. And the last was underground, the dead, the past, and represented by the snake. You’ll see this threesome a lot in Incan culture and modern Incan style decorations. 

After all of this we went to Tipon, an Incan water temple. Here we learned all about Incan irrigation and water control. We learned that the Incas used canals to control water direction and to keep their farmland fertile. Their farmland came in the form of terraces on the hills where they lived. These terraces were good for a couple of reasons. First, they allowed for different temperatures at different levels, so you could grow crops at only the levels that suited them best. For example, things like corn close to the bottom where it was warmer, and potatoes at the cooler top. The other benefit of these was that the sun heated the rocks forming the terrace walls up during the day, and the warm stones kept the soil from getting too cold at night. They had stone steps to get between the levels. The last thing we learned from the water temple was that the Incas only drank from springs, almost never from rivers or lakes, because they believed it was given from Pachamama and was therefore superior to the other water..

After Tipon we went to Cusco and Ollantaytambo. Cusco is the longest continually inhabited city in the Americas, starting with the pre-Incan people, then the Incas, then the Spaniards, then Peruvians. We spent some time there and then went to  Ollantaytambo, which was a tambo in the Incan times. Tambos were stops about twelve kilometers apart for Incas to eat and rest at on their journeys down the Inca trail. Ollantaytambo is also the meeting point of the Sacred, Urubamba, and Vilcamayo valleys, making it an excellent location to see everything and everyone around you. Its location also meant that there were many travelers going through it to get to Machu Picchu. This is why Ollantaytambo is called the gateway to Machu Picchu

After we had explored Ollantaytambo, we hopped on the train to Aguas Calientes, where you take a bus to Machu Picchu. The train trip was about two hours, and it was very pretty. It runs alongside the Inca trail, which you can still walk on to Machu Picchu, but it’s expensive and takes four days one-way. A lot of people think that the Incan soldiers carried the king on a litter, and they did, but only on flat and wide paths, which the Inca trail is not. In fact, the Inca trail is quite narrow and steep so the Inca king mostly walked to move along the trail. The Inca used Llamas and Alpacas along the trails to carry food and supplies for them on their long treks. 

When we got to Aguas Calientes we dropped off our minimal stuff for the night and went to get a bus ticket and a guide. We wouldn’t have gotten a guide, because we don’t really like them, but we decided it might be a good idea, so we did. The guide said we had an hour before we had to get on a bus so we went to have lunch. Once we were done with that, the guide picked us up and we got on a bus heading for Machu Picchu. The bus was about half an hour and Syd and I both fell asleep on the bus. Once we got there, we had to wait in line to get checked onto the property, and then started walking. 

We walked up the agricultural zone which was the terraces the residents of Machu Picchu grew crops on, then headed into the city. We took many pictures and I will put in as many as possible, but being there was just SUCH an incredible experience. We saw so many ruins and some wildlife and we were all speechless the whole time. It was just a beautiful place with such rich history, it is hard to even explain. It was just so vast and grand, it looked like it would have taken one hundred years to build, but in reality, it only took around fifty, and it was only lived in for about one hundred years before it was abandoned to fight the Spanish. Machu Picchu was just so crazy, for lack of a better term. It was insane the amount of time that was put into it, the effort that was put into it, the people that lived in it, and the fact that it was undiscovered for more than three hundred years. Our tour guide taught us a lot more about this place that I had no clue about until we came here. 

We learned about Incan spirituality and the reasons they picked this place for Machu Picchu (to be as close to the gods as possible). Another interesting thing is that when important Incas died, they were mummified and put into caves, which represented Pachamama’s stomach, where she would then take them underground to the next phase. We also learned about the building methods for different buildings. For priests and nobles’ houses, as well as temples, they used stones that were shaped to fit perfectly together, but for commoners’ houses, they used normal stones and clay mortar. If you have seen pictures of Machu Picchu already, you’ll know that there are some truly gigantic stones there, which can’t be lifted by humans. To move these enormous rocks, the Incas built ramps and put them on spherical stones to drag and push them to where they needed to be. We also saw that the doorways for the Inca were not normal human size, proving that, contrary to popular belief, Incas and other people here were very short and small, a trait you can still see in many Peruvians today. Another thing we learned was that though there were many visitors to this holy site, only about seven hundred people lived here. Yet another thing we learned was that the reason the Inca are referred to as the Inca nowadays, it wasn’t always that way. It used to be that Inca was only the name for their king. However, when the Spaniards arrived in South America, the people here referred to themselves as Incas and thus the name was born. Just before we left it started to rain which is good for the animals and plants, but not so good for the tourists. We hopped on the last bus out of this amazing ancient city, and headed back to town.

People now pray to Pachamama for rain by giving her three coca leaves and asking for rain and anything else they want. In fact, bits of Incan culture still live on in the Quechua and Aymara people that live here and still have similar gods to the Incas, even though the empire has fallen and disappeared completely. Our visit to Machu Picchu and actually all of the Incan and Pre-Incan sites was so cool and we learned so much. I’m really glad we got to see all of this and experience at least a bit of what these people and their culture were like.