The safety
Peru now enjoys is made manifest the following day when
Toledo and his wife, Eliane, go shopping at the Ollantaytambo
market. In the U.S., the
President is surrounded by a phalanx of
dour security agents wherever he goes. In Ollantaytambo, Toledo
wanders about with just three bodyguards, each of whom maintains a
discreet distance.
Following the Spanish conquest, conquistadors tore down most of the
Incas' buildings and used the hand-hewn stones to build colonial
churches, stately paseos, and residential palaces. Due to its
determined resistance, Ollantaytambo is the only place in Peru
where people live in the same buildings that once served as homes
for the Incan nobility. Most of the narrow streets have their Incan
names, and some still maintain stone water channels that bring
fresh water from the mountains. Rising above the city are farming
terraces irrigated by stone aqueducts. Most of them have been
abandoned, but an Incan granary still exists in pristine condition.
Peru's best-known destination is
Machu Picchu, an abandoned Incan
city that was hidden by the jungle until its 1911 discovery by
American historian Hiram Bingham. Today a luxury train named after
Bingham and jointly owned by PeruRail Orient-Express Hotels,
Trains & Cruises and partner Peruvian Trains & Railways
provides daily rail service between Cuzco and Machu Picchu.
As the train nears the town of Aguas Calientes at the base of Machu
Picchu, the vegetation grows denser, the valleys more
claustrophobic, and normal ambient noise is erased by the roaring
Urubamba River as it surges over boulders and past stone abutments.
Now home only to llamas and visitors who must depart before sunset,
Machu Picchu was the winter abode of Inca royalty who lived in
palace apartments constructed of tightly fitting granite boulders
and separated by small, grassy plazas. It was here that the Inca
enjoyed dinners of roast guinea pig washed down with a fermented
maize drink called
chicha.