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Epilogue

THE THREE musicians playing in the restaurant called themselves the Children of the Sun. They were Incan Descendants. The music they played was the same as what would have been played in each village we had passed on the trail to Machu Picchu.

Having just returned to Cusco, we settled in the restaurant to order a rather late dinner. I ordered my regular alpaca steak and salad with a drink of lime juice. For desert Derek and I each got a huge glass of a very nice mango punch. Then we ordered more food – soup, another alpaca piece of meat with a chutney on top with rice. Hiking the Inca Trail had worked up an enormous appetite.

The band was pretty ordinary in their standard of performance, but one of the members played the pan pipes very well. The leader with a rather large mouth mentioned between every song that they were the “Children of the Sun”, making a big deal out of it. After all "Inca" in the Quechuan language means "Children of the Sun".

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For twenty seven years I had dreamed of exploring the Incan empire high atop the world’s longest mountain range. I had read books and watched many documentaries, but all that had little prepared me for the experience of actually walking where the Inca had walked, just as they had done five hundred years ago.

Sadly their kingdom, despite being the greatest in Earth’s history, only lasted a hundred years before the Spanish invasion. Through the inquisition much of the Incan culture was lost forever. Their incredible engineering in some of the most hostile environments on Earth despite them not having the wheel or any written language was astounding.

All that remains of this once magnificent civilisation are the ruins of their cities and villages, and the stone trails they had so meticulously built between them. As a testament to their incredible talent, many of these remain intact in their precipitous environments even after five hundred years of use, weathering and earthquakes.

The greatest threat to these monuments of history now are the huge hoards of tourists. Rumours abound the Inca Trail and Machu Picchu will one day forever close to save them from the heavy foot traffic of the tourists, but this is a huge money spinner in Peru, perhaps their most lucrative industry. Closing these monuments to the public will serve only to severely affect the Peruvian economy. Closure will never happen.

Therefore this wonder of the world remains under threat of overuse, as is often the case in areas where tourism is a financial staple. The crowds will continue to come and go until finally the monument will perish forever.

Fortunately the Inca trail has strict limits to the number of people who can do it. The limit is five hundred people (including porters) per day all year around apart from February when the track is closed for maintenance. The numbers may soon be reduced to help preserve the trail. Machu Picchu on the other hand will have many more tourists – as many as the trains can carry. This is where the real threat lies.

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Once the Children of the Sun finished their performance they offered their CD for sale. I’m not sure what possessed me, but I bought one, and I was the only person in our group to buy it. I wanted some Peruvian traditional music to take home, so why not?

Once I bought the CD, I posed for a couple of shots with the musicians before they went on their way and we staggered through the dark alleys back to the hotel. We were exhausted and thankfully tomorrow was a day off – perfect for a sleep in.

A couple of weeks later after I had arrived home, I got a pleasant surprise to discover the CD was very good. Perhaps they were at their best in a studio, and not so good in their live performances.

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I was very happy to have been one of the relative few to have fulfilled a lifetime dream to have walked the Inca Trail and to have reached Machu Picchu at the end of it. But as the physicist Weiner Heizenberg said, there is no way you can observe something without affecting the environment in which you observe.

This has now brought about a sense of urgency with realising that with so many major tourist sites like this now being so accessible, there are myriads of tourists going to these places, and with so many tourists travelling here, the sites were in danger of wearing out. Now I realised there were so many more adventures I would need to undertake just to keep ahead of it all. Sadly there are so many millions of other people out there with the same thing in mind.

For the moment though, the Inca Trail and Machu Picchu on the impossibly steep saddle deep in the Urubamba Valley is still truly a magical place, steeped with the Incan mysticism of five centuries ago. Their civilisation may have been suddenly wiped out with the Spanish inquisition, but their legacy lives on.

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