CARETAS

Nicholas Asheshov

Translation
of the piece published July 2009 by Caretas

Un Tesoro a la Vuelta De Amenazado por
Vacas

['Treasure next to Machu Picchu menaced by cattle']

One of the most attractive ruins around Machu Picchu is Llactapata, a delicate
Inca site hidden high in the cloud forest with the charm of having a superb
view, the best, of the Sacred Citadel.

Early in
the morning you can watch, as the Incas themselves certainly did, the clouds
clear as the sun's rays hit first one then other parts of the citadel.

Llactapata is 200 ms higher than the main plaza
at Machu Picchu and three clean and clear kilometers
away over the deep canyon of the Aobamba.

From
Llactapata you can see the tiny, bright jackets of tourists as they wander
among the walls and ancient terraces of the citadel.  Three formidable
6,000m snow peaks provide a dramatic backdrop to the forested ridges, cliffs,
deep valleys and turbulent rivers.

But the
ruin of Llactapata itself is deteriorating fast.  Hugh Thomson, who was
there a few weeks ago with a National Geographic film crew, tells me:
"The cattle are battering down the long corridor which is now only half
the height it was when you and I were there in 2003.  Soon there will be
little left and the other sectors are all woefully neglected and lost in
undergrowth again.

"The
lovely two-storey temple on the hill is unreachable now.

"Still, we caught the light at dawn
streaming straight down the corridor just as the Inca designed it to do."

Hugh,
together with Gary Ziegler, had led a group of machete-wielding friends like me
up this mountainside six years ago and, on the basis of compass bearings and
drawings Hugh had found in Hiram Bingham's diaries at Yale, re-discovered this
jewel.  That it is in plain view of half a million tourists a year tells
you something about the still-immense hidden areas of the Amazon forests.

Last week
I talked about Llactapata for a moment with Fernando Astete,
the head archaeologist for the Instituto Nacional de Cultura, INC, at
Machu Picchu, and one of Peru's leading Inca-ologists.

"That's a difficult area.  It's
just outside, legally, the Machu Picchu national park.  The locals are
titled owners and they're mostly just interested in finding grazing for their
cows.  We're sending in people to sensibilizarlos,
but they are often very difficult."

The
combination of grumbling old-style campesinos and a
new flood of hiking tourists is twisting and changing the area.  New
hotels and hostals continue not only springing up in Aguas Calientes, the raucous town
at the foot of Machu Picchu, but now along new Inca Trails in the middle of the
national parkland surrounding Machu Picchu proper.

The INC
hasn't been able to stop these from being built any more than it was able to
stop the construction three years ago by local politicos of the Carillochayoc bridge, over the Rio Vilcanota.
Three hundred people a day are streamng across that
bridge today, Fernando Astete tells me.
The bridge provides a back-door entry to Machu Picchu.

Just this
past week, too, I popped up to Huchayccusco, a
favourite ruin at 3,800 ms a.s.l. overlooking Pisac with a sheer drop into the Sacred Valley a thousand
metres below.  This trip always reminds me of Asheshov's
Law of Andean Travel which says 'What goes down must come up again" the
practical importance of which is that make sure you have a good pair of boots
or, preferably, a mule.

In the
past, it was a tough 2-hour climb up from the village of Lamay
but now the mayor of neighbouring Calca has built a zig-zag road up the Valley wall in the hope that this will
further Calca's doubtful claim to the ruin.

At the Huychayccusco ruins, with their tall, scattered Inca walls a
dozen sprinkers, a strange sight at nearly 4,000ms,
were spraying water over rough grass on ancient terraces.

An
archaeologist at the site, Mary Farfan, said that
World Vision, a Mormon missionary group, was encouraging the campesinos to assert their rights and bring their cattle
onto the terraces.

A large, inter-continental aerial sat on the tiled
roof of a nearby adobe hut.

Ms Farfan told me that she was in charge of 53 workmen based
at the ruins -many of these were playing football in the main plaza-with a
S/.3mn budget to restore the Inca road over from Tambomachay,
near Cuzco itself to Huchayccusco, part of the
government's Capac Nan project to restore Inca roads, often rebuilding them,
from what I've seen around here, even better than the original