Connection and Mystery in the Andes

3 Nov. 2013

            It is hard to sit down, gather my thoughts, and put them on paper here in Room 11 at the Hosteria de Anita in Cuzco.  My mind races between thoughts of the past two months in general, time spent in Ecuador, our amazing hike along the Camino Inka to Machu Picchu, and the realization that we leave for China tomorrow.  In these moments, I have to remind myself of the importance of intentional reflection, lest I be swept away by the whirlwind that is the journey TBB West is on. 

            Where do I begin?  Do I begin more than 500 years ago, telling the story of a relatively small group of people who through persuasion, cunning, bravado, gifts and diplomacy created an empire that stretched from what is now the middle of Chile to northern Ecuador?  Or do I begin with the much smaller group of 19 students and teachers that happened to be walking along the same path that these Inka carved into the high Andean mountain ridges and river valleys?  I suppose I can only begin where it makes sense – through my eyes and the lenses of my own passions, interests, and curiosities. 

            Beginning at Kilometer 82, at 8,528 feet up, on the floor of the Urubamba River valley, we hiked nearly 45 kilometers, climbing as high as 13,776 ft, and including two other passes at 12,000 ft and 12,916 ft, over the course of four days, finally ending our hike at the famed Inkan ruins of Machu Picchu at 7,872 ft. early on the fourth day.  Trekking through that range of altitude, we experienced a variety of microclimates and associated environments, from Andean grassland (tall, perennial bunch grass), to low chaparral with desert-like flora and cloud forest thick with moss, lichen and epiphyte-covered trees, ferns, and Peruvian bamboo.  Each day was filled with its share of heat and chill, not only from the warming and cooling of the body as we hiked and rested, but as well from the change in altitude and the constant play of the winds, clouds, air moisture and sunlight.  Each ridge crest and mountain pass provided heavenly glimpses of the jigsaw of mountain ranges, their tops rarely visible below the cap of clouds that most always formed around their peaks, and their bottoms joined by the glue of some raging river below.  The saying up there in the Andes goes that if it is sunny, wait two minutes and it will become cloudy.  The opposite holds true as well: as I took in the view from the mountaintops, the condensed moisture that had evaporated from the lush vegetation of the Amazonian rainforest to the north and east of us would snake its way through those river canyons, at times completely blocking any grand view that might have existed only seconds before.  The words of a friend echoed in my mind.  A Catholic priest himself, and as such one who embraces the world of monotheism, he told me one night several years ago about his enlightenment upon seeing this same moving mass of moisture:  “For maybe the first time,” he recalled, “I truly realized why these people would have instilled god-like qualities upon such natural forces.”  For sure, taking moments to view the movement of a thick cloud of white through those mountains, combined with the sheer magnitude and drama of the vistas, I could not escape the humbling feeling of some divine energy at work. 

            Maybe it was just these feelings that inspired a group of people some 600 years ago to build these structures on the tops of these cliffs.  When I gazed upon Machu Picchu itself, precariously perched nearly 8000 feet up on the crest of a mountain ridge, sheer drops to a river canyon to the east and west and steep peaks rising to the north and south, I could not help but imagine the vision that brought this city into reality.  If the view of the ‘Inka,’ or king, of these Quechua people was true, then surely it was a divine vision, as they believed him to be a god in his own right, thus making his descendents gods as well and eventual heirs to the throne.  Looking horizontally along one of the agricultural terraces that make up a decent section of the ‘lost city of the Inkas’ to the eventual disappearance of that terrace into the chaos of jungle, I was awed by the vision that could turn something so wild into something so tame. 

            If the Inkas’ vision and manipulation of the world in which they inhabited was impressive, their knowledge of the celestial bodies and their place in their universe only served to compound their connection to the divine.  As the story goes, Machu Picchu was a sacred site, a holy place at the end of a pilgrimage that began in their empire’s capital, the current colonial city of Cuzco.  Along the way, there are sites consisting of a small number of homes and greater number of agricultural terraces.  These refuges served as places of rest along the route as well as laboratories where they tested the acclimatization of certain species of plants such as coca, maize and potato; plants from the mountains that they wanted to bring down to the jungle and vice versa.  There were also other types of encampments in which spring water and glacier melt were funneled into a series of baths that descended down the slopes, these sites supposedly for cleansing oneself before arriving at the final destination.  At the Temple of the Sun, in the center of Machu Picchu, there sits a rock shaped into the form of a diamond, whose points align perfectly with the cardinal directions.  When the sun hits this rock on the winter solstice, its shadow creates the perfect form of one revered star constellation.

            These stories and explanations of what actually occurred at these sites have of course developed and evolved over time from only bits of information that the Spanish, those conquistadors who colonized these lands, were actually able to collect about this empire and these people.  These settlements were abandoned by the time the Spanish came, adding to the mystery of the Inka and contributing to the desire that archeologists had in trying to find the ‘lost city.’  Because the Inka had no written language apart from khibus, collections of knotted strings that served to tell some quantitative and qualitative message about certain aspects of their reality, much mystery still surrounds this civilization that came to its height in the early 1500’s, just as the Spanish were first landing on the shores of the ‘New’ World. 

            As I walked the path largely laid in large granite stones and meditated atop the terrace edges overlooking the magnificence of the mountains, I thought about the attraction of this place.  What specifically is it that draws 500 people a day to walk the Inka Trail and another 2500 people a day to tour Machu Picchu?  Personally, I largely felt two emotions: one of mystery and one of connection.  In this age of modern science, in which many of us are attracted to scientific explanation for natural phenomena and have given up a more spiritual search for meaning and direction in life, is there still a part of us that finds a certain peace in the unknown? Is there a subconscious piece of us, deep down in that buried soul of ours, that craves to be enveloped in something we can’t explain?  It very well could be the case that these sites were the settings for life as normal, where people gathered to eat, drink and live out their lives within a culture of limited and well-structured norms and interactions.  Yet we have created fantastical stories to describe the lives of these people that in reality we know very little about.  Pondering these things, I received a certain paradoxical satisfaction knowing that I would never truly know.

            The other emotion I was feeling, that of connection, had to do with my feet walking along a path carved some 600 years ago into the Andean mountains, and walked by a quantity of people the extent of which I’ll never know.  As well, touching the rocks, one placed on top of another in perfect cuts and with sound engineering, and wandering through the different structures in the sites, imagining one laying there to rest, another sitting there looking at the view or up at the heavens, I was immediately transported through time back possibly twenty generations of humanity.  In an age in which youth is so highly desired and age is so quickly dismissed as invalid, where much of the primary forests have been cut and ancient wisdom is disregarded, there was for me a certain satisfaction connecting with a people that lived so long ago.  As each new generation tries to reinvent the world, creating new solutions to new problems that arise rather than look to our past for guidelines that might enable us to live happier, more sustainable lives, these ancient temples reminded me that there is still wisdom to be learned from those that have come before us.  In a time in which change seems so rapid and permanence so fleeting, I felt myself more grounded than ever, my human existence deepening in the temporal direction and stretching its roots back in time.

            .....On the first night, after our late arrival at Camp One (Wayllabamba camp) due to some logistical difficulties of a lack of student ID’s at the checkpoint to enter the park (they are very serious about the logistics of this national park and world heritage site), I sat in the dinner tent, Meg and Tracey sitting across from me.  Tired from a long day of traveling and hiking, each of us stared into the journals in front of us, writing about our day, lost in our minds.  I put my pen down and looked into the faces of the girls sitting across from me.  They both had different looks on their faces.  My eyes panned down to their pens – although I could not make out what they were writing, I imagined them both writing very different words based on very different experiences, even from my own, despite the three of us taking the same steps that day.  Out loud, I wondered what it would sound like for all three of us to share the unique experiences we had each had on this very similar journey, and I was reminded once again that although we are all sharing a very similar outward journey, this trip is really all about the journey within....