Peru

Up again and at 4:30, we are in a rush to get from Cusco to Agua Caliente and onto Machu Picchu (MP). Bus to train to bus. We continue with our delightful young British couple from London, Paris and Dougie. So our tour group is small. At MP Adam from Australia joins us.

MP. MP is relatively small, housing only 1,000 folks at its best including slaves. It was undiscovered until 1912 and was uninhabited when the conquistadors came. Fabrizio speaks Incan and identifies as Incan (you may recall. that Martha, our guide in Lima, identifies as Mochi). So his portrayal of Incans was quite biased and placed them in the most favorable light with what I regarded as fanciful elaborations.

It took the Spaniards 40 years to subdue the Incas but my impression is that we know very little about them beyond what we can see in their engineering, their terraces and their pottery and what was buried with them.

What made the visit so wonderful for me was the astounding Andes mountains that soared into the sky and plummeted to the valleys below us. Pictures just cannot capture the depth and grandeur. My attempt: Pics 1,3,4,5,8,9 and 18. It was a magnificent feeling seeing nature on such a scale.

Most importantly, with a thousand inches of rain a year and fog common, we were lucky. Just as we were leaving the fog swept in. Pic 20. Then later on the ride down, rain. Later visitors would have missed the best part.

Returning to Cusco. Unlike the fancy trip out with Alpaca and Lima farms, the trip back goes through small towns. Martha had said average folks earn $400 a month (1,500 sol) in Lima while Fabrizio said that folks earn about $267 (1,000 sol). Hard to reconcile this with a low key Indian dinner in Cusco for 200 sol. Amit booked us, with the power of his points, in a JW Marriott that was a convent.

On the way back, as elsewhere, a lot of buildings are only partly constructed. It's as if a financial apocalypse happened. Although I don't have a complete answer, it would seem that COVID and poliyical instability have dried up.funds. Here's what the World Bank says:

"Peru has completed a decade of relatively low growth, averaging 2.3 percent between 2014 and 2023, with one in three Peruvians living in poverty. These results stand in stark contrast to those obtained in the previous decade, when the economy grew 6.4 percent and poverty declined from 60 percent in 2004 to 33 percent in 2013."

Now, Peru is an "upper-middle-income economy."Read more