back to Part I

Part II Peru: Losing my Self in Ayahuasca
and
Part III Touring Peruvian Power Places with San Pedro, my Love and Machu Pichu pictures.

As I landed in Peru, I was sure that after going to Mars with Andre in Brazil, sitting in the jungle and drinking in the shelter of an ayahuasca camp set up for tourists was going to be like a weekend at the Hilton.

I would get a big surprise.

In Lima, the capital of Peru, live 8 million of Peru's 29 million people. A lot of people say that Lima is one huge crowded, noisy, dirty, and ugly urban mess. That is true, unless you've lived in Bangkok or New Delhi. If you have, then Lima is simply one huge small town. Thanks to the earthquakes, very few of the buildings are taller than six stories, thanks to the economy no one sleeps in the streets, and, due to the fact that there are very few motorcycles on the streets, it isn't noisy by Asian standards. The part of the city that I stayed in, Miraflores, reminded me of San Francisco.

For my first two weeks in Peru I studied Spanish and stayed with a Peruvian family. The family had heard about yoga and ayahuasca, but they never thought that they would actually meet someone who stood on his head, did meditation, and drank ayahuasca. It turns out that most urban Peruvians view ayahuasca the same way that many Americans view LSD— anything with hallucinogenic properties must make you crazy. The wife of the house asked me if I saw the devil when I drank ayahuasca. They also asked me if I was a member of the Hare Krishna sect.

At the school where I studied Spanish the staff saw me doing yoga stretches in the breaks and, again, several people asked me if I was a member of the Hare Krishna. (It turns out that the Hare Krishna sect is surprisingly popular in Peru.) I told the teachers that I wasn't a Hare Krishna and explained how the Hare Krishna sect fit into the world of yoga, meditation, and Buddhism. Later two of the teachers asked me to teach them meditation. They felt that they needed a break from an unhappy home life and thought that meditation might give them that space. They were so sincere that it was impossible for me to say no. With that settled, I opened up the meditation class to the entire school. On the day of the class more than half of the teachers and students stayed late for my two-hour class. They were perfect students. I hope that they keep meditating.

click to enlarge

I left for Iquitos and the jungle of Peru two days after my classes ended. The plan was that over a period of seven days the retreat center where I was staying would sponsor four ayahuasca ceremonies, with the last two following on consecutive nights. The history of that particular ayahuasca retreat center goes something like this: an American ethnobotanist married a woman from Iquitos, hired a shaman, built a retreat center in the jungle, and for the last 13 years has run once-a-month one-week retreats for foreigners, although the local people are welcome to attend.

The Center

Don Rober

The jungle setting, the food, and the accommodation were all wonderful, but the local shaman, Don Rober, stole the show. He has an incredible lightness of being and a huge joie de vivr. With his wide-open heart he does his best to help anyone who comes to him for mental or physical healing. This fact is not lost on the local population, a few of whom traveled long distances in canoes to ask for medical healing or to drink ayahuasca with him.

On my first morning there, just after sunrise, I went out to the ayahuasca kitchen where I knew that Don Rober would be cooking the week's supply of ayahuasca. By the time I arrived, he and his wife had already started brewing the tea. His wife's job was to tend the big pot of ayahuasca tea that was cooking on the open fire. Before Don Rober let her work, he blew smoke on the top of her head and around her body to spiritually purify her.

They boiled the tea until half of the water boiled away; then they strained the liquid out of one pot and into another which they continued to boil down while into the first pot was added more water, pounded ayahuasca vine, and fresh leaves. The Peruvians and the Brazilians call the leaves that they mix with the ayahuasca vine, chacruna. Chacruna, we can say, releases the power of the ayahuasca. As Don Rober worked through the morning he added various medicinal plants. One plant would help everyone have brighter visions, one was to heal anything wrong with the body, and another was to open the heart. Either you believe it or you don't.

It took them until late afternoon to finish cooking the ayahuasca.

Meanwhile I got to know the other members of the group of foreigners whom I would drink with. They included two bankers, a lawyer, a retired psychiatrist from the Netherlands, a house builder from L. A., a sound engineer, an artist/former Playboy Playmate of the month, and two computer programmers. Only three people out of the entire group, including myself, had ever tasted ayahuasca before.

That night, after my first taste of Don Rober's brew, I knew that this was going to be a very strong experience. Because they live in the world's biggest pharmaceutical factory, the Amazon Basin, the Peruvians can make the Johnny Walker Red Label of ayahuasca.

Every ayahuasca ceremony followed the same procedure. Don Rober, began with a speech to welcome everyone, encourage everyone, and keep everyone calm. On that first night he told us how, at the age of 11, he had started his apprenticeship to become an ayahuasca shaman. He started leading ayahuasca sessions at 18 and since then, he has taught and helped many people. He assured us that he was only interested in doing good work and that sorcery and magic played no part in his ceremonies. He then, with song and his leaf-rattle, blessed everyone there, one-by-one. With everyone psyched up and blessed, we walked up one-at-a-time to where he was sitting, and accepted a cup of ayahuasca from his hands. Because it was freshly brewed, the taste was not too bad. After everyone had downed a glass and all the candles were extinguished, Don Rober began to sing his ayahuasca songs, Icaros. Icaros are one-part chant and one-part song and are designed to take participants deeper into the experience.

Don Rober has an amazing repertoire of icaros, one of which, he told us on the second night, was designed to help people fall in love. It was those songs that had caused me to want to come back to the Amazon, for this, my second visit.

On that first night nearly everyone, including me, vomited. Later in the week the vomiting tapered off, but on that first night we all sounded like we had horrific food poisoning. On that night as well, as happened on a few of the other nights, one of the woman started sobbing and then let go with a torrent of tears and sobs. Don Rober continued singing through it all. It occurred to me that he had to have tremendous courage and well, love, to perfectly maintain the singing, knowing that he was leading many of us into a world that could be incredibly uncomfortable.

But outside of the vomiting, during that first ceremony, I didn't have any major problems with the ayahuasca. The second ceremony, however, was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life.

On that night other people reported having tingling in their toes or the sensation of pulsing energy. Some people saw interesting patterns of geometric lines. I wish that I had felt tingling or that I had seen interesting geometric lines.

Thirty minutes after I drank the ayahuasca I felt like someone was poking me with an electric cattle prod or a taser-stun-gun. At the same time I was thrown into the middle of the world's most over-powered strobe and psychedelic light show. At that point my beloved icaros became instruments of torture as they took me deeper into a hell realm.

It was overwhelmingly, as they say in Spanish, “whore-ee-blay,” horrible. Imagine being strapped into an electric chair to be executed with the whirring lights of a fleet of ambulances, fire trucks, and police cruisers blinding you. When the electricity surges through you, you're going to have a few seconds of terror and then die. I had the terror, but I didn't die, AND IT DIDN'T STOP!

What to do? The sensations were so overpowering that following my breathing or doing any kind of meditative technique was impossible.

What to do? I knew that most of the DMT, and with it the most dramatic sensations, would work their way out of my system in one or two of the longest hours of my life, but in the meantime there was nothing I could do, but wait for the hurricane to pass. Death, for at least some people, must be like that— pain and utter terror as the end gets closer. Prayer, deep breathing, counting the breaths, holding the breath, looking around, opening the eyes, shutting the eyes, and any other possible distraction was useless. This was simply totally whore-ee-blay, baby.

I believed from past experience that after the initial drama, things would become clear, even ecstatic. But that didn't happen either. Instead the lights from the police and fire departments and the electric shock gradually morphed into a horrific nausea. It was a bit like being very drunk and wanting to vomit, and then not being able to. When I've been really drunk that feeling lasts for five minutes or so. But with the ayahuasca it lasted almost three hours. Naturally, I tried to cultivate some kind of Buddhist non-attachment to it all, but after two hours I was too mentally exhausted to do anything except wish that the nausea would stop. Many times I bent over as if to retch, but nothing happened. WTF?

How, I wondered many times, is this doing me any good at all? Wouldn't it have been easier and a lot more fun, just to drink two 6 packs of beer eat a plate of greasy pizza and then buy a ticket for a three-hour ride on the world's most violent roller coaster?

The nausea was so bad that there was no room for thoughts or daydreams. Again, there was absolutely no escape.

At the end of the ayahuasca ceremony Don Rober pulled certain people, including me, who had previously asked him for medical help, to the center of the room to receive his own brand of therapeutic massage and healing (for me that means help with knee and back pain). As soon as he started working on me, at the very end of what felt like the longest night of my life, I started to feel better. That was a relief.

Gosh, so much for my week at the Hilton.

Now, I knew that I was in over my head. I wasn't ready for this and I couldn't handle it. The people who were new to ayahuasca still had some mental baggage to slow down their ayahuasca train. I was a freshly scrubbed kitchen-sink drain: nothing was going to stop that stuff from flowing through me like water down the drain. I was going to get hit with the full blast.

We weren't half-way through the week and I couldn't go on. A person is born with a certain amount of courage in the bank of nerves-- I had spent mine and there were no emergency reserves and no one to borrow from. It was time to make a new plan.

The next afternoon I talked to the ethnobotanist and Don Rober about what had happened to me. They said that eventually I'd learn to settle back, relax, and just let the ayahuasca do its work. They insisted that it was something uncomfortable in me that was making the ayahuasca so uncomfortable. Okay, I thought, but an electric cattle prod and a taser-stun gun by any other name are still a cattle prod and a stun gun and as far as I know, no one can relax when they are being beaten with them.

The two men looked at me, undoubtedly noticing the look of utter terror on my face, and said that if I wanted to drink just half as much during the next ceremony, that was fine.

Fine? It was wonderful! Clearly, I had been humbled. The man who had come from Brazil brimming with confidence and encouraging other people was now, keeping his god-dammed mouth shut.

When the third ceremony began, I couldn't have been more nervous, but I was confidant that I was going to have an easier time. Unfortunately, however, I was wrong again: Instead of tranquility, I got a repeat of the second ceremony. The only difference was that the electric shocks from the invisible cattle prod didn't come quite so often.

This time, with slightly longer breaks between the shocks, a few thoughts were able to appear on the computer screen inside my head. It was a little like being in a room that was filling up with water—to keep from drowning I could swim around and find air pockets, places to think, to keep myself going. At times like this I would guess that some people would pray or think about how much their mother loved them, how much they missed their girlfriend, the new car they were going to buy, or how nice it would be to sit down with a six pack of beer and a plate of greasy pizza. However, I decided that this would be a good time to mentally acknowledge and thank all of the people I had met on the spiritual path. That included Japanese, Thai, Burmese, American, and Indian monks and nuns, plus many very dedicated meditation teachers and a lot of sincere pilgrims. In my mind I tried to picture each one of them and mentally thank them for their life's work and what they had done for me.

Initially the thoughts came only intermittently, like lightning flashes in a huge storm, but gradually, the mind became very concentrated and, by the time the first tsunami of DMT (Dimethyltryptamine, the part of ayahuasca that is hallucinogenic) had passed through me, I was locked into a very deep meditative state.

With the concentration came, to my surprise, a river of tears. I tried to compose myself, but some kind of mental wall had been broken and the tears wouldn't stop.

Nevertheless, after an hour or so of ecstatic tears it occurred to me that this was just another mental trap and that the main idea with ayahuasca and meditation is to pull the mind back to the present moment and experience fully whatever is happening. In this case what was happening was that the ayahuasca was moving through my body and I was hearing Don Rober's icaros. I concentrated on both of those things, but the weird thing was that, even though the mind had changed focus, the ecstatic bliss continued.

The ceremony ended at two in the morning, but I was far to wired to sleep. Something deep inside had been shaken lose. I walked down to the river that flowed by the ayahuasca center, studied the stars, and then tried to relax by listening to music on my MP3 player. But I couldn't come close to being able to fall asleep, not for a second.

When the dawn finally broke, I felt pleasantly stoned but not the least bit tired.

The final ceremony was that evening. I thought about what to do. I had just been through two nights of being beaten with a cattle prod, I hadn't slept for more than 40 hours, I was more wired than an American soldier on patrol in Iraq, and here I was lined up to be shot! Did my mother raise a fool? No, I thought, I can't do it. I'm going to turn away from the firing squad, but stay for the parade.

Forget this stuff, I said, and anyway, who needs a self image, courage, or self confidence? Those things are for normal people. I knew that I would be the only person who didn't drink ayahuasca during the final ceremony. But I couldn't, I just couldn't, continue.

I did however, stay for the ceremony and it was very pleasant just to listen to the beautiful singing.

The strange thing was that after the ceremony, for the second night in a row, I couldn't sleep. I waited for the dawn by finding and playing my favorite songs on my computer's huge MP3 play list. Just after the first light, about 5 a.m. I took off my headphones, left the retreat center, and went for a walk in the jungle. What, I wondered, is happening to me?

That afternoon, while everyone else went on a boat ride, I was still too stoned to get in a boat. Fortunately, one of the staff there was a professional masseuse. She gave me a very good massage and at 11 that night after, more than 60 hours, I was finally able to sleep.

The next day we left the Amazon.

What happened? I wondered for days afterwards. Had I failed myself? Or did, in spite of myself, the ayahuasca heal me just the way it was supposed to?

I didn't have long to ponder that before another adventure would begin.

Part III Touring Peruvian Power Places with San Pedro, my Love.

Here's the theory. If you've ever been to the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Mount Kailash, Crater Lake, the Ganges at Varanasi, Ayers Rock, the Dome of the Rock or any other spiritually charged place on earth, you know that if you really want to experience that place the way pilgrims have for centuries, you need to somehow transform yourself. Just dropping by with your digital camera and taking a few snapshots is not going to do it. In some places you pray, in others you walk for days, chant, or take ritual baths like they do at Varanasi.(See my Western Tibet section for an example of a holy place that involves walking for days.) By doing a spiritual practice you stand a chance of finding the genuine value of those places. People go on pilgrimage for spiritual transformation and they do it because it works.

The witches market.

San Pedro.

Ceremonial staffs.

A traditional ceremonial knife.

A traditional mesa.

Peru has many spiritually charged places and one way to genuinely experience them is to do what the ancient Peruvians did: drink the boiled mescaline-filled juice of the San Pedro cactus.

San Pedro was traditionally known as wachuma, but after the Spanish arrived the locals decided that since wachuma was the “key to heaven” they might as well name it after the man who holds the keys to heaven, Saint Peter, or, in Spanish, San Pedro.

The San Pedro cactus turns up at odd places in Peru. The family I stayed with in Lima grew it in the front yard, they told me, to keep thieves away. One sees it growing outside many buildings in downtown Lima. It even grows just outside of many churches!

There's more. It's a very powerful drug. To help people focus the power of the plant the ancients developed all kinds of ceremonies, some of which have, in one form or another, survived. The ceremony that I got to know involved using meticulously arranged ceremonial objects placed on a table. The word for table in Spanish is mesa, hence the name of the ceremony, mesa. In my case the maestro arranged his power objects on his mesa and urged us to center our energy right there. He said that if we didn't do it this way, it would be easy for us to lose our focus, and, as they used to say about LSD, freak out.

I read once in the New York Times that the problem with crack cocaine is that it is so good that anyone who uses it once wants to do it again and again. Hence addiction is instant. According to the Times, with crack one can have in 15 minutes an experience equal to every pleasant moment one has had in the entirety of one's life.

My experience with San Pedro was that in about eight hours I could have an experience equal to every pleasant experience I've ever had plus every pleasant experience my parents and grandparents had ever had. In other words, it was unbelievably ecstatic.

Let me put it another way. Suppose you enjoy driving. How much more would you enjoy driving a Formula 1 racing car? Then imagine piloting a F15 fighter plane. Then imagine piloting the Starship Enterprise across the universe faster than the speed of light. San Pedro for me was the Starship Enterprise.

The maestro told us that San Pedro would take what ever mood we were in to extremes. For me, perhaps because the ayahuasca had already cleaned me out, that meant flying to distant galaxies. Other people had different reactions. One person in my group dreaded drinking it, one man found excuses again and again not to drink it, and two of the women in my group would drink it and instantly be transformed from middle-aged women into giggly teenagers who had just inhaled helium. Another woman would drink it and endlessly daydream about her boyfriend. Other times we all felt tremendously bonded because together we had what felt like a life-changing experience.

You can read detailed explanations of how to prepare San Pedro elsewhere on the Internet. Basically though, one simply takes a San Pedro cactus, and some varieties are better than others, and boil it until you have a cloudy soup. I always drank about a cup.

The taste is strong, but easily washed away with a glass of lemonade. After that there may be some initial nausea, which passes, and then, especially if one is in a sacred place or a “power spot” the space ship can leave the launch pad. The edge of the universe is the limit.

Naturally, I tried doing both traditional Buddhist mindfulness meditation and the loving-kindness or metta practice while under the influence of San Pedro. Sometimes when I would try a specific meditation practice, the San Pedro would have a different idea. So, for example, instead of focusing on my breathing, I would find that, more than ever before, I was captivated by watching my heart beat. The heart beat is too subtle for most meditation practices to deal with, but it can be fascinating. Death, after all, is only a heart beat away. At other times the plant took me to a place of pure ecstatic emptiness, which is what, in the end, mindfulness practice can do. Sometimes, when I could fly the starship, the mindfulness practice was so incredibly focused that I had the sense that I was, well, fully enlightened. When I would watch the breathing it was so wonderfully interesting to experience something like pure consciousness that I didn't want it to stop. That kind of feeling is fairly common with long-time meditators, especially those who have been doing a concentrated practice for weeks or months. San Pedro simply makes it possible in a few hours. With San Pedro, like meditation, I noticed, the body doesn't change much – the occasional aching back and the sensation that the knees are on fire can still happen even after the mind is razor sharp.

Herding goats through the town of Chavin.

Holding San Pedro.

The Catholic Church in Chavin.

Notice the San Pedro cactus.

Detail of the door.

The Amazon begins at Chavin.

View of Chavin de Huantar.

Temple wall with tenon head.

Tenon head.

Even more tenon heads.

The Raimondi Stela.

What is the right side up?

Chavin art or Picasso.

Metta practice was also ecstatic. With San Pedro I gained a curious insight into the way the ancients designed the loving-kindness practice. If you look at traditional descriptions of metta practice, often you'll see what looks like endless lists of things to wish happiness to. A typical list might include creatures that fly, crawl, swim, live under the ground, live in the north, northeast, east, south, southeast, southwest, heaven realm, worldly realm, all beings that are living, have been born, were ever born etc. With San Pedro it became clear that one reason those long lists were so long was because the people who made those lists were exploding with pure unconditional and ecstatic love and they didn't want it to stop. I wasn't any different. I would mentally repeat long lists of things again and again because I didn't want it to stop.

But of course the intensity of the San Pedro did stop. And, one can ask, what is the lasting benefit? That's always hard to say, but it does seem to give one a new perspective. Here is an example: just as I began the tour of Peruvian power places one of my relatives decided that he would clean out his basement and send the stuff that he didn't want, enough junk to fill a station wagon, through the mail to an address that I might end up at some time and then he would send me the shipping bill for hundreds of dollars. That might seem a little annoying to a normal person, but after piloting the Starship Enterprise around the galaxy for eight hours, I realized, hey, that's cool, I can deal with that.

People always ask what is lasting benefit of climbing Mt Everest or walking from Bethlehem to Jerusalem. In the end, no one can say but everyone is glad to have done it and often they long for the opportunity to do it again.

II Peruvian Power Places

One could spend many ecstatic months exploring Peruvian power places. I'll describe just two of them and briefly mention a third.

Chavin de Huantar is the oldest, and some would say the most powerful, of the ancient power places in Peru. First consider it's location. It lies at an altitude of 10,330 ft (3150m) and it is almost exactly in the middle of the Andes mountains which are second only to the Himalayas in size. Not only that, but the temple of Chavin is built just meters away from where two rivers come together to form the beginning of the largest river on earth, the Amazon. I read that Chavin is also near two of only ten Andean mountain passes. Plus it is in the middle of a spectacular mountain valley that seems to focus all of the mystical power of the Andes mountains right into that point. (If you've been to Hardware in India, where the Ganges comes out of the Himalayas, you know the feeling.)

Thus, we can say that Chavin is located in a natural axis mundi, a nexus point, a naval of the world, and was the perfect place for pilgrims and traders to congregate. (Other axis mundi, where heaven and earth meet, include Mount Zion, Mount Kailash, Mecca, and Crater Lake.)

Archaeologists believe that the first part of the Chavin temple was built about 900 BC with a major addition built around the time of the Buddha and Socrates, about 500 BC. The Chavin temple was designed to, as they used to say in California, blow the minds of visitors. To begin with, just to get there involved trekking over some of the most awe-inspiring scenery on the planet. Once there, the first thing visitors would see were fifty half-man half-animal statues looking at them from the wall that surrounds the temple. Inside the temple were tunnels and meditation cells that could be, if the ancients desired, filled with the sound of rushing water that they had diverted to run through the temple. Not only that, but temple masters could play the sound of the rushing water like a flute. The holes of the giant flute are still there.

There is no evidence of any kind of animal or human sacrifice at Chavin, it wasn't militarized, and it appears to have been open to men and women. How about that?

Besides the site itself, there are two pieces of art at Chavin that are world treasures. Deep inside the labyrinth of tunnels inside the older temple is a 15 foot (4.5M) elaborately carved Andean foot plow that is intricately and fascinatingly carved to represent the center of the world. And when you are there, you feel that you are in the center of of the world.

Another completely mind boggling artwork from Chavin is a 7-ft (2m) piece of polished granite called the Raimondi Stela. It is now in a museum in Lima. No one knows exactly where it was placed in the temple. If it was placed in the ceiling of one of the many rooms, viewers could ponder it from one direction for a while and then change position to look at it up-side-down—seeing the same art from a different direction as if they were seeing it for the first time. That is, looking at it one way one sees a god with a headdress and from the other way one sees a being descending from the heavens.

My experience was that over the last 2900 years Chavin hasn't lost any of its power and when I was there I was not in charge of the starship even though I could walk and speak. As I passenger on the starship the only thing I could do was watch my heart beat, one precious beat at a time, and watch my eyes well up and overflow with a river of tears.

As a place of pilgrimage Chavin seems to have faded out of popularity about 200 BC, but it was never conquered or destroyed. It simply waned. My guess is that, to put it in techno-speak, by that time everyone had home theatres so there was no longer any need to go to the multiplex. In other words, one theory goes that by 200 BC the technology of shamanism had spread far enough and well enough from Chavin that people no longer felt the need to make the pilgrimage. Indeed Chavin-inspired art has been found for hundreds of miles north and south of Chavin and its influence can be seen in Inca art. These days art historians consider Chavin to be the birthplace of Andean culture and civilization. Picasso, famously said, "Of all of the ancient cultures I admire, that of Chavin amazes me the most. Actually, it has been the inspiration behind most of my art."

Detail.	Snakes on the stairs.	Front of the temple.	The mystical portal.

Huaca Cortada in the El Brujo complex

Detail of Huaca Cortada.

Huaca Cao Viejo in El Brujo.

Detail in Huaca Cao Viejo.

This is not a mountain, it is a building.

Detail of the above building.

One of the civilizations in Peru that followed Chavin, and copied some of its art, was that of the Moche. The Moche civilization flourished from, according to whom you read, from about AD 100 to 800 AD. These guys weren't as laid back as the Chavin people – they were militaristic, had ritualized combat, and did the human sacrifice thing. Along the way they managed to build some huge adobe buildings including what some say is the largest adobe building that was ever built. From a distance, even now, those buildings look like high hills. It is only when you get closer and see the protruding rafters that you can believe that they were once functioning buildings.

Unfortunately severe El Nino rains have, over the centuries, collapsed many buildings and worn down the others.

A great deal of Moche art, however, survives in tact. The Moche, it turns out were masters of true portraiture and produced it in quantity. They never got around to writing or producing portraits of women, but their portraits of men are amazing and all the more so because the Moche were the only civilization in the Americas who, prior to European contact, had mastered the true portraiture.

Moche art.

The descendants of the Moche lasted until about 1470 when the Incas conquered them and looted their greatest city, Chan Chan, which was about 500 years old. The Inca took their loot, which included Chavin-influenced art, to Cusco, the Inca capital. When the Spanish got there they continued the looting and even changed the course of a river so that the river would wash away one of the mountain-like Moche buildings to reveal the gold inside it.

In Chavin I felt that my heart was beating out of my chest. In one of the Moche power places, El Brujo, I felt that well, my scrotum was being massaged by the invisible sex goddess. Later the maestro told me that at that particular place the Moche had, well, erected a temple to sex.

There is one more Peruvian power place that I can mention. Machu Pichu was built in the 1400s by the Incas just after they succeeded in greatly expanding their empire. There are more theories of the origin, use of, and decline of Machu Pichu than there are theories to finding a winning lottery number. The Machu Pichu theory that makes sense to me is that the ruler in the Inca capital of Cusco wanted a place to get away from the heat in the summer. Someone told him that the three-day-walk-away Machu Pichu location was spectacular. He agreed and the place was built. A century or so later everyone realized that the site was too expensive to maintain so they abandoned it. The location and the ruins are still spectacular--when people go there they feel good and are continually amazed, hence its popularity. I was there two days. In both days I arrived early and stayed late -- hence the lack of other tourists in the pictures that you can see by going here.