Long Weekend in Machu Picchu: Getting There

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To Peru and Back in Less than Five Days

We step out of the Cusco airport—not named anything with the word Cusco in it—and walk into a National Geographic story. The short, old women with the skirts, the knee-length stockings, the men’s black hats are right here. A strange fellow with gangly body movements gets uncomfortably close taking pictures of us. Could it really be like this, or is my mind, following a late-night flight and gate change out of JFK, a delayed departure from Lima not because the plane isn’t there but because there are insufficient bus drivers to take us to it, followed by a healthy opportunity to chat with my fellow travelers while waiting for takeoff on the tarmac—just adjusting to Peruvian time? Why rush when you can go at the same old pace and still arrive at your destination?

What I wonder about from the second we step out of that airport is what exactly European invaders did to the indigenous people they found here. I don’t feel quite right describing them as Indians—isn’t that Christopher Columbus’s misnomer? Native, while apt, doesn’t seem quite right; or is a racist connotation just all in my head? Yet indigenous people seems so unwieldy.

I wonder whether Quechua is both a language and a tribe, and then I wonder whether the people here consider themselves to be members of tribes. Then I wonder exactly how tribe is defined. I don’t know that the people here ever felt compelled to organize themselves in some bureaucratic way. I don’t know that they really affiliate with this entity known as Peru.

I sense a disinclination for Spanish if they know English and they are speaking to tourists who don’t speak their language. This theme, of colonist versus the colonized, will be one that pervades my short stay here. Right away, I learn that the Spanish spelling of this city is Cuzco. It’s Cusco to the people.

Raul, our guide, describes himself as mestizo, part Amer-Indian, part Spanish. I decide to describe the people I see just as people.

—Lori Tripoli

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