It was named one of the “new” Seven Wonders of the World in 2007 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983. Probably a large percentage of the world’s people can easily recognize its distinctive silhouette. And because way too many of us choose to visit Machu Picchu, the legendary Incan “lost” city in the Andes Mountains, the Peruvian government is soon planning to limit the number of daily visitors to protect their most famous site from damage caused by its huge popularity.

I’m glad I got to see it this past summer.

I first read about Machu Picchu as a Spanish student at A. C. Jones High School in the 1960’s, and the mysterious city has fascinated me ever since. I had always wanted to visit the spectacular ruins, but hadn’t gotten around to it…

…until last spring, when my cousin Patsy Chesnutt Tucker of Buena Vista, Colorado called to tell me that she was planning to visit Machu Picchu, and did I want to go with her?

Ellen, the Tuckers’ second daughter, now a senior at Buena Vista High School, was spending the summer in Cuzco as a volunteer for a church project, helping with their music program, translating for visiting doctors and teaching art to children in isolated mountain villages. Her older sister Laura had spent the summer following her freshman year at the University of Texas at Austin working with a similar program, and both of the girls had taken advantage of their stays in Peru to visit the famous Incan ruins.

Patsy had decided that it was her turn to do likewise—and it took me about 30 seconds to make up my mind to accompany her!

Her husband Shannon is a business computer consultant, so the Tuckers are accustomed to arranging their travels online. Patsy located a Peruvian travel agency with a good website, an excellent reputation and a tour package just right for us--and our trip was easily lined up.

As I began reading about Peru, the Incas and Machu Picchu, I wondered how my body would react to the highest altitudes I have ever visited. Cuzco is 11,000 feet above sea level, and Machu Picchu is at almost 8,000 feet. Many tourists suffer from “soroche,” altitude sickness, and I was a bit nervous about how I’d do.

Patsy came to visit our uncle Fred Chesnutt for a couple of days in late July, then we set out on our adventure. We flew out of Houston in the late afternoon of July 30, crossing Central America with enough light to see both coasts and some of the mountainous terrain, probably of Belize and Honduras. We arrived in Lima, still at sea level, late that evening, after a six and a half hour flight.

After spending the night in a pleasant bed and breakfast in the embassy district of Lima, we returned to the airport for our flight to Cuzco. For a little over an hour we flew over rugged mountains, with little or no vegetation or visible civilization, other than an occasional zigzagging road that I definitely did not wish to travel.

In Cuzco we were met by a travel agency representative and Ellen, who joined us while we were in the ancient Incan capital, whose name means “navel of the universe” in Quechua, the language which some 80% of Peruvians still speak.

At the Hotel Arqueológico we were greeted with cups of coca leaf tea, one of the most common recommendations for countering altitude sickness. While the tea is made from the same plant used for cocaine, “mate de coca” is a mild herbal beverage which is legally sold in grocery stores. However, a doctor in one of our tour groups said that it would show up positive in drug tests, so she declined to drink it!

Coca has been cultuvated in Peru since 6000 BC and is called the “sacred leaf” by the native Peruvians, who believe it takes away their tiredness and nourishes their bodies. In order to produce the addictive and illegal cocaine, huge quantities of the leaf must be mixed with chemicals, and most Andean people do not approve of that production.

Either the coca tea was very effective or my body adapted very well, for I had no problems other than having to stop and catch my breath frequently when climbing Cuzco’s many stairs and steep streets. I have the same reaction in central Mexico, when my Spanish students and I climb the mountain of Tepoztlán.

Cuzco may be the most picturesque city I have ever visited, and I’ve been to some very good contenders for that title. The walls of many buildings in the Incan city, including our hotel, were extended upward on the original stone walls constructed many years before Francisco Pizarro and his Spanish army conquered the Incans in 1532.

In that ancient site we connected Ellen’s laptap computer to the hotel’s Wi-Fi and sent e-mail messages home to Texas and Colorado!

The guidebooks advise taking it easy the first day at high altitudes, so we decided to stroll around the downtown area near our hotel. We visited the obligatory “stone of 12 angles,” one of many examples of the impressive stonework in Cuzco,

In most of the cities they conquered, the Spaniards destroyed the original buildings and constructed churches and government buildings on top of them. However, the Incan walls throughout the empire were so well built that it was evidently easier to build on top of them, rather than to tear them down. As a result, one gets the feeling of being in the Incan city approximately as it was during the 15th century.

The Incans interlocked the stones together with carved pegs something like Lego toys; the fact that they used no mortar allowed the walls to shift without falling down during earthquakes. The walls are angled at the base, and doors and windows are trapezoidal, which provides additional strength. As a result, Incan walls have survived numerous earthquakes, whereas Spanish constructions have not. Modern day Peruvian architects are now employing Incan building techniques!

We wanted to try traditional Peruvian food, so Ellen took us to one of her favorite restaurants, where we began with “chicha morada,” a non-alcoholic beverage made of purple corn and tasty spices. “Palta rellena” was next—a huge avocado stuffed with a creamy potato and vegetable salad, followed by “ají de gallina,” chicken in a mildly spicy chile sauce.

But the dish Ellen had been looking forward to trying was “cuy al horno”—roasted guinea pig! The small animals have been raised and eaten for special occasions by the Andean people for centuries.

It turned out to be the most expensive meat we have ever tasted, for guinea pig has very little meat on its bones. One has to hunt for it. The taste was somewhere between chicken and pork, not bad, but not tasty enough to repeat the experience. However, we can now say that we’ve eaten guinea pig!

The next day we joined six other American tourists for a guided tour of Cuzco’s most important sites, starting with the Cathedral on the Plaza de Armas, the main square. Of course, the church was built on the site of an Incan temple. Unlike the many Incan walls in the city, the Spanish-built structure has been destroyed by earthquakes and rebuilt. One of the most famous statues of Christ is known as the “Lord of the Earthquakes,” for Cuzcans believe that, after being placed in the cathedral, it has saved the city from subsequent sysmic destruction.

The Church of Santo Domingo was built over the walls of Qoricancha, the spectacular Temple of the Sun where the Spaniards found many statues made of gold and silver in the huge garden below the temple, which was itself decorated with the precious metals and with diamonds, emeralds, turquoise and other beautiful stones. For the Incans, the gold, silver and jewels represented the sun, the moon and the stars, respectively,which were their principal deities. There was no personal possession of the riches which the Spanish so feverishly sought.

Sadly, the beautiful statues were melted down into gold and silver bars and sent back to Spain to finance their wars.

Our next stop was Sacsayhuaman, the huge fortress overlooking Cuzco. It is constructed of many six-foot high stones which were brought to the mountain by thousands of workers and carefully fitted together. And from there we had a spectacular view of Cuzco, which in Incan times was shaped like a puma, with two rivers forming the tail, the downtown area the body, and the fort, the head.

We also visited Tambomachay, the temple of water, which had an underground aqueduct system carrying water some 12 kilometers to the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco. At Q’enko we saw the cave where Incan bodies were mummified for their afterlife and where animal sacrifices brought the condors, which represent the heavens, down to commune with humans, represented by the pumas. Snakes symbolize the underworld.

Our guide explained that the “chakana,” the symmetrical Incan cross with three steps on each side, depicts these three stages of the Incan universe, and the hole in the middle represents Cuzco, the center of their world.

That night we attended a colorful ballet folklórico performance combined with a lavish Peruvian buffet with so many choices we couldn’t try them all. Another traditional dish we enjoyed was alpaca meat, and we enjoyed tasting the popular pisco sours.

Sunday morning we joined a couple from Arizona and a native Peruvian doctor and his family from Ohio for our tour to the popular artisan market at Pisac, in Peru’s Sacred Valley, the heart of the Incan civilization. On the way we saw the well-designed terraced mountain sides where Incan descendants still raise corn and many other vegetables.

We stopped at a sanctuary where injured mountain animals are nursed back to health. There we got to see up close two pumas, several llamas and alpacas, an ocelot, three condors and several other animals.

After purchasing beautiful woven alpaca items at the Pisac market, we continued to the village of Ollantaytambo, where we climbed some 275 steep steps to another fortress/sun temple overlooking the valley. Our guide pointed out the rock quarry across the river, at least a mile away, from which the huge stones were dragged across a ramp (now a road) and up the mountain.

After a late lunch Patsy and I were dropped off at the Hotel Pakaritampu (Quechuan for “dawn”) while the rest of the group returned to Cuzco. Perurails controls the number of tickets a travel agency can purchase from each location, so some tourists travel to Machu Picchu from Cuzco and others from Ollantaytambo.

We were fortunate to draw the latter option, for our beautiful little hotel was five minutes away from the train station, where we were to be at 7:00 am the next morning. We walked back to the main square and enjoyed shopping in the local market and looking around the ancient farming village with the original acueducts constructed by the Incans. Our hotel had spectacular flowers in the extensive, beautifully groomed gardens, as well as a pen of llamas for us to visit and a telescope for viewing the stars.

Monday morning we boarded the Hiram Bingham train, named for the Yale University professor who first stumbled onto Machu Picchu in 1911 and brought it to the world’s attention. According to our tour guides, after the Incans saw what the Spaniards had done to Cuzco and the surrounding areas, they obliterated all signs of the trails to the beautiful mountain city which arqueologists now believe was a resort for the Incan rulers. Our train had comfortable, old-fashioned arm chairs and tables reminiscent of early twentieth century passenger trains.

After an hour and a half of spectacular river views with towering, snow-covered mountains in the distance, we reached Aguascalientes, the small tourist town crammed into the extremely narrow Urubamba River valley, just below Machu Picchu.

When our guide met us at the station, he asked us to wait a minute while he ran a quick errand. While standing at the station gate, I heard someone call out, “Señora Past!” Former Coastal Bend College Spanish student Reneé DeLisse and her college friend were getting ready to board the train back to Cuzco, from where they were travelling to Lake Titicaca, after having completed their visit to Machu Picchu. Our paths crossed at exactly the right time!

At last we were ready for our long-awaited destination. We boarded a Mercedes Benz bus painted with the famous view, one of a whole fleet of buses which take the less ambitious tourists up the very steep mountain road with 14 hairpin turns, a 20-minute nerve-wracking ride during which we simply reminded ourselves that the bus drivers make that trip numerous times every day. We saw backpackers slowly climbing the even steeper trail to the ruins and were happy we had opted for bus transportation.

According to our guide, the buses and everything man-made in Aguascalientes are brought in by train. There are no roads to the town, and the buses are the only vehicles.

Our guide, the grandson of an Incan shaman, left us at the entrance, with instructions to climb up the trail to the left of the guardian’s hut to take our “post card” picture of Machu Picchu, then to meet him and the young couple from Arizona (who were coming in on a later train from Cuzco) at the gate an hour later.

We had our passports stamped at the entrance—yes, Machu Picchu is an official destination!—then followed the trail around the mountain, and there it was: that internationally famous view, MOSTLY LOST IN THE CLOUDS! We had goosebumps, anyway, for we could see enough of the beautiful ruins to appreciate the incredible Incan architecture.

And we took our surreal postcard pictures with the Huaynay Picchu, the tallest of the city’s two famous mountain backdrops, disappearing in the clouds.

From our guide we learned that Machu Picchu was constructed between 1438 and 1650 and probably served as a hidden refuge after the Spanish conquest in 1532.

The city of 1200 was abandoned in 1650, possibly because an Incan woman had brought her Spanish lover or husband to the city, he said. Their slain bodies were found at the sun gate, the entrance to the city used by all who came by the Incan trail from Cuzco. Evidently the residents of Machu Picchu fled to the jungle after that invasion and the site was abandoned and forgotten.

We saw the sun tower, with one window through which the sun shines directly on June 21 and another perfectly located for the sun’s rays on Dec. 22. Like Qoricancha, those windows had pegs around them to which gold trim was originally attached.

In addition to the royal sector, we visited the farming sector with multilevel terraces where corn and quinoa were the major harvests, and the urban sector where the workers lived. We admired the fountains on 16 different levels, with filters to clean the water as it descended the mountain so that the water was just as clean at the bottom as it was at the top. We saw the Temple of the Condor, whose form we could appreciate better because we had seen the real thing the day before.

Nearby was a cave where mummies in fetal positions were entombed. Our guide said his grandfather’s theory was that the condors take the spirits of the dead back to the valleys, where they are reincarnated as babies, hence the fetal position.

That afternoon we hiked the trail to the Inca Bridge, an ancient draw bridge on an amazing trail across the sheer face of a tall vertical rock wall. The Machu Picchu dwellers could remove the three logs that crossed the chasm between two sections of the trail and render it impassable to enemies.

I’m not afraid of heights, but I defnitely don’t like unprotected edges, so I endured the hike by hugging the rock wall. The scenery was worth it!

As we hiked around the spectacular site, we heard other tourists speaking Japanese, French, German and Portuguese, as well as British and East Indian English. All the world loves Machu Picchu!

We watched the sun disappear behind the mountains, then took the bus down to Aguascalientes, where we ate at Urpi’s, at Ellen’s recommendation. She said the food was excellent in spite of the name with an unfortunate English association; “urpi” turned out to mean “dove” in Quechua. I enjoyed delicious mountain trout and Patsy ordered another plate of alpaca.

After spending the night in a quaint little hotel where the pleasant sound of the river flowing over large rocks lulled us to sleep, the next morning we returned to enjoy the parts of Machu Picchu that we hadn’t had time to see the first day. This time there were no clouds, and we were glad to have had two very different views of the beautiful city.

We poked around in the residential areas and climbed to the Intihuatana, the “hitching post of the sun,” as it is called, at the highest point of the royal sector. Incan astronomers studied the Southern Cross from that location. In fact, Machu Picchu is located between four mountains which imitate the famous southern constellation.

After a picnic lunch, we took the bus back down the mountain to the museum where artifacts found at Machu Picchu are displayed. Then it was back to Cuzco by train, this time with a domed top which provided dramatic views of the distant snow-covered peaks. And, after serving us tea and tarts, the young waiters first donned traditional costumes and danced for us, then provided a fashion show of stylish alpaca sweaters.

One more night in the Hotel Arqueológico, and a morning to visit the Convento de la Merced, built in 1653, known for a beautiful monstrance with the world’s second largest pearl, carved in the shape of a mermaid, whose tail represents Jesus the fisherman and body symbolizes humanity.

We learned that the missionaries used lots of gold in the Peruvian churches to attract the indigenous people to Christianity, since they were accustomed to identifying gold in their temples with the sun god. Many of the statues of the Virgen Mary in the churches we visited had robes shaped like mountains and golden sun rays around their heads.

On the way to the airport we saw the large statue of Pachacutec, the Incan emperor responsible for many of the beautiful structures we had seen in Cuzco. A great urban developer, he is compared to Alexander the Great and to Genghis Khan.

Sadly we flew away from the beautiful city of Cuzco, the “archeological capital of the Americas” and the continent’s oldest continuously inhabited city.

Back to Lima to spend a totally different evening in the very elegant, very modern shopping center LarcoMar, on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. After dinner in a pretty restaurant with an ocean view, we visited the Museo de Oro (Gold Museum) and admired pre-Incan metal masks, knives, jewelry and metal-working tools.

For our last day in Peru, we toured Lima’s Plaza de Armas, which dates from the 1535 founding of the city. Spanish conqueror Francisco Pizarro’s body is entombed in the large 18th century cathedral, which has been destroyed by earthquakes and rebuilt numerous times. We saw the Government Palace, on the site of Pizarro’s own house, then walked to the Church of San Francisco for a tour of its famous catacombs.

After a delicious lunch of ceviche, shrimp and fish at Restaurante Segundo Muelle (Second Dock) near our bed and breakfast, we strolled through an ancient olive grove planted by early Spaniards who imported the original trees, then visited a huge adobe pyramid, la Huaca Huallamarca, a burial site dating back to 100 BC where many mummified bodies have been excavated, along with their weaving tools and cloth.

As we waited for our overnight flight back to Houston, I read a beautiful book of photographs and essays I had purchased at our guide’s recommendation in Ollantaytambo: “Sabiduría y Amabilidad de la Pachamama: Magnífico Ollantaytamo y Machupicchu,” (“The Wisdom and Kindness of Mother Earth”) written by Washington Gibaja Tapia, an Incan Machu Picchu guide. (I’d like to know the story of his name…)

He writes, la Pachamama has projects for millions of years, not just for “right now.” She taught the Incas to respect one another and the beautiful earth, to think of the generations who would come after them, and to build structures that would last 1,000 years.

Perhaps we need to take some lessons from the Incas.