As visitor numbers at Machu Picchu increased through the 1930s and 1940s, Peruvian intellectuals of the ‘1909 generation’ were rediscovering their country’s indigenous roots. The indigenismo of important Cuzco figures like Luis E. Valcárcel and José Uriel Garcia sparked an Incan revival movement. Since then Cuzco has been regarded as the fountainhead of modern Peruvian identity. It has become common practice to reinvent Inca rituals, often based on the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century accounts of the ‘Incan historian’ Garcilaso de la Vega, and perform them at archaeological sites. The tourist industry has incorporated and marketed these rites.
During the 1960s, more affordable plane travel swelled the ranks of Guevara’s ‘degenerate tribe’. In 1954, just under 7000 tourists visited Cuzco, of whom only 400-odd were foreigners. By 1971, there were 40,000 foreign visitors alone.20 After the suppression of the Shining Path guerilla insurgency in 1992, tourist numbers soared to unprecedented heights, topping 1 million for the first time in 2012.21
Finally, after all the queuing and the checking of tickets, all of the plane-to-train-to-bus transfers, Dad and I were inside that famous landscape, and it was, inevitably, anticlimactic. No cosmic silence descended. No Andean wisdom welled up inside us. Machu Picchu didn’t seem as real laid out at my feet as it had in brochures, postcards, guidebooks and documentaries. All those steps, all those stones baking in the hard mountain sunlight gave the impression of wandering onto an abandoned film set. The way the walls seemed to move when you stared at them – an optical illusion caused by bricks of irregular sizes – contributed to the sense of unreality.
Our guide, Javier, wore a cowboy hat and waved a rainbow-coloured flag over his head. ‘This way!’ he cried, at the head of our tour group: 18 middle-aged Scandinavian psychologists, my father and me. Tourists often mistake the flag of the Incan Empire for the flag of the international gay pride movement. The truth is it’s little older, an invention of twentieth-century Peruvian nationalists. ‘This way!’ Javier cried, and led us, first to the terraced agricultural zone where llamas grazed, impossibly white, against the lush grass, then to the small stone cottages of the workers’ quarters, and finally to the Inti Watana stone, which points directly to the sun during the winter solstice. The Inca, Javier said, believed the stone held the sun in place. He spoke a peculiar, halting English, pausing often to adjust the position of the coca leaves stuffed into his cheeks, or to whip out a folder of laminated images that showed how certain sections of hillside or valley had been sculpted to resemble symbolic animals. Steena and Ingrid, and all the other Scandinavian therapists – hard-nosed advocates of evidence-based research in their professional lives – kept exclaiming: ‘Ah, yes! I can see it now. I can see the condor.’
‘Looks like a pile of old rocks to me,’ whispered Dad.
The old peak flooded with people as the morning wore on, the crowds overflowing the stone vaults and houses. And what bothered us was that we were undeniably part of the flood, not observers of it. Javier would dart around a corner, then scurry back, saying, ‘Too many people. This way. Vamos!’ Other guides could be heard explaining the same features in the same words as we rushed past, sometimes cracking the same lame jokes. Javier talked on and on. He told us the Inca had expertly quarried stone for 200 buildings from the surrounding hills. He told us works teams had shaped the stone and transported it using inclined planes. He told us they had built the city walls without mortar upon a terraced mountainside to better resist earthquakes and mudslides. He had uttered these words so many times they were as dead as stones – to him and to us.
We were enormously relieved when, after three hours, he finally let us explore on our own.
When you stand at the sun gate looking down on Machu Picchu, what you are really seeing is the West’s collective hallucination of how an ancient civilisation should look. The search for the ‘lost city of the Inca’, remember, began after the discovery of Troy and Knossos in Europe in the late nineteenth century.22 The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who visited Machu Picchu in the 1970s when he was already blind, saw the place as clearly as anyone. In an essay on Coleridge, Borges writes about the archetype of the ruined palace in the Western imaginary. Reflecting on the strange coincidence that both Kubla Khan’s ‘stately pleasure dome’ and Coleridge’s poetic evocation of it came to them in dreams, Borges concludes the palace must be ‘an eternal object’ that will be dreamed and re-dreamed across human history.23
In 1990, Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori authorised the construction of a cable car from the valley floor to the top of Machu Picchu. Improving comfort and ease of access, he argued, would boost tourist numbers and increase revenue at a time when the country was rocked by terrorist insurgency, hyperinflation and out-of-control government debt. Opponents claimed the development would damage the integrity of the site and boost tourist numbers to well over UNESCO’s recommended maximum of 2200 visitors per day.24 The decade-long conflict that ensued illustrates the tension between regional, national and international claims to the site.
At a time when many Peruvians were hungry, people still cared enough about the cable car issue to take action. Throughout the 1990s, general strikes regularly paralysed Cuzco, and protests by students and faculty members at the city’s two main universities attracted the attention of the local and international press. Hundreds of students began an annual tradition of walking from Cuzco to Machu Picchu in protest, completing in eight hours a journey most tourist hikers of the Inca Trail spread across three days, by marching along the train tracks. Peruvians abroad used their influence to lead a massive international letter-writing campaign to their government.
In 2000, as ongoing revelations of corruption and human-rights violations hounded his regime, Fujimori backed down, suspending the development indefinitely to carry out further environmental impact studies.
Late in the day, back in Aguas Calientes, we stumbled upon Tony Kidman sitting alone at the bottom of a staircase in the oncoming dusk. He gazed into nothingness, gasping for air, his face badly sunburnt.
‘Are you all right, Tony?’ Dad asked.
He seemed not to hear, and for a moment looked through us. Then he snapped to attention. ‘Ah, Tim. It’s you.’ He winced. ‘The altitude’s still knocking me around.’
‘That’s no good,’ said Dad. ‘What did you think of Machu Picchu?’
‘Hardly saw a thing.’
‘Too many stairs, mate?’
‘Too many years,’ he replied. ‘Far too many.’
In September the following year, we were saddened but not surprised to read in the papers that he’d died of a heart attack. He was only 15 years older than Dad.
Alejandro Toledo, Peru’s first democratically elected President of indigenous ancestry, was sworn in at the old Inca citadel before an audience of cabinet ministers and foreign presidents on 29 July 2001, the cameras feasting on the famous scenery. He had drawn upon his background throughout the campaign, kissing Incan amulets, donning avocado necklaces and having his supporters chant the name of ‘Pachacuti’. Toledo’s appealing story – from shoe-shine boy to Stanford-educated economist to presidential candidate – masked his support for the same orthodox, pro-market policies as his predecessor.
Soon after his election, Peruvian negotiators led by the country’s French-born anthropologist First Lady, Eliane Karp-Toledo, began pressing Yale University for the return of a large collection of artefacts – including bones, ceramic pots and Incan tools – taken from Machu Picchu by Hiram Bingham’s 1912–1916 expeditions.25 Having let the collection languish in boxes for decades, Yale scholars had commenced a new wave of research that was revolutionising understanding of the site. They were also in the process of putting together a major new exhibition of the materials.26 The approaching centenary of Bingham’s first visit to Machu Picchu in 1911 added symbolic weight to the negotiations.
The dispute rested on the interpretation of two decrees, one from 1912, the other from 1916, authorising Bingham t
o remove the artefacts from Peruvian territory. Yale argued they’d fulfilled the terms of both decrees by returning some, but not all, of the artefacts in the 1920s. The Peruvians countered that there was never any question that all objects were eventually to be returned – even if no specific timeframe was given in the decrees.
When Toledo crashed out of office in 2006, the public stoush continued. His successor as President, Alan García, was a representative of the old Lima elite who had never been overly interested in indigenous issues. But by this stage, even he could see the benefit of taking up the anti-imperialist war cry: ‘Either we come to an understanding regarding…Machu Picchu, or we’ll simply have to describe them as looters of treasures.’27 In 2008, his administration filed a lawsuit against Yale through the US court system.
In the end, Yale recognised the damage to their brand outweighed the value of the collection. In November 2010, they agreed to return all but a few of the pieces. As with the handback of Uluru to traditional owners in Australia, this compromise involved co-management of indigenous cultural assets that maintained their accessibility to a broader public. Yale and the Peruvian government jointly announced that admission fees from an international travelling exhibition would be used to build a new museum and research centre in Cuzco, where the North American university would assist in an advisory role. The scandal brought this modest collection of bones and pottery – notable mainly for being dug up from the most famous of all Incan sites – to the attention of an unprecedented public audience. In Cuzco, more than 70,000 people attended the exhibition in its first year back on home soil.28
After seeing Tony off at the station, Dad and I decided to kill the last couple of hours before our train back to Cuzco in the thermal baths that give the town its name. Aguas Calientes was almost wholly colonised by tourism. Souvenir stores and restaurants lined both sides of the polluted stream running down the main street. At the top of the hill were the baths. Having rented towels and board shorts from a little shop out front, we changed and picked our way to the poolside. There, four fetid brown pools of bubbling water were crammed full of raucous Peruvian families, with barely a foreigner to be seen. Salsa blared over the sound system. Kids were doing dive-bombs and backflips into the deepest pool while the adults drank Cusqueña.
‘Careful, gringos,’ said one woman, as Dad and I slid into the water beside her. ‘My sister has been farting.’
The sister shrieked and splashed her.
‘That’s all right, Dad and I have been holding it all day. Now we can relax.’
The women laughed, surprised we could communicate with them. They slid over to accommodate us. Both sisters were in their late forties. Their children were thrashing about, wrestling in the shadows, but neither husband was anywhere to be seen. They were drinking beer in the tub, with several empty bottles already balanced precariously on the edge.
‘¿De dónde vienes?’ asked the first, the cheeky one.
‘Australia. Ustedes?’
‘From Cuzco.’
‘And you came to see Machu Picchu?’
‘Yes, so the foreigners didn’t have it all to themselves on Independence Day.’
Her sister giggled.
‘You came all the way from the country of the kangaroos to see Machu Picchu?’
Dad interrupted to ask for a translation.
‘They want to know why we came to Peru.’ I told them my papá was a psychologist. ‘He came for a big conference in Lima. I’m his translator.’
‘A psychologist,’ said the woman. ‘Then you must help me with my oldest son.’
‘After a free counselling session, is she?’ said Dad. ‘Which kid is hers?’
‘He’s in Cuzco. He doesn’t like to go anywhere with his mother anymore. He’s sixteen.’
When she began to speak about her son, her whole demeanour changed: ‘His marks have dropped off at school. He has fallen in with a bad crowd. He misses classes and stays out late at night. I’m afraid he’s drinking or taking drugs. I’m afraid he’ll get his girlfriend pregnant. He won’t tell me where he’s been or with whom. When I try to talk to him, he shoves his headphones in his ears and turns up the volume. I’m afraid he will send himself deaf. It’s my fault he is suffering. It’s my fault he doesn’t know his father. How can I demand discipline from him when I was undisciplined at his age?’
This took some time to translate.
‘You who are an expert,’ she cried, as if she could make Dad understand through the vehemence in her voice, ‘what can I do to bring my boy into line?’
‘Tell her I’m not an expert on Peru,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what it is like to raise a child as a single mother in this country. All the literature says parenting varies a lot from culture to culture. If I was her therapist, I’d be able to meet with her son and hear his view. Without meeting him, it’s very difficult for me to give her advice.’
The woman listened patiently through the Spanish version of all this, nodding along.
‘But he must be a big expert,’ she replied. ‘He was invited to come a long way to talk. He must have something he can tell me.’
‘All I can do,’ said Dad, ‘is speak to her as a parent. I’ve been very lucky to have raised two fine boys. In my view, the only thing you can do if your son is lost is make sure he knows you love him. Let him live his own life. Let him make his own mistakes. If he knows you love him, he will always come back to you.’
I have a photo of us together at Machu Picchu, laughing in the sunlight. We are playing roughly, like brothers, tickling each other as a stranger takes the shot. Heads thrown back, bodies blocking the famous view: there we are on the old peak, with the young peak behind.
Uluru: How to Travel Without Seeing
While my library contains the works of travel writers, I have mostly searched for those who speak about their own place in the world.1
– Alexis Wright
I’ve spent my life gazing east. The Americas have obsessed me since my teens: rock-and-roll and the Beat writers, Latin American fiction and poetry. An east coast Australian, and a city boy through and through, it never occurred to me to see my country’s desert heart until my wife R was invited to Alice Springs in September 2014, the only Mexican to give a paper at the Ecological Society of Australia’s annual conference that year.
Flying home to the coast, I felt less confident in my use of the possessive pronoun. That smouldering, red-black plain didn’t feel like my country. The terrain was as dry and rough as a scab, with the same scorched palette of colours as the dot paintings I’d seen at the Araluen Arts Centre. I could see spirals and swirls hovering over the cracked red earth. Beside me, R was watching Charlie’s Country, Rolf de Heer’s harrowing film about Indigenous Australians’ experience of the Northern Territory Intervention. In 2007, the Intervention, an emergency response to allegations of alcoholism and child sexual abuse in remote communities, suspended the Racial Discrimination Act in order to apply blanket-coverage welfare and alcohol restrictions on Indigenous people in certain parts of the country, regardless of their behaviour as individuals.
Tears rolled down R’s cheeks. ‘Worse than Mexico,’ she said, dabbing her nose with a tissue. While in Alice Springs we’d visited Monty’s bar, a drinking hole fortified like a prison, where the security guard outside had looked her up and down as we approached, taking in her lovely golden skin, before deciding she was white enough, and swinging the gate open.
And then there was the Rock itself, that great, silent, ominous thing, crisscrossed by the gaze of footsore thousands. How could an outsider feel any connection to it? Less than a year earlier, I’d spent a fortnight in Peru with my father, playing the old Latin America hand. The truth was I felt less of a foreigner there.
Two boys built Uluru, playing in the mud after rain. Then, they travelled south to Wiputa, where they speared a wallaroo and cooked it. The wallaroo’s tail broke in the heat of the fire, so the boys threw it away. Today, a long crack can be seen in the hil
lside where the tail fell. Heading north, one of the boys threw his club at a hare wallaby but missed. A fresh water spring opened where his weapon struck the ground. When the first boy refused to tell where he’d found water, his companion nearly died of thirst. Finally, the boys fought to the death. Their bodies are preserved as boulders on the top of Attila, the flat-topped mountain whitefellas call Mount Conner.2
Uluru’s importance as a landmark has a practical dimension: it’s a sandstone monolith in the desert, marking a well-watered location. But for the Anangu, its significance derives from its position within a nexus of connected places: to the east the table mountain, Attila; to the north-west, Kata Tjuta’s unearthly red domes (the Olgas); and around the Rock, many smaller sites – Mutitjulu waterhole, Kantju Gorge, the caves at Kuniya Piti. Uluru stands at the cross-roads of a network of Dreaming tracks the Anangu believe were once followed by ancestral beings.
The name, as far as we know, is just a toponym. It may or may not have some relation to the Yankunytjatjara for ‘crying’ and ‘shadows’; it definitely doesn’t mean ‘island mountain’, as literal-minded white guides have told some visitors.3 We are a credulous bunch, those of us who approach the Rock longing for something deeper and older than the secular modernity of Australia’s coastal cities – hungry for significance, ready to believe. But if Uluru has a meaning, the Anangu aren’t telling.
Alice Springs is the gateway to the Rock. The 1872 inauguration of a Bush Telegraph Station in Alice – connecting Adelaide to Darwin and Australia to the rest of the world – saw more outsiders begin to arrive in the region. In its wake came labourers and bullock drivers, Afghan camel men, prospectors for gold and rubies, dingo-scalp hunters, scientists, government officials and anthropologists. The railway line, first to Oodnadatta, and later, in 1929, to Alice, also opened the interior to pastoralists. In the period from 1871 to 1891, which historian Dick Kimber calls ‘the bad old days’, 500 to 1000 Indigenous people were shot.4 Even as smallpox, measles, influenza and venereal disease badly impacted the Indigenous population, European incursion pushed them from their country into reserves and missions. Settlers’ overstocking of dry country, carelessness with fire, and widespread clearing of vegetation helped turn already arid land into desert.5 Broader ecological changes, including a catastrophic drop in the central Australian mammal population, undermined the traditional subsistence economy.
Requiem with Yellow Butterflies Page 11