When you’re only one country away, getting to Machu Picchu can still take a few days—even if you don’t hike the Inca Trail. First, you board two planes. Then, you may spend two days in the lovely city of Cusco in order to adjust to the 12,000-foot altitude and where endless color can be found… in the bonnet of a wee lamb,

 

 

… in the glow of the age of the cathedrals in Plaza de Armas,

 

 

… on all the doors painted blue and often covered in hearts,

 

 

… in the twirl of the skirts on the dancers we happened upon one evening in the Plaza,

 

 

… in the textiles and fruits and bread and meat all piled high at Mercado San Pedro,

 

 

… and in the wraps the women use to carry their belongings as well as their babies, strapped snuggly to their backs.

 

 

On the day you’ve been waiting for, you awake in the dark and take a two-hour bus ride followed by a two-hour train ride. The countryside is enveloped in mist, or so it looks like as the sun peeks over the jagged mountain line and shimmers against the dew crystalized across the fields of short crops. You might think about how long it has been since you’ve really seen morning dew like that. But it isn’t mist at all wrapped around you as the bus bumps along through the early morning. Really, you are in the clouds. When are things ever what they seem?

 

 

Then, another short bus ride along narrow dirt switchbacks to the top and a view of history so expansive, you realize almost immediately that the many and widely circulated photos you’ve ever seen of this world wonder haven’t come close to containing its essence.

To the right.

 

Head on (above), from behind (lower left), and up close (lower right). The original water supply/drainage system still works!

And to the left.

 

What you can’t sense in the photos are the breezes that wrap around your legs. Or the birds that hover and dance in midair before swooping down to the snaking riverbed far below both of you.

 

On the path to the Inca Bridge.

 

There is also the smell of the grass along the perfectly spaced and angled terraces, kept mowed by one of 16 llamas descended from the two that were initially introduced to the ruins some time ago.

 

 

There is the moment when the tour is over and you climb to the famous lookout point and rest on the grass nearby and try to take it all in so you can really remember what it feels like to be surrounded by an entire Incan village built over five hundred years ago, so isolated it was spared during the Spanish Conquest and fully protected until the last century. It makes you want to both be still and jump for joy.

 

 

And then it’s over for you and the couple thousand of tourists who visit on any given day. You descend the steep stone steps, get back on the buses and the train and crawl tired into your bed back at the hotel in Cusco before you wake up to fly back home. You have the feeling that you would love to come back, but wonder if you ever will.

 

Full moon over Cusco.