Peru – an Initiation Journey – Part 3

On of the climaxes of my journey to Peru was – of course – the famous ancient inca city Machu Picchu 

It was a long journey. At first a 30 minutes by bus – then 1.5 hours by the cosy and serviceminded Machu Picchu train.

Upon the arrival at the last station, the queue to the bus was huge – very huge. Luckily, there were a lot of busses, so when bus no. 19 arrived, our group was happy and eager to enter the bus. Alas – the bus didn’t drive for long – until it suddenly stopped. Something was wrong with the bus, so we had to leave it again and wait for the next one -no. 22, which drove us for the next 20 or 30 minutes up – following extremely narrow mountain roads to Machu Picchu. If you suffer from fear of heights, I wouldn’t recommend you to look too much our of the window of the bus. If you do so, you will notice a very steep way down to the bottom. Add to this that the bus drives very close to the roadside.  

Magnificent sight of Machu Picchu. Everything felt “right and familiar”. I sensed that the most of our group felt the same way. At the same time, I felt a deep honor and humbleness by getting to experience this. Everything here was so refined and filled by ancient Inca history, which also includes a lot of suffering.

Walking around within the temples of Machu Picchu

The site of the Condor, Machu Picchu

We spent some exciting hour on this historical Inca city. Walking from site to site – from temple to temple – wondering about all the people, who used to live here was rather surreal.  Juan and Ivan Nuñez del Prado lead us through the history look here: Machu Picchu History (more links below the blog).

The site of the Condor, Machu Picchu

Of course, we went through several ceremonies, before we went back to the entrance.  F. eks. forbandt i os til den store kondor ved kondorens sted.On our way out, we were watched by two chinchillas, living there. Number two is sitting at the right top of the photo

Walking down the mountain again to enter the bus queue, we found that the queue was extremely long. We had to wander several 100 meters in order to enter the back of the line. Ivan told us that this was the longest line, he had ever experienced. Stating that  Ivan sagde, at det var den længste kø, han nogensinde havde oplevet her. We waited for at least 1.5 hours, before it was our turn to get on a bus downhill.

In the meantime, we enjoyed the sight of a beautiful flying hummingbird, which unfortunately didn’t want to be photographed. Ivan told us the legend about the hummingbird:

Female hummingbird, photographed by Keith Johnston (Free Images)

At the beginning, the condor was the king of Machu Picchu, but this was changed, when all the birds decided that they would have a competition to find out, if the condor was to keep his title as the king of Machu Picchu. The bird, being able to fly the highest op towards the sun would be the winner. The condor was sure that it had won, when it had lost sight of the other birds below. Then suddenly, the tiny hummingbird appeared from the feathers under the wings of the condor and flies even higher up than the condor.

By this, the hummingbird became the king of Machu Picchu.

A few days later, we experienced an very spectacular incident in connection with one of our many ceremonies.

The Inca ruin Moray of Urubamba

We visitted the Inca ruin Moray of Urubamba – 7 circle formed terraces. In beforehand, we had obtained a special permit, allowing us to climb all the way down to enter all the various levels. Furthermore, we were to bring a guide on the tour. In spite of this, other guides started fluting loudly, already when we entered one of the first terraces to do our ceremonies.

As this went on and on, Juan decided that we had to forget about the last level and climb up again. We were very disappointed by this, because we were really “attracted” to the last level. But we had to adapt to all the flutists in order to cleanse out all the hoocha (heavy energy). I guess they don’t have any staff meetings at this place. Or maybe the beans are sour in Peru as well  🙂

El Niño Compadrito is an authentic skeleton of a child, who is worshiped, because many persons claim that they have received miracles from El Niño Compadrito. The skeletton of El Niño Compadrito was found after he had helped a little boy to find his way home to his nervous parents after an outing in the forrest. 

We visited this child mummy and gave him our wishes, in order to receive his blessings. Also, we bought candles to burn afterwards in a room next the Niño del Compradito.

Suddenly, when standing in this room,trying to light up my 9 candles, there was a smell like the fur of a dog being burned – or  – ups – my beautiful poncho. Luckily, there was a woman in the same room, who helped me fight the fire, before it had any severe consequences.

Juan Nuñez del Prado and Esther Økær

The fourth and last part of my story will tell you about the famous egg in the cathedral of Cusco. And – as promised in part 2 – we also go for a quick visit to Copacabana 🙂

More links for the history of Machu Picchu:

History.com

National Geographics

(Bloggens indhold er ikke sponsoreret/contents of the blog have not been sponsored)