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I stayed at a ramshackle wooden lodge on the site of the ancient Inca city of Machu Picchu and rose at 5 AM. Even the clerk at the reception desk was still asleep, wrapped in a woolen poncho and the chill of the Peruvian Andes.
I stepped out into the misty morning, into the high grassy plateau lined with beige stone buildings and took possession of the place, for myself. I always explore far from tourists. I don’t want a familiar companion along either. Not even the Peruvian painter I left behind and might love. Tending to his needs or anyone’s only distracts from entering into a new world, or in the case of Machu Picchu, a very old one.
I went into one of the stone houses without windows, where flint was once struck to light the lamps. In my imagination I became the woman in the old dimness, weaving cloth on a back strap loom. I conjured up a bench, some pottery, and thatch for the naked roof.
Back in the swirl of grey and white mist, I climbed steep granite staircases through levels of terraced farmland, and peopled the soil with ghosts of peasants hoeing.. I stopped to nod to the Inca gods inhabiting the sacred plaza above the fields and rested with my back against the temple wall.
As I sat puffing I thought, if I was going to spend all that energy on a slope, it should be on Machu Picchu. I went down to go up the center mountain at the far end of the green plateau. As I approached, it appeared no bigger than one of the hilly bumps in the Catskills.
I figured it would be an easy stroll. The people at the lodge had told me there was a path on Machu Picchu. I started walking the side of it facing the plateau, and wandered through wildflowers looking for the path. It wasn’t there. I realized I was on the wrong mountain and started laughing at myself. Every time I get on a plane for some obscure corner of the world, I wonder what trouble I will get into on the trip and how I will get out of it. I welcome the test.
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