Turn Right at Machu Picchu: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time

by Mark Adams

At its height from 1438 to 1532, Cusco had been the heart of a kingdom that ruled ten million subjects and stretched twenty-five hundred miles up and down the Andes.

Scientists have calculated that there are thirty-four types of climatic zones on the face of the earth. Peru has twenty of

Imagine a history of modern Iraq written by Dick Cheney and based on

authorized biographies of Saddam Hussein published in Arabic, and you’ll get some idea of the problem historians face.

“There’s a general law in life,” he said. “The body and mind only get stronger when they’re traumatized.”

Johan Reinhard’s Machu Picchu: Exploring an Ancient Sacred Center. In it, Reinhard suggests that trying to understand places like Machu Picchu and Vitcos as individual, self-contained sites misses a larger point. These monuments were built in relation to the sun, the stars, the mountains—and to one another.

the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s explanation of the difference between calling something beautiful and calling it sublime.

In Kant’s epistemology, it meant something limitless, an aesthetically pleasing entity so huge that it made the perceiver’s head hurt. Machu Picchu isn’t just beautiful, it’s sublime.

Should you find yourself in Cusco en route to Machu Picchu, I highly recommend that you stop for a drink at the Cross Keys Pub.