A few years ago, I was actually able to save up some money and went to Machu Picchu, the historical sight in Peru... my wife is Peruvian but she had never had the chance in all the years she had lived there to visit...the plane was just skimming above the mountains that were protruding through the swirly-whirly clouds...so much so that I picked my feet up so they wouldn’t hit the top of the mountain and cause us to crash......you have to take a five hour train ride to reach the ruins...which I was ok with...I love trains...especially ones that just meander along and don’t care how long they take to get somewhere...I don’t care much for bullet trains...you know like the ones they got in Japan that go from like Tokyo to Mt. Fuji in like two minutes or something crazy like that...there’s few places in the world that you need to get to that fast...so anyway, the train zigzags up through the mountains and next to a river that like your life itself, doesn’t know where it’s going but it gets there anyway...we made some stops at some one alpaca villages along the way dotted with brick and grass huts with dirt floors...you could see them because the doors were sometimes open to let air in some of the cooler mountain breezes that would occasionally come and try to neutralize the hot Andes sun...or Sol s.o.l. as they say... I met a lot of interesting people...natives who would come up to the train windows when the train stopped to catch its breath in this high altitude, wearing colorful traditional dress and they’d be selling corn with kernels the size of quarters...cute Inca girls with 100 watt smiles... and just to make you feel at home, they had Coca-Cola too....there was a guy and girl who were backpacking all over South America, after having done so in Western and Eastern Europe... and I talked to them about their free spirit travels and they had a lot of great stories to tell...out of envy, I hated them for it...once we got to the site, we took a tour and they pointed out all the essential need to knows...we took some steps that were practically vertical going up and death defying going down...now’s no time to slip or trip...or have drank too many Pisco Sours, the national drink of Peru…(my wife’s sister-in-law is an expert at making them)...if you miss the train going back, you’re another kind of s.o.l...unless you’re wearing your pants with the deeeeeeeeeep pockets...it’s unknown why the Incas decided to abandon Machu Picchu...maybe they couldn’t get wifi there...or their satellite TV reception was poor...or it was just too hard to get to since they didn’t have trains back then...what a total drag it must have been to have to walk everywhere...yeah, they had the Inca Trail but you ever tried to walk that?...I mean I complain about public transportation as much as the next guy, but having to walk everywhere would just suck...it is thought by the intelligentsia that they did not want the Spanish invaders to find it and destroy it...there were a lot of invaders there now...some American, some European, and some bucket listers...those kind of annoying ass people that have got to tell you at a party what they scratched off their bucket list recently...or those kind that just have to tell you how many countries they have been to or how many continents they’ve visited...and show you hundreds of selfies with them smiling and doing stupid poses in front of stuff...yeah, like I give a flip...I overheard a couple of them talking and they were not talking about Machu Picchu itself; its beauty, or its historical significance...no, they were already talking about where they were going to go next; as if the world itself was just a game board like the ones children play with, and the object was to travel around the board like a small game piece, and get to the finish line first...personally, I hope they don’t pass go and collect $200...I hope they go directly to jail.
