Photos

Most photos of Machu Picchu show the ruins and the setting, and I've got plenty of those. But there is also the old Royal Inca Highway - actually a footpath less than half a meter wide - which once connected Machu Picchu with Cusco and other cities of the Inca empire. From Machu Picchu, the highway leads up to the Gate of the Sun ("Intipunko") at the entrance to the valley. We were staying overnight at the ruins and had decided to hike up to the gate the next morning.

There are a number of hiking tours that take people from Cusco to Machu Picchu over several days (and several very high passes), and they hire porters to carry most of the baggage for the visitors. We passed this group of porters who had stopped on the highway to take a coca break - coca leaves (the source for cocaine) have been used for centuries to help people cope with high altitude. At least one and possibly two of the porters seen here are chewing the leaf. Coca leaves, and maté de coca (a tea made from the leaves) are legal in the Andes, even if the processed product is not. This traditional use of the raw leaf to prevent altitude sickness (and it does work) is one reason why it is so difficult to eradicate cocaine production in Peru and Bolivia.

(FYI for people with strong legs and lungs but not several days of time: There is now an option to take a single-day hike (from Km 104 on the train route), up through the Gate of the Sun to Machu Picchu.)

Technical: This was originally a slide shot, and I don't have any of the shooting data, though clearly I was using a shallow DOF. I scanned a 10-year-old 3x5 print into Photoshop, then spent a lot of time cleaning up scanning artifacts. I then fiddled a lot with Curves and Highlights, and finished up with a slight Saturation reduction (I've been reading too many recipes lately), as some of the colors were still too garish.