Machu Picchu

In Machu Picchu, acts of desecration are forbidden. It is considered to have been a sacred place to the Incans, and thus, a sacred place to the modern people of Perú.

To visit this place, I paid four hundred and fifty soles in train tickets, sixty soles for bus tickets, and a hundred and forty soles in order to get in the gates. In total, six hundred and fifty soles. The average Peruano earns one thousand five hundred soles per month.

The UN estimates that Machu Picchu can sustain up to five hundred visitors a day. The Peruano government has agreed to limit access to two thousand five hundred people a day. Two thousand five hundred tickets to Machu Picchu.

However, they also sell four hundred tickets to Machu Picchu mountain and four hundred to Huanu Picchu mountain. Both tickets also include the right to visit Machu Picchu.

Finally, if you purchase your train tickets before your ticket to Machu Picchu, the Oficina de la Cultura will sell you a ticket for a later date, stamp the ticket, and then scratch it out, writing in a date to match the one on your train ticket.

A local conservationist, he estimated to me that there are approximately five thousand visitors a day during high season. Ten times as many people as Machu Picchu can support without risking its future.

Originally, I wrote a humorous piece about how to get some alone time with Machu Picchu when it attracts more visitors every day than Disney World. How to take pictures without hordes of picture snapping tourists in each one of them.

But, I suppose, one desecration from me is enough.